He is compensated if he produces it live. People wanting to get paid several times for doing it only once and using the artifices of unpaid engineers to deliver it? Funny stuff that.
The media we all enjoy and the way we enjoyed it traditionally required money to pull off. Lots and lots of money, and so those that put that money into it (labels, studios, etc.) wanted lots and lots of money back. To make lots and lots of money though, you need royalties, or some way of profiting off every commercial distribution of your song. In the days before the internet, these studios and labels became enormously profitable because the consumer was essentially totally beholden to them. VCRs and CD burners and tape decks started eroding that control, and the internet has now completely blown that control away. Enter abusive legislation like the DMCA and lobbying efforts to expand criminal punishment of copyright infringement.
What the RIAA and other conglomerates are protecting is their (perceived) position as necessary content holders and distributors who we need to fund new artists and distribute them to the masses. To me the debate is: to what extent do we need these huge content holding and distributing entities, and is there a problem with legislation designed to artificially maintain their business models? (I.e. eroding net neutrality, etc.) In other words I don't think it is a fair critique to say an artist cannot or should not profit off of any copies of their work, if they want to. But the extent of limitations on copying, and how the playing field is artificially gamed to stifle innovation and competition--yes, that is a concern.
What? No one is harmed. Let's say I own not one but for reasons I don't wish to explain two CD copies of Lady Gaga The Fame. Now let's say it's 2009 and I have a gig coming up and I'm like, I need to burn a few tracks from the album onto a couple of CDs, and I don't want to go into my closet and rip the tracks again on my new computer, so I torrent them.
Is anyone harmed?
Define "harm?" Is Interscope "harmed" by what their lawyers would construe as infringement? This is taking into consideration that you already own it, since their argument would still be that
any copy you make without their authorization (i.e., without paying for it) is infringement. So just your convenience in accessing it has value, value you have not yet "legally" availed yourself of by, say, using a cloud service that pays money to Interscope (Amazon, Google, iTunes) for the right to offer customers the ability to store their music online and access it anywhere, or just buying it when you really need it. Do I agree with this? Taken to the extreme (i.e., saying you cannot even copy your own CD?) of course not. Ridiculous. But if you own it, and you have not digitized it yourself, and you avail yourself of the convenience of getting it anywhere you want by torrenting it (when there are free and legal alternatives?) I don't know about that. I can see both sides of that one.
In essence the industry is (correctly) now offering a "buy it once, play it wherever and whenever" model with things like Google Music and Amazon's cloud locker and so on. The digital copy is something you can do yourself (by ripping it and uploading it to the service, or emailing it to yourself, or putting it on dropbox, or whatever), or you can buy it, but taking a digital copy outside of these two licensed means could be, technically, infringement. Trivial? Yes. Wrong to call stealing? Yes. But technically, harm in the legal sense.
