Free Music Downloads!

An internet citizen flying by the name of “john” just posted a reply to a 3-year old blog piece, titled, The Music Pirate Police are Now Mounted! A bit of a scare piece about copyright reforms in Canada which were eventually overturned and later ratcheted up several notches into what has become a terrifying legal miasma called Bill C-61. If you haven’t read about how your rights are about to be deleted, please take a gander at Michael Geist’s excellent blog and read up on the matter. You really should. Better yet, read the bill itself and form your own opinions.

I will post john’s comment here, in it’s entirety, unadulterated:

too may people are ruining the music and film industry due to the lack of respect for artists’ work. Their penny pinching. Being able to pick up a CD every once in a while to support your favorite artists would not have such an impact on your wallets and if you can’t afford to buy then you shouldn’t be burning period because if your able to burn music so easily on a nice shiny computer, you certainly had the money for that computer now, didn’t you? Taking music online from burn sites ruins everyone from artists to companies to vendors who sell the products, think twice before being so cheap and wondering if you should pick up a disc or two. God forbid you buy a CD or DVD because you question yourself, “hmm i can burn this online”. Is it really worth the time and patience as well as the crap quality you get off these burn sites? If you knew anything about quality and sound, 98% of these burn sites quality is for crap and even sounds worst when you play it on a quality sound system.

For some reason, I feel this post is deserving of a direct reply. Lifted up into 2008 in a front-page blog article. My reply:

Fair-enough, John. I do buy music. Probably more than your average internet user because I like to support the artists and encourage good music. It’s the Right Thing To Do.

But I also download music, and I believe it is our right to do so in the same way that I can make a copy of a disc that I bought to share with a friend. Or to combine songs into a “mixed tape” to make a compilation and juxtapose different pieces in new contexts. I will defend my right to do so as long as I am able.

I think copyright reforms like Bill C-61 in Canada are evil and are caving in to largely American-owned music and movie industry pressures by a conservative government. These measures don’t protect the artists, they attempt to protect the flailing businesses who are too slow or ignorant to adapt to the changing world they are now in. They are removing the rights of citizens in favor of appeasing a small group of businesses with a lot of money. They also turn the very people who should be their best customers into criminals, rather than trying to find a way to turn downloading into a profitable new form of business. I think Apple has proven that people will pay for downloads if they’re convenient enough. Amazon, Rhapsody and others have followed-suit.

Many sites that offer content for download offer it at comparative
or better quality than commercial online retailers. Many offer FLAC
encodings which are bit-perfect copies of CDs with no loss of quality.
Many of the people who download these types of encodings probably know
more about sound quality than you do.

The internet could be (and probably is) the music and movie industries’ greatest source of marketing, whether they’re willing to realize and admit it or not. I would also encourage you and others to make use of services like Pandora and Last.FM. Legitimate, industry-driven operations providing excellent content online free of charge. To say that people are ruining these businesses by illegally downloading content is placing the blame on people rather than questioning whether or not the music and movie industries themselves are responsible for their own hardships.

Have you never downloaded anything, John? Would you like for your DVD-R/W drive to continue to function as a device you control, rather than something that is locked down with hardware restrictions preventing you from writing the bits you have chosen to write on it? Do you care that the speakers you use now should continue to be able to play back the music you “own” or have in your possession? Would you feel it was alright if suddenly all of the audio equipment in your residence refused to play content that didn’t carry a special key saying it was legal and safe? Would you mind if the government and businesses kept a log of everything you played back on those systems to make sure you weren’t committing a crime?

Download responsibly. If you like something you find, go out and buy it. Better yet, write about it online and encourage others to discover it for themselves. Be a good citizen. Support local music. Stand up for your rights.