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More than just perfect copies though. It made it easier for millions of people to do it without even thinking of the consequences.
No doubt with your history you're familiar with what a nuisance (albeit smaller scale one) that bootleggers were. I'm sure you remember how Charle's Mingus' wife Sue used to get even with record stores selling bootlegged of her husband's concerts and whatnot. As you said the mindset existed, but it grew exponentially with the advent of technology designed to make sharing information freely. The problem was that the people who designed it were for the most part idealists. When they thought of information sharing i don't think they meant it in this way.
It may also be a nature vs/ nurture thing. Millions of us weren't taping songs off the radio to our cassettes at once. For one thing it was a lot of work. Now there's no work involved, and more people do it. Technology has made it easier to steal, lie and cheat. It has also made it easier for companies to justify making rip off versions of popular songs to put in their adverts as a way to avoid paying fees.
I worked in the radio business when I got out of college and I never paid for records, the physical vinyl records. Because there was always a surplus of them (usually for contest giveaways) at my workplace which received the free copies because the record companies believed it was 'free advertising'. I ALWAYS thought that was a short-sighted policy and was the seed of the 'feeling of entitlement for free music' over 30+ years later. It must be noted that while they got the records free, ASCAP and BMI still change licensing fees on behalf of songwriters, something they never collected when people taped off the radio or won a freebie. One big reason the music biz was affected first and hardest by the 'free culture' was that such a mindset already existed. The only thing the mp3 format did was made it easy for the first time to make perfect copies.
It's the erosion of ethics, driven by technology. One could argue with every technological advancement there has been an erosion of sorts (the automated factory cause exploitation of workers, etc) so it's easy enough to see a direct correlation. But what's crazy is how much it has grown. Exponentially. At high speed internet rates.
@Leslie, I know you ain't my lawyer and that ain't legal advice - but the really interesting thing in that bit isn't the obvious hop and skip straight into infringement and legal trouble, but the way that people now ask music companies to do this while they didn't before. It wasn't the long arm of the law that made people avoid this before, it was the prevailing ethical attitudes at the time. A bit like how many clients these days are so spoon-fed with digital layouts they forget that our ripping and scanning of already photographed images for our mock-ups can set us on the path of copyright infringement when the clients asks for "exactly that" they see on the mockup. Never mind that digital mockups are limiting in the small way that you're stuck working with images that you can find, rather than the unlimited ideas-resource your brain can think up (and your hand can draw). That's another GRAR argument for another thread.
OoooH I wish I could find that "embargoed" image I snapped of the winners list we get in the morning in Cannes, it had all the "don't tweet, don't facebook, don't email this before 20:00 HOURS" on it and some nice short legalease that you'll lose your press-pass/go to hell/be shunned forever etc if you do. Of course everyone ignores this and the list is passed around like a joint at a hippie-dinner.
I wonder what it says on the award-winners lists, because they tend to be the first to gossip about it.
The sense of entitlement with the younger generation is skewed. "I'll pay for convenience", well then, do that. Actually do that, because that's not a dollar-a-month Spotify account, that's a hundred dollars a month spotify account. You won't actually pay for convenience until the price is right, so stop saying you will. That price varies between a dollar and $0.
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