The government of Switzerland has issued a statement declaring that it will not take action to alter current copyright laws allowing the downloading of music and movies for personal use. The statement is the result of a lengthy study conducted by the Swiss government into the impact of so-called “piracy” on the entertainment industry.

Switzerland’s findings are just the latest in a series of reports showing that the downloading of music and movies is far less harmful than the entertainment industry would have us believe. In July Douglas C. Merrill, formerly of Google and then EMI, one of the three main record labels, said in a keynote address that his research while at EMI showed that users of torrenting service LimeWire were among the best customers in the iTunes music store. Around the same time, Telepolis published a report (Google Translation) stating that users of the recently raided kino.to website tended to pay more at the box office than the average moviegoer. Meanwhile, another study conducted by Northwestern University (PDF) showed that users of peer-to-peer client software – i.e., BitTorrent users – bring in a substantial amount of money for the large ISPs.

Originally posted by Ixtab
reply to post by eNumbra

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Your argument rests on the presumption everyone who downloaded it would have otherwise purchased it if digitally cloning it was not an option.

BUT OF COURSE!

Anyone can argue piracy etc all day long.

In theory, an artist could sell a single album which could be shared 6 billion times and everyone has a copy and only one sale was ever made.

Originally posted by jsettica
reply to post by eNumbra

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Well in theory if I had an album and 6 billion people down loaded it and 1 billion went out and got a good copy of it at $10 each on a CD I don't think there is a signal artist in the world that would not go for that.

Most songs down loaded are crap quality so there is till a market out for good sounding music same goes for movies, crap down load and then go out and buy a good blue ray.

That's what it's like.

10 th line

The United State Supreme Court has refused an appeal that would have made downloading music an infringement of federal copyright law. Take that, Metallica!

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, or ASCAP, had been attempting to appeal to the Supreme Court an early ruling by an appeals court in New York that said that a downloaded song constituted a public performance of the song under federal copyright law. Attorneys for ASCAP were fighting to reverse that decision in hopes that they'd be able to collect additional royalties off of songs downloaded from the Web.

According to the appeals court, "Music is neither recited, rendered, nor played when a recording (electronic or otherwise) is simply delivered to a potential listener." US Solicitor General Donald Verrilli agreed with the appeals ruling and that just because a song was transferred over the Internet did not mean that it was being performed, reports Reuters.

Originally posted by Vitchilo

While in the ``land of the free``, the MPAA writes a law that's about to destroy free speech on the internet and is based on the chinese model.