In January 1st 2006 the pirate party was founded in Sweden as a protest to the law making it illegal to download copyrighted material.

Above quote taken from wikipedias entry on "Pirate Party"

As the topic says I am curios to the members of this forums opinion on this.

Reform law good. Break law, go to jail.

I think artists should take another approach to making art. They should give away their music with Creative Commons +attribution licenses.(and variants) Then they should just ask for donations and such, or perhaps just sell cd's more as ceremony. I am not entirely sure that would work, though, but i have pirated in the past, and bought stuff from the artists of music i liked. Currently i get some music from CC bands, like from here Jamendo : Open your ears, and i guess this Content curators - CcWiki has some good stuff too.(just found that) I just wish there was a FOSS audioplayer that could rate, download(for CC music), play and guess new music for me. (Like pandora, except pandora does not download, of course, also pandora is down for outside USA) I guess that would be a hard thing to get to work properly. I have been thinking about how that should work a bit.
I am not sure about copyright that already exists.. The internet does suggest that the way we should look at copyright might be off. I dont think they have the right to download illegally..

Who is gonna pay artists if downloading media is free for everyone?

Those who deserve the media. Those that admire it. Those who are moral about rewarding others for the good they do.

I'm not for piracy, but the reason we have it. I think is because the record and film industry is too greedy. Jamendo is a good way of freeing the art from the big greedy record company admins.

" If we can't push all this shitty music onto our costumers. Including Digital rights management - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia We can only afford 4 ferraris instead of 8."

And all the lies they come up with. Piracy is not killing music, it's killing the record companies. Music has always been here. Do we really need to make these greedy people even richer. Do you think the artists get's to see much of the money from the record sales....

If I'm going too buy a cd, I'll rather buy it from a concert. Then the artist get's everything, instead of a few % royalties. Tell me, who made the damn music.

How about getting a better business model? Just try to pirate : Let's say ubuntu

First let me say that I am kinda drunk ATM so if this post will make any sense I don't know. I'll try and form my thoughts correctly.

Usually when an album comes out it contains two perhaps three songs that you think is good, rest is mostly crap songs. To pay full price for this is ridiculous. To pay for the albums of the mostly exposed artist, those played on the radio, is also kinda stupid. What if I don't like the most recent fame factory or some other stupid show winner? I hate those massproduced artist that are supposed to appeal to the greater public. The artist I enjoy are those who are original and not copies of some other artist, if you took two of todays artist and played them after each other I wouldn't probably notice the change.

The artist that are unique are the ones I enjoy and they can't be found so easily, that should say bought that easily. Those who sell music sell the most popular, the most recent music, to earn more money by selling to the grey masses.

The really unique can only be found on, let's say Direct Connect or some site that offers free music.

Recently I discovered a band called Ugress from Norway that has enticed me very much. They are really good and offer some of their music for free, I have never heard them before! I also like Binary Mind which you can download from Jamendo for free.

What I am trying to say is that the independent artist that offer their music for free have surpassed what the record companies have to offer, unless you are the victim of liking what you are told to like.

As the recording companies go for, what they think is, the most famous, those who can make up their own mind don't have anything to listen to. When hell freezes over I'll download a <Famous Artist> album.

To comment the Pirate Party, I think it is an interesting initiative because I am nothing more than an poor student that can't afford all the music/games/movies I like. But I agree that somehow the creators of the music/game/movie should be payed, that could be accomplished by paying some tax to the ISP for letting you download all the music that you want, perhaps that could be made a national tax. We Swedes already pay a tax for television, as soon as we get something that can capture the signals to TV we have to pay a tax, no matter if we use the TV only to watch DVDs or as a computer screen. This tax also counts for our radio.

If the tax wouldn't satisfy everybody, I'll gladly pay the artist in person, if I like his music that is. Because of the advance of mp3 the CDs have become somewhat obsolete.

To summarize everything:
1. More online content in the form of MP3, actually I'd rather see it in the form of .flac or .ogg but that isn't likely to happen.
2. The pay going directly to the artist instead of some company taking almost everything and paying the artist minimum wage.
3. Perhaps a tax or a fee payed to the ISP that goes to the artist you download.

Now when I have written everything it seems kinda offtopic but nevertheless it is and interesting debate that probably will go on for some years.

To credit those band mentioned:
Ugress
binarymind - Home
A site to download great music from! Mostly electronica though:
Jamendo : Open your ears
Another site that offers free legal music:
Magnatune: license music and MP3 download
Please visit their sites, they have free music for you!

If you find yourself listening a lot to some bands you downloaded, please donate

Of course! And I'd love to see those bands live! If a band releases a couple of free songs that everybody can download their live performances would be more popular.

That's another model that artists could use. Release free music and earn money by doing performances.

I think software prices should come down for example i love a program called photomatix for photography it only does one simple thing and they want 90 € for it wtf ? that 3 days wages for me....
now they give you two main ways of doing it in the program and give you one free and the more propriety method you have to have a license for so like 10 people buy a license just for one function and another 100 are still using a usable function of the program for free thats not right I'm not paying 90 € so that 90 % of people get a usable program free and i have to pay for just that little bit more functionality... thats not being fair they should charge 20-30 € and give you a 30 dsy trial, the program is also slightly buggy, hell I could get the whole damn os for 90 € (win XP)

I don't think that it's up to the government to decide how the music distributors and bands make money. If they wish to sell their music, then the government should strictly enforce the rules. Otherwise, the market will become unhealthy.

You can get an excellent view of what happens on unhealthy market by the current standing in the operating systems. Most people use Windows, highly due to pirates. If there would be no pirates, much more users would prefer to use Linux and it's business models instead.

BTW I download my music from eMusic, which sells music in the form of non-DRM mp3 files (unfortunately no Ogg Vorbis yet, but I suppose contacting them would lead to it being offered also) and the artists do get paid. If anybody is interested in that, drop me a message since with invitation both parties get to download an additional 50 songs for no cost. Plus if you plan on using it on Linux, then mention that also for a tip.