I’m particularly fond of today’s strip for “The Coast” (summarized here in text form since I don’t have a scanner):
Panel 1
Lawyer: “Your Honor, this man stole a CD. I ask that you sentence him to twenty months!”
Judge: “One month.”
Panel 2
Lawyer: “ONLY ONE MONTH?!”
Judge: “I have that CD at home. There’s only one song worth stealing.”
Why buy one song for 15 dollars when you can download it for a dollar (or, more likely, for free?) Sure, I can rattle off the stock answers: To support the artist. To support the people working at the music store. Because digital pirates are bad, bad people.
I suppose that the furor over personal downloading has crowded out the old-fashioned kind of piracy: bootlegs. While shopping in Chinatown for F.I.R.‘s album (or you can look at their Hong Kong site, instead) I came across a bootlgged copy of Utada’s Exodus album. I was briefly tempted to buy that, but deicded against it in the end because 1) I’d promised myself I would not download this album and I’d go buy it when it came out; 2) the bootleggers had added random songs and didn’t always have the titles right; 3) it didn’t seem to be a very high quality bootleg–the cover was faded; 4) I was really hoping I’d find F.I.R.’s album, so I wanted to keep my money in my wallet. :tongue:
I’ve always maintained that on a moral scale, downloading is better than buying bootlegs. Yes, both hurt the artist (and all the other people involved in the chain of selling you the CD), but only one profits a group of shady people. No, I’m not talking about the shady downloader. I’m talking about the shady bootleggers! Okay, so maybe a case could be made that the people in the store who sell bootlegged CDs have to make a living. That doesn’t change the fact that the proceeds (in other words, your money) of bootlegging may go towards organized crime; at least the majority of downloaders aren’t involved in that. Hopefully.
Wait, this had nothing to do with the comic strip, did it?
[edit] I think it’s weird how I never post on Mondays and Tuesdays but have posted consistently for the last couple of Wednesdays :bored: