Low Prices of Drive due to RIAA?

[peternoux]

Has anyone ever notices the continuing drop on the prices of large capacity hard drives, DC-R/RW drives and disks, and DVD-R/-RW/+R/+RW disks and drives? The only reason you would need these things is if you're downloading large quantities of files. When advertising about a low price, a rebate, whatever, retailers fail to see that if the hunt for file-sharers continue these products will become useless. I mean what would you need a 200GIG hard drive for if you don't have t a hundred movie files or thousands of mp3s to put into it? You can now buy a 48X CD-RW drive from Officemax for under $30 dollars, but in a few months they'd be obsolete. I've tried asking a local retailer about this and a customer representative chose not to comment. Has anyone ever had the same problem?

[eclectica]

Why buy a CD burner when you can get a DVD burner for a little more? Why get a 60 GB hard drive when you can get a 120 GB for a little more? That is why the prices are going down, and also because new computers come with the goods in them so people don't have to buy them separately now.

[Elistas]

Plus the technology is getting cheaper which is also a large factor into why these drives are getting cheaper. I mean, look at how RAM prices changed dramatically over the past few years. You can get 128MB of RAM for the same price that 16MB did a couple of years ago.

[mtndew21]

Why has nobody brought to fact that the customer is taxed for every blank media,harddrive,mp3 player, cd/dvd burner,dat recorder ect.sold to the customer ? which is meant to compensate the artist and riaa greed.And i think that would allow for "FAIR USE". If not Abolish the AARC ACT.why be charged a fee if i can use it as i see fit.

1) Every Music CDR since the AHRA was enacted has a hidden tax built into the price! (2% of the manufacturers sales) This is supposedly to pay the artists for home recording. Who Collects the Tax? The RIAA under the auspices of the AARC. Who shares office space with the RIAA and has many of the RIAA employees working for it. I haven't been able to find one artist that was paid a cent of the money. 4% is set aside for non-featured artists, of the remainder 40% for the featured artist and 60% for the labels. To date I have not found one artist who has received one cent of this money. In addition every CD recorder has a $2.00 surcharge built into the price that goes directly to the RIAA .This also includes cd players,dvd recorder's,dat recorder's,and mp3 player's. anything that can play or recorder has this tax collected on it.which is meant to compensate the artist and riaa greed So should we not have FAIR USE of the product then as we pay for this ?
http://www.virtualrecordings.com/ahra.htm

[Malicious Intent]

There was a news article on how it was arguably legal for Canadians to share because of a tax like this, but this is the first I've seen it mentioned that there was this tax in America. Infact I seem to remember an article posted be kooperman saying that it was an option to introduce such a tax.

[The Hunter]

It was to permit people in Canada to copy files for their own use, but uploading is whole different matter. That is to be discussed in the fall sitting of parliment.

[shawners]

More computers are built with Bigger and bigger hard drives.. 80 gigs upgradeable to i have seen. So with that in mind, plus mass producing, supply and demand. And Competition.. Prices will be driven down.. Especially due to the fact they make them reliable and to last a long long time.. So less and less return buyers.. Its like color tv.. I seen them so low.. 229 for one at walmart. I cant remember if it was 27, or 31 inch.
I would like a 200 gig hard drive but i dont collect movies, if i did i put them on CD-R til dvd comes out.
40 gigs seem to hold 4000-4500 songs.. ALot of 320kbs, 192, and least are 128kbs.. so 60000 music files or more could be tamed =) on 200 gig.

[mtndew21]

that is a usa Act not a canada act.
http://ewhac.best.vwh.net/FPI/digitax.html

[jonnymnemonic]

Technology gets better, older technology gets cheaper. It's been that way forever, so there's nothing new happening here. I remember paying $1400 for a 300 megabyte (not gigabyte) full-height SCSI drive 15 years ago or so, now that much money gets you a whole computer (with a hard drive hundreds of times as large as that, and probably more RAM than that.) I remember 256k SIMMs costing a couple of hundred bucks, now you get two thousand times as much memory for that money, or more (AND money is "worth" less now too).

Interestingly, I think we've now seen the size that we need for video and audio files, and that's not likely to change much. 700 megabytes gets you a Dovx movie, 5 gigs gets you a DVD quality movie. So we'll be able to hold more and more of these on our drives as the technology continues improving. Think ahead 20 years and extrapolate hard drive storage increases at the same scale as the LAST 20 years and we should be able to hold thousands of DVD-quality movies and probably MILLIONS of songs on our drives by then. I'm at half a terabyte on my machine now (555 gigabytes). In 20 years it could be a petabyte or more. Wonder if the OS and backup software will support 360k drives then. Imagine: "Please insert disk #2,398,445,671 and press a key to continue..." Lol ;)