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Wow 25 replies. I'm going to respond to anyone with a +3 score. Won't waste my time on the anons and trolls.

SomeJoel:
Agreed. I recently saw an episode of Boondocks last week that parodied this. The freeman family was at the theater, with camcorders. At the beggining was an MPAA commercial about piracy. It showed a little old lady getting mugged, and the caption "YOU'LL GET THE SAME PUNISHMENT FOR PIRACY AS YOU WOULD MUGGING A LADY!"

I thought to myself that wasn't cool at all. I agree, the punishment should be equal to the crime. Maybe for the folks making tons of $$$ it should be the same punishment as mugging, but for some 12yro kid, nah.

  Jugalator :
Perve :)

  kindbud:

Cool name :) Ok, lets play logic here. I own a house, and I know someone is running a meth lab, or storing stolen goods. Or let's say I know about a murder but don't say anything about it. Usenet.com knows what's on their servers, which as much as I love technology, I hate to say they're an accomplice.

E-mail is different. The messages aren't public.

These last few answers are for all the folks below +3.

Price: Karaoke costs more to license and has a thinner profit margin than the original songs do. I could put together a compilation CD of dance hits, and make way more money on that than I would "Karaoke dance hits" simply because more people just listen to music than karaoke. Karaoke is a small fish in a big pond.

Right for a business to transform media:
Refer to this article from IP Lawyer Robin Gross: http://ipjustice.org/wp/2007/02/22/karaoke_legal_myths/

Our business is failing:
Heh, stupid troll.
http://www.7bamboo.com/cms/?q=node/54
10 years best karaoke in the South SF bay area. I don't think so.

The "I don't like you for your $500b comment guy":
Hey, seriously, i'd hope our .gov would be smarter than that to waste all that money on combating karaoke piracy. I'd rather see things like they were in Clinton years.

Everyone else:
Thanks for reading, commenting.

--toqer

http://stashbox.org/23136/P1010004.JPG

Take a look at that old man in the middle of this picture. He's my boss. He owns a karaoke bar in San Jose California called the 7 Bamboo.

This guy has been doing karaoke a loooong time. Up until 2002 and American idol, karaoke was sort of frowned on by most Americans. Then AI came out and there was a sudden surge in karaoke's popularity.

http://www.7bamboo.com/cms/?q=node/210

I did some screenshots of the Namm global music report in that article. I'll just summarize, basically the entire karaoke industry is making less money now than it was 10 years ago in 1997.

Myself, i've seen our business hurt by piracy. Before 2002, we were some quirky little Japanese karaoke bar, pretty much one of maybe 4 karaoke venues in San Jose, but between 2002 and 2004 we saw a sharp decline in attendance, and a sharp growth in karaoke venues and it's been a constant uphill battle to keep customers coming back.

I made a choice to not pirate karaoke at our club. We have about 7000 songs in our collection. This in in contrast to the 10-15 venues that have popped up in our area with anywhere between 50,000-150,000 songs.

Karaoke is expensive. About $2 a track. So somebody please tell me, with a straight face how these new guys that just popped out of nowhere suddenly have a $300,000 karaoke collection. Fact is, they don't.

It's still competition for us. Everyone that works at 7bamboo makes less money because of it. Less tips, less sales, less everything, but more work.

Look at the face of that old man and tell me that usenet.com is in the right by enabling these people to screw his business over with competition running on pirated songs. The business he and his wife built was in jeopardy until I came along and gave it a hot beef injection of technology.

Fortunately for them, and the rest of the 7b's employees, I can keep the place on the bleeding edge of karaoke technology without resorting to piracy. Still though, I think my time would have been better spent doing more worldly things.

Personally, I hope the RIAA wins this one. Don't mod me a troll for voicing this opinion either, because since when has someone voicing a legitimate, validated opinion considered trolling.

It's just not fair. Karaoke CD's have to be ripped carefully at 1x, so i've put over 400 manhours into ripping our 300 original CDG's. A pirate can suck off a newsgroup and have 7000 songs in a few hours. Given a few days, they'll have a 40-50k+ collection.

BTW RIAA if you're reading this, look into alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke. Shut that one down first, plzktnx.

--toq

Prolly too late for a little karma whoring here, but since i've been here in karaoke 5 years, I have to tell this tale.

In 2001 I was a laid off Sysadmin in Silicon Valley. I had no desire to move from here, I was staying. I took a job at a karaoke bar after looking for 6 months to get back into the trade I had been in for 10 years. I figured at this point, anything as long as it was money.

Being a Sysadmin type, I showed the former KJ how to use a PC with karaoke. After he quit, I got promoted from doorman to KJ. Shortly after I got promoted, I started broadcasting the show online, got a shoutcast partner sponsorship from Nullsoft, got printed up in the new york times and the rest was history. My tips skyrocketed, business here at 7 Bamboo was slamming in 2003.

We got printed up in a lot of newspapers around here as well. Folks would come in, see our PC setup and figure if it's that easy, they could do the same thing themselves. San Jose has seen a hardcore proliferation in PC based karaoke setups over the last 2 years.

Well, here's where the trickle effect comes in.

I would say most of these new KJ's are pirating. 7 Bamboo has been in business over 20 years, and has a collection of about 6000 songs. (Retail value of over $15,000) Most of these new guys have collections of anywhere from 20-100,000 songs. How is it someone that has only been in business less than a year can afford that much karaoke? The answer is they can't, the answer is they just download songs from limewire, alt.binaries.sounds.karaoke and other P2P type places. Karaoke piracy is so rampant, it's really affected our attendance here.

In 2003, we were one of only 5 or 6 venues here in San Jose. Now there is over 50. When my old 70yro boss scratches his head wondering WTF is going on, it's hard to explain to him. Conversations go like this:

Toshi: Bobbysan, what's happening? (note, heavy japanese accent)
Me: Toshi, bad people, steal karaoke, start business
Toshi: Steal from us?
Me: No toshi, steal from the internet
Toshi: Should unplug the internet when you leave
Me: No not like that toshi
Toshi: Oh? Explain bobbysan
Me: There are places on the internet people download them for free
Toshi: Oh? Why don't we do the same?

You guys get the idea. Trying to explain this to a 70yro Japanese man is near impossible.

Bottom line though is there are so many new karaoke venues that have been enabled by piracy, it's really hurting us. We play it straight, but remember karaoke is a small pond compared to film or regular music. A small pebble of piracy here is like having a boulder chucked into a puddle.

--toq

Good thing the Axis didn't have these! We'd all be sprechen si deustch and eating kraut right now.

I love flying Electric RC stuff. One of the major considerations for an RC power system is weight, which is why NIcd is going out, and LiPo is all the rage now.

The article was really scant on details, does anyone know approximately what the weight of this device will be? Will fuel cells be able to replace typical LiPo batteries in RC aircraft?

PS, typing this live from my Karaoke show, stop by and say hi :)

Was the p-233 laptop I picked up for $30. I slapped a $7 wireless card on it, removed the hinge and put it in a picture frame. I use it at the karaoke bar I work at so singers know when they're coming up.

http://www.7bamboo.com/modules.php?name=News&file= article&sid=212

--toq

Sure there are karaoke competitions, nothing quite the caliber of what was portrayed in Duets with Lewis and Paltro. Competition does not follow traditional Japanese karaoke style, and is nothing more than a gimmick by desperate KJ's to attract customers

First, let me tell folks who I am before my expertise in karaoke and tech stuff. I'm toqer, I broadcast my karaoke show over the internet via winampTV. I've won award after award for my shows in addition to having an article in the New York Times.

http://www.7bamboo.com/nyt1.htm http://www.7bamboo.com/nyt2.htm http://www.7bamboo.com/chat.html KARAOKE IS HARDCORE!!!
--toq

My bandwidth is sponsored by AOL/TW since i'm like the only guy not broadcasting porn or pirated movies.

Oh, I thought it was sponsored by viewers like you.

a. I define karaoke as a parody, and im sure others would agree with me.

While it's true that few people would enjoy ripping karaoke versions of Garth Brooks for their IPods, it certainly isn't legal parody.

b. Do tribute bands pay licensing fee's?

Absolutely! But that money goes to a different set of agencies, primarily Harry Fox.

c. Karaoke tracks are never performed by the original artists, why are they getting royaltees for music they do not produce?

That's an ambiguous statement. You might've meant that your singers are volunteers who give permission to stream their singing, but there's still the instrumental track you're infringing on. Those instrumentals may or may not be by the first people to publish that song, but even cover bands are original in some respect. (A first generation copy is "more original" than ones copied from it, etc)

As to why the big-name performers get more money than the band who actually made the karaoke CDs, that's a valid objection. It's really just a matter of bookkeeping overhead- it would be too hard for you to submit a list of all songs you've streamed over the year, so they just average it out and assume your playlist mirrors the Billboard 200. For more info, jwz wrote a complete article. (It's on webcasting, which you're still doing, even though you overlay other peoples' vocals)

I'm one of only 2 in the world doing this.

There is no such thing as "legality through obscurity". Sure, the rareness of the activity means you are unlikely to be the target of a lawsuit, but it doesn't mean you can honestly describe your site as a "legal use" for statistical analysis of a protocol.

Just for kicks I made remote control streaming karaoke jukebox. I used WWWinamp by Justin Frankel. Pick a song, add it to the playlist, then watch it here. You'll need winamp to watch the streaming karaoke video. Kinda cool, kinda on topic, kinda free (well windows isn't but that's another slash discussion)

Hey folks...

Badmofo is getting hit pretty hard, i've set up a mirror here . If you're having problems accessing badmofo, just use my mirror.

(PS Sorry if this hit you too hard Brennen)

--toq

Maybe I should have done the NYT registration thing, and read the article, but the board is in japanese!

I work with japanese, and I understand a few words, but I just can't see what the hubbub about this article on a japanese board that I can't even read is.

Here is a very active forum of trolls and flames in english if anyone is interested.

2001 laid off, 2002 unemployment ran out, got a job as a door man at a karaoke bar. 2003 said screw it and started my own consulting gig with my partner.

Against the advice of a lot of people, we did it legit, we got our business licenses in order, we incorporated, got company bank accounts, the works.

Now we may not be working 40hrs a week at $13@hr. We maybe get 8 hours here @ 75, another 4 or 2 here and there, but having the freedom too do what you want with your company (and it's credit) is more fun than slaving away for the full 40 hours a week.

Now after a full year and a first tax return, we've officially made it past that first year of business that most businesses fail in. (most businesses don't survive past 6 months, with a partnership they die even faster) I guess i'm lucky, my partner and I have been friends since we were kids, and we really compliment each other out on the job site.

Now going back to freedom to do what you want with your company, remember how I said "2002 got a job as a doorman at a karaoke bar"? Well, now we have that very same bar hooked up with DSL and we're streaming video of people singing karaoke every tuesday-sunday night

Sure its silly, but its fun, and I never would have been able to do a project like this working for somebody else. My advice, print some cards, get some business licenses, and promote yourself.