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Lighten Up 23 November 2001 Edition
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Burn & Get Burnt?
The local recording industry has started up a campaign designed to try and reduce the number of pirated music CDs floating around the country.

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They say that unauthorized copying is costing the industry nearly $100 million a year -- and that's a lot of money.

Threats of legal action have begun to fly and the campaign warns that such copying is illegal.

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    Then there's the "lets tug at their heartstrings" pitch in which they claim that copying music CDs takes money out of the pockets of the hard-working musicians -- especially local artists.

    Okay, I think we must all agree that selling or giving away unauthorised copies of copyrighted material is theft -- plain and simple.

    However, the music industry shouldn't cry in its dinner quite so much -- at least not until they offer a somewhat better deal to both the customers and the recording artists.

    As acknowledged by those conducting the campaign -- the media is dirt-cheap -- so why are prerecorded CDs so damned expensive to purchase?

    Compare the cost of a blank cassette with the cost of a CDR disk -- then look at the price of an album on CD and the same album on cassette. Why is the industry gouging CD-album buyers so much? Could it be simply because they can?

    Let me also repeat a bitch I've made before in this column -- why can't we have a scratched CD recording replaced for the cost of the media and handling instead of having to buy a whole new recording??? If it's good enough for tough-minded software vendors like Microsoft to have such a policy, why can't the recording industry do the same?

    What about those poor local recording artists?

    From what I've heard, they get a pretty rough deal from the recording industry anyway -- seeing very little of the hefty retail price obtained for each CD. It becomes hard to feel sorry for the recording industry when the recording artist sees little more than pocket-change out of each sale.

    Here's a tip for the recording industry: start giving the customer and the artist a reasonable deal and they'll probably be less inclined to steal your intellectual property.

    And another tip: if you treat everyone like a thief by copy-protecting your CDs and mounting witch-hunts then what have people got to lose by stealing your stuff?

    I think the final word should go to the girl who presents the Juice TV Music News when she refered to the campaign as: "Burn or Get Burnt" -- possibly by accident, possibly by way of a Freudian slip.

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