Downloading Music and Rights

[mgriffin]

Obviously if I had to choose between someone NOT buying my CD, versus buying the CD to rip a copy and then resell it, I would choose the latter.

[APK]

My 2 cents. As has been said, this second-hand issue is a very grey area.
There are second-hand stores and plenty of avenues on the web. I've not heard big labels complaining much about second-hand sales (but I'm not particularly listening either). I'm sure there are lots of people who buy physical albums knowing full well they may just rip it and sell the pristine copy. And with the price of downloads getting higher at many stores, you might as well buy the album, rip then sell it if the price is right ... you might actually get the album cheaper than buying the download.

I think the real legal issues are actually very similar to commercial software. You own the right to use the software, you don't own the program. And selling the software can only be done if the company allows the registration to change ownership ... which means you no longer have the right to use the program if sold because it is then registered to someone else. This is of course enforced to some degree with various copy protections schemes available to programmers. With music the enforcement is pretty much impossible, so is largely ignored.

I don't have any stated restrictions on my DataObscura site about selling albums you have bought (and keeping a ripped copy), and not sure I've seen one on any other web label either. It would be unenforceable, and a bit of a put-off to some buyers I'd imagine.

Especially with selling downloads, which are so easily shared, you have to trust the integrity of the buyer. Some of them certainly do respect a kind of unspoken law on these things. Others clearly don't.

[ffcal]

I hadn't realized how ambiguous my comment was that Judd excepted above.  I was referring there to file sharing an entire CD with others, and not to burning the CD for one's own use.  I agree with Mike's position.

Forrest

[LNerell]

You seem to be assuming that all downloads are from people who would not buy a CD in the first place. If this was the case then CD sales would not have tanked like they have with the introduction of high quality downloads. There is enough empirical evidence to indicate there is a connection between the two. As a personal example, when Terraform was released on CD the sales were much lower then expected based upon previous sales of my own releases and Steve Roach's normal sales for a new release. We found shortly after the album was released that someone had made high quality mp3s (320kps) of the tracks, had scanned all the artwork including the front cover, inside foldout, the extra postcards, and the CD itself. All were then zipped into a file and uploaded to a bittorrent site. This was the first case any of us has encountered of this kind. You could argue that no one was interested so they didn't buy the CD, well thousands of people were interested enough to at least download it. I won't argue that all of those thousands of download were potential sales, but sales have been so low that the label has yet to recoup its costs, and this has made it difficult for me now to release any new material.

I just wanted to add a postmortem to this thread as related to my quote above. I got an email last night from my label informing me that Terraform is now out-of-print for the reasons I stated above and it will not be repressed. 

[ffcal]

I just wanted to add a postmortem to this thread as related to my quote above. I got an email last night from my label informing me that Terraform is now out-of-print for the reasons I stated above and it will not be repressed. 

Sorry to hear that, Loren.  I must have picked up one of the last copies of that disc from Soleilmoon a week or two ago.  A very nice disc and package that deserved a better fate.

Forrest