The Pirate Bay Options

[Robert]

For those who download via torrents have probably heard of or even used the website
ThePirateBay.com
It's a torrent site base in Sweden
What you may not have been aware of is the 4 people who operate the site are in court right now for violation of copyrighted laws. The people running the site have always flipped the bird to US and UK companies and their stormtroopers tactics, because unlike the US, the Swedish copyright laws see the difference between a kid downloading a song versus a company selling pirated CD's.
ThePirateBay has a hilarious page on their site documenting all legal threats they have received over the years.
Be sure to read through it when you have some time to kill.
http://thepiratebay.org/legal
One of the best would be from EA Games
http://static.thepiratebay.org/ea_response.txt
I've been known to virtually bitch slap some people over the years but these guys are great.

Anyway, the reason I brought this up is their current legal battle will likely have repercussions throughout the torrent community. So I am happy to report on the very 1st day of court, half of the charges against them have already been dropped.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10165604-38.html

[Bargod]

Like Robert said it's the record companies own fault. I just bought a ton of blank cd's for less then $10 (ok, maybe not a ton). Anyway, as the technology became less expensive to put out music on cd's the cost of the music should have gone down. It hasn't. That means the record companies are just making a larger cut off of the cd's we buy.

Musicians generally do not get much from the sale of cd's. They make their money from live shows. What's really amazing to me is how many times I saw Fugazi in the '90's and only paid $2 for most of the shows. Towards the end I was paying $5.

Also, the reason blank tapes are legal (and blank cd's) is because it was found to be legal to copy music you already own. Well guess what, I own a lot of stuff on tape and record but don't have a way to get it onto my mp3 player so I see it as perfectly ok to get it from the internet since I've already paid for the damn music.

The question is, why would bands put up with record companies, especially the big ones? Well, it depends on what the band wants. If you are Fugazi you just want to perform in front of people. It's about the music. If you are some young band that's playing whatever the current pop craze is then you probably are in it for the fame and the money etc. You want your videos shown on TV and your songs on the radio. That takes the money of a big record company. It costs money to make your video, and to pay to have it played and to pay to have it on the radio and to pay to advertise the hell out of your crap cd that teans will then buy solely because they heard it on the radio and saw the video in high rotation on a music channel.