Russell,

On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 01:19:07 +1200, Russell McMahon wrote:

> The (amoral)(or is it immoral) 

It's immoral!  (That is it has bad morals, rather than none)

> clowns in our recording industry 
> association, and their ilk worldwide, want to claim that if you want 
> to copy your record onto CD or CD onto Flash player or ... for your 
> own use (with the original not being used when you are using a copy) 
> that you should pay a completely new fee of the same order of 
> magnitude that you paid for the original. 

In the same way they claim that piracy "costs the industry X billion a year" - meaning that if they could 
charge as much as they wanted, that's what they'd make.  They (along with FAST and others in the software 
business) completely ignore the fact that a lot of the time if people had to pay what these people want, they 
wouldn't buy the darned thing in the first place - it's just not worth the price, so they haven't actually 
lost a sale at all.

> They also claim that wearing 
> out is part of the original expectation and that if your original 
> fails then you should buy a new copy at full price. 

I hope they make full payment to the original architect for the design, whenever their houses need 
redecorating or refurbishing...

> They make no 
> effort to make the material available in all the media that you may 
> wish to use it in - so if you can copy it but they don't supply it you 
> mustn't do it.

Immoral indeed!  They seem to think that they have the right to make profits of a level that they decide, 
ignoring the fact that the market won't stand it.

> This has nothing to do with piracy/theft in the accepted sense or 
> playing multiple copies at once or any such. They are joist attempting 
> to find new ways to charge you more.

Oh yes!  ("joist"?  You mean they're trying to hit you with the charges, as if with a piece of wood? :-)

> I think that most of these people used to be cigarette industry 
> executives who got fired for having low moral standards.

Indeed.  It reminds me somewhat of a South African dentist I went to in about 1978, who I suspect was thrown 
out of the Bureau Of State Security for cruelty!  (It was such an ordeal that I couldn't bring myself to go to 
a dentist for 10 years afterwards).

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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