Fuck. Bastards.

I'm frankly astonished at this threads title and premise.
I guess i'm an outdated OLD fuck who hasn't got with the program.
It's the HIP thing now to own Terabytes of STOLEN music now, isn't it?

Sigh. Another nail in New Labour's coffin.

Thanks for 10-15 years of upcoming Tory rule, you inept, bungling twats.

I totally agree with all your points gents, certainly no doubt Mandy is a self-serving villa-loving oily cunt.

Has anyone advocating this stupid stupid law stopped to note the recent research that has shown that illegal downloaders are THE SAME people who spend the most on legal music?

I would contend that a download still forms part of this wider music related economy performing in many cases the same function as a radio show or the samplers that some record shops or online dealers supply. I would also contend that, in many cases, the same people downloading files are also the ones still active in seeing bands, purchasing material and still visiting record shops.

I can also envisage a situation where if one was interested in more obscure or old music that a download would represent the only opportunity that a person on a lower income or with family commitments would have to hear a band or artist. I can imagine being upset about downloads if say I was a collector or a second hand dealer and that the value of a recording was based entirely on its rarity rather than any other merits, if I were speculating to accumulate. More pertinetly, if I was watching the value of my long searches and years of pusuit plummet as people realised that a certain recording was not only rare but also shit.

Although no collector myself my tastes run to the late sixties early seventies and I buy music to listen to. I have wasted many years chasing reissues on CD to only discover that they were shit. I know I am not alone in this. Downloads and sites like Last FM and Spotify have saved me a lot of money and time but I am old fashioned and like to have "the artefact", to own.

The main risk to music is that kids, in many cases, do not care about music in the same way that I did and do. This in part may have something to do with the ease of ownership. Raging about this is all well and good but a complete waste of time. This law was drafted by Canute and stands the same chance of success. If it does have an effect it may sever even more the link between music and the populace.

Huh. Well I don't have much good as far as guitars go, a Hondo copy, a couple of Squire models and one Fender Jazz Bass, BUT I have my lovely ARP Odyssey Mark III synth and lots of other good keyboards...

Of course I'm much more interested in synths and how they work than guitars anyways. Brand names or not a guitar is just a piece of wood with strings, as nifty as the sounds they make... so why make the distinction between a Fender Strat or a copy of one? (Although I will say it does depend on the quality of the company -- some cheap guitars are junky, obviously...)

This has generated a lot of heated discussion about the pros/cons of downloading, but very few people have focused on the actual legislation. Regardless of your view on downloading, this legislation is still very draconian and unpleasant. It removes the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" from the law in question. To me this is the important issue here.