nobodysprefect

Mike sold me a bass. Due to a mistake on his part I had to return it to him. He immediately accepted that he'd made a mistake (an understandable mistake imo) and went out of his way to ensure my payment was refunded promptly. He's as fair as they come and I'd be happy to deal with him any time without any reservations whatsoever.

[quote name='spinynorman' timestamp='1347101370' post='1796929'] Thanks for posting that, very interesting and good luck with your thesis. [/quote] You're welcome and thank you! I find the law to be JUST what I've been looking for all my life... Provides for some challenging - and by challenging I mean 'insurmountable by humanity at this stage of evolution' - questions to tackle if I feel philosophical, yet there's the old-fashioned, diligent scholarly kind of research of case law provides to provide a nice counter point. Practice? What's THAT? Joking aside, I always found music to leave me extremely bored, intellectually speaking. Apart from acoustics* or perhaps gendered performance cultures**, there's no room for intellectual pursuits in music. * you can get up to very hard maths if you want to, I hear. ** the methodological problems alone constitute entire fields of study!

Yeah, so I'm writing my master's thesis #1 on this very issue. Basically, the theoretical economics literature is divided on the effects of filesharing: depending on the model, filesharing can either harm, help or be neutral for music sales. Robust empirical studies show no statistical correlation between supply of files and music purchases. The theoretical models explaining the lack of correlation posit that there are two factors going into this: first, the quality of the good obtained through filesharing is inferior. Secondly, filesharing enables consumers to sample the music before making a purchasing decision, which lowers the risk of the album turning out to be 80% filler, which lessens the uncertainty inherent in the purchase, which increases the disposition to buy. I'm not touching punitive damages; according to McGregor (McGregor on Damages) the English way of calculating damages is a 'but for' -test, and, as such, a European jurist doesn't have to live in a world with punitive damages. Taking into account the fact that even for records that did not get bought, the persons buying music generally buy other albums that they have, by sampling, found to be a better match for their preferences. From my discussions with my professors, the facts are not simple, and the arguments are convoluted, and judges are asses who can't be bothered to listen to a convoluted probabilistic argument; as such, filesharers lose often. As the US consumption of games and DVDs has grown far more than the sales of music have declined, the apparent explanation for declining music sales is that, firstly, other forms of entertainment have passed listening to new music as a pastime, secondly, the replacement of LPs with CDs is more or less complete, and thirdly, with digital distribution and the ability to buy a single piece instead of an album, the value of the average sale has plummeted. There is preliminary evidence that iTunes, Spotify and others have been able to 'crowd out' filesharing, as people who are not abjectly cash poor but time rich prefer to spend 10e/month for a superior good rather than perform illegal acts. The crux of my thesis, and it's title, is the difficulty of justifying damages in a filesharing case. Disregarding IP romanticism, western societies extend monopoly privileges (to paraphrase Jefferson) to stimulate creation of inventions, science and art. Since damages awarded in a filesharing caseare NOT music sales, the artists who create the music in the first places receive not a single cent in royalties. The legal system, then, creates a simulation of a sale between the infringer and the rights holder, but not between the rights holder and the creator of music. Of course, the creator/artist was not a party to the case, BUT there is always the option to make a law mandating a percentage of such damages going to the artist. Since there is no such law, it must be the will of the legislator that the artist receives nothing. It could be argued that the damages incentivise the publishing of new music, but, since there is effectively an illegal purchasing cartel of record companies who are no longer necessary to produce or distribute music, the economic justification for allowing damages in a filesharing case are weaker than ever. To summarize: the society does not need recording companies in order to have new music available for consumption, yet their illegal purchasing cartel is left untouched, the artist does not receive a single penny of the damages awarded in filesharing cases, and the citizen is punished (hey, speculative and vacuous damages is close enough to a criminal fine - doesn't matter much to his wallet which it's called, anyways) without the amount of damages or even the causation being supported by good evidence.

we traded 635s and everything went swimmingly! Recommended.

We traded basses, and David was great to deal with throughout. I dig. Oh, and excellent packing.