Slashdot Mirror
Copy Protection - Scapegoat or Real Threat?
ZenShadow asks: "Okay. The RIAA is screaming about MP3s being a problem because they
can be digitally copied and distributed. Now we have this recent
slashdot article in which the FCC cites copy protection as a key
issue in digital TV standards. My question is this: We've had cassette tape recorders and VCRs for years now, so why is this such a big deal? Is this just an excuse by the industry to hold back the advancement of technology, or is the ease of distribution -really- that much of an issue?"
Notwithstanding the mournful, plaintive cries of the Liberal storm troopers aching for the NWO to get moving and conquer America properly (rather than quietly and in bits and pieces as they are now doing -- have you heard any news from Michigan lately? Its new rulers have blacked out all coverage), I think we can solve this property rights issue very easily -- and conveniently for all of those whose legitimate interests are threatened.
Let's face it, the work, in its entirety, belongs to whoever put up the capital to publish it. If the Rolling Stones didn't have a record deal, they'd be nothing. Their label, however, could just hire somebody else to make the same records of the Stones walked off. So really, the artist is irrelevant and has no rights of any description. They're all drug-addled perverts anyway. The only thing that matters is the guy with the checkbook. The customer is only buying the right to listen to the work, and certainly has no conceivable right to make copies or anything of that nature.
So here's the plan: All computers will be required by law to run a background process at all times (disablement of which will constitute an attempt to commit felony copyright infringement, with a number of counts to be determined by the time span during which the daemon is disabled divided by average song length). This process will detect attempts at copying. Operating systems which refuse to implement this in the kernel can only be doing so in order to facilitate copyright infringement; this is a felony. If you have nothing to hide, you'll play by the rules. The record companies have a compelling interest here, sorry. If we allow copying, we'll be destroying their incentives and the economy will be in flames within the week. It happened in the Soviet Union, and it can happen here. We must preserve the freedom of our economy at all costs. Furthermore, the monitor of each computer will contain a large, heavy, spring-loaded mallet. The law will require that the copy-detection process activate the mallet and clobber any user who attempts to copy any sound files of any description (statistics show that the segment of the population which creates its own files is statistically negligible, and the success of Mayor Giuliani in fighting crime has taught us that guilt-by-statistics can be implemented with no loss of voter confidence). Tampering with the copy-detection process will, obviously, incur the wrath of the mallet as well.
So there you have it. If any of you sick, whining liberal pansies want to take issue with this, don't even bother. Your hilarious irrationalities (esp. yours, JustShootMe) amuse me but they will not and can not deter me from my tireless efforts in the defense of liberty. Extremism in the defense of liberty is, as the man said, no vice.
To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
The RIAA steals from people all the time. They claim that you are buying the rights to listen to the music contained on the disk (rather than the recording itself). So why is it then that if the CD gets broken, they charge exactly the same amount for a new copy (rather than the reasonable costs of media and handling)? After all, I supposedly bought lifetime rights to personal playback the first time around. If I want a CD for home, and a cassette for the car, they still charge full price even if I buy both at the same time so that there can be no doubt that I am paying twice for the same license.
Could it be that their party line is more of a convieniant excuse than an honest belief? Now we move on to fair use. Up until the latest massive lobbying efforts of RIAA, the consumer had an absolute legal right to make personal use copies of any music they licensed (bought). Now that they have lined enough pockets to get the laws changed, they are flexing their muscle to force the makers of players to cripple a perfectly good product and add cost to the units. Having to actually cough up more money to pay for a feature that is actively hostile to my use of the player is insult added to injury. I have to pay for that even if I decide to boycott the music and movie industries in favor of indepandants who are more free with their product.
I do not complain about RIAA or the movie industry protecting what's theirs, I complain about them offering one thing, but giving me something else. I complain about the presumption of guilt implicit in the copy protection systems (yes, I realize that innocent until proven guilty is only guarenteed in criminal law, but the principle is the same even if the guarentee is not).
A final note, I was reflecting the other day on why digital video tapes and data DAT and audio DAT are not compatable. They all have the same basic specification, and the transport and read/write mechanisms are REMARKABLY similar, but are just different enough to prevent compatability. Because of that, I can't just pop the tape of my last vacation into my backup tape drive and read off the mpeg-1 stream directly.
The only reason for that incompatability that makes any sense is pressure from the RIAA and movie industry. I'm pretty sure that's the reason, the only alternatives include: The makers of those products decided that re-inventing the wheel is fun, and the R&D costs just don't matter or they limited the appeal to consumers because they just hate having to add all those large numbers in their ledgers.
> Remember how they tried to hold back DAT?
What do you mean, "tried"? They DID hold it back, they killed the bitch. You only see DAT in studios and purist's homes anymore.
The duplication argument has always been rather flimsy. Sure, analog looks bad today, but in its heyday it was the way to go. In 1984 nobody complained about the quality of video tape, consequently movie studios were equally afraid of analog piracy. Except they could do less about VHS then than they seem to be able to do about DVD now. Is it just me, or does the power of the entertainment industry really grow by the hour?
Regarding market forces and falling prices of CDs, bull$hit! Market forces should have dictated a long time ago that CDs should be way cheaper, yet strangely they're not. I mean, who really walks into Media Play and plonks down $18 for a CD, when you can get the same thing for $12 or less online? Yet they've retailed for $18 for the last ten or more years. Just check out Europe, where the cost of CDs has exceeded the pain threshold. Cheapo labels such as Naxxos (sp?) have made arguably quality classical music available for a fraction of the price of the big labels, and they sell like hotcakes. But you don't see Deutsche Grammophone going down in price, do you?
Personally, I think the problem is a recalcitrant generation of executives that simply can't smell the coffee. They're used to their set margins on which they've grown rich for half a generation, they can't envision a world in which they don't clear $10 on a CD.
Consequently I think CDs will eventually become irrelevant. Heck, I think most prerecorded media will become irrelevant. MP3 is only the tip of the iceberg. I firmly believe music servers will become the mainstay of the future stereo system. Get the music on that hard drive, and you can access it from anywhere in the house. 200 CD monster changers were a nice try, but not the answer. I want to get my CD on the network and NEVER touch it again. The big holdup is still the lack of widespread experience with the concept. Most people simply have never browsed a list of several thousand tracks from a few hundred CDs, clicked on one, and it started playing instantly. No walking up to the shelf, finding the CD, undusting it, ejecting and inserting the tray, waiting for the CD to spin up and track, etc etc. Once sufficient numbers of people experience this, the avalanche will start.
I have over three hundred CDs on the network at home. I can play the music from any of the desktops, or from a laptop anywhere in the house or outside via a wireless network. No storage duplication here, no multiple CDs to buy. A simple 486 machine with a cheapo 18G HD can serve up several simultaneous 128K streams. Once my Internet pipe is wide enough to allow me quick downloads of entire albums from an online vendor, I'll never touch another CD. Why would I want to go back to discrete physical media?
THAT'S what the media companies are scared of. Today it's music. Give it another 5 years and 500GB and 1TB drives, and we'll do the same with video. Suddenly the market for shiny disks is gone, and all that "protection" revenue is lost. And we're surprised the industry is up in arms about the digital revolution?
This is a bit of a misconception. Even if DAT were pushed by the music industry, it has inherit limitations that make it non-optimal for the consumer mass market.
I've owned 2 DAT recorders, and have recorded over 300 DATs myself.
The RIAA threw two roadblocks to try and stop the proliforation of DATs. The first was SCMS. SCMS is supposed to prevent serial copying.
SCMS is only required on "non-professional" decks. The reality is that the market for DAT recorders is so small, that most decks on the market are sold as "professional" decks, at around the same cost as "consumer" decks. In other words, if you are encountering SCMS problems, then you didn't do your homework when you purchased your equipment.
The second roadblock was a tax on DAT media. This "tax" is paid directly to the music industry, as "compensation" for the unauthorized copying that they assume you are going to use the media for.
Of course, being drafted and paid for by the recording industry, this law directs that the money be paid out to artists in proportion to their record sales. So, even though probably half the DAT tapes in existance have recordings of the Grateful Dead and Phish, the money from those blank tapes goes to Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys.
The DAT tax roadblock was also immediately bypassed. DAT tapes and DDS tapes are nearly identical. The major difference is that DDS tapes are of slightly higher quality, and because they are computer backup media, they are not subject to the RIAA tax. So, most people who use DAT simply use DDS media instead of music-branded DAT tapes, and get better media for less money. And we don't give a penny to the RIAA. Millions for our music, but not a cent for tribute!
If you want to try out DAT technology, it's easy enough to do. Sony and Tascam manufacture excellent decks. They'll set you back at least $500.00, but if you want to make professional-quality amateur recordings, it's the only way to go. The only way for you to make better recordings is to go with professional reel-to-reel, and that's MUCH more expensive.
DAT was never an appropriate technology for the mass market. Both the tapes and decks are easily damaged, and subject to wear.
The best use for DAT is live field recordings. DAT is almost universally embraced by live tapers. These are people who purchase special "taper tickets" that allow them to bring their recording equipment to concerts.
Bands allow this for several reasons. First is the realization that people are going to make tapes no matter what they do, and creating a tapers section improves the concert experience for tapers and non-tapers, because tapers want the people around them to be quiet, and many non-tapers like to yell and make noise at rock concerts. Having the tapers together avoids this conflict.
Second is that allowing taping builds a tremendous amount of goodwill among the fans toward the band, and dramatically increases the band's exposure, and ticket sales. Most bands make their real money on concert ticket sales, and a lot of people's first exposure to a new band, especially one without a record contract, is hearing a live recording. If you like the tape, you might decide to see the band next time they're in town. Bands like moe., String Cheese Incident, have leveraged their fan base by allowing audience taping.
It's an interesting phenomenon. Very grass-roots.
If you look behind the soundboard at a concert where taping is allowed, you'll see a forest of microphone stands. Look to see what's plugged into those microphones, and it's almost all DAT recorders. Next time you're at a concert, take a peak at the soundboard setup. If the concert is being recorded by the soundman, odds are overwhelming that it's being recorded on DAT.
DAT has a couple of advantages in this situation. DAT recorders are extremely small and lightweight, and can record up to 2 hours on one tape with NO break. (They can record up to 3 hours on a 90 meter DDS tape, but this is frowned upon by some because 90 meter DDS tapes are out of spec and can cause problems on some DAT recorders.)
Compare this to Minidisc, which requires a disc swap every 74 minutes, or cassette, which requires a tape flip every 45 or 50 minutes. DAT also has true (uncompressed) CD quality audio (44.1 KHz), and better-then-CD quality (48 KHz) modes.
In a live recording situation, DAT means getting the entire set without having to worry about when to change the media.
The big disadvantages of DAT are that DAT tapes and recorders are fairly fragile and subject to quick wear. A DAT recorder has a cylindrical head -- a miniature version of a VCR head. These heads rotate at extremely high speed against the abrasive tape, and wear out over time, requiring an expensive replacment. Also, the tapes themselves are very thin, and wear out after about 100 passes. Once they wear out, they start to shed, and the result is digital noise -- like a chainsaw ripping through your music.
Also, DAT tapes do not age well. The expected lifetime of an infrequently played, properly stored DAT tape is estimated to be around 10 years, due to chemical deterioration as the tape base ages.
What is becoming more common is that tapers record on DAT, then take their DATs home, and digitally upload their music onto their computers to create CDRs for listening and trading purposes. Even the people who use DAT understand its limitations.
DATs and DAT recorders would never survive in the typical consumer environment. People leave their CDs and tapes on the dashboard of their car. They leave them piled up outside their cases. They let them become dirty, and use the dirty media anyway.
DAT tapes subjected to this treatment would quickly become damaged, and a damaged DAT tape can quickly destroy the heads on a DAT deck. A DAT deck so damaged would then destroy every DAT tape that was played on it.
In other words, even people who use DATs regularly understand that DAT is not an appropriate medium to replace cassettes.
CDRs are the best user-recordable mass market media available at this time. They are cheap, can be copied at 6x or greater (With the exception of a single Tascam dual deck, DAT can only be copied at 1x), and are easy to take care of. Their biggest drawback is the 74 minute limit.
DVD-R will blow that limit out of the water. The only question is when DVD-R will come to market. That's what I'm waiting for.
Blaming the record industry for "killing" DAT simply ignores a lot of realities about the technology.
It's impossible to disagree with these obvious statements.
Is the above statement equally obvious?
I don't think so.
The above reasoning comes from the idea that copyrighted works and patents are Intellettual Property .
They are not.
They are a Temporary Concession granted by the Social Community to the copyright and patent holder.
It is logical and expected that the law protects these grant.
The use of words like theft, robbery, property has only the effort of making things look worse.
The use of distribution media that enforces these grant forever is even doubiously legal, IMHO.
If copying a DVD is illegal even when the copyright on its content will be expired, then I smell something wrong.
Just my 2 euro.
As far as I can tell, your entire argument is based on the above hypothesis. Too bad it's so wrong.
I have approximately 600 audio CDs, give or take a hundred. (I don't really know how many.) (And no, I didn't pirate them; I bought them.) Have you ever seen 600 audio CDs? It is a physical storage problem. They use a lot of space, and in order to make it easy to find the CD that I want, I try to keep them sorted. I say 'try' because every week or so when I get some new CDs, I have to do insertions. That's actually more work than I normally care to do. I have tried various types of racks and such, but so far, all of the physical media storage solutions fall short. Maybe if someone will invent a CD tower that uses binary trees to support log-n searches and insertions, they'll make some money off me.
Not to mention that it uses up a lot of physical space, yet needs to be in a place where I can access it easily.
I have figured out a solution to my problem. The solution is to feed my CDs into a computer, where they'll be MP3 encoded all onto a single hard disk. If I fill that disk, I'll just buy another disk. Then the CDs can be put into cardboard boxes out of the way somewhere. Whenever I want to play something it'll just be point'n'click. And I bet the computer won't have nearly as much trouble keeping them sorted as I did. What if I want to listen to something in the car? The best solution would be to copy some of the MP3 files to CDR/Zip/tape/flashram, and then get some kind of portable player for it.
And then there's my videotape collection. It's currently manageable, as long as I don't get too many more of them. But when I look at all those huge VHS tapes and compare them to the size of my 4 Gig DDS-2 tapes (and I imagine that DDS-3 and DDS-4 are even more efficient), the idea of MPEG compressing them to digital media is rather attractive.
This is theft? No, it's fair use -- as defined both by law, and common sense. I should be able to store multimedia however the hell I want to. Storage is my decision, not the content provider's.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Analogue dubbing was always rife, but remember how in school you might have got a third or fourth generation tape and the quality was terrible? Obviously digital recording is perfect (compression issues aside).
MP3's are rampant though. Never before has something come along on this scale. Software piracy is an issue, but not like this. There are billions of songs out there, and that's almost literal. People dispute claims of software piracy, saying "I wouldn't have bought it anyway". I know people who suck entire CDs down off the web. CDs they *would* have bought.
I don't think the "I have a right to evaluate a song" argument holds up. I have NEVER seen someone download an mp3, think "I like that, I'll go buy it now" and delete the mp3. To clarify, of course I (and many others) have bought CD's after hearing mp3s, but this argument really doesn't hold up to a lot of scrutiny.
Scapegoat? Sure. I don't think anyone here needs reminding of how mass media plays on the "terrorists, p0rn mongers and spammers" image.
But I think the issue of MP3s is actually quite legitimate, and worthy of some 'action', though no idea what.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
What the RIAA is saying makes sense, if you accept their business model as the only way to distribute recorded material for profit.
The kind of personal digital control that people are regaining over the mediums that surround them is forcing certain industries to take a hard look at what it is they sell. Does the RIAA promote the sale of plastic discs in colourful cases, or do they sell music?
Once they stop fighting for the things that they sell, rather than the ideas that they sell then they can start focusing on a business model that works.
As far as I'm concerned, the cat is out of the bag as far as digital distribution goes. The RIAA can spend its last remaining years of importance fighting to put it back in, or it can find a better way to do things.
Hotnutz.com
Someone out there has spent time and effort and probably their own money creating some product be it music, a movie, whatever.
so THEY are entitled to get all their money back, even if environmental changes totally alter the distrubution system such that every single person in the world could appreciate their art WITHOUT ANY EFFORT, COST, or ATTENTION by the creating artist or controlling producer.
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours.
Theft, pure and simple eh? So if you read a book, get an idea, and think about that idea, then tell someone else about that idea, you have "stolen" it from the author. Sure the book is still there, sure the words are still there for anybody else to read, but it's still stealing, right? bah!
What exactly have I "taken" when I get an MP3 from Napster? What is moved? What is lost? What have I taken control of?
So the big deal is all about protecting what is the legal property of someone.
No the big deal is about lobbying to create laws that build a framework to control and limit something that is inherently infinite, and could benefit society in a variety of ways.
To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
To base a society on principles that it is bad to share with others is socially destructive.
When will people grow up and stop trying to pretend that theft is okay - try taking responsibility for your actions.
Right after you grow up and realize that it isn't the same world that it was 5 years ago, and those laws which define the "theft" of infinite products should be thrown out like yesterday's trash.
Why do you think people have this opinion of young computer people being pirates? Could it possible be because they hear comments from pirates trying to defend the undefensible?
Could it possibly be that there are enough slow witted folks to agree with the people condemning the pirates, while not realizing that the condemners are the same ones losing money because they didn't realize the world had changed underneath them, that we will be denied access to and the ability to share beautiful things?
+&x
We see copy protection as being annoying - a tool used by these agencies to keep people from doing something that they're going to do anyway; it just slows them down. I think a lot of times this is the greedy point-of-view. Industries are desperate to hold on to *any* protection they can get, because they're afraid that without it they'll start losing their sales.
And they have good reason to be afraid. If bandwidth and hard drive space continue to increase in size and decrease in price, piracy will explode on the Internet. You think it's bad now, just wait -- you haven't seen anything yet. So here's my take (finally):
Let them implement their protection schemes. Nobody's forcing anyone to use any particular scheme, right? I mean, theoretically a movie producer could release an unencrypted DVD, if they felt so inclined. If you happen to release some work of your own, protect it. Or don't. Make the choice yourself, and allow others to make the choice for themselves with their works. If the unprotected way is really the best way, then it'll come around. Or consumers will vote with their feet -- that's the way the market works.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
Think about it - a recoding artist is in exactly the same position as a small programmer - needs to distribute the result of his or her craft - but worries about being ripped of.
In the past they depended on a distributor to get their work out to their customers - now they have the net - they don't need the distributor provided they can get enough cusatomer mind-share - and they can reduce the price of their product enourmously if there's no distributor/retailer taking a cut.
The problem we all face - "how can we help the artists/programmers/writers/... the people who create the bits - make a reasonable living off of their work?".
The media distribution industry is toast - they just don't know it yet - and they aren't going to go away without a fight - they have a lot of lawyers and a lot of money in the bank ..... they just aren't required any more -if we can find a way to get money to the people who make the bits we can strangle them from both ends.
The way I see it there are two possible situations with MP3's either: 1) People will trade them like crazy and nobody will buy CD's. 2) People will be exposed to more music and perhaps purchase more of it. Personally I don't have the luxury of an mp3 player at my car, work, home, school, gym, etc... so when I hear something I like I buy the CD. As a matter of fact I buy more cd's now that I listen to more music. Another possibility could be the recent trend in the mass marketing of music. If you haven't noticed all the radio stations are being bought up by a small group of companies since degregulation occured. There is no more local marketing to specific groups or regions, we are now spoon fed what they think will sell to the most people. Perhaps MP3's are a threat to this monopolostic tendency? I'm not saying this is the case, I'm just suggesting that there is probably more to the story than meets the eye. The movie and music industry has survived tapes(video and audio) as well as cd burners. Plus only part of the money they make is from cd purchases. There must be more than meets the eye. What do you think fellow /. readers?
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
um, last I checked, I can copy anything I please. In fact, I do make backups of every CD I buy, since CD-R's can be had for 50 cents apiece. It's only if I distribute something I copied that I break the law. That's what RIAA doesn't want you to know - they want you to believe that any form of copying is piracy, so you'll swallow their copy protection measures. I'm sorry if it sounds like nitpicking, but I felt compelled to clear that up...
The question isn't of whether the big companies should be scared of piracy as we've been able to pirate CDs if different formats for years. Simply buy a $20 piece of hardware for a playstation and voila, $3 and a rental at schlockbuster gets you a $30+ video game. An hour online at 56k and a CD burner and $3 gets you an entire audio CD. Neither of these markets have colapsed yet. Even though it doesn't have the quality of of a digital copy, analog video copies offer very good quality until you get to about the 4th generation or so. The same goes for audio tapes. I can record a program off HBO or Showtime and save myself $19.95. You know why this market hasn't colapsed? Because people are willing to pay $20 for a video or DVD or $15 for a CD or $50 for a video game. It's inexpensive, and honestly not worth the effort of illegal piracy. Only when piracy becomes impossible will people be forced to pay more than they should; and then this will be the time in which piracy will be needed most.
The ABSTRUSE One
Jason Byrons
"You all laugh at me because I'm different
I laugh at you because you're a
I like it. Someone has got the balls to point out that RIAA or no, theft from the artist is still theft.
There are two weak spots in your post though. First of all, the easy one:
"If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours."
This is true in many cases, but is not a given. If I make a tape from a CD which I've purchased, so I can listen to it in the car, it is not theft. If I make a compilation of all the songs Martha Wainright has recorded (on the McGarrigles' CD, on Dan Bern's CD, and on her own), and I own all of the CDs I'm copying from, it is not theft. The artists, the RIAA, and the legal system all agree on this.
The other problem is that copy protection and so forth have not helped the artists--they've made money for the recording industry execs. Consider as a similar (not identical, I know) case in Canada right now. We just had a levy put on all blank media purchases to pay for illegal copying costs. Any of this levy that actually gets through the mill goes to the artists, based on total sales! In other words, Celine Dion gets a few buckets more money, the small artists get roughly nothing, and the tiny independent artists have to _pay_ extra for the blank media to record their original music!
Copy protection has historically done just as well at rewarding the artists. This is why I have recommended that anyone who copies a CD (or tape, or whatever) that they haven't bought should voluntarily mail five bucks or so directly to the artist. THEY'RE the ones who deserve it!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Sounds drastic, but it's very real. On the audio side, SDMI's plan includes both "watermarking" and encrypting new audio content. Devices without decryptors can't play new content. If a device with a decryptor sees audio content that's watermarked but not encrypted, it won't play either. However, the SDMI crowd has backed off from the original plan, which was to deploy dual SDMI/MP3 devices which, when they played their first encrypted content, destroyed their MP3 play capability. The new plan is that if MP3-encoded watermarked data shows up, it won't play. The secret self-destruct mechanism seems to have gone away for now. The music industry views this as a major concession; it means no protection for legacy content. (i.e. MP3s of "oldies" will still work.)
Over on the video side, the DVD CSS people have a control freak's wet dream planned. The plan is to move decryption out to the monitor, so a clear image never exists in a user-programmable computer at all. This is the long-term plan to deal with the current "crack". Part of the plan includes encrypted handshaking between everything on the home net to insure that everything has "approved" protection mechanisms. Plans are underway to encrypt DVD's, cable, Internet A/V content, and even broadcast TV if the FCC will stand for it. Deployment will come with HDTV.
On the legal front, the criminal "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act kick in this month. Look for arrests regarding DVD CSS soon.
We will soon have two choices - either buy hardware and software that is closed, or don't play entertainment content.
- RIAA (or whoever) are greedy bastards
- they are stupid for even trying to copy protect
- we've been able to do it for years with analogue - what's the big deal
- I have a 'right' to evaluate music even if I don't own it
- it's about the bottom line
- they feel threatened
- etc etc
Now don't get me wrong, I would love to pay nothing for my music and video/DVD etc. And I don't claim to be an angel when it comes to never ever pirating *ahem* backing up stuff, but let's get a reality check!Someone out there has spent time and effort and probably their own money creating some product be it music, a movie, whatever.
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours. You can try and hide your actions by cloaking it in phrases like 'making a backup', or it 'they won't notice' or whatever, but there can be no argument that it is theft.
So the big deal is all about protecting what is the legal property of someone. To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
All the other excuses (they feel threatened, bottom line etc) are not the main issue. The main issue is protection of what is legally theirs.
To feel that the big organisations of the ilk of the RIAA are making a big deal out of nothing, shows the attitude of entitlement that seems to foster amongst many people who whine about the actions of the RIAA.
Complain about high CD prices - that is fair enough. Complain about someone trying to protect what is theirs, and you sound like someone who has no connection with the values that every society is based on.
When will people grow up and stop trying to pretend that theft is okay - try taking responsibility for your actions. Why do you think people have this opinion of young computer people being pirates? Could it possible be because they hear comments from pirates trying to defend the undefensible?
I posted this on superspecialquestions.com, the web BBS that M. Doughty (of the band Soul Coughing) runs.
.wav or .mp3 file? Such programs exist, and they get called "cracks", and talked about as if they're seriously under the table. They're hard to find. Are they illegal? What about the simple solution -- if I get a headphone-plug-to-headphone-plug cable, put one end in the "out" jack on my sound card, put the other end in the "in" jack, and play the Liquid Audio track while I record to a regular wave file? Is that legal? Wave files are easy to encode as mp3s. Am I allowed to redistribute the resulting file?
g ht.html
// I enjoy it when people like my music, but it's MY music. I did it. I put myself into it, and it's mine. I have a right to be compensated for it if you want to use it. The free distribution of mp3's takes away that right//
legislating the number OR i'll chew my audio, thanks.
The 5% nation has switched from offering an mp3-encoded Soul Coughing recording each month in favor of releasing a greater volume of material in the Liquid Audio format -- the catch being that these Liquid Audio files are only playable for 30 days.
The deal, as I understand it, is that more music can be released in the Liquid Audio format, since the 30-day timeout makes a future commercial release of the music more lucrative.
Let me explain why I feel this is a Bad Thing. The issue is complicated, but I'll be as breif as I can.
Liquid Audio is very different from mp3.
First, it's a "secure format". That means that (either by patent or trade secret) only Liquid Audio (the company) and its licensees can make players for these files. It also means that you can't easily convert a Liquid Audio track into another format.
Second, that 30-day time limit is more than just an inconvenience. It raises questions. Clearly I'm not supposed to be able to get around that 30-day limit. But is it a legal restriction, or just a technological one? What's the legal status of a program I might write to to convert a Liquid Audio file into a
If we don't ask questions like these, they're going to be answered the way record companies want rather than the way we (as either fans or musicians) might want. Explaining why those answers aren't likely to be the same is a little bit of a task. I'll do the best I can, and provide links. If you're interested, they'll cover the topic much more thoroughly than I'm going to here.
About Mp3:
There is a political battle being fought over the mp3 format. Mp3, like many formats to come (trust me here), makes it possible to store and transfer high-quality audio recordings digitally within reasonable a size range and with reasonable transfer speed. This is becomes increasingly true as storage and network technologies allow for larger and larger files to be reasonable for storage and transfer. Suddenly, it's physically possible to receive and entire albums in digital format over the internet. No one needs to manufacture a CD. No one needs to ship CDs to stores. No one needs to run stores, and no one needs to go out to stores to get music. Record companies are terrified. That's because the business of physically distributing music media is very profitable, and in the near future, it will probably be very outdated -- unless record companies get their way and are able to create an artificial demand for the distribution of music. They've banded together as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to fight mp3. One of the most effective arguments they're using to convince people that such a system needs to be put in place deals with artist compensation and copyright protection. But before I get into that, here are some links for information on mp3 and what record companies are doing about it:
http://www.riaa.com/
http://slashdot.org/ (search for "RIAA")
http://david.weekly.org/writings/sdmi.php3
About Copyright:
There was a time when Copyright made perfect sense. When printing presses were the only way to copy a publishable work, the trade-off was universally beneficial. Printing presses were expensive. Copyright made it possible for people with printing presses to profit from publishing a peice of writing, and didn't limit the rights of people who didn't have printing presses, since they had no reasonable way to copy printed works anyway. People with printing presses were happy, people without printing presses lost nothing of value, and authors could be rewarded for their efforts. When we stretch copyright to cover digital media, however, things get a lot more complicated. Anyone can copy a computer file. In fact, copying digital media is implicit in doing a lot of things that we have other metaphors for as well. To view this web page, for example, you've got to copy it from a server on the Internet. In its journey from that server to your computer, it is copyied between many other computers on the internet that you never have to pay attention to. When it arrives at your computer, it is copied around several times in RAM to get it into a format that will make sense to you, and it is probably copied from the RAM onto your disk for temporary storage to speed things up if you want to view it again in the near future. Then it's copied to a special place in the RAM, which is read by your video card, which then transforms it into the light you're seeing. Then it gets copied about in very similar ways in your eyes, your optic nerves, and in your brain. Worse, the whole web page, like any Liquid Audio track, image, or computer program, is represented within your computer as a number. What are the consequenses of legislating the rights people have over numbers and how they chose to interpret them? Copyright in the present day has become a very complicated issue. It's obviously still important to reward artists and authors for their work, but it's not at all clear how we should do it. Here are some links to pages which talk about what's wrong with the kind of Copyright that many record companies (and software companies before them) are in favor of:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyri
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html
http://www.public-domain.org/old.html
Because of the mp3s released via the 5% nation, I used to count Soul Coughing amoungst the most politically progressive bands in terms of digital media policy. Such venerable (and notably non-major-record-label-affiliated) musicians as Frank Black and They Might Be Giants have released entire albums in the mp3 format. While I'm not sure it's really up to musicians to keep tabs on issues like these, it's certainly nice to see.
and this is an exerpt from a later post in the thread:
I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?
It comes back to the issue of how we're goinging to make music something someone can reasonably do for a living. I don't know how we should do that, but I know that a situation in which musicians get paid because people aren't allowed to do something which is essentially very easy to do will never work out. Getting controlled substances is considerably harder than copying digital media, and look how well the War on Drugs is doing. So why don't we drop that idea and start thinking very hard about what we can do instead?
If I want a new car, I cant sell my old. The licence says so.
My car only runs in one region. If I move, or travel I will need separate cars for separate regions. And of cource an imported car won't run here.
If my car is broken I am not allowed to fix it. I must buy a new one.
These new cars dont work on some roads. However It is forbidden to modify a car to do so, even if you have the skill.
Of cource these regulations are only there to protect the intellectual property of the car designers. Hey, they actually get 1 cent for every car sold.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Put simply, technology never supported an encryption option before, nor would it have been a salable feature for consumers.
If someone put out a version of the Philips cassette which was impossible to duplicate from, this 'feature' would meet with a singular lack of enthusiasm from consumers. Let's get creative and add that the new Philips cassette not only can't be copied from, but will only play on the tape player that you have, plus there's the option of spending a dollar less for a tape that will play only ten times and then destroy itself neatly without injuring the drive.
Well, woo frickin' hoo- what a triumph of technology for purposes either orthoganal or hostile to what the consumer wants! This would not fly. At the time of the 33rpm LP, the Philips cassette, even the CD, this sort of thing was not attempted. DAT was 'secure' from unauthorised consumer use- and DAT died in the consumer market.
The goal of the recording industry, and indeed the movie industry as well, is to establish a new playing field in which none of the power falls into the consumers' hands. You buy your DVD- if you move to another area you have to buy another copy of the DVD for that area's players. Limited-play media are another recurring industry wet dream, especially when confronted with the specter of 'perfect media that lasts forever'. The fact of vastly cheaper media production than the old days combined with raised prices on the grounds of higher quality is nice for the industry, sure, but perfect media copying scares them... hence the paradigm change.
The change is from rude methods of interoperability (many people make audio cassettes, but they all pretty much play on all the decks you can buy, due to rigorous specs as to the dimensions of the cassette shell and standards for tape speed and dimensions), forced by the reliance on cruder analog media, to the new world of entirely virtual media- media that is no more and no less than a bunch of data. The data is easier to standardize- but it is too accessible! Any clown could write that format, or alternately could suck the data off the disk and start making identical copies. So the paradigm is to treat media, data, like it is hostile software- the word encryption, and especially the word security, give people a sense of potential danger safely contained.
But whose safety is being protected? Hint: it is not the consumer's. Indeed, in many ways the world of the media consumer, with data that can only be played on regionally localized players, data that is only rented and though you own the container you only are licensed to view the data in certain ways and don't own even the copy you purchased, data that is increasingly way beyond the consumer's ability to comprehend or control- this world is less safe for the consumer than the days of 45s and LPs. The consumer is increasingly restricted, controlled, and where once the idea of a consumer's copying off loads of tapes was seen as an intolerable abuse of the consumer's reasonable freedoms, now we approach an era where the consumer may be literally not allowed to own their own media. Instead, he or she can only be trusted to buy and care for the carrier media for streams of data- which are marked off as explicitly not the consumer's property, and which may be so well defended that the consumer can only plunk a dvd into a player and watch the fiberoptics deliver a tightly encrypted datastream into a black box in a _speaker_... inaccessible, unopenable. One wonders if the music and film industries are devising scuttling charges, so that if evil hacker people try to open the black boxes, they destroy themselves, thus preserving their secrets and forever withholding... the consumer's purchase from the consumer.
That's the paradigm change, bigtime. Are you buying the data of a song when you buy the CD, or are you only buying permission to listen to the sounds? If you analyzed the grooves of a record to determine the harmonic content of Pink Floyd, would you be thrown in jail for it? Obviously not- the concept is absurd, you own the physical record. Now, what if you crack the encryption to run a fast fourier analysis on the harmonic content of a Pink Floyd DVD? Curious how the activity is the same, but all of a sudden you're in jail for what you are doing with your possession... or is it your possession?
*sigh*
I don't know about anybody else but I know where I stand on the matter. I have purchased a modern 20-bit ADAT (an 8 track digital audio recorder) and will be producing music again, after rather a long hiatus. I'll be releasing this music in MP3 and seeing if maybe I sell 'original master' CDs on the side. I also intend to offer free recording to the likes of slashdot nerds who also intend to release mp3s for free. If I end up too busy I might also require that the musician code something and release it under the gpl ;) but anyway, each of us eventually find our own best battlefield. For me it is using my sound engineering and musical skills (which are better than my writing or coding skills) for the purpose of the new media- putting a big-ass stake in the ground of mp3, lest trendy encrypted _crap_ wash it away. And yeah, I'd give up profit for that cause. It's not so much about 'where I want to be' as 'where I'm just not willing to go', and I confess to serious dread and ill feeling over the rage for encryption and redefinition of entertainment media as stuff that's owned by big corporations and only _lent_ to consumers on promise of good behavior. I do not think my behavior warrants my 'license to own music data' being revoked unconditionally- I don't think it's reasonable that I not be allowed to open the box and poke around inside it to see how it works and maybe break it, or maybe get it to work better.
I build audio gear now- but when I was a kid I killed something like four cassette 4-tracks :) I wanted them to do more! sound better! and I took them apart and tried to do things to make the sound bigger or brighter or just generally more amazing. This usually did not work, but eventually I learned neat and useful things.
It horrifies me that the kid like me, today, trying to take apart digital media and make it bigger and better, is a criminal- not for plans to make bootleg copies for all his little friends (that wasn't my concern either), but for having the arrogance to want to take apart the media and do it a different way. We now have a situation in which people are harrassed as criminals for simply grappling with information- not government secrets, not 'if you open this the warranty is *buahahaha!*', but criminal liability and court involvement to punish what I was doing for years as a reclusive geeky kid. And I find that quietly intolerable, and cannot coexist with it.
So geek musicians, keep posted, be ready to travel to Vermont (not like I can afford to do road trips!), because I'm moving as fast as I can, trying to answer this situation with action. I want to get _great_ music out there with sound that meets or beats the best the industry can offer, and have it be data that people can _have_ and do what they wish with. I've made that rant before. On the eve of my wonderful 20 bit adat arriving (yaaaaay!) I am ranting it again. There can be no coexistence with me and the industry- I hope more people come to that realisation within themselves. I'm no pirate and do not steal the music industry's so-paranoidly-guarded wares. In fact, I don't even download mp3s- I intend to make them and _upload_ them. I don't want to make the industry poor, I want to make them irrelevant. >:)
Cheers, slashdotters. -chris
Recent stories on Slashdot have told of the ongoing "tennis match" between digital content providers versus consumers and technically skilled people. The recent cracking of DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) lent ammunition to the opinion held by computing professionals and users that copy protection systems are doomed to fail. The effort has been likened to building a dam against the ocean; a foolish and useless exercise. In Slashdot discussion fora, the point has often been raised, "If you can perceive it, you can copy it. What are they going to do, encrypt the bits all the way to the speaker/electron gun?" If the Copy Protection Technical Working Group gets its way, that is precisely what's going to happen.
I received a piece of email spam today, which actually turned out to be useful (probably the only time that's ever happened anywhere). It directed me to a flat panel display industry group. Among others, one of the links pointed to the California Display Network, which had a link pointing to technical info on flat panel technology. Since I currently earn my living writing graphics card and display drivers, I clicked through to see what I could learn.
I found an entry for an overview of digital visual interfaces, provided by Silicon Image. As I reviewed the headings of the slides, one entry stopped me cold: Conten t Protection Status. Content protection? In a flat panel?? Yup: "Implementation of DVI content protection is suitable for PCs and monitors." [emphasis mine]
Thus began an evening of link clicking and Google searches to find out what this off-handed remark could mean. The slide made mention of the 'CPTWG'. This is the Copy Protection Technical Working Group, a consortium of content providers (movie companies), consumer electronics manufacturers, and players in the IT industry. This is the same group that developed CSS for DVD players.
One paragraph from the above page is particularly disturbing:
The most recent meeting of the CPTWG was yesterday, 8 December, 1999. Their meeting announcements may be found here. According to the December meeting announcement, the next meetings will occur on 11 January, 2000, and 9 February, 2000. It costs $100 to attend.
The attendance roster from the November meeting (PDF file, sorry) lists a very interesting, and possibly worrying, mix of organizations. A partial list of representatives included:
If you download the roster and read closely, you'll see every major piece of your computer represented. There is no doubt that at least one part of your computer -- your CPU, your RAM, your disk drive, your graphics card, your monitor -- is manufactured by one of these companies.
If you look further still, you'll see there are no consumer advocacy groups listed.
What are they all working toward? Quite simply, to prevent you from using your lawfully obtained digital material in any way they don't want.
Here's one example of how they'll do it: If you've visited Fry's or CompUSA recently, you'll notice that full-size flat panel displays are starting to appear. Currently, most of these displays are based on the old VGA analog signals, which are converted into the digital signals needed by the panels. The Digital Display Working Group is working on a new connector and signalling standard called Digital Visual Interface (DVI) that will allow computer displays to go all-digital. You won't need a DAC on the video card; the digital signals will be fed straight through to the display. Image fidelity will be much higher, since there won't be any intervening DAC/ADC conversions. Version 1.0 of the standard has been published and is available for download (PDF format). The DVI spec currently does not stipulate copy protection measures. However, plans are in the works to incorporate it.
Intel is one of the primary contributors to this effort. On Intel's developer site, they have some papers on copy protection for IEEE 1394 (Firewire) digital streams. In two separate articles, 1394-based Digital Content Protection: an Intel Proposal, and Content Protection for IEEE 1394 Serial Buses (the latter being a Powerpoint presentation masquerading as a PDF file), Intel outlines its proposal for protecting digital content over Firewire. By using cryptographic authentication techniques, a device offering digital content will "handshake" with other devices on the bus to assure that digital data is only received by, "compliant devices." In a revised overview of the proposal, IDF Talk: Content Protection for the IEEE 1394 Bus, Intel offers concrete implementation details, including:
The full proposal (currently version 0.91), with lots of technical detail, is mirrored on CPTWG's site (the links to Intel's site don't work).
Intel's proposal also recommends that the copy protection system be field-upgradeable to thwart ongoing attacks, and that it should be possible to revoke (read: disable) a device determined to be "compromised." (The tone of the proposals is also interesting. It's previously been thought that, because of USB, Intel is hostile to IEEE 1394. Yet these proposals suggest that Intel's quite enthusiastic about 1394... Once copy protection is incorporated.)
Intel's proposal mentions only IEEE 1394. However, it also mentions that there's nothing preventing the technique being applied generally to any bi-directional link. So for all occurrences of '1394', substitute 'DVI', and you've got an idea of what to look forward to in your new digital monitor. And your new DVD player. And your new HDTV set. And your new USB speakers.
Intel goes even further in their paper, A Framework for DVD-Audio Content Protection. In it, the author suggests that DVD-Audio recorders permanently remember the IRSC (International Standard Recording Code) of every song the device is asked to copy, so that it may only be copied once, period. They go on to suggest that the recorder could have a modem built-in to authorize (read: purchase) the ability to make additional copies.
In short, through this industry consortium, Hollywood proposes to exert control over every link in the digital chain, from the digital camera, to the disk drive, to the CPU, to the graphics card, to your display. They will decide what rights you have. Even if a court decides Fair Use includes multiple copies for personal use (such as assembling a video montage), it won't matter. Your computer will still refuse to make the copies (and probably fink on you, as well).
This coordinated effort is ostensibly to combat unsanctioned copying (which the industry chronically refers to incorrectly as 'theft' and 'piracy'). However, no one has ever been able to provably quantify the value of unrealized sales due to such copying. All dollar estimates that have been published are just that: estimates, based on idealized extrapolations of what-if scenarios. Moreover, although the industry claims to "lose" billions every year, they continue to post record profits. Finally, despite the proliferation of CDR drives and the Internet, most unrealized sales are the result of organized mass counterfeiting rings, not casual copying. None of the proposed methods I've seen appear to thwart mass counterfeiting at all. So clearly there's some other reason for all this.
The thing that puzzles me most is why the computer and consumer electronics industries haven't told Hollywood to take a hike. Intel's copy protection proposals state, in bold letters, "No content protection = No Hollywood content." This belief is taken as axiomatic by all the players, and appears to be the driving force behind the entire effort. This belief is also false.
Audio on CDs are recorded as plaintext, and the music industry continues to earn rapacious profits. Even the with the advent of CDRs, no music industry executive in his right mind would suggest dropping CD sales and going strictly with cassettes and vinyl. If nothing else, the manufacturing costs for CDs are lower than those for cassettes and vinyl. Likewise, DVDs are tremendously cheaper to produce than videotapes. Videotape duplication is a labor-intensive process; DVDs can be stamped out automatically. The savings in cost-of-goods alone would more than balance against any unrealized sales from casual copying. Corporate shareholders, always mindful of the bottom line, will also demand that the studios move to the cheaper, higher-quality process, copy protected or not.
The fact is that the computer and electronics firms are in the driver's seat, and are free to dictate how the new digital formats will work. Hollywood will use whatever format becomes popular, whether it has copy protection or not. They may grumble about it, but they'll use it. The economics afford them little choice.
We are only now beginning to explore the social and ethical consequences of a Star Trek-like universe where everything can be infinitely duplcated at zero cost. We have no idea where things will end up. But now is not the time to start erecting electronic walls and imposing artificial scarcity. The ignoble and richly-deserved death of DIVX showed -- fairly unequivocally, I thought -- that consumers want to make free, fair use of their digital media, without interference from outside. I believe its death reinforces the future toward which we've been pushing for centuries: Increased abundance at reduced cost.
Nevertheless, the CPTWG and the organizations supporting it are blindly moving forward. It may turn out it's impossible to dam the ocean, but they're gearing up to give it one hell of a try. We can only hope that the lesson of DIVX will be repeated until it is learned.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
There are some major differences between now and 5-10 years ago, which make this a much bigger issue than it was then.
Copying of movies and music certainly existed then (which is why even really old videos have that FBI warning on them), but it was limited in several respects. First of all, the media you mention, like all media back then, was analog, and duplication of analog media produces an irreducible loss of quality. To a lesser extent, even playback damages them. This means that one can only copy a tape a certain number of times before it becomes useless. Futhermore, real movie/music buffs won't settle for anything less than top quality, which means the original tape as sold by the studio or label.
This changed with the advent of CD and (recently) DVD. With digial media, one can easily make an exact copy of the original, and digital media generally don't wear out either. This is what terrifies the studios about DVD, and what bothered the labels about CD when it first came out- not the prospect of copying, but the prospect of perfect digital copying.
More importantly, the difference lies in distribution. 5 years ago, even though CD writers did exist, piracy wasn't a huge problem, except from large, organized pirating operations. This is because there is an irreducible cost contained in the physical media, and the shipping of that media. 5 years ago, if I wanted a song without paying for it, I would have to put in some effort, and a nonzero amount of money, to get ahold of it, whether paying for a blank CD or tape, or making the effort of locating someone with the song to copy from. On top of that, it involved a per-copy cost to the original owner- he must spend the time and effort to make each and every copy. The economic term for this is that there was a nonzero marginal cost for each additional copy. This put a practical limit on piracy- any given disc sold would be unlikely to produce more than, say, 5 pirated copies, and very few discs were pirated at all to begin with, so the problem was small. Imagine trying to pirate a DVD today. DVD CCA smokescreen aside, it's pretty much impossible- you have to find a copy of the movie, a DVD burner, and buy a blank DVD, which costs more than the legit movie does.
The internet is changing this situation rapidly. With mp3, the cost of distributing a pirated CD is essentially zero. There is a small bandwidth cost, but it is quite manageable thanks to MPEG compression. And, thanks to internet distribution, a single CD could easily spawn thousands of pirated copies, because once the disc is ripped, the marginal cost of giving the mp3s to someone is essentially zero, and so pirates became willing to give even complete strangers copies. On the other end, if I want a pirated song, I can get it for no more than the cost of my time searching for it, with no additional effort or cost to physically ship it or get it into playable form. This has led to a radical explosion of piracy.
Sooner or later, the same thing will probably happen to DVD. Right now, this is prevented by the combination of a high bandwidth cost and the absence of any software capable of playing a movie directly from a file stored on disc. The CSS crack will address the second relatively soon, leaving only the first. As the mp3 experience shows, that point is probably a lot closer than one might think- only a few years ago, distribution of CD-quality music over the 'net was unthinkable.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
I'm a small-time artist (or was not too long ago anyway). I don't pirate CDs. I really *do* delete mp3s I download if I don't plan to buy the album (and I've bought many albums after getting to hear a few more of the songs on it). When the predecessor of the RIAA tried to stop DAT, it hurt *me*; it took away a tool I needed to record and distribute my music. The industry tried to stop the VCR, reel to reel, and the compact cassette, all tools I needed and used to their fullest. When the RIAA bans mp3 (not that I think they'll succeed) it prevents me from distributing my own music (and trading legit amateur music with my friends). "You want to distribute music without a contract? You must be a criminal."
To drive the point home: Heard much from Joan Osbourne recently? No, because her recording label hasn't liked her second album attempts (she wanted to go in a different direction), refuses to release the music and yet retains rights to it all. Her only option is to not record again. Same with XTC (whose contract recently expired), Prince (who is so pissed at Sony he's planning to rerecord *all* of his hits from the 80s). Don't give me *any* line about the RIAA or the music industry having anyone's interests at heart; their own musicians won't come out to back them.
The RIAA represents corporations with a big fat cow of money at stake. It's common sense: They will act in their own interests. They'll try the easy ways and go for the biggest pot of cash first. That in itself is not greedy or evil (although it is amoral). The tactics they've decided to use are the worst kind of FUD. "You don't believe in the Free Market and Capitalism? You must be a criminal."
The RIAA wants to turn a battle for artists' rights (that's right; I'm on the artists'-- my-- side) into a piracy story. It is not in their interests for artists to have any freedom. That will cut into their profits, so what do you expect them to do? The DVD Forum (which doesn't particularly like Linux or OSS; they want you to play on platforms they can strike Deals with) are turning a battle entirely about interoperability into a battle about piracy. "You want to watch DVDs with unapproved software? You must be a criminal."
Monty
xiph.org