p2p sharing - techcircus

[kris at melon.org]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 01:45:26PM -0400, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
> No, it is valid.  In analog days, the copy was less perfect and thus
> you could not copy copies of copies; the trading was self-limiting.
> 
> Digital copies are not copies, they are indistinguishable from the
> original.  They /are/ the original (in the Andy Warhol sense) and so
> therefore, without qualification, the copy is a sale not made: If you
> have Eminem on your HD, there is _zero_ reason to buy the CD, you
> will get identically the same product.

I think at this point, we should distinguish between a copy on a HD,
and a CD-CD copy. It's worth remembering that mp3 is a _lossy_
compression algorithm, and therefore distingushable for the original.
Additionally, the mp3 specification allows for several variations
within an mp3, so depending on the encoder used, and it's settings, the
lossiness can apply to different pieces of information from the
original. Although much slower, degradation caused by
encoding/decoding/reencoding/etc. does occur.

Of course copies made at any given stage are identical to the original,
so wel well seldom (if ever) see any significant degradation in audio
files anyway, since there are always better versions out there.

-- 
Kristofer Coward				http://unripe.melon.org/
GPG Fingerprint: 2BF3 957D 310A FEEC 4733  830E 21A4 05C7 1FEB 12B3
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