The recording industry is calling a lot of things piracy these days, but just what is piracy? Is copying a CD? They contend that to make a copy of a CD, whether the whole disc or just part of it, is piracy. It does not matter to them who copies the disc or why. Their contention is bogus. To make a copy of your own disc for personal use, or to make a custom mix of your favorite songs from discs you own, is fair use. To make copies of discs to sell for profit is piracy. This used to be called bootlegging.
Just what do these words mean? Piracy originally meant murder, rape and robbery on the high seas. Calling copying something piracy has always been a bit of sensationalism. Bootlegging originally meant hiding liquor in the legs of your boots during the prohibition era. How it came to mean making an unauthorized recording is unclear. An academic paper about this subject has been published by the University of Konstanz. (It is no longer on their server, but still on the Wayback Machine at archive.org.)
It is easy to find bootlegs and pirated CDs. Go to a flea market, a swap meet, a street vendor in a city, or some thrift stores, and you will find music and videos at amazingly low prices. CDs can often be found for under five dollars. Not all music sold at flea markets and swap meets is pirated, but much of it is. You can frequently tell that these discs are not the genuine article. The cover art is wrong, or the colors are dull. The packaging is different from the CDs at the mall. Most people know that these discs are pirated, but week after week, and month after month, you can keep going to the flea market, and the dealers are still there. No one is busting them, or their suppliers. The artists who created the music we enjoy get nothing from the sale of these recordings, and their quality is often grossly inferior to legitimately produced CDs. It is clear that the people producing and selling these recordings are guilty of piracy. Why don't the RIAA and the recording labels go after them instead of file traders?
The main reason is that people who would buy a CD for under five dollars at a flea market would never spend almost twenty dollars for one at the mall. They wouldn't even consider it. Also, people who will pay full retail prices at the mall wouldn't be caught dead with something from the flea market, even if it were free. The recording industry does not consider the bootleg dealers to be competition or a threat.
The recording industry is afraid of CD burners and the Internet because they are new. Anything new will always be perceived as a threat by those in power. It is power that recording industry bigwigs fear they will lose. Before Napster, their power was akin to that of a king. They decided which artists we would hear on the radio, and which artists would have their music for sale at the mall. They arrogantly told artists, "I made you a star. I am entitled to the lion's share of money from your music sales, your t-shirt sales, your concert tickets, et cetera." Any artist that wouldn't do it their way might never find an audience. Napster changed that. Unknown artists simply made their music available to the file trading community, and found their audience without having to sell their souls. We were able to decide for ourselves what music was good, and what was not by trying before buying. The industry did not like that. They want to dictate to us what's hot and what's not. Kings fear a revolution, so the recording industry shut Napster down, and started to make discs that won't play in a computer. Sometimes these discs won't play at all.
There is an article on the RIAA's official website by Miles Copeland claiming to dispel recording industry myths. He accuses artists of biting the hand that feeds them. It is a classic example of the industry's "I made you a star" arrogance. Fans decide who is and isn't a star. Fans are the difference between a starving artist and a successful one. The industry constantly puts its prefabrications purported to be artists on the radio, and in stores, but their CDs either don't sell for long, or don't sell at all.
The new copy protected discs the industry is producing will be their undoing. A lot of people want to play CDs in their computer for background music while they work, or because they don't have a stereo system other than the computer. Take for example, a commuter on a bus or a subway train. This commuter puts a new CD by his or her favorite artist into a laptop computer, and it won't play! The industry just lost a customer.
The industry thinks that because the DMCA, and similar laws many nations are considering or have adopted prohibit circumvention of copy protection, they have the power to decide when, where and how we use their products, even after we buy them. They are mistaken. Every "copy protection" scheme they have invented has been cracked. It can be this easy or this easy. It may technically be illegal to do this, but how are they going to catch people? They are not making it hard for "pirates." They are only making it hard for paying customers to use our personal property as we see fit, and using our personal property as we see fit is our right.
Copy protection of CDs is an expensive exercise in futility that will only create new enemies for the record labels and the RIAA. Any time the industry spends millions of dollars to develop a new scheme, crackers will break it for next to nothing. Soon, none of the discs from the mall will play in a computer, but the ones from the flea market or a street vendor will. Once this is the case, people who previously wouldn't be caught dead with a disc from the flea market or street vendor will line up to buy them, especially teenagers with disposable income, who are the very people the recording industry covets. If the recording industry is so blinded by their lust for power and their greed, that they continue on their current course, they will self-destruct.
We at dontbuycds.org do not endorse buying pirated discs. Doing so does take earnings away from the artists we enjoy, but we must point out that the pirates have proven one thing. The price of CDs is way too high. Pirates are selling CDs dirt cheap, and still making a profit. We admit that the recording companies do have higher costs. They produce and promote music, as well as manufacturing the discs, and pirates only copy discs, but these costs do not justify price gouging.
P.S. Thank you to Kip Brown for clarifying the terms "piracy" and "bootlegs"
