TeenRevenue Sues RedTube for $40M

[griffin8r]

The part of your statement about cookie cutter bullshit also shows how young you are. They have been doing this since the 50s. I don't know about before because I'm only 58.

1) I'm not as young as you think I am.
2) I'm a music history and music theory buff, and play several instruments. I recognize cookie cutter bullshit everywhere in rock music. Chord progressions that have been beaten into the ground, melodies that are anything but, bands that self-copy (Nickelback, anyone?), bands that copy other bands (Def Leppard/Nazareth ripoff back in 1988), it goes on, and on, and on, and on.

Your post is one of the typical ones to justify theft. The reason people steal is because they think they can get away with it. They never care about the people they hurt. Recently a friend of mine lost his job in the music industry, because of piracy, he also is now bankrupt and has lost his house. Is that his fault or the people who decided to steal instead of buy?

Slow down there, partner, I'm not advocating theft of intellectual property. The piracy issue is a whole separate issue, and one that the industry could have dealt with swiftly back when it first started cropping up - not by suing everyone, but by embracing the digital delivery system and implementing legal pay-for-download sites back when MP3.com and Napster were still in their infancy.

The culture of illegal downloading developed back then because people were sick of buying CDs because of a single they heard, and finding out that single was the only song worth hearing on the CD. There were no other options for checking out the album beforehand in the mid 90's, unless you were lucky enough to have a local record shop that still accepted returns.

Again, I don't condone it, but I see why it happened.

Also many of the greatest bands of the 20th Century are suffering from piracy. So it seems thieves don't just steal the bad, they steal the great as well.

Sure, and it's absolutely wrong. However, thieves also steal and hack software regularly, some of the biggest names in the software industry (Adobe CS4 anyone?) and yet the software industry goes on, undaunted, because they continue to make quality products that professionals buy. The music industry could take a lesson from this.

The power of the consumer is in the fact that he can direct and shape and industry by buying what he likes. When he stops buying he has no say in what direction that industry takes to keep as many people in work as possible.

You are absolutely correct. Personally, I prefer to do my shopping for music in the underground scene - better variety, better prices on CD's, production might be a bit shaky from time to time, but the songwriting and stylistic approaches in many cases are more honest. There's something inherently satisfying about listening to a raw recording of an honest songwriter, versus a slicked-up production of someone who can't sing without electronic help trying to sing a song they didn't write, over music they didn't produce. (Barbara Mason, anyone?)