[Mr Angry]

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

So Mr Angry your saying every download is a sale lost are you ?? so when a person has spent their available money for whatever period you think they will magically come up with more to buy the stuff that they end up downloading. I am not an advocate or supporter of piracy at all and have condemned it in the past on this and every forum i am a member of but for you to make out that every download is a sale lost is ridiculous.

Rizzy, read what I wrote. I said "every illegal download" was a sale lost.

I don't subscribe to the school of "if you can't afford it steal it" and I have nothing but contempt for those who do.

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

Also recent studies have shown that pirates have a beneficial effect in terms of people that don't download buying on a recommendation now i highly doubt that is on a massive scale but it shows the issue isn't as simple as you and others wouold like to make out.

From the BBC

A recent Demos survey [3.51Mb Powerpoint] garnered plenty of headlines, but its flaws were not widely reported. Firstly, it grouped people who used search engines to discover music in with people who use P2P, but you can of course use search engines to discover music, then listen legally to streamed music for free or buy music.

The study simply illustrated the unsurprising fact that, as a group, file-sharers tend to be bigger consumers of recorded music than non-file-sharers - because most file-sharers are very interested in music while some non-file-sharers don't consume music at all. The net effect of illegal file-sharing in the UK and elsewhere has been to reduce legitimate sales. This is why spending on recorded music has fallen every year since illegal file-sharing began to become widespread.

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

I wasn't talking about retail outlets as i think your well aware when i talked about increasing profits but the major media companys that constantly spout how downloading is killing them. Same companys who put maximum pressure on retail outlets to cut what they sell the stuff for but never drop the prices they sell the stuff to retail for

Nonsense. You have no substantive evidence to quantify that assertion and it is easliy disproven by the almost total collapse of the UK music distribution market. Again, make a distinction between downloading & illegal downloading.

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

If you cast your mind back to the eighties wasn't there that statement from them that unless tape to tape recording was stopped there would be no music industry in ten years yeah that came to pass didn't it.

The phrase was "Home taping is killing music" not "Home taping is killing the music industry". The more jaundiced amongst us realize that it is not as black and white as you try to make out. At the time of the campaign CD's were already in use / production and replacing vinyl and the Walkman had shifted millions of units. Indeed all of the lead aggregators (to this very day) in IT and audio hardware are primarily music businesses. The message it was sending was that by taping music (for example live radio broadcasts) people were not encouraging others to experience live music.

Originally Posted by RizzyKing

This issue is not as simple as either side make it out to be it isn't black and white and until all involved in this realise that we are never going to see any sort of resolution.

Here is how simple it is - debate aside. What gives anyone the right to copy for free something which should be paid for?

That is as black and white as it gets.