Vote

Lower the price of CDs. If blank CDs can sell for less than $1/ea. (and the companies selling them are making a profit), then we're paying too much. Offset the profit loss by salary cuts and downsizing within the record companies.

In days of old, pirates walked the plank or were hanged. That still seems appropriate for the "pros." But for the guy who now and then makes a copy for a friend, does anyone REALLY care?

Reduce the cost of discs. If discs were one third to half the current prices, everyone would want an original. It is just the price that forces people into pirated copies.

lower prices

Lower prices. Music and movie bigwigs need only so many Rolls Royces....

What do I suggest be done to replace watermarking ? NOTHING. What needs to happen is that the recording industry needs to overcome its pathological hatred of the idea that some persons in this world will obtain copies of music that they wont pay for. And dont you think they raise the price of legitimately sold music to compensate for it ? When you build a toll road, there will always be toll-jumpers, when you impose a tax, there will always be cheaters. The law should be enforced when massive copying operations are uncovered; but when I want to make a copy for a friend-who will often end up buying the CD anyway- why should my recording quality suffer ?

Don't even try to think of a solution. It's a hard problem. We should just let things work out their own ways. Just listen to MUSIC and forget about AUDIO-okay, that's also hard for your audiophiles.

Nothing's free, not even piracy, which requires time, effort, and resources. Lower the price of CD's, etc., to make it less cost-effective.

If prices are reasonable and product is available then piracy will not be much of a problem. I believe people mainly buy pirated goods when the real thing is too expensive or too hard to come by.

Aren't the record companies rich enough already?

lower the price of cd's. when lp's dominated they were far more affordable.

Piracy would not be a problem if the music companies were to lower the prices of their CDs. As a letter carrier for the USPS,I see hundreds of AOL,Prodigy,Earthlink,and other internet service cd-roms thrown away every quarter on my route alone. Obviously,greed,not high production costs,is the explanation for the costs of CDs in my book. Legal,quality liquor at an affordable price drastically reduced the market for bootleg booze. Lowering the price for CDs would do the same against the pirated music market.

I would make it so cheap to buy the CD's, DVD's ect, that it would not be worth it for anyone to copy them. After all when a product is mass produced it is supposed to get cheaper. It is because the Record Companies are over charging that we have so many people making bootlegs to keep and sell.

Simple: lower the prices of software

Price the recordings at a reasonable level, and it isn't worth pirating. That is what the computer software companies did. Who's bigger BMG or Microsoft?

Maybe, by lowering prices, thus creating more demand.

I have yet to see any real evidence that *REAL*pirating (ie recording & redistributing for profit) has any serious effect on a major label's bottom line. Recording ones own CD's to play in the car / at work / at school / etc. is, of course, very common...*and entirely legal* ...and even here the industry imposes extra fees on so-called 'music' compatible CDR disks... what utter bull#$*@ ... attempting to charge us twice for their so called "intellectual property." In reality if the industry reduced the price of CD's to a reasonable level of profitibility, those few people who do buy pirated material might choose to buy the original media.

Im still willing to bet that the artists are still getting their money. I personally wont burn an mp3 that i listen on my 2 channel setup. you can hear the difference.

Pirating or bootlegging will always be with us. In my experience, they may be cheaper, but the sound quality is nasty. You get what you pay for, as usual, and I don't buy 'em. Let the problem run, and let the music industry go after the offenders who are big enough for prosecution to be economically feasible.

Lower the price of a CD to $5.00 to $8.00 and increase ticket costs to live performances. I'm tired of the riff-raff.

Piracy can never be stopped no matter what we do, so it is a complete waste of time and energy to try. What we have to do is make music cheaper and easier to buy - as well as hear before we buy - and a wider/better selection of music should be available. Most of what the record companies foist on us these days simply isn't worth buying; MP3s are the ONLY access many people have to decent music. The record companies keep deleting great music, and as they own the rights to it not even the artists themselves can sell it thereafter! At the end of the day, all laws depend on the public's sense of fairness to work; without this there would be total anarchy. I think most people respect an artist's right to be paid for their work, we just don't want to be ripped off by the record companies. In fact, the people who have the least respect for an artist's right to be paid are the record companies themselves - how many successful music acts do you see that go bankrupt, or have to sue their record company to get any money oout of them?

gimme a break. After signing on with megabuck recordings and after making a million dollars on a cheap record that sounds so terrible it only sounds good on your sisters 50 dollar boombox who cares what kind of watermarking scheme they come up with? It all sounds terrible in the end anyway.

Make recordings so affordable that it is foolish to attempt pirating.

The vastness of the music industry is a product of its profitability. Pirating artists' material diminishes their profits and therefore their incentive to record. If we do nothing to stop piracy, fewer artists may record, or artists will record less. The question is how significantly piracy will effect an artists' profits and, given that profit is not an artist's only motivation, their incentive to record. I suspect very little, because the only sure way to obtain a high-quality recording remains buying the studio's release (unless you have a SCSI Plextor CD reader and writer set-up, which offers bit-perfect copies of CD media--which won't help with the coming new media). Admittedly, not everyone cares about hi-fi sound (witness the MP3 phenominon), but those people who pirate might not otherwise purchase the music, i.e., if it's free, a larger number of people will demand it than if they must pay for it. I suppose recording artists could view piracy as a terrific way of reaching a wider audience!

cut cd prices by 75%! Pirating will go down, I guarntee it

REDUCE the price of softwares....... Making it more affordable to the masses will help to discourage piracy. Recording companies should strike a balance between the price and sales volumen factor, a simple economic case of turnover = price x sales volume. I, for one, will opt for the original discs if they are made more affordable, given their obvious superior sound quality.