Following up on Kirk’s article yesterday on bootlegs, I thought it might be a nice waste of bandwidth if I threw together a list of music that I would purchase instantly if it were only legitimately released. Some of this is music that I have listened to zillions of times, in every format imaginable, as bootlegs were taped or ripped for me over the years. Or purchased on vinyl from long-gone record stores in San Luis Obispo and Westwood. Or maybe they were cassettes I found found at the Camden Town Street Fair; or CDs I came across at the KUSF record swap.

Some of them, of course, came via Napster or other like-minded sites. Hell, a couple I even recorded from the A couple I originally recorded from the King Biscuit Flower Hour. All of them have two things in common: either the record company or the artist thinks that these have no audience and/or artistic merit, and I would buy them in a split-second if they were ever actually legitimately released.

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It’s not widely known, but the first bootleg recording was made by Thomas Edison back in 1902. Edison snuck one of his wax cylinder recorders into a parade where he briefly recorded John Philip Sousa’s band as they passed by. Edison was a huge fan of Sousa and was eager to use his invention to relive the performance in the comfort of his own home. Sousa, on the other hand, hated Edison’s invention and refused to be recorded. Edison knew that his clandestine recording was the only hope he had of ever enjoying Sousa’s music privately. Music fans have been recording and trading live performances of their favorite artists ever since.

Edison’s recording is what we commonly call a bootleg. Bootlegs have been a rite of passage for music lovers throughout the rock era. You discover a band, become obsessed with their music, buy everything you can get your hands on, then move on to unreleased live recordings.

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Several months ago, I put together a list of TV shows I’d like to see on DVD. Since we are talking about piracy this week, and using DVDs as an example, I thought it would be interesting to:

1. See what movement there has been on that list
2. Talk a bit about the lengths we’ve had to go to at our house to avoid buying a pirated DVD set of a show that will never come out on DVD.

So first, let’s look at that list:

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Now that we’ve established that physical media piracy is still a very real problem, the next question that comes to mind is, ‘who buys this stuff, and why?’.

For sake of convenience I’ll use pirated DVD’s in the examples that follow. This shouldn’t be taken as an indication that the problem of piracy is limited to the motion picture industry. On the contrary, piracy is a problem for the music industry, the publishing industry, the apparel industry, and just about any other industry that manufactures goods that can be easily replicated.

Here are a few obvious reasons why consumers buy pirated merchandise:
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Whenever we talk about piracy the discussion tends to revolve around the issue of illegal downloads. It’s strange because a much older form of media piracy is still rampant. Counterfeit media products cost the entertainment industry tens of billions of dollars per year and arguably do more damage to the industry than file sharing ever will.

Consider this: When your 16-year-old brother downloads a song or movie from BitTorrent he may or may not consume the product. It’s open to debate whether or not tangible economic damage has resulted from the download. Certainly a copyright has been violated, but it’s difficult to place a value on the damage that has actually been inflicted. In most cases an illegal download does not equate to a lost sale. By contrast, when a consumer buys a counterfeit CD or DVD it’s much easier to assume that a sale has been lost and some real economic damage has resulted from that sale.

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Last week, we posted an item about the acetate of the first version of The Velvet Underground & Nico going on auction on eBay. (As I write this, the bidding is up to US $107,000.) This weekend, I got an email from a friend who said that he was downloading a digital copy of this album.

So here is my question: are either of these piracy? The auction of the physical artifact and the digital download of the music purportedly ripped from that physical artifact. Is the auction somehow not piracy, but the download piracy?

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Unversal Music, the mega-major record label that thinks so little of its fans that their CEO, Doug Morris, recently said that iPods were: “just repositories for stolen music,” has evidentally hit upon a new business model: lawsuits and extortion.

Apparently making money by putting good music out there with a price point that might entice people just isn’t good enough. Because, of course, we are all thieves. So instead of that, they’ve decided to go a different route. Instead of using their artists to make money, they’ve decided to fall back upon the lawyers. Hopefully, the lawyers will get a better royalty rate.

Let’s review, shall we?

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The recording industry has been waging war against Russian-based music websites for years. While the industry has successfully litigated most file sharing networks out of existence, they haven’t had much luck stopping sites like MediaService’s AllofMP3. Despite the RIAA’s best efforts AllofMP3 continues to sell digital downloads to music lovers around the world, while technically complying with Russian copyright laws and licensing agreements.

While complying with the laws of your country may seem like a loophole here in the United States, it makes perfect sense to a company that’s based in Russia. Unfortunately for MediaServices that the loophole is about to be closed. There are signs the Russian government is planning to crack down on grey market download sites like AllofMP3 in an effort to gain admission into the World Trade Organization.

Regardless of what you think about the legality of AllofMP3, there’s no denying that MediaServices has created one of the most innovative and consumer friendly digital music services around. AllofMP3 is so well done that the “legitimate” recording industry could learn quite a bit by studying it. Hopefully the major labels will take a long look at AllofMP3 before it gets shut down.

Here are a few lessons the music industry could learn from AllofMP3:

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I’ve never actually checked out allofmp3.com, the infamous Russian site that offers a ton of music for prices that are more in line with the non-physicality of digital files. Not for any moral reason, but because I remember the bad old days of the late 1990s, when clicking on dodgy-seeming links looking for an .mp3 caused tons of windows to pop-up or other weird things.

But while I never bothered, I count myself a fan of anything that causes fuming at the RIAA. And a lot of y’all took advantage of their services, so much so that people were saying that it could keep have Russia out of the World Trade Organization.

That’s right. Forget all of that stuff about Putin’s insanity, and all of those unsecured nukes, but let’s go after the people who provide the cheap and 100 percent legal under Russian law downloads. So, the pressure was on, and just the other day, after Visa International suspended credit card service, allofmp3.com cried “дядюшка,” and changed their business model.

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Sigh. Nothing worse than life imitating a throwaway joke. Last week, writing about YouTube’s copyrighted material discovery software, I called it “the digitial equivalent of drug-sniffing dogs.”

Little did I know that the MPAA had already taken my silly joke and turned it into an even sillier reality. In a move that sounds more like a YouTube parody than anything else, the MPAA has trained a pair of dogs to sniff DVDs. I swear to gods that I am not, in any way, shape or form, making this up.

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