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Does anyone have an mp3 collection they'd like to sell?
cbsoundman - 5-13-2005 at 04:04 PM

Good luck with that because that would probably break a lot of copyright laws.

stsirois - 5-21-2005 at 01:36 PM

What if someone LEGALLY downloaded a bunch songs from say iTunes or Napster onto their hard drive & then decided to sell their hard drive. Wouldn't that be legal?

Thanks,
Steve

Fishy - 5-21-2005 at 01:40 PM

I think it depends a lot on which country/state you're in. Up here it's still not illegal to download copyrighted mp3's, but you're not allowed to share them :D Although that is about to change :

Pirk - 5-21-2005 at 02:16 PM

Here there is already a special tax for copyrights when you buy blank cd-roms or a new hard-drive! (In France everything is taxed and often several times...)
So I think I've already payed the copyrights at least once for all my music on my PC, and twice when I buy a cd that I rip in mp3 on my hard-drive! :D

Fishy - 5-22-2005 at 01:51 AM

Probably I'll start buying music when it's

1. Doesn't cost me a penny
2. I get a huge LP alike cover on every album "I spend money" at
3. If I can play it again and again, and there are no problems if I spill wine or beer over it..

Hey! Mp3's fullfill all my wishes! :D If you look away from nr 2 which I hope ejukebox will support in a future version...

I think I will like mp3's even when an (incredible stupid) EU-directive will tell me that I shouldn't :)

Pirk - 5-22-2005 at 10:34 AM

OK Fishy! So store up 10 kilogram of your best for me :)

Hmm, by the way in my country we go to vote to approve the EU constitution very soon... :o

cbsoundman - 5-24-2005 at 07:27 PM

We pay copyright on everything, here. What sucks is that bands and performers really don't make their money off of CD sales unless it is your third. They don't even make it off of radio play (about 3 cents a song if you wrote it AND performed it...yeah, not every song you hear is wrote by the performer). Bands and performers make their money off the tours.

Pirk...they like to tax you on everyting, huh? What is the EU constitution?

I agree with you Fishy, MP3s offer a lot of advantages over CDs and heaven forbid, tapes or records. If someone scratches your CD or record or breaks your tape, you are out. I have a second hard drive I keep offline with a backup of my collection so if a file gets corrupted or deleted, no big deal, I restore it from backup.

Pirk - 5-24-2005 at 05:25 PM

cbsoundman...UE constitution. It's a -complicated- treaty (191 pages!) which present the values of the European Community.
It seems that all the European countries are not ready to approve this treaty because each country will lose some of his independence...

You don't have tax on music and value added tax (VAT) on consumer products in US?

Music and copyrights. France, and other European countries are small countries (compared with US) so performers and bands must earn their life with less people than US bands. I think a French tour can't collect so much money than a US tour. Moreover each European country have his own language, so inevitably a restricted audience! But I don't think that tax is a good solution: I support the artists who win their fans on tours and who sell their CDs themselves using independent labels. So I can buy these CDs eventually...

Otherwise I like mp3s, me too!

Demnos - 5-25-2005 at 09:57 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by Pirk
Here there is already a special tax for copyrights when you buy blank cd-roms or a new hard-drive! (In France everything is taxed and often several times...)
So I think I've already payed the copyrights at least once for all my music on my PC, and twice when I buy a cd that I rip in mp3 on my hard-drive! :D


Here in Germany it is similar, we have a tax for analog blank media like tapes, cassettes, and a (much higher) tax for blank digital media like CD-R.

Under German law, every private person is legally entitled to make personal copies of any music, as long as he uses a legal source for it. This means I can copy CDs from all my friends and can also make copies for them of all my music, as long as I use original CDs as source. Files from Kazaa and eMule are not considered legal sources. The idea is that the tax paid on blank media pays for all these copyrights.

However: The record industry also has the right to copy-protect their music, and since last year it has become illegal to break any form of copy-protection even if it is trivial.

With more and more CDs being copy protected we now have the bizarre situation that we still pay full copyright taxes, but cannot make use of our legal(!) right to copy music.

Coming back to the original post: In Germany you could indeed sell your MP3 collection as long as all MP3 titles have been obtained from legal sources (i.e. online music stores). But as these stores all operate with DRM (digital rights management) it would probably be of little use to just sell the files. Selling of MP3s obtained by any other means (self-encoded from CDs or via Internet) is illegal.