Over the years I have had countless debates on the topic of intellectual property rights with countless people.
I, being a musician, come down firmly on the side of protecting the rights of the artist and their product. When I write a song it is a very personal experience to me; nearly on par with having children.
I understand that for many it is hard to understand a recorded song or video as property. Due to the technological advances of the modern world songs, books, and movies have been reduced to little more than 0s and 1s of binary code.
It is easy to justify violating copyright law because downloading a computer file from a P2P share site has very little in common with stealing physical property. It is easy to argue that you aren't even stealing.
When you steal physical property it is gone. The lawful owner can't drive the car that was stolen from them. But the argument is that when you pirate music and movies you are simply making a copy of the original and in no way diminishing the original.
My argument against this is simple supply and demand.
Let us suppose that a song is worth $X. This is the price that the writer can hope to earn by selling the song individually or selling the copyright wholesale to another party. This price is affected by the genre of music, the talent and skill of the writer, and the overall appeal of the song.
In the days before digital media, that price was guaranteed; not the individual price of the song but rather that the writer was guaranteed to receive compensation for the value of the song.
The problem is that now, as soon as the song is released there are thousands (likely more) of people who are willing to make copies of that song to be distributed for free. All of the sudden there is a HUGE supply for the same demand which means the price people are willing to pay drops.
This means that the song, instead of being worth $X, is now worth $X/1000, $X/100,000, or even less.
Some don't see this as a problem. After all, the only one hurt by digital piracy is the big, greedy record companies; right?
Maybe not. Maybe we all pay.
To shed light on this question I will use another industry.
Doctors garner a considerable salary. Most of the top 10 highest paying jobs in the US are types of doctors. And well they should be.
The training to be a doctor is expensive both in time and actual money and are granted a superior level of trust. Add to that the fact that medical school is highly competitive and the process highly selective (eliminating many who cannot stand the mental rigor) and the basic economic forces of wage compensation make the price paid for a doctor's time high.
However, as the cost of being a doctor increases through higher tuition costs and higher malpractice insurance rates and returns decrease because of insurance payment rates (insurance companies rarely pay full price for anything), the increase in federal price fixing through Medicare and Medicaid (and soon to be even worse through Obama-care) the incentive to be a doctor decreases. Who, in their right mind, decides to go into a career field where the return on their investment of training is on the decline?
Because of this there are many bright, gifted young would-be doctors who are choosing instead to enter an entirely different field.
In the same way, is it possible that after seeing a diminishing return on their investment, talented young artists are entering other fields than music?
Ask anyone older than 25 years old if the music as a whole is better today or years ago. Not to say that there isn't any good music today; just that the percentage of good music to mediocre/bad music is on the slide.
Is it possible that this reduction in quality is due to an exodus from the music industry? And if piracy is, even in some small part, a cause of this diminishing; who really pays for digital piracy?
What do you think?
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