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RIAA Sues MP3.com
Hiryu has the first submission of this -- "Just read this over on BetaNews
'Today in Federal District Court in New York, the Recording Industry Association of America filed suit against
MP3.com for copyright infringement with regards to its new Beam-It software. Stating that MP3.com was "in
reckless disregard of the law", the RIAA begins its second round of litigation over digital music. ...' " So let's see: Napster, Streambox, DeCSS, DeCSS, mp3.com, which digital music/video lawsuits am I forgetting?
Most consumers have NOT chosen MP3. Most adults I know, and most serious music collectors I know, realize MP3 for what it is - piracy, and avoid it like the plague, not because they do not understand how to use it, but because they realize it is illegal.
PLEASE! MP3 is not piracy, it is convenience. I have a computer next to my stereo rack and am putting all of my CDs on it in MP3 format (large HD) so that I can make up play lists and listend to what I want all day while I work around the house without having to futz with it after starting.
I understand technology (I design microprocessors for a living), but I have absolutely no desire to steal music - nor do most of the people I know. Many of these people would be quite willing to go to some sort of on-line distribution system if it did NOT involve piracy.
You may know how to design microprocessors, but you are either ignorant of the many possible uses (legal as well as illegal) or you are spreading FUD on purpose.
Bob Clip - friend of A Nony Mouse
Dragon's Lair was the first *laserdisc* game. It wasn't a CED game at all.
No. I can tell mp3.com what CD's I bought.. and they are free to ask. ,copies are not sent to mp3.com, I believe.... they only check to see what you have and then send out of their archive.
But my having a CD does *not* give mp3 the right to broadcast it to me. Yes, it gives *me* the right to make copies, etc... for my own personal use, but in this case
So, if instead, mp3.com set themselves up as a secure, offsite storage company for mp3 music files and I had to send them burned CDs with my mp3 files on them and they copied them to my rented space on their servers and then sent me copies when I asked for them, THAT would be OK?
What is the practical difference. The fact is, they want the PPV model plain and simple and they don't intend to quit until they get it or they are gone.
Bob Clip - friend of A Nony Mouse
Okay, here's the straight lowdown on this:
my.mp3.com is a personalized web site containing MP3s. They have a LOT of MP3s from probably about 90% or more of the albums you own that are studio released. These MP3s are ripped from commercially availible audio CDs (Including from RIAA labels, without permission). You can create an account on my.mp3.com and download a specialized application for Windows and Macintosh (Naturally, the Windows one is 3x the size ). This application connects to their server on port 8094/TCP and sends some basic statistics about the disc for identification purposes (Similar to CDDB). If the disc is found in the large MP3 collection at MP3.com, it apparently asks for checksums (I have yet to disassemble or analyze it so I do not for sure) from the original audio CD to verify that the CD that MP3.com ripped is identical to the one you own. Then my.mp3.com gives you access to play/download that disc from any computer (or other device) attached to the Internet.
I think it's a wonderful idea myself, however it's a crying shame that MP3.com did not get the permissions needed before offering the service (I mean, they ARE offering downloads of commercial music). I'm terribly afraid that RIAA does have a valid point in that much (Even though they usually ARE full of shit).
They claim that a) mp3.com made copies of 45,000 commercial titles and placed them in their servers. This could be read several ways, but as a commercial venture, they may not have the rights to do this. They also do not have the rights to 'perform' these titles for anyone else, regardless of whether that someone else owns the music already or not. If they do not have the right to do this, if they can limit what they are doing to this, then this is what lots of people have problems with them about. Let's take the case of Mr. X who knows every piece of music ever performed or recorded. (For the sake of argument ok?) He knows all the details, when it was recorded, where, who played what, who sang lead, backup. Who wrote the words, who wrote the music, who arranged the music, etc. He decides to make some money from his unique ability. You dial hiw 1-900 number with any piece of music you want playing in the background and he will give you a running commentary on the music in quiestion. After the music finishes, he will answer any questions you may have about the piece.If you want, he will aslo just shoot the breeze with you about the piece. You are billed by the phone company. Why in the world would anyone think he owes money to the RIAA for this? Mind you, he is making money as a result of music that they own the rights to. While we are at it, we need to outlaw this SPEAKER TECHNOLOGY. It makes copies of protected music in the air and broadcasts them to those within hearing range. My neighbours might actually hear a song that they like nad have not paid for. (I know they are not here yet, but they probably want to be!) Bob Clip - friend of A NOny Mouse
Everyone knows that artists can't be trusted with money. That's why they need organizations like the RIAA to take it away from them. If the artists really were allowed to decide what consumers can do with their music they might allow horrible things like non-commercial redistribution. This takes away money from the families of the RIAA. Thus by allowing artists to control their music you jeopardize our entire economic system.
riffage.com & audiosurge.com are other free mp3 promore independent to big name artists sites
Ugh. Fuck, maybe we should just do the Logan's Run deal and kill all lawyers over 30. *jk*
Whoa! Who let Dan Carver from the Howard Stern Show on /. ?
Sheesh... I can't get over:
1) The hordes that "just don't get it"
2) The American willingness to litigate
I think the dinosaurs went out with more dignity.
Dood, online distribution is already here. Just because nobody is making money off of it doesn't meant that it doesn't exist. I will continue to download massive quantities of mp3 files off the net, and will also continue to buy the cds that have quality songs on them. I will never, ever buy another cd without hearing every song on it first, though.
You have to be kidding. Every single person in my office who listens to music at all has gotten into downloading mp3 files.
Nobody is going to use encrypted files when open ones are freely available. Besides, any copy-protection that they do come up with will go the way of CSS, so what's the point?
OK, let's suppose something just a bit different.
It is a few years from now and we are living in that world that the MPAA fears. Huge storage and bandwidthe cheap.
We set up offsitemusicbackup.com
Customers pay a small yearly fee. They upload their wav files to us for offsite backup. Remember, this is the future and it happens fast.
Each user gets a directory on our server, but our software is smart enough to put in links to songs in their directories rather than the songs themselves, if the WAVs are exact, in order to save a bit on space on our end. (If you don't like even this, wait a few more years and we store the WAVs that they upload in their own directories.)
Then, when they ask, we send them back the data that they have deposited with us for safekeeping.
Will this be ok with the RIAA?
Off topic:
Should a government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, pass laws which over half of the citizens regurarly break?
Also off topic:
We can talk about things which are legal/illegal, right/wrong, stoppable/unstoppable, etc. Sometimes in discussions like these, one of us is talking about stoppable/unstopable and someong thinks they are talking about legal/illegal, etc.
Bob Clip - friend of A Nony Mouse
They just _knew_ the old skool record farts would knee-jerk sue without thinking. I hear they've already spent over $4M in the past few months on the best lawyers in the USA to prepare for every contingency while their programmers have buttoned up the software just right.
When you think about it, what is a CD anyway? Nothing but a bunch of stored up performances.
Uhm, if I did that I'd dupe the CDs as CDs - the bit rate at mp3.com just isn't high fidelity. Yeah, it fools many people, but I'm a bass player, and the low frequency definition just isn't there.
Further, why shouldn't I have a right to put my music collection on a server that I can remotely access, and why shouldn't that server be available as a 3rd-party service? This is the direction the whole computer/software/information industry is going in, if you believe Scott McNealy.
Perhaps we shouldn't allow ranchers to keep cattle on public lands because that can lead to rustling?
But, it's probably not useful to try to reason with you, Mr. Coward. Your link to 'Who Rules America' tells me everything I need to know about you.
Hey vectro, no need to fall to that level. His link almost certainly does not tell you all you need to know about him. Neither does knowin someone is a Jew, Hispanic, Barbadian, Segillian tell you all you need to know about them.
Off topic:
Why is it that the tolerant just will not tolerate the intollerant?
Bob Clip - friend of A Nony Mouse
Dude, I'm sure all the "good lawyers" are already taken. NOBODY is as rich as the Record industry. Except maybe the movie industry. THEY will have much better lawyers (if you equate quality with price).
This is BS!!! I have been using this service for
about a week and their is one aspect that is KILLER! And that is the fact that they have teamed up with a few online companies that sale cd's....So I go to one of these sites and make a legitimate purchase -- and I am able to listen to my new CD right NOW --- and I do not have to wait for the snail mail to catch up with me 6 or 7 days down the road...(allow I am happy when Mr. UPS man does show up with the real deal to add to my collection and read the lyrics and look at the pictures.) To me this is about as "value added" as it gets. A. I get my music B. the dealer sales a CD. C. The record labels and artists make money.....Everyone is happy.
I have purchased 10 CD's in the last week and a half --- I love this system!!! Now I hear they are suing to take it away from me...ouch!!!!
This is similar to those same DVD Security freaks that have decided to pay millions in court as an after thought to the hundreds? that it would have taken to port a few client apps to Linux.....
I have never been the political type -- but this country is really going down the tubes.....
IMHO --
A sad American
can you beleive I spent my friday night typing that waste of time up? Why can't the RIAA just let artists decide.
I agree. The moral majority is getting SCREWED by these law suits...I have personally poured $200 into CD purchases through Mp3.com's partners as a direct result of being able to have the value added of listening to the CD's as soon as they are purchased. I have purchased $500 dollars worth of DVD's hoping to some day play them on the operating system of my choice... Instead of paying all of the court and lawyer fees -- I would think the "man" would be better off investing money into the technology....But instead it is 3rd parties who are giving you the "value added features..." They can all BITE ME!
> But in all seriousness I am consistantly shocked > by the fact that the UK doesnt have a written > Bill of Rights; by far the single greatest > feature of the US Constitution.
The problem with a written Bill of Right is that your rights are limited to the provisions in this document. A relatively static constitution like this constains the flexibility of your law in the long term. In UK, on the other hand, law is by precedent. Either, an act is put on the statute book and tested in court or, case law is created by the judge during a case.
The whole process means that it would be very difficult to pass a law like DMCA and it would still be up to the judge to interpret the law even if it was passed.
Now, if I make a backup of a CD I own to tape, I can play that tape in my car. If I make the backup of the CD to my computer's hard drive, I can play that too. If I rent a storage locker, I can put my tape backups there - or remove my hard drive and put that there. If someone offers me free rent on a storage locker in exchange for information on my listening habits that are valuable to various marketers, we're still on clearly legal territory. And we're right where mp3.com is.
Now, if I loan you a CD and you copy it to tape, you've infringed copyright; similarly if you effectively store a copy with mp3.com. But since when has a company providing storage lockers been legally responsible for inspecting every item that goes into them? People conducting legitimate business are not automatically drafted into the Waffen SS. Even when bombs have been assembled in storage lockers, the landlords are not charged with a crime - they are expected to consider their customers innocent. It should be different for a locker that can only store music?!
I have mp3-formatted copies of several of my CDs on one of my computers - which is well-connected to the net. Certainly I can legally access those from elsewhere. I also have Website space I rent on several IPPs - if I put my own files there, and don't provide public links, but only access them myself, I'm still fully legal. Free Web space is available from other IPPs, presumably I can do the same thing there. And if I then share those files with others, at some level this counts as unauthorized broadcast if I'm not giving a royalty to the musicians - but that's my crime, not the IPP's. This is exactly the settup with my.mp3.com, except that they're doing everything they can to block me from doing that sort of thing.
What it really comes down to re the RIAA is "It's a network, stupid!" And the individual's rights in network space are much the same as in physical space - to make use of public accommodations including storage spaces for ones private property. You see, what the RIAA is actually about is outlawing private property in network space - as soon as you go into network space, all property reverts to any corporations which had a hand in the manufacture or distribution of said property.
Who wants to allow them to so define the individual out of our established rights in the public sphere?
Wyt
The difference is one of time/ease...
Time to rip/decode *one* cd, on the order of ten minutes, depending, yes?
Time to send fifty magic numbers to my.mp3.com, a few seconds.
Also, why use your own diskspace when mp3.com is giving you there own? Of course, if your connection sucks, then you'll want to use your own...
Likewise, a service business that made custom CD-R compilations out of people's CDs might find itself in legal hot water, even though, morally, it would not be committing music piracy.
Copyright laws serve a useful purpose. However, the constant cries about how the sky is falling due to piracy (gee, I wonder why the studios and record companies are still in business after all these years?) are a mask to hide the real issue.
That is, when it comes to ordinary consumers and members of the general public, should the system of copyright laws, "licenses", and technological measures used to encourage sales and discourage piracy be based on the carrot or the stick? On treating customers as members of a free society, or as the unwilling subjects of a dictatorship?
The entertainment industry's preferred solutions to the digital era involve the stick, in spades. From AHRA (SCMS, recorder/media tax), to the Rio lawsuit (see the EFF analysis), to the DMCA (the law to legally protect copy protection even when it interferes with a user's Fair Use rights), to DVD copy protection, to the three-pronged attack (SDMI, DVD-Audio CP, Super Audio CD CP) on audio recording rights. (While the grossly unbalanced UCITA provisions are aimed at computers, I can't imagine their passage having anything except bad implications for audio/video consumers.)
News coverage and the pronouncements of various entertainment industry executives tend to dwell on the "necessity" for the stick, without mentioning the profits of the status quo or the possibilities of the carrot.
I'm getting tired of being beat on by the stick, and I think it's time that we formulate a vision of how we want the markets and copyright laws to work. The way the debate goes now is like this: "what's the industry's is the industry's ... and what's the public's is up for negotiation". The Constitution authorizes Congress to pass IP laws so that the PUBLIC will reap the benefit, and we should not be afraid to remind them of this fact.
For instance, how about extending copyright laws to include compulsory licensing of performances? Or changing them to say that if you use any form of copy protection that messes up legitimate use, you lose your copyright?
Instead of prohibiting copies, maybe vendors could give buyers some way to check if a disc was an original or a copy. A user could then exercise human judgement (what a novel concept!) to distinguish between a commercially pirated disc (this type of disc would generally be returned immediately for a refund) and a legitimate home recording (such as a compilation of music videos created from prerecorded videos the user owns). The underlying technology might be very similar to that used for copy protection, but by changing the focus from controlling the home user to attacking the commercial pirate, the resulting system would be much more friendly to honest consumers, and to fair use for library/scholarship purposes, and to allowing widespread public use of the copyrighted work once it enters the public domain.
Yeah, I'm 12 that's how I remember the Commodore 64 cracking scene.......
And you still miss the point - you can make an exact copy of a cd already without using mp3...the average mp3 that gets traded over the internet is as inferior to a cd as a cassette tape copy was to an LP 25 years ago. The record industry was stuipid and wrong then to oppose cassettes and they're stupid and wrong now to oppose mp3. And you're stupid and wrong, and whiny too.
I program for a living and I have no problem with doing away with ALL copyright and patent laws regarding software.....it would be a good thing and programmers would end up making more money in the long run. And if we did away with ALL copyright protection on music, musicians would end up making more money and consumers would pay less for music. All copyright laws are is a government granted monopoly and anyone who knows some simple economics can prove mathematically that monopoly is a BAD THING.
you freeking queer!!!!
"Actually, yes, the CD is becoming an unaccetable format due to its lack of copy protection. The recomd companies are investigating using closed, properitary technologies instead of open technologies like CD. It is unlikely that in the future companies will distribute their music so openly again - largely because history shows that if they do, people will illegally pirate them."
Well, it should be amusing to watch them try. Even if we assume that their new wonder-technology is so mysterious that noone can understand how it works at all, can't copy the discs, can't capture and coy the data read off of teh discs etc., at some point it has to turn the data into the noises people actually want to hear, which can be intercepted and encoded any way people choose.
Guess they'll wake up one day.
Let's invite Rosen to an American down home party.
Well God damn! I didn't know Ted Turner was Jewish.
Ac3 is a good format too. We just need free players/encoders.
well i dont like the RIAA but this _is_ a way to mass distribute songs illegaly you and a bunch of friends use same account add all your cds then you listen to the mp3s with winamp have the output as diskwriter and bam it pops it out as a wav file quality isn't as good as a cd quality rip
It was completely off-topic, you seem to have been confusing the MPAA with the RIAA.
Not hard to do these days
Can't you guys get over your inferiority complex????
Consider: I have a legitimate ccopy of a work. I place it in a repository wherefrom I can conveniently access it. Sounds like fair use to me. Now, in this case, the work is NOT being transferred to the repository... or is it? By IDENTIFYING the work, I have effectively compressed it for transmission (using a one-time pad that de/encrypts the title of the work to the work itself). Clearly, I can retrieve the work I "stored" since the bits I get back are the same as the bits I bought. I DID store it (albeit using a novel compression technique to transmit it) since I had to transfer it in SOME form. How is this not a legitimate defense? - RSH
The thing that the corpaorations dont realise is that >60% of the population are thiefs/criminals that dont care.
And that 40% smoke pot too.
Only 30% are typical yuppies what have so called good christian values.
On the upside, we can invite the lawyers to an old fashioned barbeque.
they are not sending the CD, but the CDDB database info, ie X user owns XYZ cds
Investigate it yourself. For a better understanding of how we got into this mess, please read Who Rules America.
This is the kind of message that make me wish for a "-1 Idiotic" moderation score...
... AnonyMOOOOOOus Cow...
Maybe if Merica came out of the litigation stoneage and implemented Loser Pay like the civilised world, there'd BE some "good" lawsuits.
Investigate it yourself. For a better understanding of how we got into this mess, please read Who Rules America.
attend a meeting and the second you sit down you regret not having gone to the bathroom immediately preceeding the meeting? You sit and squirm in fear that the wrong movement will unleash a loud fart during one of the quiet lulls in the meeting. That happened to me. I tried to shift my buttocks but failed. I farted very loud. Everyone laughed and chuckled. I turned red. I later masturbated in the bathooom to relieve stress.
"How old are you? 12? 13, tops?"
Of course, since he has a different opinion to you he must be a child. Surprised you had to ask.
This, you fucking idiot, is why we have VCR's. Screw DVD. If they want to take all their blocks and go sit in the corner alone then be my guest. I'm quite happy with my VCR.. I can play AND record whatever I want.
Scratched discs don't "beam." Its checking the disc for known bits.
how 'bout all the corporations merge into one mega corporation and then sue everyone on the planet. if they did that we'd all see them for what they actually are, greedy spoiled pricks who exploit anyone and anything if it'll make them a buck. i guess they won't do that, they would lose their case.
Well, I buy my music, but if they succeed in making a non-copyable format and it catches on, I will stop buying.
I have already paid several times for the same music. I just lost most of my old albums in a hurricane last year and now I will buy it again. Is this morally right? If I can show/turn in the damaged LP, why can't I buy a new LP/CD without paying the royalties again? Why can't I copy the music from my friend since I bought it in the first place?
Notice, I think they are ripping me but I still buy, but if they make it IMPOSSIBLE for me to protect myself in a case like this again, they will not get any more of my money.
Bob Clip - friend of A Nony Mouse
signal 11. the master of stating the obvious cute little tripe that appeals to the brainless. a fine representative of slashdot.
I've had it also, I buy cd's i copy mp3's and i soon hope to enjoy DVD's. I DON"T collect these things. I'm the kindof person who just wants to see/hear it once or twice and move on to the next new song/movie/media type. If I like something i'll buy it and support it. I don't support the RIAA and CD's there a big ripoff the average cd today costs $0.25-$1.00 dollar to make and less to mass copy stuff. Why should i buy something that will sit on the shelf after a few weeks never to see the light of day again. I do support artists. But not ones who cater to mast commerciallism. The lawsuits basically come down to stoping DVD, DeCSS because the big companies can't see the little guy (consumers) with readily available technology. Our society has built a dependence on these companies and it makes me sick. It's time the RIAA folded and other media companies to disband, the new era has started and your not wanted anymore.
you're both fucking idiots for going with VHS when Beta is so much better.
signal 11. master of the cornball techno-joke designed to augment meaningless karma.
here's a hint signal. all you need is 26.
You know you don't even need DeCSS for this? There has been a DVD -> MPEG1 [de/re]encoder out there for a few years now. VCD's based on DVD rips didn't *need* DeCSS to work.
And besides, you pay $25 because you *aren't* buying a VCD, you're buying better picture/sound quality. If you want to rent/rip and not buy, you need not DeCSS and you won't end up with 100% quality.
Nice to see hate-mongering on /.
Whatsamatter, boy? Don't have enough brains to get in on a good deal yerself? Too busy beating up the black folks to get a good education fer yerself? Been readin' all that revisionist "Christ -ain't-Jewish-he's-Nordic-damnit" history?
Here, you putz, is the low-down:
The Jews do not control the world.
Oh yeah, next time you go and cut eye-holes good bed linen, chew on this little fact: those that are in positions of power and influence are there because they worked for it and deserve it.
Now run along now and go marry your sister.
i don't think it's about winning the specific cases really. it's about turning people against mp3's. making them taboo. oh you have mp3's? your a criminal! look at how the mainstream media covers these cases, they always portray the corporations involved as the good guys. they always ignore certain key facts. it's all a part one big propaganda campaign to convince people that geeks are a bunch of criminals. they are trying to destroy the soul of the internet because the internets soul is opposed to their interests. they want to turn the internet into another supermarket. a global megamall with their mindless entertainment and useless products for their brainwashed consumers.
> it would be a good thing and programmers would end up making more money in the long run.
How? Can you shed any evidence for this?
By adapting free and open source software to meet the needs of specific organizations or people. For example the LAMP web tools (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) make web development feasible for thousands of projects that wouldn't be undertaken if they had to be developed with commercial tools like NT-IIS-Oracle-Cold Fusion etc. Or for another example, how much programmer time would be wasted if every shop had to program their own regex functions instead of using Perl....
The more of these tools that are available, the more productive I will be at making computers do what the paycheck-signers want them to do. The more productive I become, the more money I will earn.
Its pretty simple, actually.
the orginal duration was short, so the inventor could profit for a limited time. Thats not bad.
When I buy a CD for $17 dollars how much does the 'inventor' get? How much would it really cost to deliver the music on that CD to the consumer and still give the inventor the same amount? The difference between those two numbers is monopoly inefficiency, and it's going to get worse. The periods for copyrights and patents will keep getting longer, and the waste to monopoly will keep getting bigger......
Copyrights and patents were put in to place for one reason - to benefit the citizenry. The laws in place today don't do that. As long as that remains true, I'm with the pirates.
the 'American way' sucks.
They would try to shut down the libraries but the libraries are protected by a group of very old money lawyers that owe their soul to the Carnigie foundation which has assets for the sole purpose of protecting libraries that worth billions and billions.
At the summary judgment motion hearing on 1/18/00, when the judge asked Mattel's attorney (Rosen) what statements were libelous, after stating a couple of things, Rosen said that he could shorten the hearing and moved to dismiss their counterclaim. We agreed to a dismissal with prejudice. Today, via fax, I received their motion to dismiss w/o prejudice. To me it seems like Mattel wants to be able to practice brinkmanship. What I mean by brinkmanship, is Mattel will file suit, run through all the motions until a judge will see the facts (and of course slap Mattel hard), and them Mattel will dismiss the case.
RSI injured geek wins against Mattel, but Mattel still tries to shut him up!
The one time I decide not to preview...
It should read:
They need to get a clue, cluetrain style:
http://www.cluetrain.com/
I don't see how consumers would ever switch to RIAA crap like SDMI. Even if MP3.com gets shut down, it will make *absolutely no dent* in illegal mp3 trading.
all three of you are dumb fucks for not just retelling the story in the great oral traditions of the griots of African tribal villages. who needs pictures anyway.
A few nights ago, I heard about my.mp3.com and I thought it sounded like a cool idea. So i'm merrily on my way to getting my cd collection online -- then on one CD, it bombs. The thing was that they had a lesser CD by the same artist in the dbase, which irked me at the time, but I just ignored it and went along. A few CD's later, same thing happens ... then it hits me: both CD's have a major scratch. Damn. But i'm thinking the time signatures of the CD (the CDDB thing I also assumed) shouldn't be affected. After some close examination, it turns out there are three steps to the process: (1) logging into the server Just some basic HELO type stuff, nothing fancy (2) CD time sig compare This is along the lines of your idea, some bright gal/guy could fake this, but... (3) CD section byte compare This third step took me for a loop ... after the CD time sig has been verified, the server requests bytes from the CD (approx 8232) starting from certain offsets. It does this a few times, apparently. You can spoof time sigs all you want, but the last one is a tricky mofo ... now, if it didn't request the bytes from random locations (common sense tells me there is no way in hell they have that much storage to do random compares)...
Mp3.com (or thier employees) obviously owns the CDs in order to rip and encode the tracks. Mp3.com would be the first customer of the service thus legitimatizing all the CDs contained on it.
They are sending you digital data in a compressed form. It is not audio untill your computer converts it into audio.
Wonder if Judge Jackson (of DOJ v. Micro$oft fame) would like to hear this?
http://www.cedmagic.com they put video into grooves on a plastic disc hahaha
nobody forgot it, its just that nobody gives a rats ass.
The Guys in Negativeland are rampant attention-getters. The way that they cashed in on the kid in Rochester, Minnesota who killed his entire family "after fighting with his parents about listening to one of their songs" points out the kind of smarmy postmodern nihilists they really are. I even have a copy of the "U2" album and I am saying this. Screw Negativeland.
Makes it sound like my driving skills.
Is Streambox the same as TiVo?
ROFL.
You couldn't be more wrong. If I took one of my CD's and put it on the web I'm guilty of copyright infringement, period. Where the hell did you get the idea that if it's data, it's in the public domain?
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html
it doesn't matter how many you kill. they keep coming. the system creates more of them. the only way to stop is to infect the system with someting good. although even that didn't work but it did produce a big faction of borgs who weren't inherently evil bastards :) maybe with lawyers the only way to stop them is to destroy the system that produces them.
RIAA!? $h!t. Why can't they stuff there money gruben heads back up there @$$es. I love mp3[dot]com tho there free music cds suck now that they have less music on them and more crap, but thats not the point. VIVA LA FREE MUSIC!
You fucking idiot. That money doesn't go to the RIAA, it goes to pay for the CD you are listening to. Musicians take out what amounts to a huge loan, called an advance, to make an album. Record labels put up a lot of money up front and they want to get their money back. In fact, in many cases they get ALL their money back BEFORE the musician sees a dime. When you pirate MP3s, you are not stealing from the RIAA (which only helps collect debts owed and protect the rights of musicians) or the record labels, you are stealing from the musicians who put their efforts into the album. Pull your head out of your ass before you speak again.
That's right, well before RCA ever put stylus to plastic, the DiscoVision sarted by the tiny unknown Japanese company, Pioneer, together with MCA, released DiscoVision in 1974! Well before LaserDisc, well before NeedleVision. It was a collosal failure! but the first video on disc system.
i've read about this case before. it amazes me at just how evil corporate lawyers are. i wish more people would come forward who have had similar experiences. corporations have so much resources for them to blow cash on lawyers to destroy small businesses, individuals, environmentalists, etc. is an easy task. they infect the media with FUD, they use the legal system to bankrupt and waste peoples time. the american legal system is so easily exploited by those with money it's almost as if it was intentionally designed that way.
www.bowman2000.org
the CDs cost pennies to manufacture.. they dont cost much to ship hell you could ship every single god damned cd air freight for 8 bucks and it would still be cheaper than what you have to buy in the record store... especially european imports 30 dollars for a penny piece of plastic? and the royalties the musicians get from this is squat. where does the rest of the money go? damned if i know.. because basically, esp w internet, there is absolutely no physical or technological reason music transfer should cost that much and artists are not going to get their ass fucked by the companies much longer.
What is isteresting is that the dual needle/dielectric concept in general was not all that complicated. This technology could've been cheaply implemented decades earlier as a kick-ass AUDIO format (using all bandwidth for audio) that would *even today*, blow away CDs for audio quality.
why don't the artists or the labels do it themselves? cut the greedy corporate bastards out of the distribution line. why can't i buy the new NIN cd directly from Nothing Records? Why should I have to buy it from some greedy corporations who had nothing to do with the creation of the music and who gives the artists only a tiny cut of the profits? what the RIAA wants to do is maintain their monopoly on how music is distributed. they want to maintain the corporate control of popular music. if instead the artists had an easy method to sell their music online they would be out of business. that is why they do all of this shit with the stupid lawsuits and the silly propaganda.
the RIAA may not be anti-technology but they are anti-freedom. they sole purpose is to maintain their power, to maintain their profits. they don't care about artists or consumers. they care about money.
That, and staked to the ground in a trainyard.
Asshole.
What the fuck does any of that have to do with mp3s? You can pirate cds, ya know. It's not like it's a big superhuman effort to turn a cd into mp3 files. You can copy cassette tapes. Are we going back to vinyl because it's harder to pirate? Right on, Disco Dumbass.
Anyway, bring on the encryption games. It'll be 1980's C64 cracking all over again. You release the new encryption scheme on thursday, and it's broken in time to enjoy the fruits of piracy over the weekend.
The cost of information is approaching zero. Bitch all you want, Luddite, but as far as I'm concerned, fuck you, I'm with the pirates.
Mattel paid a judgment (under CRP 11) in the case which the website detailed. Why would Mattel pay a six figure six figure judgment if there was no wrongdoing. Though $140k is not much money to Mattel, it is much more than a nuisance amount. If I was just looking to make some quick money, I could have taken a settlment that would have required me to shut up!
My site has helped people. An email received from a reader of the site today said,
Another reader said,RSI injured worker wins against Mattel, Mattel still tries to shut him up!
If you had the cd to borrow, you could copy it to your hard drive just as easily, moron. I guess if you had a huge cd collection, and you rented space somewhere to keep it all, the RIAA could sue the storage company, too, by your weenie logic.
do not blame it on 'sexism' this only takes your focus away from the true causes (greed, power) and alienates you from potential female allies in your fight.... it is the classic 'divide and conquer' ploy of colonialists and exploiters everywhere to divide their enemies along cultural and ethnic lines and make the subgroups destroy each other.
I agree completely, and hope you get up-moderated. However, MPAA != RIAA, sorry to bust balls.
Do what the subject says. Please.
BECAUSE IF YOU DONT I WILL SHUT DOWN YOUR BUSINESS BECAUSE I CONTROL 90% OF ALL MUSIC PRODUCED IN THE USA AND I OWN YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR LITTLE DOG
HAHA that would throw some shit in their hair.
Yeah. God knows those college students are just dripping with excess cash, and would have thought nothing of plunking down cash for the CDs containing every single MP3 they've downloaded.
Daiundoukai, hajimarou!!!
[Let the great battle begin.]
The mp3.com beam-it software gives anyone, anywhere, access to 99% of the cds ever manufactured. Every track in mp3.com's inventory is properly labeled and catalouged. This dwarfs the number of mp3s that napster could make available and is more reliable. This only hurts major label artists and does nothing to help independent artists.
This particular RIAA action isn't anti-technology. The one against the diamon rio was, but this one is just due to the fact that mp3.com has made a huge record keeping system containing these songs and information it doesn't own.
As a purchaser of music you basically have the right to make as many personal backups as you need in case your shit gets destroyed. Mp3.com does not have the right to go and make a backup for you just in case you felt like listening to your cd when you don't have it around!!!
man that is a very sweeping statement! don't you think that even if there are just so many bad lawsuits ppl should still be able to bring good lawsuits to trial?
yeah, that's satire i ghuess. it's just to bad that it's off the mark. i encourage everyone to try to be fully informed about this issue. There are headlines at c|net and my.yahoo. And you could always check out riaa.com where there are two articles posted justifiing this lawsuit.
In the past riaa has brought some absurd lawsuits, but please get past your gut reaction and view this lawsuit on its merits.
You would think that these RIAA weenies never stepped foot on a college campus. Mine had loads of used music media shops. That's where I acquired most of my music when I was in college. I achieved the same effect even without mp3's; my RIAA-visible purchases of music were near zero.
"There is absolutely no way that they are going to release their entire library on a non-copyprotected format."
Okay, so I guess CDs are unacceptable too then? Is there any form of distribution you feel they can accept or do you think the're just going to cease distribution all together?
Ya see, that's the problem with Hell (or any ultimate punishment). Once you're condemned to it, what reason is there for you to repent or attempt to make amends and go straight? Might as well whoop it up, eh?
mp3.com can afford good lawyers.
with good lawyers, they win.
when they win, it sets a precedent.
with a precedent, the RIAA lose the other cases.
IANAL. What's anyone think?
moderate the parent of this comment up. i hope ya'll read these articels before you flame the riaa.
you are right that you can not pirate mp3s from my.mp3.cm that my.mp3.com doesn't have but they have most of the us's cd's! their collection is not limited to their artists
...in that toxic ocean of Hg that they live in. The only artists that the lawsuit will hurt are precisely the ones who's souls are *not* signed to the RIAA. What better way to kill two birds with one stone (at least from the lawyer's POV)?
The big deal is that you can make an exact copy and distribute them quickly. You can't exchange cassette copies in mass quantity. CD's which are made from illegally pirated MP3's use MP3 technology to steal songs.
Oh, but I can with a twist. Just do a purchased cassette to mp3 conversion on the first play out of the package and then send around the mp3s. I can do this with FM, MTV, CMT, band in the park. To stop this, they have to take away the ability of the users to create digital sound.
hat isn't going to happen, so they need to come up with some innovative ideas as to how they can make money given the new realities. If they keep trying to make their billions in the candle making business while the world moves on to electricity, they are not likely to win.
Bob Clip - friend of A Nony Mouse
They do have a case! Check this:
That's right i only own about 40 cds! I emailed my brothers and my friends and got them to set up their cd's for me. I know that this is illegal mp3s but i don't care. I hope that mp3.com doesn't get shut down, otherwise we will all have been wasting our time. I have even been checking out some password sites! One site has all these accounts and each link is a cgi on the site which indicates someone has taken the link and temporarily removes the link from the site so that eh mp3.com account doesn't get cancelled for having to many users logged in.
Please if people have to read this it will give them a clue/....
Just how messed up the whole industry has become they'll sue anyone over anything just to make a few dollars. Look at how high they jack up the prices. Do they honestly expect people to pay 25 bucks a DVD, when they could rent it for a couple and then use DeCSS to copy it to the hard drive, where it can be compressed to whatever format you're feeling lucky with?
HEY! I patented whack-a-mole, pay me $0.35 and I won't prosecute. ;)
Okay, I'll go out on a limb here...
Naked and petrified "David", a DaVinci sculpture, is priceless--any price you named would be countered by a higher bidder, be it Bill Gates, Ted Turner, or Italy. Yeah, all of Italy, the country.
He's naked, he's petrified.
Paging Natalie Portman... Ms. Portman, Line 1...
My thoughts on a inverse profession-IQ law.
Given that:
So. as the profession goes to Lawer, stupidity goes to inifinity.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Instead of trying to push their stupid encryption and copy protection schemes that clearly are not winning the market, why doesn't the RIIA start selling MP3 CDs? I'd buy them. After all, they already are selling their music on unprotected media (CDs), so why do they insist on clinging to a new system that the market has clearly shown it doesn't want?
And let's not forget that MP3 is nothing more than a lossy compression algorithm, like JPEG or MPEG. Encoding something in MPEG 1 Layer III (mp3) is no more illegal that encoding something using WAV, ADPCM, GSM, GZIP, MIME-64, ASCII, UNICODE, or any other compression algorithm.
And let's also not forget that any security system based on security-though-obscurity (this includes disk copy protection in the 80s, to the PlayStation protection, all the way up to DVD CSS) can *always* be broken. So it is really worth angering the market over something with only marginal benefits?
I think not.
(Everything I say above about the RIIA can be applied to the MPAA and their DVD "protection" scheme.)
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"I already have all the latest software."
Why are you yelling at the yanks? Don't make us Canadians look bad, m'kay?
Your posting doesn't have anything to do with the topic of the RIAA becoming pissy over the "my.mp3.com" stuffenpuffel, unless you count "greed" as relating it (it's weak, at best).
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Well whoopdy doo. I wasnt surprised, the RIAA has grown a "wee" bit power hungry. They cant do ANYTHING to mp3.com, they dont know what the hell theyre talking about. I can *guarantee* the next step for RIAA is suing CDDB. "Well gee, they have a database of all our artists and song tracks! This must mean theyre stealing our money! OUR PRECIOUS MONEY! NOOOOO!" Some other predictions: suing slashdot for posting stories about this, suing every company (inc sony) that sells mp3 players, attempting to ban mp3 players, attempting to ban every mp3 encoder out there, raising the prices of cd's to 50$, and end up the laughing stock of the nation. What are they thinking?
By the way, anyone have a link to the guy who *really* makes the binary shirts + had the idea? Copyleft doesnt have a link to him. Plz email me his site.. thanks.
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
My basic thesis, suggested in my subject-line, is that folks have allowed themselves to become enslaved to the entertainment industry. Now I'll admit that "enslaved" is perhaps too strong a word, but hopelessly enamored is, IMO, too weak a description, as well.
The entertainment industries, epitomized by the likes of the RIAA, MPAA, cable industry, broadcast industry, sports industry, etc., believe they have their customers by the short ones. And to a degree: they do. Just look at the reactions when a local cable provider hikes its rates. People howl in indignation and demand Government action. As if cable TV somehow where an inalienable right and a necessity-of-life. Watch what happens when a sports franchise threatens to leave town for a more lucrative market. We make heros of movie stars??? Folks: beer is a necessity. Coffee is a necessity. A good, solid Internet connection is fast becoming a necessity. But commercial entertainment? I don't think so. Commercial entertainment, while admittedly a nice distraction from the daily grind and life's slings-and-arrows, is not a necessity.
Go read a book. Or a newspaper. Or magazine. Write some code just for the fun of it. (Using that well-crafted, open source stuff you have :-). Or can get.) Go take a nature hike. Have a snowball fight. Build a snowman. Or a sand castle. Go skiing. Or surfing. Do some maintenance on the house. Build something. Spend some time with friends--maybe play a game of Monopoly or chess. Have a conversation with someone. Go to the shooting or archery range. Go bicycling. Learn something new. Go lay in the grass and watch the clouds go by. Play with your kids. Or your pets. Or your significant other. (Don't have a SO? Go find one. That oughtta keep you occupied for a while :-).) In short: do something other than play passive-role-observer to something spawned by the imagination of somebody else. Somebody who's primary motivation is to enrich themselves by way of convincing you that you need what they're selling. In other words: get a life.
I like music as much as the next person. And movies. I'm certainly no Luddite. I own a HT system that (other than the TV itself--that's next) likely far-and-away exceeds what most folks have. And I have a tape and CD collection to match. (The DVD collection was getting there.) I truly enjoy these things. But I don't need them. I can walk away from them. Being able to walk away from these things makes it much easier to tell their purveyors, in the only terms they really understand, what you think of their actions. It's simple: you just stop buying their products.
I had several DVDs on my want-list. Because of the actions of the MPAA, my purchasing plans are on indefinite hold. And I'll not be renting any DVDs or VCR tapes, either. I also had several CDs on my current want-list. It's been a while since I've added to my music collection. These plans are also now on indefinite hold due to the actions of the RIAA. And starting Monday morning (I usually only listen to the radio in the car--on my way to-and-from work): I'll not be listening to any music radio stations any more. (Those ride-times are an excellent opportunity to spend some time with your own thoughts. Something that the constant blare of the radio distracts from.)
Find something else to amuse yourself with. And tell the commercial purveyors who believe you enslaved to their products to go to hell! .
(So? I got a little link happy. Sue me!!)
Nothing like an MP3 article to reduce the median IQ of the respondants...
Actually, I am going to take a very un/. approach and attempt to be informative rather than insulting. The problem with your argument lies in the postion you take when you state: "Above all, I have the satisfaction of having had supported the artists who produced the music, rather than have stolen from them (95% of the artists I listen to are indie). You should be made aware that the selling of recorded music almost never represents a considerable revenue stream for the artists, big or small. The only exception to this is the occasional mega-pop band who manages to keep their popularity alive long enough to renegotiate a more favorable contract. If I had the energy at this point I would search the web for an article by Steve Albini--being a fan of indy music I am sure you know who he is--which details the miserable mathematics of the situation. Maybe someone else out there has the aforementioned link handy???
Bands make their living primarily from playing live venues and this is especially true of the smaller indy musicians. IMHO, the recording industry's fear of MP3's is not really about piracy, but rather results from their awareness that the easy distribution of quality recordings seriously undermines their position as the only viable channel of distribution. While the case being discussed in this article is not a particularily appropos example of this, as I think in this instance mp3.com is clearly in the wrong, many of the recent and current suits from the RIAA demonstrate my point. What if a band could entirely circumvent the recording industry and promote themselves on a large and "professional" scale? The potential losses could be devestating. And before anyone objects that the self-distributed artists would suffer from the same ease of piracy facilitated by MP3's I think a quick look at history is necessary.
I am not aware of any band ever having gone broke from their recordings being stolen, but I am aware of numerous examples of bands having made astronomical sums of money by giving their music away. Although even metioning their name around here is inviting a veritable shit-storm of flames, the Grateful Dead are the best example. While they never made very much on their album sales, only one ever reached the top 20, they were the most profitable music act almost every single year from 68' until 95'. It turns out that allowing their fans to record and freely distribute their live concerts resulted in an incredibly devoted legion of fans allowing the Dead to play between 200 and 300 shows a year to audiences ranging from 15,000 to 200,000.
The point is, MP3 has the ability to radically change the character of the music industry by decentralizing it and making it more artist-centered. As it stands now, the record companies make tremendous profits by the selling of CD's while the artists see little and further they leverage that importance to extort a substantial piece of the artists only real source of income, the live concert. So if you really are concerned with the fate of your beloved indy artists and not corporate infrastructure which exploits them then you should rally the cause of piracy and hasten the end of the current corrupt system
im going to get 20 CDs of mp3s from a friend, 2000+ mp3s.
You call me a anti tech dude? common, 90% of these rare techno tracks are NOT AVAILABLE localy on CD, the rest are either mp3s from records which are NEVER printed again.
When the RIAA sued Diamond Rio, the 9th Circuit Court created the right for people to "space-shift" copies of their music.
MP3.com has set the stage for the courts to rule whether or not We The People have the right to proxy those individual rights to a third party for private use. They will likely argue that the authority to make database archival copies comes from CD owners who are virtually "space-shifting" their music.
If MP3.com wins, then we might be able to proxy all kinds of intellectual property (movies, music, television, games) to our choice of entertainment service providers-- perhaps the cable company (AOL Time Warner?), the phone company (AT&T?), ISP (Microsoft? TiVO?) or website (Slashdot? ;)
If the RIAA wins then the best we can do for ubiquitious access to music near-term will be the myPlay scheme or personal servers from home.
With all these lawyers clustered together, it would be easy for some unbalanced individual to blow up all the media's lawyers with one fell swoop. Not that I advocate that kind of thing...
You don't have to have the CD in the drive every time you play it. Basically, you just 'notify' mp3.com of your ownership once, using their software, when the CD is in the drive. From then on, they'll stream it to you without the disc.
You don't need to borrow your friend's collection, you can borrow CDs from your library. If these guys were honest about their beliefs/motives, they would admit that they think libraries should be shut down as well. They would also admit that what they want is for you to have to pay a fee EVERY TIME you access their materials. That is PPV, PPL, PPR, whatever. (view, listen, read)
While you have it out from the library, you could copyncompress it anyway. You could even record it to reel to reel tape. Perhaps they should make those reel to reels illegal as their primary purpose it illegal copying.
How about mp3.com sets itself up as a private library and we become members. We all send in our CDs, LPs, Tapes, etc. They keep track of how many of each track they have and then only stream that number of that track at one time. 'Let us check that stream out of the library.'
The old ways of doing things ARE going to be passed by as a result of PROGRESS. These guys can fight and make noise, but they are not going to win in the end. If I am wrong and they do, you will not likely want to live in that world.
Bob Clip - friend of A Nony Mouse
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The fun is when people download the program, and run it on a text file that is theoretically the beginning of a letter to Chris (Dear Chris). The output will be the DeCSS source code. Woohoo.
~Chris Carlin
The RIAA is saying that you need permission from them and a license to find out what CD's someone bought, and they can't just *tell* you? I figured they'd be against the vast compilation of mp3's.
So, if a site wants to know what other books I might be interested in, and I send them a list of all the books I own, is there any sane reason why publishers get mad? Do we go apeshit over Nielsen ratings, to find out what shows people watch?
Did I misinterpret this entirely, or does this lawsuit / article have absolutely no basis in reality?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
? Why does this surprise you? Blame Tipper Gore, while you're at it. Many women do the censorship / moral grandstanding / campaigning for *rights* for blah blah blah that ends up taking away rights.
I'm just glad the women I know aren't like that.
Of course, there are men who do this too, Jesse Helms being the best example to come to mind. But women can apparently play the "protecting the family" / "protecting the defamation of" [whatever] angle better.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Disk space and convenience. I have a small CD collection (~100 CDs) and it's taking up most of a 13GB drive. I know many people with collections much larger than mine, and not all of them would have the disk space to put their entire collection on a hard drive. One person to whom I was recently talking estimated that he has over 70GB of mp3s (all ripped from CDs he owns) burned onto mp3 collection CDs (~15 albums per CD). But not everyone has CD burners, either. So, mp3.com's Beam-It gives people the convenience of random access to their entire music collection without the problems of finding the local disk space to store it.
There is certainly a defendible legitimate use for the service. The question is whether the abuses (actual or projected) outweigh the benefits.
--Phil (Soon going to have get another drive as I get more CDs.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
A 'signature' cannot be considered compression.
I dont mean to contradict what you are saying or play devils advocate, but where do you draw the line between lossy compression and signiture?
:) There has to be one... probably its the point at which a reasonable replication of the original data can be inferred from the cypherblock. Of course, if you have local copies of probable plain texts, a signiture may qualify.
Just thinking out loud...
Pax -- Ob
Why not? Can you hear your music on your CD? Can you do it with a friend sitting near you? Can your friend still hear it when you leave the room? Can he take mini-radio and put it alongside the tape so you could still hear the music with the second mini-radio set when you go, say, to the bathroom? Now how this is much different from what MP3 does?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
But for what I see they are *not* broadcasting it. They are unicating it to those who owns it.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
On second thoughts, no. Mr Clete and the Musicians' guild had nothing on the RIAA (and the MPAA come to that). Bastards.
This may be moderated as "funny", but I seriously believe this is a realistic viewpoint to take. Forward this comment on to the MP3 people, it may prove useful . . .
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
you make the mistaken assumption that indie musicians make alot of money from records. they don't. not even platinum records make alot of money. especially if the record is a debut. after all is said an done on a platinum debut the net is about $40,000. that is split across the past. the money isn't in the music, it's in the shows and merchandising. there is no way you can protect recordings that are so easily duplicatable.
i am an independent musician as well so you can't say i don't know what i'm talking about.
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
in most of the software i buy, the value point exceeds the convenience point. sometimes i need the associated documentation, or sometimes i need to be assured that i can get support, or it's simply not popular enough for it to be available in the pirate channels. so buying it in these cases makes more sense.
the same thing goes for music. right now cds are overpriced and it's very easy to download mp3s so if there is a song i like by an artist i'm not a fan of, i download the mp3 because the convenience point far exceeds the value point. now if a new cd comes out by an artist that i'm a fan of (nine inch nails for example) i will be the first in line to buy it because i don't just want to hear it on my computer, i want to hear it in my car, in the shower, in my room, etc.. so i'm paying for the value of being able to carry it into all the places i have a cd player. the value point exceeds the convenience point.
most fans are like this. even though i have mp3, i still buy cds. also, buying the artist's record legitimatizes the fact that you are a "true fan" of the artist. that may sound corny, but it's true.
i don't buy cds of artists i'm not a fan of because i've bought too many cds where i liked a song i heard but the rest of the album was shit. it's funny how the riaa talks about theft when i can't get a refund for this shoddy product. i'm sure lots of other people have experienced this and have a sour taste in their mouths from buying cds. like i said, it's the fault of the record companies. record companies should have learned a long time ago how to make money off of artists' existing fan bases. it's called opportunity selling which these companies are extremely bad at. instead they dump bands with extremely loyal fan bases to look for the next ricky martin or britney spears so they don't have to do any work. the writing is on the wall and these companies are going to go down in flames because of their resistance to change. may they burn in hell!
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
They need to sue UBL.com, and AllMusic.com,
all the sites that "exploit that[the artists music] for commercial gain". This is completely ludicrous. I mean, their software confirms that you have the CD that they are providing the music for. The RIAA is still getting it's fat pocket filled by the CDs that are given out, and so are the artists. Their "we are fighting for the artists" facade is completely blown to smithereens by this. The artists have ALREADY BEEN PAID. What mp3.com is doing is just like me ripping and encoding my mp3s, and putting them on a passworded ftp server for my personal use. It's completely legal. The RIAA, IMHO, just signed it's own death warrant.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
A simple re-implementation that would fall under the bounds of the law would have the first person to pop a CD in automatically encode and upload the result to the server; later users would just upload the "compressed" (verification) information to gain access. Note that under this scheme everybody gets access to all of their music, unlike the "Gee, I hope they have it scheme" that is the first incarnation of my.mp3.com...
It's interesting to note that myplay (whom I've worked with) is forcing the actual upload of bits to a locker; they could transition to such a strategy as mentioned above and fall within legal bounds.
The main problem is that of the proxy. Is MP3.com allowed to make copies on behalf of customers? The service that they provide is fundamentally compelling, and IMHO not damaging to any CD owners. In this way, I believe that they fall under the bounds of the intent of the law, while failing the letter thereof.
As regards the security issue, it was brought up in the "DVD CCA vs. John Does" case that inadequate security is not an open invitation to break it, nor can it be counted as a facilitating mechanism; so that argument is moot.
David E. Weekly (dew, Think)
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
Heh, there's a lot more music sites than just mp3.com! Check www.amp3.com, www.musicbuilder.com, etc.
I do believe it's obvious that the RIAA is just afraid of the mp3 technology. Pretty stupid, huh?
My god. Its about time!
:/
I just bought a cd from Cheap-CDs (Sigue Sigue Sputnik...remember them?)...it'll be here in a few days.
But I'm listening to it RIGHT NOW!
Why in hell didn't someone do this before?!?!
Even better...why isn't the RIAA doing this themselves? Because I *might* copy the stream (it streams as mp3) or give someone my url, etc?
Huh?
Did ya miss the part about how I just bought it?
It's the perfect blend of hard-goods distribution, e-commerce, and good ol' 'Merkin need for Instant Gratification.
Oh. Wait. I forgot. I might wanna give my account info out to some bozo so that they can copy the stream, so the whole concept is bogus. Keep forgetting about that
I suppose if I operated on the principle that every customer *is* a crook (as opposed to every customer *could be* a crook) I'd have issues ith this as well.
As for Beam-It... I dunno. Why bother? Most remote access is at 56k anyway..atho' "One Day" it will be different.
*sigh*
But at least I can listen to my new Sputnik CD now.
Well I'm off to *shop* some more...this is GREAT!
-K
One day, you'll learn to watch what you post...
This device will be able to whack moles faster than any traditional man-with-a-hammer technique ever could! In fact under test conditions the electrified mole whacking machine can whack up to 100 moles a minute!
...
Which works well until the mole-pop-up-rate reaches 101 moles a minute, or 1000 a minute or
Although a Canadian citizen, and not in a good position to fight this, I am absolutely infuriated at the RIAA et al. The DeCSS is now the only item on my web page and I now have absolutely zero qualms about illegal MP3 trading. I will for the rest of my life do my best to make sure that not one penny of my money will go to those greedy bastards. I have been involved in promoting live music since 1981, and am in utmost sympathy with actual artists creating work. I have NO sympathy for corporate leeches stealing their money and mine.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
>Odd, since I agree with you about 95%. Much more so than other slashdotters.
The whole point of pirating MP3s and bothering to grab them off the net is NOT so much to circumvent paying fair prices for music. Giant hard drives and CDR drives aren't so much for that either. What I think it's really about is *fair* prices, with the price of an indie CD not inflated by monster-mega advance payments made to the most popular artists like it is now...
But even that is a lesser shade to the *true* desire of everyone: to have near-instantaneous access to anything we feel like hearing, at any time, without having to stand around the CD stores wondering just how many good songs you're gonna get when you plunk down your fifteen bucks.
Over the years, I've bought thousands of records, tapes and CDs, and I can honestly say I've been satisfied that I got a fair exchange for my money only about 10% of the time. That's the real reason why people are rebelling against the exchange model currently in place: having "good" music is an almost immeasurable value in people's lives, yet the RIAA and the record companies have made so little effort to see that we get it when we try to.
Not to mention what record company playlists have done to all my favorite indie stations over the years... Hell, they even convinced a lot of college radio stations to go with playlist formats for large blocks of their programming time in the interest of "helping the DJ's learn what the real broadcast world is like." I know, I was one of those DJs at a college station when it was being RIAA-raped.
The change imposed by the MP3 format is tremendous and efforts to stop it are useless. The only solution is to go around.
One last point: it is MP3, along with progressive music stores that let you listen before you buy, and reusability of CDs (allowing used CDs that you can also listen to before buying) that has led us all away from mega-pop, mega-rock, and the like.
I see one other possibility. People just might forget about paying for recorded music altogether. Artists would still make the music, motivated by the love of sharing one's expression, and many could make a living doing live shows and merchandising. The RIAA and all the record companies would simply fade into oblivion. If you think about it carefully, do you really think that would be so bad? I'm not sure, but I don't think so.
I'm convinced that YOU don't get it. Not even close.
The current situation of the RIAA going after MP3 enthusiasts is like "rank and file" muzzle loader armies going after nests of rabid guerilla machine-gunners. Except the machine gunners outnumber the muzzle loaders by about 10,000 to 1 or so.
Technology has changed the landscape in much the same fashion as machine guns have changed warfare. The RIAA needs to wake up and realize that they can no longer succeed in spoon feeding us overpriced CDs while paying so-called artists like Michael Jackson millions for "music" he hasn't even created yet.
The RIAA has to adapt and change to a new landscape that has shifted like quicksand under their feet. They cannot put the genie back into the bottle, and need to stop wasting their resources in trying. They cannot simply throw more manpower at the machine gun nests, or they'll get mowed down and forgotten by history. Not in court, of course, but certainly on the balance sheet in legal fees, and in the stores in lost revenue!
I can't tell how they're going to succeed in making money in the future, but I have at least one viable concept: would you pay ~$10-20 per month to have unlimited access to their entire library of recorded music, without restriction or limits, in your home, in your car, and by wireless walkman, even if you knew their hardware was secure and you couldn't copy it off digitally onto something else (to prevent people from "sharing" a subscription)? I know I would!
This is but one idea that would do an end run around the machine gun nest of illegal MP3 distribution, yet still provide a fair trade of money for product for them and the artists. (I envision a micropayment system for the artists could be set up, to pay them for every time their songs are accessed.)
Why is mp3.com fighting with the RIAA over duplicating CD's and sending them over the Internet? Why does mp3.com even *bother* with this approach, instead of trying harder to use mp3 technology to market new artists and give people exposure who would otherwise never be heard? Money, I guess.
Frankly, I've been hoping someone would develop a portable device that could hold an ISO9660 CD with mp3's on it. Then, the recording artists would be in a position to record more music on a single disc. This would be a great opportunity for, say, jazz and classical performers.
I'm troubled by this My CD project, and I can't develop a great deal of sympathy for mp3.com. They're getting into a bruhaha with the RIAA that could well destroy the precious thing they really offer.
Sad. I was just about to plan some purchases of DAM CD's from them. I'll still do so, but with this crazy My CD thing, I wonder how long I'll be able to do it.
And I wonder what will happen to the artists who've contributed their music?
Oh, well--I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Greed wins the day---again. Only this time, it's two greedies fighting with each other. Too bad. So sad.
--------------Rev. C.C.Chips---------------- For the real truth, visit
He ultimately refused to negotiate and therefore, a lawsuit seems to be the only way to resolve this.
Translation: He refused to do things our way.
Why the [expletive] would anyone want to download (as opposed to encode) an MP3 of a CD that they are holding? For this to be a good idea, you would have to have a very slow processor and very high bandwidth. Is this the situation that mp3.com visitors find themselves in? I don't think so. Processing power is ubiquitous, and nobody is satisfied with their bandwidth.
It looks like mp3.com has just become RIAA's best friend. How? Well, they have just given RIAA an easy opportunity to smear the public perception of MP3s. If mp3.com loses this, MP3s will look bad by association.
I don't know if mp3.com actually has a legal leg to stand on here, but I'm pretty disappointed that they would take such an large risk over something so utterly worthless.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I sure as hell didn't. It never would have occurred to me that mp3.com saw value in sending music to people who already have that same music.
Nor did it ever occur to me that mp3.com would ever decide to send MP3s of music made by artists that they didn't have agreements with.
Sure, I expect to see RIAA lawsuits over MP3s, but that mp3.com would do something as ridiculous and unexplainable as this? Nope. I had no idea whatsoever that mp3.com would make things so easy for RIAA.
You actually saw this coming? You must have insider information about mp3.com's management smoking crack during lunch breaks.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If CDDB is the only means of verification, then it's astonishingly easy to defeat.
;-) and alter my local hosts file to spoof a CDDB site.
I can do a CDDB lookup, get the response I am looking for (hello sniffer
I am sure someone will make this little hack into a pirate-friendly application.
Perhaps this is what the RIAA fears, little user-friendly application to bypass the whole "rigorous" process of verification and download CDs using unlimited bandwidth and wasting no time with dead-end sites.
There are more than enough talented unscrupulous music lovers who are software engineers to make this a quick reality.
--
Leonid S. Knyshov
Network Administrator
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
I agree with most of the comments pointing out that mp3.com probably doesn't have the right to transmit *their own* copy of a track to you just because you also own a copy.
Consider this, though:
case 1: "hard drive in the sky"
If mp3.com were essentially providing private storage space to all comers - that is to say if beam-it actually transmitted the bits off your own CD (each and every one of them) to the site, and later allowed you to retrieve them. This case would be hard for the RIAA to win. Obviously, this case is not the case.
Case 2: "Case 1 + sneaky compression"
As per case one, maintaining that they're storing stuff in a private directory (just for the user). Except there's a bunch of redundency here. So they guys at MP3.com compare the bits they got from your CD (again, every single bit from the CD you're "beaming"), and replace your copy of the file with a pointer to an identical file somewhere on their system. I don't know if we've crossed over into illegal land yet or not.
In case we haven't:
Case 3: "Fake 'transmission compression'"
something like this: read bits from user CD until we have only one possible match on the site. Then compare sums of bytes. Here we have the outside chance (however remote) that by some cosmic coincidence they get it wrong, and give you permission to download something you don't own. This would never actually happen, but theoretically... This theoretical possibility would give the RIAA a good case, from both legal and ethical perspectives.
Interesting cases to think about, anyway.
check out my own music in case you care.
The Beam-It bit works only if the users have a copy of the CD already. They put the CD in their drive, and the Beam-It software does a CDDB lookup. However, you said: mp3.com probably does *not* have the right to stream all of Thriller to you, simply because you happen to own the album. On the contrary! Because I own an album, I have every right to re-record the music in any format I choose. If I've bought an album, I'll be damned if I'm going to be told how I can listen to the music on it.
More to the point--regardless of what they say is legal or illegal, the information contained on a CD once distributed can be considered in the public domain. It's data--once it's out there, it's out there, and there's no way to recover it.
Fighting the War on the War on Drugs.
http://smokedot.org/
Okay, here are my devil's advocate responses to your extremely well-thought-out and (dear God!) rational reply. I almost hesitate to argue, because it's the first reasonable post I've seen in a while... but here goes:
MP3.com isn't going to claim they are entitled to "fair use." They'll claim that I am. RIAA can't sue Sony (the tape recorder manufacturer) or Maxell (the tape manufacturer) for the copy of "Led Zeppelin iii" I made for my car. Suppose I leave this at my friend's house, since he lives near the freeway and I only like listening to Zep when I drive long distances; is it wrong for me to keep it at his house so I can pick it up when I go? If he offers to let everyone in the neighborhood use his tool-shed as a depository for driving tapes, would he be at fault? We'll let the judge decide.
The real problem (as I see it) is where MP3.com got the MP3's. Their database is almost certainly CDDB, but I doubt that they actually own every album they stream. This is where I anticipate the trouble, since they would be in possession of copyrighted material that they didn't pay for. The chicken-egg argument then becomes:
MP3COM: "These MP3's are being used legitimately by customers!"
RIAA: "Where did you get them, you rebel scum?"
MP3COM: "We made them in advance, anticipating that they would eventually fall under fair use!"
[in which case they're liable for any MP3's that haven't been accessed, as these have not been subject to any "fair use"]
{OR}
MP3COM: "We create them on-demand from our customers with a small warehouse of Jawas, CD burners, and a million phony subscriptions to BMG and a h4cK3d credit card number, d00d!"
[in which case MP3.com can't sue them for anything, but, uhhhhhh.... let's hope the SPCJ doesn't complain]
But you see where it's going--MP3.com could have their ass covered. I recall an RIAA argument that says that using a CD burner in a computer is illegal (see last week's Baltimore City Paper) because the "intended use" is to copy data (vs. music, which is so different...).
The RIAA has never tried a test-case, and it's easy to see why. MP3.com could end up testing the case and busting down all sorts of barriers.
Or the Emperor could rack them with intense agony utilising Dark Side Force Lightning, in which case all bets are off.
--Jurph
Yes, I upload information to them, and yes, it's information from a CD that I own. No, it's not the audio data from the entire CD. I tried a CD I knew they wouldn't have--my a cappella group's debut album--and they said they'd e-mail me when they got the CD.
Sorry, but relativism only gets you so far.
--jurph
they really care about everybody elses rights
online ??!?!?!
They are just acting as a storage repository for people to store their legally purchased cds on under fair use. Who says I can't store my own cd under fair use on a remote server?
I'm a pretty big media consumer. I have well over a thousand cds and a quickly building collection of DVDs (I also paid to see over 100 movies in theatres last year). I am the media companies target market. But now I'm pissed off. They've got no business pushing all these lawsuits which will only serve to hurt the small indepentant artists. If you can't compete with the new techs, well then learn to use them. But you won't be using any more of my money to sue people innovating new delivery streams. I hereby boycott all media. I will buy no more cds, no more dvds, see no more movies as long as these suits are outstanding. I represent several thousand dollars of annual media expenditures, and while that's not even a drop in the bucket, there are others like me who will do the same thing.
You missed a clue: MP3 is a codec protocol; piracy is only one of many possible uses for that codec.
...funny. another wannabe or once-was media superpower fighting... THE INTERNET.
sure, fight the internet. good luck. i laugh at your petty little efforts to preserve your completely unwarranted monopoly. we see through you, RIAA.
the RIAA was a scam to extract money for non-existant services. once, it was neccessary. then, it became a monopoly and decided to go for the big buck. now, it is dead.
it is trying to play the internet game. unfortunately, there is no place for the RIAA in the new world. so they are trying to stop the flood.
ps: Hillary, you seem to be a smart person. So here is my advice: go look for another job. the internet with its fast and ubiquitous delivery makes the RIAA completely obsolete. and the internet is unstoppable, even by lawyers.
I have another problem with the lawsuit. As an example, say you and I each own a copy of a CD. If I have a nice tape deck but you only have a cheap tape-playing walkman (remember those) but you want to go jogging and listen to the CD, can't I legally make you a copy to play on your walkman since you own the CD too?
Yes, it is called fair use.
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
Okay, too many patent, suits, copyright, my head is starting to spin ... HELP!
...
Why is MP3.com being sued? afaik, they sre a distribution point for Internet Musicians. Unless of course "MP3 is method for circumventing copy protection and intellectual copyright bla bla bla"
There is no point in sueing MP3.com - as is the nature of the internet, portal sites will soon pop up mirroring its content, or even worse, blatantly disregarding copyright law and posting Commercial RIAA music.
I've had enough of this. When are these people going to learn, the free flow of information means that we have to rethink their concept of the business model?
.my 2p
I have always suspected that the RIAA was run by Dr. Evil. This proves it. I can picture it: "We shall sue them for...68...billion dollars."
sup
Hey, hoser. Chill.
You trying to make us look dumb, or what?
The good 'ol Canada vs. US argument can be found on plenty of places on Usenet, I don't need to see them here.
It looks to me like little of what you said actually has much to do with MP3.com - and it seems the two of us are sloshed just to stay warm (frick - it's cold here!) but I'm not about to make an ass out of myself.
The future is mp3 and other digital transfers of music, this is obvious, but how will any artists that don't have the RIAA or other such organization behind them actually be able to make a living at creating music with the rampant piracy of copyrighted music getting more and more out of control?
I don't see how any new artists will be able to make money.
I don't see how small independent labels will be able to survive.
I don't see any monetary incentive for new artists to try to make a living at music.
It costs enough money just to get started (instruments, equipment, studio costs, etc), being able to re-coup those costs seems impossible if no one ever pays for your music.
The end result of this will be that only the most bland, sellable artists will be able to make a living because they are the ones that the large labels can afford to push (high probability of sellability). All the other artists willing to take a risk are out of luck.
We are destroying the possibility of artist in the future to be able to make a living doing what they really want to do by stealing their livelihood away from them.
- daniel
- daniel
Turn off your computer and go outside
'ABSOLUTELY! People look at the music industry and see them fighting against MP3, and assume they're against on-line music distribution in genral (and perhaps people misinterpreted my post the same way). Nothing could be further from the truth - the music companies would benefit from online distribution immensely. But there NEEDS to be a proprietary format for it, so it can't be stolen.
MP3's are NOT an acceptable format for the industry because they can be stolen. It would be absolutely foolish for the record companies to officially release their catalogs on MP3, because the existing MP3 user base has proven itself to be completely untrustworthy due to piracy.'
It would be another misguided attempt at technological content protection like CSS. To be able to view the content it must be decrypted at some point. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the recording industry comes up with a well designed and secure distribution format that was created with the help of the best minds in cryptography. It still won't help them. Eventually a clear stream of data has to be send to the sound card so the audio can come out of the speakers. It is fairly trivial to write a dummy driver that dumps to a disk file instead. At the very least, it will be easily possible to get the uncompressed audio to play with.
That might be a small problem. The uncompressed audio will be full of artifacts that might not be audibly obvious but will nonetheless pose a problem when the audio is recompressed in MP3 or some other open format. This problem is not a showstopper. It is an audio engineering problem. It's probably possible to use various noise reduction and guessing algorithms to make the audio file VERY closely resemble what came from the primary source(like a CD). With some work the audio can be redistributed in an open format with VERY little loss of quality.
Incidentally, physical media aren't going away either. Many people will still want cover art and the like and serious audiophiles will insist on uncompressed music. MP3s can still be made from those sources in addition to massaged decompressed and recompressed streams. A proprietary format will only be an inconvienience to consumers, nothing more.
The RIAA will need to have the following beaten into their heads: the old business model is obsolete and lawsuits will not prevent that. Circumstance will accomplish this even if every judge in the land rules in their favor and gives them everything they want.
Actually each "work" is a song, and my understanding is that they can actually sue twice per song (once for performance copyright, once for content copyright).. so in the worst case.. figure 10 songs per CD .. 135billion.. pretty bad.. even Bill can't bail em out!
Although I severely doubt they would get hit by anything near that much considering the security measures they have in place -- the worst "damages" the RIAA could probably end up claiming is the revenue MP3.com is deriving from the service (via banner ads and their CD selling partners)
"after fighting with his parents about listening to one of their songs" points out the kind of smarmy postmodern nihilists they really are. I even have a copy of the "U2" album and I am saying this. Screw Negativeland.
..
That comment right there shows hold no merit, what happened was, this kid killed his family, and as a joke, they (negativland) released a statement saying they had nothing to do with it, and then leaked it to the media, and the media jumped on it.. you obviously dont know what the hell your talking about in this case.. the name is fitting.. Anonymous Coward..
I was referring to the court case about their old record company suing them and running them through the ringer... Get your facts right
BlahSnarto..
Push this puppy up to (+5). Insightful
The sharpest insight of any post in this discussion, IMHO.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Is the middleman (the RIIA) even needed? Assume I'm a musician. I could set up an e-commerce website and sell MP3s of my music directly to the consumer. I could even set different prices for different qualities of my music. I could also set up a fund for people who copied my music from someone they knew (and liked it), so they could legalize it by paying me, say, 75% of the MP3 download price.
The consumer, who knows someone with a CD burner (or has one themself), could burn their favourite MP3s to a CD-R and play it in their car, CD player, or whatever they want. They could also put it on a different media.
This model is not only better for the musician, who can now start up risk-free, but for the consumer as well, who benefits from lower prices and greater selection and flexibility. The only entity who loses out is the RIIA, because it is no longer needed.
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"I already have all the latest software."
Is the middleman (the RIIA) even needed? Assume I'm a musician. I could set up an e-commerce website and sell MP3s of my music directly to the consumer. I could even set different prices for different qualities of my music. I could also set up a fund for people who copied my music from someone they knew (and liked it), so they could legalize it by paying me, say, 75% of the MP3 download price.
The consumer, who knows someone with a CD burner (or has one themself), could burn their favourite MP3s to a CD-R and play it in their car, CD player, or whatever they want. They could also put it on a different media.
This model is not only better for the musician, who can now start up risk-free, but for the consumer as well, who benefits from lower prices and greater selection and flexibility. The only entity who loses out is the RIIA, because it is no longer needed (of course, it could set up an e-commerce hosting service for musicians, and benefit from that).
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"I already have all the latest software."
Considering what most of the world things of the US, and how much we get stepped on by the US, so we really care what the US thinks of us? I don't.
Besides, all he really said was he likes living in Canada better.
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"I already have all the latest software."
Yeah. That's a _lot_ of pain and suffering I could do without.
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"I already have all the latest software."
Because you have something else in the CD drive!
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"I already have all the latest software."
Anyone who is in the same situation as the above poster, post "Me too" here. If this is a success, we can send the figures to the RIIA/MPAA.
"Me Too!"
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"I already have all the latest software."
How can you at the same time say 'investigate it yourself' and link to an article which makes numerous unsubstantiated claims, with nary a reference to be found.
Also, I think you'll find that, much more important than any percieved racial seperations, the divisions between the classes is the fundamental problem here. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.
But, it's probably not useful to try to reason with you, Mr. Coward. Your link to 'Who Rules America' tells me everything I need to know about you.
The problem with this is that large corporations find it very difficult to break copyright laws, because they get stuck with lawsuits. If people were trading illicit GPL binaries on IRC (though I can't imagine a reason why) I doubt ppl here would care much.
What it comes down to, is that corporations act very rationally but immorally, which tends to be the opposite of the way that individuals act.
And if I were given the chance to metamoderate a negative moderation to your post, I would mark it unfair.
No one questions (yet...) your right to make copies of your music for personal use. But the real question here is whether or not you have the right to give a copy of a copyrighted work to someone else who also owns the same work.
The corporations are going to realize, either through enlightenment or exasperation, that a certain amount of pirating is going to happen no matter what, and all their lawsuits and dumbass anti-theft schemes just annoy and alienate a sizeable segment of their customers. And then they're going to realize that it's not really a bad deal for them... people are still going to buy real product, and bootleg MP3s can be great exposure. They'll have to grow up and take the bad with the good. Makes me want to waggle a finger at them and remind them that life isn't fair, then give them a little pat on the head and tell them to run along... the little tyrannical ballbusting corporate stinkers. They're so cute at this age, aren't they?
Now, of course, when 2.2 terabyte credit-card-size storage cards become widely available, and your common Swatch holds 400 gigs, then all bets are off. But there's enough time between now and then to implement the only system that can save the corporations' sorry asses, as far as I can figure...
You already pay $40/month for, let's face it, lousy fucking cable TV service that's unreliable and offers you no choice whatsoever. What a joke. But most of us keep paying it. Personally, I don't, but if I could pay $10/month and only get Fox (for The Simpsons and Futurama), Discovery, History, Bravo, AMC, Comedy and the Learning Channel, I'd be a happy bastard. But I'm not going to pay another $30/month for a whole pile of pathetic sports, news, almost impossibly stupid MTV shows and something called the WB Network which I'm under doctor's orders not to ever even look at. Oh... but sorry, got off on a tangent there - that's GooseKirk Rant #47. Back to...
Check this out: If I could pay, for example, $60/month for full-on media services... if I could watch any TV show anytime I want, any movie anytime I want, and listen to any music anytime I want, I would never download another illicit MP3 as long as I live. Make this media service available via DSL, cable and broadband roaming wireless, and bam, you've just effectively - not completely, but effectively - wiped out piracy.
YOU TAKE AWAY THE INCENTIVE. Why would I bother owning any physical media whatsoever? Why would I waste my time copying multiple gigs of MP3s and DVDs from my friends? I'm going to want this service no matter what -- it's cable TV, the video store and the music store all at the touch of a button, with all the new stuff available to me the second it's released and all the old stuff available any time I want. Every episode of Futurama, every song by Charles Mingus, every John Cusack movie all professionally encoded and cataloged and awaiting my command. No more schlepping around crates of CDs, no more messed up tapes and discs from the video store, no more late fees, no more unavailable titles, no more accidentally trashing or burning or theft of entire collections, no more missing a favorite show... I've seen the future, brothers and sisters, and it is cool. And add a Transmeta receiver with broadband wandering wireless service, and I'm good for home, the office, the car, jogging, whatever. And, oh yeah, make it a service that runs on top of my current internet provider, please.
The business side of a project like this... I dunno. I'm sure it could be worked out. Out of a $60/month fee, say $10 goes to overhead for whoever runs the service, and $50 gets divided up among all the artists who created content on some sort of a per-watch/listen scale. I realize this raises more questions than it answers, but I'm sure the particulars could be hammered out. Hey, I'm the visionary, I leave the accounting to the eggheads, alright?
OK, there's some privacy issues here, too, I know, I know. The Corporation is going to know everything I watch and listen to. Well, I'm of the camp that the US Gov't needs to pull its head out of its ass and enact some EU-style laws, and pronto. Sorry to my libertarian pals, but I think it's abundantly clear by now that the private sector is not going to play nice on its own, and a little governmental smacking around is occasionally in order. Microsoft. But that's neither here nor there. Personally, I got no beef with marketers knowing that I like good things and hate bad stupid things, and to please stop trying to sell me the bad stupid things and I don't care if Oliver Stone did make the football movie, I'm still not going to watch it, and I'm not going to watch his WWF Smackdown movie in 2012, either, so if I have to watch that idiotic commercial one more time...
Well, anyway, am I talking the crazy talk here or what, folks?
-----
GooseKirk
> I program for a living
Profession game developer here.
> I have no problem with doing away with ALL copyright and patent laws regarding software.....
I agree that patent laws on ALGORITHMS are pretty silly.
> it would be a good thing and programmers would end up making more money in the long run.
How? Can you shed any evidence for this?
> All copyright laws are is a government granted monopoly
The orginal duration was short, so the inventor could profit for a limited time. Thats not bad.
What is insane, is EVERYONE patenting EVERY bloody thing they think of, and making ideas "theirs" for a lifetime. THAT doesn't profit the arts and sciences, only a monopolistic business.
> and anyone who knows some simple economics can prove mathematically that monopoly is a BAD THING.
In the long run, yes.
Cheers
The Bill of Rights is there to protect the American people from an unfair Government - not to dictate how and why laws get passed (though many laws are created to protect those Rights). The problem is that we have given corporations those same Rights so now they have the ability to create/pass laws that protect their interests - something that the creator of the BoR (Thomas Jefferson) would have been completly against. This is not a weakness of the BoR, but a weakness of the American people to let it continue. The BoR actually gives us the power to change it - the problem is a majority of American people either: just don't understand that, refuse to do anything about it or just plain give up their rights.
LRJ
Yes, the constitution was origianlly written up by lawyers and business men but the parts giving us free speach and the right to bear arms were added later to protect us from those same lawyers and business men (if they get out of hand). The sad part is that most of the American people don't realize this anymore and so are in the process of giving up these rights.
LRJ
> Most adults I know, and most serious music collectors I know, realize
> MP3 for what it is - piracy, and avoid it like the plague, not because
> they do not understand how to use it, but because they realize it is illegal.
I am a middle-aged adult, and I am not a criminal. I like mp3 because it allows me to burn a whole lot of songs, over a hundred tracks, onto a single CD. Wouldn't you rather carry around one CD than ten or fifteen? The relatively low quality of the playback system's speakers makes the sound quality difference with mp3s insignificant. And if I leave one of my mp3 CDs in a hot car and it gets ruined, then I'm only out a couple of bucks. At work, I can copy a bunch of tracks onto the hard drive of my PC without wasting gigabytes of disc space. And all this is perfectly legal. I have never stolen one single track of music. Every one of my mp3s I've made came from a CD I bought and own.
I just don't see how you can make any bootleg-proof scheme for on-line distribution that allows me to carry around the end product like I can now with ordinary CDs. Either you pay for a track or an album and then you download a file, in which case the file can simply be copied and bootlegged, or you have to go to the seller's server every time you want to play a track. That second alternative is way lousier than simply buying the physical CD, since once you have possession of the CD you can carry it anywhere you like, play it in your car, etc.; there's even a well-established precedent that buyers of CDs can make copies of the tracks for personal use, which is my legal justification for ripping all those mp3s off my own CD collection.
I don't see how you can stop copying from any kind of music media. In the end the unencrypted output must be turned to analog voltage to drive a speaker. Capture that output into a sound card and presto you have a copy of the track you want. The sound quality is marginally diminished and noise is introduced, but if you have a reasonably good CD deck, preamp and sound card it's no worse, I think, than you get when you play an original CD through, say, a boom-box, or anything less than the best of sound systems and speakers. I suspect that the analog devices at the beginning and end of the chain, microphones and speakers, do more damage to the perfection of sound reproduction than all other links in the entire recording-to-playback process.
At any rate it is my conviction, and it has been for decades, that a certain amount of illicit copying and sharing of music seves as a major stimulus to the music industry. The argument that "if listeners can get it for free, they won't buy it" is bogus. After all, when you listen to music on the radio, isn't that free? And yet all music companies and all recording artists are always very eager to get their music played on the radio, not just because of the radio royalties, but also because that's how their customers find out about it. The same goes for this mp3 trading that is so popular these days. People trading mp3s hear musicians they otherwise would never have heard of, and if they like what they hear, they go to the store to buy more CDs by those musicians.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I think the point was not that being out of print makes piracy legal or right, just that it makes it a "victimless crime". Neither the artist nor the record company loses any money because the "pirate" had no option to buy it, at least not in such a way that the copyright holder would see any benefit from it. As for the collectors value for rare recordings, I doubt this has much effect on the value of an actual, legitimate physical recording, because they remain as rare and desireable as before. Which brings up an ethical issue that you and I might not agree on. To me it seems that collectors have no inherent "right" to have the value of their collections driven up by enforced scarcity. None of the money exchanged for the very expensive collectors items you mention goes to anyone who had anything to do with the creation, reproduction, or distribution of the art. The collectors had no role in it at all, and therefore are not entitled to anything. I don't begrudge anyone making money on collectibles, but it isn't a right, and it doesn't deserve legal protection.
---
Peace,
vilvoy
No question - this is as ballsy of a move as it gets. The RIAA suit should be a surprise to noone, least of all the management of mp3.com.
So, what's their defense?
Many web sites contain copyright notices that state you may not make copies of the data, yet for a short while we all do. It's called a cache.
I wonder if MP3.com will attempt to claim that the 1's and 0's they stream WOULD have been those of the user, except that the server didn't need to upload them because it already had a cached copy from someone else. Or can they somehow prove that a good hash function of lots of 1's and 0's is as good as the data itself?
I also wonder if MP3.com actually owns a copy of the 45,000 CD's that they make available. If they DON'T own them, could they claim that the enclosed restrictions don't apply to them? (The theory being that MP3.com is just providing hard drive space, not a music distribution service, so why should they own them?) If they own them, they are likely bound by the reproduction restrictions.
This is going to be an interesting ride. While I absolutely love their service, I hope they have some sort of ace up their sleeve - from my understanding of the facts, it looks like they are in blatant violation of the law.
Yes, there will always be people that will figure out how to "cheat the system". But most of the people that know they "can" decide not to. I can walk into a [\w+]-mart and see all of the security measures in place: two-way mirrors, cameras, etc. and I know how to get around these. Do I act on this knowlege? No. I pay my money, get my merchandise, and continue on my way. I think the majority of people are honest.
_ .:*~*:._.
As for borrowing from the library, or a friend's collection you could always do that. All MP3.com is doing is providing some free storage(in beta anyway) and some streaming ability.
In my case, the only time I pirate music is if I can't find, within a reasonable amount of time, a recording that I really want. In this way, I think the RIAA is inadvertently perpetuating piracy by not making more obscure titles readily available.
.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:.
_.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._.:*~*:._
ASCII art?? I thought it was a REGULAR expression
Personally, RIAA needs to realize they can't go out and fight every battle and expect to win. These is just going way to far.
You actually saw this coming? You must have insider information about mp3.com's management smoking crack during lunch breaks.
I was referring to the RIAA lawsuit, not Beam-It, or whatever it's called. I think most slashdot readers expected the RIAA to sue MP3.com over this. You are right, however, that sending MP3's of music to people that already have the music seems pretty dumb. It seems like they're sticking their necks out for nothing. Oh well.
Take care,
Steve
I'm going to sue the RIAA now because I'm tired of seeing more stories on slashdot about poor sites and companies being sued over it.
- Mike Roberto
-- roberto@apk.net
--- AOL IM: MicroBerto
Berto
YES! You hit the nail(mole?) right on the head.
Maybe I'm just picking a nit here, but I don't see mp3.com as broadcasting the information. Merriam-Webster defines broadcasting as this:
I think the relevant item is "3 : to transmit or make public by means of radio or television". mp3.com is not making the data public. It is a private exchange of information between me and mp3.com.
I have another problem with the lawsuit. As an example, say you and I each own a copy of a CD. If I have a nice tape deck but you only have a cheap tape-playing walkman (remember those) but you want to go jogging and listen to the CD, can't I legally make you a copy to play on your walkman since you own the CD too?
Isn't mp3.com just converting the CD I paid for into a more usable format that meets my particular desires? This is assuming that mp3.com actually bought all 45,000 CDs that they ripped to mp3.
-- Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.
That's precisely my point - simply inserting a CD in the drive once is not sufficient evidence of ownership.
--
It's _not_ any different - that's the point! In both cases, there's a copyright violation going on. If you rip a friend's CD collection to MP3, you are violating copyright law by copying materials for which you are not licensed. If you borrow a friend's CD collection and get MP3.com to send you the corresponding MP3's, MP3.com is committing a copyright violation by distributing copyrighted material. In both cases, someone's breaking the law...
--
Is it possible that somebody of the RIAA is interested in exploiting this market later on "legally" by stopping all competition before anybody of the RIAA starts covering this market? (Assuming i am correct in saying that the RIAA is an organization funded by a bunch of Recording Industry Professionals.
Face it, there is no easy to achieve copy protection .. they have tried the security by obscurity method, however .. and failed .. *SIGH*
How come launch.com is not targeted for a lawsuit? Must be because they don't do anything illegal. Especially with "My Launch", which is, of course, not at all similar to My MP3. Nope. Couldn't be because they are affiliated with AOLTimeWarnerEtc... Could it be that they just want to stomp out competition for what they envision as the future of music distribution? Just a little?
Isn't the first issue you mention kind of like saying a bank is liable if you borrow a CD, burn a copy, and then put the CD is a safe-deposit box? All mp3.com is doing is acting as a storage depot for music -- isn't issue one analogous to copying a borrowed CD, and storing it somewhere? I'm still confused as to the point the RIAA is trying to make and how they're ``protecting artists'' in doing this.
-AC
I'm confused as to what the RIAA is saying. Rosen states, "the copyright law was not invented just to protect the interests of companies, it exists to protect the creative talent of the many artists this culture has fostered and the investment in their work," but I fail to see how a database through which, in Robertson's words, "Only the person who buys the CD is entitled to listen to that music" prevents investment. Users still have to buy the CD.
-AC
What the fuck does any of that have to do with mp3s? You can pirate cds, ya know. It's not like it's a big superhuman effort to turn a cd into mp3 files. You can copy cassette tapes.
The big deal is that you can make an exact copy and distribute them quickly. You can't exchange cassette copies in mass quantity. CD's which are made from illegally pirated MP3's use MP3 technology to steal songs.
The cost of information is approaching zero. Bitch all you want, Luddite, but as far as I'm concerned, fuck you, I'm with the pirates
How old are you? 12? 13, tops?
Actually, yes, the CD is becoming an unaccetable format due to its lack of copy protection. The recomd companies are investigating using closed, properitary technologies instead of open technologies like CD. It is unlikely that in the future companies will distribute their music so openly again - largely because history shows that if they do, people will illegally pirate them.
PLEASE! MP3 is not piracy, it is convenience. I have a computer next to my stereo rack and am putting all of my CDs on it in MP3 format (large HD) so that I can make up play lists and listend to what I want all day while I work around the house without having to futz with it after starting.
I thoroughly understand that MP3's can be used for legitimate purposes, but the vast majority of online use (e.g. Napster) is rampant piracy. There are some iffy things in the MP3.com, because it does not actually do a thorough validation that you own the album, and the protocol is easily spoofable. What is needed is a copy protcted music format, since the a large percentage of the current user base of MP3 users have proven themselves to be irresponsible with pirated music in their hands.
Consumers chose mp3s as the next generation in music distribution. It would seem that the RIAA's posisition on technology is "Fight anything we did not originate."
A few clues...
Most consumers have NOT chosen MP3. Most adults I know, and most serious music collectors I know, realize MP3 for what it is - piracy, and avoid it like the plague, not because they do not understand how to use it, but because they realize it is illegal. I understand technology (I design microprocessors for a living), but I have absolutely no desire to steal music - nor do most of the people I know. Many of these people would be quite willing to go to some sort of on-line distribution system if it did NOT involve piracy.
Your assertion that the RIAA is avoiding MP3 because they did not originate it is fundamentally flawed because you have failed to demonstrate that it is in their interest to use it. The MP3 format is fundamentally flawed from a commercial standpoint because it has no copy protection. There is absolutely no way that they are going to release their entire library on a non-copyprotected format. Second, and nobody ever mentions this, the MP3 format is not as high quality as a regular CD. Why would the record companies choose to have quality suffer? The record companies are apparently working to develop formats for online distribution. As I said in another post: resistance to MP3's is NOT resistance to on-line distribution. On-line distribution is in the company's interested. Everybody knows this. But MP3 is fundamentally flawed from a commercial standpoint so there's no way they will use it. MP3 is not the final word in online distribution - it was not designed for commercial use and is basically the "alpha" version of what we will see in the future.
You call me a anti tech dude? common, 90% of these rare techno tracks are NOT AVAILABLE localy on CD, the rest are either mp3s from records which are NEVER printed again.
The rarity of a record does NOT give you the right to steal it. I have many expensive records and CD's in my collection, which are long out of print and not available locally, and which I've paid on the order of $50-$100 for, and which took forever to find. Many of these I could have simply made a cassette or MP3 copy, but I chose not to. Some people collect records which are VERY expensive; I know some are in the $30,000 range and probably more (I haven't followed the scene in several years). A lot of old vinyl records have not been re-issued on CD because the copyright owner isn't around, or isn't interested in releasing it, but there is still a copyright on the record. In this case, the only solution is to buy the original vinyl, or wait until the copyright expires, when a CD copy is released. There is a certain satisfaction in looking for a record for a long time, finally finding it, and then be able to enjoy it, rather than simply pirating it off the net and gaining instant gratification.
Now I -do- understand that the "rarity" of a record is inherently connected to the fact that records are currently physical artifacts, which can go in and out of print. When online distribution does become a commercial reality, we will not have this problem any more, but there will probably be other problems. For example, if you need some sort of license to play the song, it is possible that nobody will issue you the license anymore.
Non-profit libraries and archives have certain limited exemptions from copyright law. MP3.com, a publicly-traded company, does not share these exemptions. That's just the way the law is written.
One problem with the borrowing a cd defense story, if you have the cd, why do you need to even bother with mp3.com when you can rip the mp3z directly from the cd? The judge would look at this defense and just bust out laughing. The second one isn't too stable either since mp3.com is merely acting as a backup service as far as they are concerned.
Perhaps they are going to produce a secret weapon: the electrified mole whacking machine!
This device will be able to whack moles faster than any traditional man-with-a-hammer technique ever could! In fact under test conditions the electrified mole whacking machine can whack up to 100 moles a minute!
We are all doomed. We might as well lay down our code and surrender.
Shawn Poulsen (Fruan)
"On Slashdot, many obvious things are insightful." - Annonymous Coward, 2000/7/9
Most adults I know, and most serious music collectors I know, realize MP3 for what it is - piracy,
So I'm pirating when I copy my entire cd collection onto my harddrive? (yes, I do have my entire cd collection on my hd, that way I don't have to change cd every 5 minutes or so)
Mikael Jacobson
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
For MP3.com to win, they would have to argue that the record industry is in fact in the business of selling licences to use their copyrighted works.
This could have very bad consequences, and it seems to me that the RIAA is actually doing us a big favour by fighting this interpretation of the law. Owning a physical copy of a work gives you rights you almost certainly would not have under a "licence to use" scheme, e.g. selling your copy to a third party, reverse-engineering it etc.
correction, not 45,000 songs, I meant to say 45,000 cd's :)
this is pretty good. you should forward this to the defense team. Mod this up, someone.!!!
Not to defend the RIAA -- I am in full support of MP3.com -- but what about security? It sounds like Beam-it just checks your CD to see its ID or tracks and once it determines its a valid CD, it says "OK" and lets you listen. Well, how long will it be until someone stubs this process and forges the messages back and forth to MP3.com from a stubbed Beam-it?
They won't ever learn, until they start to lose court case after court case.
mp3.com doesn't make it any easier to pirate CD collections than borrowing it from a friend.
Um... So? That doesn't make it okay...:
"Teacher! Billy just hit me!!!"
"It's okay, Timmy, he's not going to be the only one, so why punish him?"
Y'see?
Wow, these people are really running scared... lawsuits ater lawsuit. Whack-a-mole on a GRAND scale...
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
Ouch. Butthat figures. Not that women and technology don't mix, it just explains the erratic behovior I think.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
This is a cheap and fast way for anyone to get a little more known - and I do think that music should be where open source software is - free.
They are afraid of an *algorithm* - why wouldn't they sue the MP3 algorithm creator then? If the RIAA think that the MP3 is doing THAT much of a damage to the whole music industry, I think the creator should be responsible..
I also want to point out that if we had 10 times the bandwidth and 10 times the hard disk space on our drives, and if the MP3 standard didn't exist (or any encoding algorithm), people would transfer WAV's.
(To the RIAA): Now let's replace the term "MP3" with "WAV". It's easier to understand now that it would be illegal to transfer pirated music, but that if the WAV files are completely created from scratch, and the creator wants to distribute his music freely, then let him do that. I just don't understand why you are sueing MP3.COM just because it's a different format !!
Just because technology gives you the ability to pirate music doesn't make it right. The RIAA are very often wrong, but not quite as much as the general net population gives them credit for...I mean, it IS their job, like it not, to try and protect the copyrights of their members.
The funny thing is, if there were a service like Napster (yeah this is hypothetical, don't quiz me on how such a thing would function) that was clearly created to make it easier for evil corporations to violate the GPL..but could also be used for legitimate purposes...the people here would be calling for blood.
Hypocrites.
Yes, moderate me down to hell. Thanks.
Okay, I've not looked at their toy (in the UK it's not exactly an attractive idea to listen over the 'net) and I don't know how hard steps 2 and 3 are. But this was the first thing I thought of when I got their e-mail ad for the service. I can certainly understand the industry's concerns.
I think it's a great idea -- I just hope mp3.com know what they're doing...
-- Peter
The person who gets sued by the most money grubbing organizations wins.
all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
That was Sony/Philips research which brought us the compact disk. At that time noone could have thought that the widespeard of PCs would allow to ordinary folks to reap the digital information directly from the CD, and so the Red Book specifications didn't include any provision for copy protection. Yet I guess the most important point is that (i) CDs are grossly overprised, and (ii) there is a large number of CDs with 1-2 hit songs and the rest is junk. Both are the reasons for rapid proliferation of both mp3 compression and exchange and copying CDs to R(W)CDs. RIAA is fighting the loosing battle. In fact I believe we so get used to the absense of copy protection, that SDMI as well as SACD (with built-in protection) are doomed to fail (not too sure about SACD but my gut feeling is it ain't gonna catch)
I don't know, maybe it's just me, but as an average 15-year-old I don't exactly have $20 laying around to go pick up the newest album, there's too many expences as it is. Not only that, but wouldn't life be so much better if music were sort of more of an "open-source" environment. Or, how about you have a website setup to have MP3s on it (the illegal ones), but make them legal by paying royalties to RIAA or whomever, and give the MP3s away for free. (revenues would be made by advertisments, and think of the popularity of the site, legal MP3s from big artists for free..). Just my thoughts.
Maybe its just me, but does this mean that those cddb files that keep stacking on my harddrive are illegal?
And that MP3 CD-ROM I made of allll of my CD's so that I can pop it in wherever I'm at and download selected tracks of *my* music to my RIO are illegal as well? Sorry, I like my RIO. No skipping on the bus, I can wonder down the rail road tracks by my office whenever I want to, and I hardly ever need to recharge my batteries.
Ditto with the DVD BS. I chew out my gf every time she asks me to burn a copy of a CD for her. But com'n people, some of us are actually HONEST _and_ curious about these technolical good things.
Not to flame anything, but what the heck are these people smoking, and where can I get some?
Moo!
while(1){
i=find_mp3();
if( i == enjoy_mp3 )
i_buy_cd_at_aandbsound(i);
}
erik takes another swig o' Kokanee
Moo!
if you have the CD in your CDROM, why the fsck would you want to download an MP3 with that music on it????? why not just hit 'play'???????
I don't see why mp3.com doesn't just drop the whole thing, and shut down my.mp3.com. Am I the only one here who thinks that mp3.com's new program is pretty useless anyway? I mean, there are very few places I go other than my computer room where I would have both the desire to listen to my music, and an internet connection to get to via mp3.com. If a company wants to do something really useful, make me a portable mp3 player that can read mp3s from a cd-r. Or a car player that can do the same. Or a streaming server/player combo that would enable me to stream my mp3s from home to my workplace. Those might be useful technologies. But the my.mp3.com thing is way to restricted with what they can marginally get away with to be of any real use. Plus it requires an internet connection, and those aren't pervasive enough yet for this sort of technology.
Intereting Point. If mp3.com would lose, couldn't they just change their beam-it app to work like the described "Case 2"? And if they lose again, just step a bit more back again? Even if their actual implementation looks "sueable" right now, the overall concept look very legal to me.
Oh c'mon! The RIAA are not bad people. They just start lawsuits against everything because they have to. It's their job to try and stop stuff that might eat up profits - their CEO and all of them have been hired to protect their goods. If they don't protect their works, they might all loose their jobs.
Yeah right. Let them sue everybody's pants off. I still won't buy CD's. Why? Because in the Netherlands you have to pay 25 bucks for a CD. And that is way too much.
I think it is time for a new kid on the block. And say bye bye to Sony Music, Warner Bros and all those other nobrainers who have really NO clue what the new generation want!
Can someone tell me if I understand this correctly. Here are excerpts from the lawsuit filed by RIAA, taken from MP3.com (BLAH'S added for readability): UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK ...BLAH BLAH BLAH ... 3. In order to create and offer this "upgraded" service, MP3.com copied the tracks from some 45,000 commercial CDs onto the computer servers that operate the MP3.com site and the My.MP3 service. ...BLAH BLAH BLAH ... C. For an award of damages, including, without limitation, statutory damages for willful infringement of $150,000 per work infringed; ...BLAH BLAH BLAH ... Does this mean they are suing for $150,000 x 45,000 = $6.75 billion?
I'm not sure if this has been covered already, so forgive me if it has. Here goes: Today I installed Beam-it, and uploaded my info which stated that I had one cd. I then went to the my.mp3.com website and saw my info with my cd. I then clicked on one of my songs and it was streamed to me. Somewhere in this process I was sent an nameofmysong.m3u file. I renamed this to nameofmysong.txt, and opened it in a text editor. It contained something like this:
x tdXNpY21hb0qEO9QYo43TZTSqYC1lSUHsDPBJA-- /virtual_machine.mp3
http://downloads.mp3.com/AAIBBBLGvTGwGAwARib21iwg
So, I copied this info into my browser and downloaded the whole mp3. It got sent to my windows temp directory by default.
So here's my question: I sent this url to my buddy, just to see if he could get the mp3 as well, and sure enough, he downloaded it as well! So what's to stop everyone from doing this? He doesn't have the cd, but how would anyone know that he's not me on another computer or something? Or even if that doesn't make sense, does all of that encryted stuff in the address do anything like track how many times I download this song from various IP addresses? It seems like Beam-it is very open to piracy. Am I correct? Keep in mind I'm not a computer expert, and this is my very first post here.
Thank you
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
Their Web site claims that it is illegal to copy music onto a computer hard drive, whether or not you own the music in question. They do not want you to be able to use any digital recorders (for instance, computer CD-RW drives) that are exempt from the AHRA's SCMS and recorder/media taxes. This also amounts to a claim that it is illegal for you to make MP3 files from CDs that you own for your own personal use.
When they made this argument to the judge in the Rio court case and attempted to get the judge to make such a ruling, the judge didn't fall for it. The court ruled that just because AHRA offers an automatic statutory immunity for copying using a narrow class of devices, that does not mean that Fair Use rights are negated for other equipment. (See the analysis on the EFF Web site.)
It's lunacy to believe that they are licensed to 'perform' or distribute spare copies of someone's music to them just because the person owns the music. THEY do not. Can we say 'sickeningly obvious'? Can we say 'guilty, guilty, guilty'? Any judge can, and will.
The frustrating part is that I'd been subconsciously counting on mp3.com to be there for me when I started putting large amounts of material out there. I don't have anywhere near the resources to host even my back catalog on my own web server, it'd break me. mp3.com were ready to host as much as I could come up with, for equal rights to distribute it and the banner ad revenue. It was a truly win/win situation, and now they've totally obliterated their perfectly legitimate stance as a hosting service for all the LEGAL mp3 artists, by attempting to also host everything they have no rights to.
For God's sake, they wouldn't host cover tunes from their artists, and now this? Please tell me there's an mp3 site out there which will host _many_ megs of data for nothing, and which ISN'T STUPID? It'd be better still if it was a big name, but AFAIK mp3.com is _the_ big name in this area, and they're absolutely blowing it and endangering the wellbeing of all the artists who believed in them- and screwing up the plans of the artists who hadn't got round to establishing a serious mp3 presence yet.
Or, perhaps, is this a rock-and-roll style publicity stunt? Could mp3.com be planning to cave at the last minute, _after_ becoming front page news all over the world, but before actually taking any damage? And then turning around and going 'Why, it's OK, really- look at ALL THE GREAT BANDS we LEGALLY have! Why, we don't need those stinky old mainstream CDs at all!'
Oh, I hope it's something like that. That'd be worthy of Malcolm McLaren- truly a cynical and ruthless bid to manipulate the media and the industry. Please, mp3.com, be that cynical! You're not helping anybody one bit if you're serious about this Beam-It stuff. It's crazy, it's stupid, you're guilty, you have no right and no reason to believe you should have such a right and IT'S A SIDESHOW TO YOUR REAL PURPOSE! Support your own damn bands, not the industry!
If the person has access to the CD and can put it in their drive to demonstrate that they have possession of the licensed material, then they could just as easily rip the tracks from the CD and convert them to MP3s on their drive and upload them to MP3.com. They are just saved from those extra steps by MP3.com giving them access to an archived copy. MP3.com did nothing to help them obtain an illegal copy, if that is what they are using. The customer obtained that copy prior to using MP3.com's service.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
How can they require someone to prove ownership of a CD? Say I have a friend to makes backups of all his CDs. Then one of the originals is destroyed. He still has the backup and can listen to that. Then later I give my friend $.50 for that backup CD because he doesn't want it anymore. That CD becomes my property. I can't really prove it's mine, other than the fact that I have possession of it. I can't prove that it's a legitimate copy at all. How then can MP3.com truly verify ownership? Do I have to repurchase my entire CD collection in order to have access to it online? I'm sure the RIAA would love that since it means they get to further rip off consumers.
If I can obtain the CD long enough to put it in my drive, then I could just as easily rip the tracks, convert them to MP3s, and upload them to MP3.com. Doing this would only require access to the CD for a few minutes, but would give me permanent access to the copy. I don't see how MP3.com's service is in any way contributing to piracy. If any piracy occurs, it occurs independently of MP3.com's service.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
'Hmmm, I guess it'd be legal for someone to prove they were at a workstation with M$ word on it, therefore MP3.com can legally distribute it to any computer they use now'.
:)
Sure. Moreover, many companies do it this way - install Office applications from one disk (probably even of uncertain origin) and then buy a bunch of licenses from MS. MS never was seen to object it. And it's natural - they just get rid of burden of distributing those CDs and can make money selling just pure air and holograms in those licenses - everyone's dream, not?
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
Have these people ever heard of LIBRARIES? You know, places where you can go and check out books, cd's and videos for FREE and listen to them? I can go to the SF Public Library right now and buy a CD that I don't own, listen to it, and bring it back. I've paid not one dime for it (except in taxes to the city, which in this case I pay happily for library services.) Why do we not see the 3000 year old institution of the library decried as a threat to the income of authors?
If they have even temporary possession of it they can easily copy it onto cassette tape if they want, without any help from mp3.com. In other words, the mp3.com service does not really create any new opportunities for piracy. Or are you proposing that stereo equipment with built-in CD player and cassette recorders should be banned also? They can be abused in precisely the same way.
The only reason the RIAA think they can get away with this (and the MPAA too for that matter) is that they think the judges are too stupid to see past all the digital technology mumbo-jumbo and realise that these copying opportunities are no different than what we already had before the age of the PC and the internet.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
You're overlooking the possibility that data warehousing is precisely what mp3.com *is* doing.
MP3.COM has to show that they don't make any copies of CDs which haven't been sold from their web site. But as soon as someone orders the first copy of any given CD from them, mp3.com can make a copy because that copy is licenced to the purchaser...and to any subsequent purchasers of that title.
But whether a given CD is legally owned by MP3.COM, or whether it's only owned by one or more customers, as long as the user demonstrates that they have it also by inserting it in the drive, then there's no difference in principle between the user uploading their own copy to the mp3.com site for their own personal use, and mp3.com simply enabling access to their own archived copy. Those who have demonstrated possession of the licensed material simply get access to the very same bit patterns stored in another place.
This is one place where the legal system has yet to get to grips with the difference between IP and other kinds of property. With IP, all copies are in fact the same object. You can't distinguish between one copy and another if the bit patterns are identical.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The RIAA was caught with their pants down. They got big and fat off CD profits, and just assumed that the world would wait until they were good and ready to wake up and exploit this "internet" thing.
As a result, they had no product in the pipeline, and were blindsided by the grass-roots MP3 phenomenon.
If the RIAA had come out with a music distribution mechanism for the internet even 5 years ago, MP3 may well have never come to be. Instead, the labels and RIAA ignored the format, no actually, they ignored the ENTIRE MARKET for on-line music.
Not surprisingly, the world stopped waiting for them.
Now all they have LEFT to do is pretend that MP3s are all about illegal pirating. They've missed their chance. They blew it. It's going to cost them their industry monopoly.
It isn't the first time a major industry has been destroyed this way. The railroad industry was nearly wiped out when the interstate highway system was built, because they thought that they were in the railroad industry, and forgot that they were actually in the TRANSPORTATION industry.
People who wanted to ship their products but didn't want to deal with unresponsive and expensive railroad service simply bought trucks and hired fleets of truckers.
The music labels thought that they were in the CD and cassette business, and forgot that they were in the music DISTRIBUTION business.
Just as highways and semis broke the railroad monopoly, the internet is breaking the music distribution monopoly.
They're fighting because they're big, and rich, and dying. And it's their own fault.
Corporate evolution in action. The dinosours die.
- John
that someone would do a nice article on who the RIAA actually are so the people that read the article will realize why the rest of us get so pissed off when we hear about them suing someone. The RIAA is composed of a very small handful of recording companies, the companies that own most of the distrobution channels of music and do everything they can to keep a strangle hold on it. When the whole audio CD-ROM format was just a twingle in some engineer's eye, they could have doubled the quality of CD audio but the RIAA decided not to give consumers TOO good of quality music recordings. Mostly because they were weary of the popularity of CDs. They were right, who would ever buy a shiney five inch disk?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
O, Canada,
My home and native land,
True intellectual rights
In all that Law commands.
With glowing screens
We code all night
From persecution, Free!
To innovate, encrypt,
And Hack*,
Protected, completely!
States, keep away!
Greed, you can't sue me!
O, Canada,
We stand on guard for thee,
O, Canada,
We stand on guard for thee!
...Just my little bit of appreciation for where I live.
Having lived/worked in the states, and travelled within it quite a lot, all I can say is... wow. Different world. Completely.
As your very own Ross Perot said once... "Money is the most overrated thing in the world."
*Hack, not crack. That's illegal here.
** BTW, that's sung to the tune of our national anthem, in case you didn't figure it out. Do you guys even know how many provinces we have? What our capital is? Who our Prime Minister is? Sheesh!
*** Flames elsewhere. We have freedom of speech here.
They need to get a clue, cluetrain style:
I don't see how consumers would ever switch to RIAA crap like SDMI. Even if MP3.com gets shut down, it will make *absolutely no dent* in illegal mp3 trading.
~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd
Yes. You own the album, and *you* can make all the copies you want to use personally. That does not mean that mp3.com has the right to distribute that same music to you. It's a subtle point, and I'm not sure how to state it more clearly.
mp3.com does not have the right to transmit the entire Led Zeppelin collection to me, over the net. Why would they suddenly gain this right if I happen to own the album? They don't.. my owning the album has nothing to do with mp3.com's distribution rights, period.
As for public domain.. you are completely incorrect. A CD, once distributed, is most certainly *NOT* in the public domain. By definition, things in the Public Domain have *ABSOLUTELY NO* copyright protection, and anyone is free to do whatever they want with them.
I understand what you are saying, and I agree, but what does this have to do with the fact that mp3.com made copies of 45,000 commercial titles without permission?
The accusations are fairly clear... all should read the official document.
They claim that
a) mp3.com made copies of 45,000 commercial titles and placed them in their servers. This could be read several ways, but as a commercial venture, they may not have the rights to do this. They also do not have the rights to 'perform' these titles for anyone else, regardless of whether that someone else owns the music already or not.
Yes, every user of beam-it actually uploads their
cd to mp3.com. It's just that mp3.com has thought
of a rather good data-compression technology. Like all data compression it relys on caching common streams of data. mp3.com has common streams of data on their server resulting in rather ridiculous rates of compression, like compressing an entire cd down to 8 bytes.
It's all in how you look at it.
If I were betting, I'd guess the lawsuit will go in favor of MP3.com. Why?
Because obviously, "Beam-It" was designed to provoke a lawsuit. It's so obvious, the first four seconds after I went to my.mp3.com, I said to myself "Huh, when's the lawsuit".
Obviously MP3.com has used the IPO money and a period of time to craft a winning strategey for just such a lawsuit, then released the most brazen thing thing they could think of to trick RIAA into suing them.
As for what masterful strategy they've thought of, that I do not know. I look forward to the trial!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If it's not any different, then it would happen regardless of whether the my.mp3.com service exists or not. mp3.com doesn't make it any easier to pirate CD collections than borrowing it from a friend.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the UK is the true land of the free. You yanks with your namby pamby constitution and your free speach, right to arms and all that...
:)
Namby pamby? NANBY PAMBY?!? Dem be fightin' words ya thin liped tea drinkin' pansey. We kicked your ass twice before, we can do it again.
But in all seriousness I am consistantly shocked by the fact that the UK doesnt have a written Bill of Rights; by far the single greatest feature of the US Constitution. (Yeah yeah, it's amemendments, but they were immediate amemendments.)
You think this is fucked up.. You should read about what happened to the guys in Negativland..
Personally, i think what they are doing is a waste of resources and time.. Plus it kills any type of freespeech/creative paths..
-BlahSnarto
'slash huh?'
"Us yanks" are fine... Some of our more rich corperations that will fight tooth and nail to stay that way and steamroll any new thecnology that gets in their way. ;-)
But most companies and people are fine here, really. There's just a few big bullies that delight in trying to ruin all our fun.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
They will get their day in court and we will see. New technology sometimes makes for logical changes in law that allow for innovation instead of protectionism.
The main argument seems to be that we are able to produce our own copies of music, but other companies are not allowed to produce copies of the music for listening even if it is verified.
Apparently the RIAA is afraid of certain security problems with the my.MP3.com (well that and monopolizing all music).
If you took your CD and put it on the web for your own personal reasons without allowing access to anyone else, that is acceptable.
This seems to be what mp3.com is doing -- except they are doing it for the customer, and they just verify that they own the work they wish to listen to. Whether it is legal to do so is the dispute.
It's kinda like CDDB but remembers your CD collection. The worst part of this is that from the descriptions it only works with mp3's already on MP3.com so there is no issue of piracy beyond what MP3.com already contain.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, the UK is the true land of the free. You yanks with your namby pamby constitution and your free speach, right to arms and all that are boging yourself down in pathetic law suits, injunctions etc.
This law suit along with the the DeCSS one is not about real issues, it's about paranoid's seeing the bottom line thretened and back into the corner, pointing fully loaded lawyers at everyone that 'looks at them funny' and screaming for their mothers.
I don't see how. Borrowing a CD and burning a copy for yourself is the only copyright violation in that case. Therefore, you would be liable for burning the CD, if RIAA decided to go after you. And anyway, I said that the first issue was relatively weak. The second issue - verification of ownership - is significantly more damning, IMO. MP3.com simply does now require users to demonstrate ownership in any meaningful way. Therefore, MP3.com may be distributing copyrighted material to people who aren't licensed to use it.
--
Nobody disputes that. The problem is that MP3.com does not have a right to send you that data. Yes, you can rip a CD to MP3 and carry it with you; no, MP3.com cannot send you the MP3's just because you claim to own the disc.
More to the point--regardless of what they say is legal or illegal, the information contained on a CD once distributed can be considered in the public domain. It's data--once it's out there, it's out there, and there's no way to recover it.
Unfortunately, we need to regard what they say is legal or illegal; that's how the system works. Yeah, the system sucks sometimes, but it's what we're stuck with. And I think there does need to be at least some legal protection for creative work. Of course, that's just my opinion.
--
I'm convinced that YOU don't get it. Not even close
Odd, since I agree with you about 95%. Much more so than other slashdotters.
Technology has changed the landscape in much the same fashion as machine guns have changed warfare. The RIAA needs to wake up and realize that they can no longer succeed in spoon feeding us overpriced CDs while paying so-called artists like Michael Jackson millions for "music" he hasn't even created yet.
Taste is not an issue, and has absolutely no bearing on the distribution issue. There are still mega-selling, mega-pop teen type acts such as Britney Spears, Nine Inch Nails, Christina Aguilera, and Metallica who still sells millions and millions of records, so your assertion that people do not buy Michael Jackson type music is only true in that they have shifted to different artists of the same genre. It is simply not true that people are moving away from teen-type, mega-pop music - it is probably stronger than ever right now. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the issue at hand.
The music which has the best chance of dying to due to online distribution is inide music, since the margins for it are absolutely diminutive, and online distribution will drive prices even lower. The reason I have a vested interest in trying to stop online piracy of music is because indie music is by far my interest and it makes me sick to see my favorite indie artists not get paid the money they deserve.
I can't tell how they're going to succeed in making money in the future, but I have at least one viable concept: would you pay ~$10-20 per month to have unlimited access to their entire library of recorded music, without restriction or limits, in your home, in your car, and by wireless walkman, even if you knew their hardware was secure and you couldn't copy it off digitally onto something else (to prevent people from "sharing" a subscription)? I know I would!
Obviously I would pay $10-$20/month for the complete collection. Heck, I would pay that much simply to get the access to every recording Deutsche Grammaphon released in 1967. See, you're on my side: you're willing to pay. That's my point. 99.44% of online users look at online distribution not as a new, innovative means to distribute music (as it does indeed have the potential to be), but as a way to never pay for music again (and as long as people have that attitude, they will be disappointed.)
This is but one idea that would do an end run around the machine gun nest of illegal MP3 distribution, yet still provide a fair trade of money for product for them and the artists. (I envision a micropayment system for the artists could be set up, to pay them for every time their songs are accessed.)
ABSOLUTELY! People look at the music industry and see them fighting against MP3, and assume they're against on-line music distribution in genral (and perhaps people misinterpreted my post the same way). Nothing could be further from the truth - the music companies would benefit from online distribution immensely. But there NEEDS to be a proprietary format for it, so it can't be stolen. MP3's are NOT an acceptable format for the industry because they can be stolen. It would be absolutely foolish for the record companies to officially release their catalogs on MP3, because the existing MP3 user base has proven itself to be completely untrustworthy due to piracy.
Thanks for the breath of frssh air - your response is by far the most clueful post I've read on slashdot about MP3's.
I am a middle-aged adult, and I am not a criminal. I like mp3 because it allows me to burn a whole lot of songs, over a hundred tracks, onto a single CD. Wouldn't you rather carry around one CD than ten or fifteen? The relatively low quality of the playback system's speakers makes the sound quality difference with mp3s insignificant. And if I leave one of my mp3 CDs in a hot car and it gets ruined, then I'm only out a couple of bucks. At work, I can copy a bunch of tracks onto the hard drive of my PC without wasting gigabytes of disc space. And all this is perfectly legal. I have never stolen one single track of music. Every one of my mp3s I've made came from a CD I bought and own.
This is all perfectly fine. I have no qualms with MP3 for personal use, but I find that many people (esp. younger people) use MP3 solely to pirate music.
I just don't see how you can make any bootleg-proof scheme for on-line distribution that allows me to carry around the end product like I can now with ordinary CDs.
There are countless ways. One which springs to mind is to have a hardware dongle and a music file specifically generated for that dongle. You would have the same dongle on your car, home, office, etc.
At any rate it is my conviction, and it has been for decades, that a certain amount of illicit copying and sharing of music seves as a major stimulus to the music industry. The argument that "if listeners can get it for free, they won't buy it" is bogus. After all, when you listen to music on the radio, isn't that free? And yet all music companies and all recording artists are always very eager to get their music played on the radio, not just because of the radio royalties, but also because that's how their customers find out about it.
Yes, the radio is one way to find out about music, and yes it free, but radio has commercials, and is not play-on-demand. For the listeners whose musical tastes are actually well covered on the radio (not me!) many still want to be able to listen to something on demand, and listen to something commercial-free. For many people, radio is effectively a SUBSTITUTE for buying music, which is fine. How many people, who listen to e.g. oldies stations go out and buy the music they hear? Probably not many (compared to, say, a jazz station).
The same goes for this mp3 trading that is so popular these days. People trading mp3s hear musicians they otherwise would never have heard of, and if they like what they hear, they go to the store to buy more CDs by those musicians.
For every person who goes out and buys the CD after getting the MP3, there is at least one person who gets JUST the MP3. I've met people who cannot even fathom paying for music, and many people on this website have the same attitude (read the comments and count how many times people have said "I haven't bought a CD in two years").
The difference between people making CD's into MP3's, and the music companies distributing MP3's, is that their is a certain value lost from getting the MP3 instead of the CD. You lose the attractive presentation, the cover work, the high sound quality, etc., etc. But if record companies actually distributed MP3's (only), the MP3 would be THE PRODUCT. There would be no value lost by getting the MP3 because there is nothing more to have. How many people would buy an MP3 when they could get the EXACT same product from the internet for free? I would, and you would, but many people woudln't. This is different from "home taping" and the like, because you are not getting merely a copy, but the actual product itself. That's the danger.
The LP -> CD issue is tricky. You paid for the music already, and the record company has more than broken even on any LP which was successful enough to get a CD re-issue. There is some cost to re-master it to CD, but that cost is much less than producing something from scratch. Sometimes there are value-added features such as extra tracks and the like. But for the most part, it does seem to make some sense that you would get a discount when you buy the CD. You shouldn't get it for free because there IS some cost.
This problem would be solved by a software-like licensing scheme, where you pay a small price for the physical media, and a larger price for the license of listening to the music.
I do not believe that copyleft-type music would work. It is extremely expensive to produce albums, and I don't see where that money would come from. Although artists could make up the losses from touring et al, records are still by far the primary vehicle of music, and need to be preserved above all.
When you capture the audio, you only get one program's interpretation of it, not the raw data itself. This isn't "the product", it is a copy of it. As long as the industry can distinguish between the product and a copy, everything is fine.
You better believe that people do MP3's instead of buying CD's. I've heard from many people who haven't bought a CD in a couple of years or more, because they just steal it from the net. Especially younger people (e.g. college students with dorm bandwidth).
I personally would much rather pay $15-$20 for the CD and get the artwork, case, booklet, etc. I own over 1,000 CD's (and not one single pirated MP3 or cassette), and I consider my collection "attractive" - especially boxed sets and the like, and is one of my prized possessions. It is one of the centerpieces of my home. I do not consider a hard drive with gigabytes of stolen music to be "atrractive" or something to be proud of. Above all, I have the satisfaction of having had supported the artists who produced the music, rather than have stolen from them (95% of the artists I listen to are indie).
It would be nice to be able to pay $1 and download a song, but there is no way that the industry can trust the consumer with the MP3 - thanks to all of the pirates who steal music currently. Probably it will end up working out like software and you will have to enter a registration number to play a song. A real pain, but when you have so many pirates running around who steal everything in sight and refuse to pay, that's what you have to live with.
The RIAA has yet to "get it". They are slowly destroying themselves in a flury of anti-technology litigation. I challenge you to name 1 company/organization that has ever met with success by fighting technology. It just doesn't happen. The sooner that the RIAA realizes that the consumers are the ones with money and are therefore the ones that call the shots, the more likely they will be to salvage some shred of what may be left of the music industry if they keep up at this.
I fully support mp3.com (and the EFF defending against the MPAA, etc.) in their quest to harbor in a new era of digital audio and video, but how much of the public knows about this?
Let's face it, public perception is key to suits like these. If the well-known RIAA (and MPAA in their case) can convince the public a bunch of hackers are trying to stela the stuff which will ultimately raise prices, the majority will side with the big guys.
To people like my mother, or computer illiterate friends, a hacker is a bad person. Is a hacker responsible for it? Well, no, but unless the whole story gets out there no one will ever know it. And unfortunately, most major news services have reporters who fit into this same under-tech-educated majority ofthe public.
Someone needs to find a way to bring these topics, in their entire truth, to the public in a manner they can understand. The RIAA has the power to do it. Do we?
My mother just doesn't read slashdot. Does yours?
> You *do not* have access to every song ever
> made, because *you have to buy physical CDs*.
> If you do not own the CD *you CAN'T listen
> to the music*
I'm sorry, but there is an _amazingly_ large difference between sending their server a few numbers and actually owning the CD.
At the very least, there is nothing to stop people from going to their friends, saying "Hey, can I borrow your CD collection tonight?"
*POOF*, they now "own" all of those CDs?
Also, it certainly can't be long before some enterprising individual(s) breaks whatever encryption is used to send the CD serial #s to MP3.com's servers, and they (and whoever gets their software) suddenly own any music they want! Now _that_ is pretty threatening, and quite a legitimate reason to worry about something.
As for a lawsuit? Well, They could go for the tried and true Physical Intimidation method...
Dean: "Alright then, let's empty out your pockets."
Homer: "Make me."
Dean: "Proffesor Rocco, Chancellor Knuckles..."
(heheh, those crazy finger-breakin' academic types...)
How many MP3 sites are out there? Hundreds, at least. How many private servers? Tens, hundreds of thousands. Any team of lawyers will not be dumb enough to think they can sue them all. All they could possibly be after is spreading FUD. And considering the effort it takes to pull one lawsuit through, we shouldn't expect to see any serious impact of this until oooh, say, 2025 or so. Needless to say, MP3 has negligible chances of existing for that long as a predominant format.
// zyqqh
I think there are a couple of different things to consider. For example, radio stations and internet broadcasting companies do pay license fees for every instance in which copyrighted material is played. The RIAA has the right to inspect play lists if they believe a station is in arrears. Pirate radio operators have been prosecuted for not paying RIAA fees as well as FCC fees. Many of the really great early internet radio stations were taken down when the RIAA finally caught on and made it impossible for non-revenue producing stations to stay on the air.
On the other hand, there have been valid arguments for the theory of Intellectual Property Proxy. Which is to say, that if you can prove you own something in real space, then you automatically own it in data space. Bank transfers and stock transactions are good examples of existing intellectual property proxies. You can buy, sell, vote and hold stock without ever seeing or providing a stock certificate. You can make bank transfers online without touching cash. Those arguing this position state that the implied user license allows MP3 to broadcast music for which the user has already proven to have paid a license.
Mr.Attack has already provided valid reasons for why that argument is unlikely to hold up in court. A tertiary and possibly more damning argument for MP3 is that they are providing the material in a format different than the user has a license to use. It is virtually the equivalent of having a site connected to a laser disc player which reads your disk title, then sends you a VHS tape of the movie. Could you make a VHS copy legally? Absolutely. Can someone else send you a copy, based on the fact that you inserted a disk for less than 2 minutes? Nope. Read the innocuous FBI warning. Could you data warehouse the information, then request it in a different format? Probably, but even then there is probably some fee due to someone.
Since MP3.com is not acting as a data warehouse; i.e., the user is not uploading the CD for conversion or storage, then it would appear that they are indeed acting as a broadcaster. As such, according to the letter of the law, they are liable for broadcast license fees. And since MP3 is distributing the music in a different format and there is no data warehouse of the user's licensed material, it would appear as though MP3 may be violating copyright law with the new services.
----I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.--
Please get a clue.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Hmmmm... suing a COMPLETELY LEGITIMATE site and depriving musicians of a valuable channel for their works. Yeah.. this is gonna go over well... about as well as a lead balloon. Let me be the first to welcome mp3.com to the battle. Bad move for the music industry - they just nailed an entire business. It's not just individuals and "DOEs" anymore, they're sparing no expense!
No. It's not how I look at it. It is very clear.
If they don't have the album in their server already, there is no way for me to send it to them.
A 'signature' cannot be considered compression.
You are NOT making a copy, and sending it to mp3.com for later retrieval. You are simply saying 'I have this CD and want to listen to it later'.
Somethign needs clarifying here.
With Beam-It, does the end user actually encode their CD's and UPLOAD them to mp3.com, for later streaming... or does mp3.com simply say 'okay.. they have this CD according to our software.. so we have license to send the music back to them'.
If the data is actually being set up BY The users....mp3.com has a good case. they are providing data warehousing and retrieval.
If mp3.com is doing the latter, they have a problem.
You see.. although you, personally, are allowed to make copies of titles you own for your own use.. this does not grant everyone in the world license to send that same information to you.
mp3.com probably does *not* have the right to stream all of Thriller to you, simply because you happen to own the album.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even WITHOUT my.mp3.com, couldn't you rip and encode someone's CD collection ANYWAYS if you borrow it? What makes this any different?
From reading the suit, it appears that the RIAA is trying to obtain software-EULA-like protection for audio CDs. For example, they are saying you can't use the music for commercial purposes at all -- even if you aren't violating copyright(which they are not doing -- only copyright owners can access the material).
Hillary repeatedly refers to the "license" you have to use the Music. I don't remember reading or signing any license agreement before buying a CD! How can they say that usage is governed by any "license" other than standard Copyright law?
Does standard Copyright law prohibit redistribution of copyrighted material to people who already own that copyrighted material? Or is it that (as the RIAA asserts) you never "own" copyrighted material -- the best you can ever do is "license" it -- and what that license is is up to the copyright owner (who apparently doesn't even have to state it before you buy it).
The example I use is this: Radio stations have to pay royalties because they broadcast to people who don't own the copyrighted material. However in the case of my.mp3.com, the content was only being shared with people who already owned the copyrighted material.
Technically mp3.com does NOT profit from the content directly (since the user already owns the content), they profit from the SERVICE they provide (namely, allowing you access to your music library from anywhere).
Obviously this is comes down to interpretation of copyright law, which means this battle will almost definitely end up in court -- and the outcome could be very important to all forms of licensing and copyright control (e.g. EULAs and the UCITA).
On a second note -- I think it's interesting that the RIAA didn't pursue their normal charge of "contributory infringement" like what they are accusing Napster of. For example, I would have expected them to show how one user could upload their CDs, share the account with another user, and allow that user to listen to the music. Now obviously that is a pretty dubious charge, but it's what they typically use against most companies who create tools that make piracy of music very easy. I wonder if this signals a change in their strategy -- a push to assert even MORE control over how copyrighted content is used.
We all knew this was coming.
Question -- do MP3's really cut into record sales? To me, DLing an MP3 seems more like listening to the radio than buying a CD -- I like the cool booklets and case art and will gladly pay $15 a pop for them. You can only play an MP3 on your computer or Rio, and though you can put one on a CDR and play it on a stereo, CDR's are ugly, unreliable, and don't always work in every CD player (at least in my experience).
Here's a case for MP3's though. I like certain kinds of foreign music, but I can't find that stuff for sale ANYWHERE. So the only thing I can do is DL the MP3's from Napster. I think it's fair to do this because I am not depriving anyone of income.
Since people sometimes can't find the CD they're looking for, they should set up something on the Internet where you can order an MP3 license or something. For a US dollar, you should be able to buy the right to have an MP3 of a certain song. Of course, you wouldn't have the right to post it on FTP, but you'd be able to have the MP3 and put it on CDR so you can play it in your car. There's LOTS of stuff I'd pay money for if I just could.
Of course no one in the recording industry would EVER do that.
Take care,
Steve
If you read the text of the suit at mp3.com, it shows that the RIAA is asking for 150,000 per work. If their are roughly 10 songs per cd, and as the RIAA claims, 45,000 songs, then 10*45000*150000= 67.5 billion dollars. Chew on that for a while.
Historically, all forms of electronic mass media and broadcast (such as radio, TV, records, tapes, CD's, etc.) have had physical limitations (limited radio / TV stations, cost of media production, etc.) The Internet represents the first medium with no physical restrictions and virtually no barriers to entry. Therefore it is impossible to dominate the Internet as CBS and NBC dominated radio in the early-mid 20th century. (for example, they sometimes put small local stations out of business by overpowering their signals--this is before the FCC). All other forms of media have followed similar suit, with different tactics respectively to fight for control of their medium. The result is that traditional mass media is controlled by gigantic corporations who stand between content producers and their audience. (of course with TV, they often control both content and broadcast, operating under a profit through advertising model).
With the arrival of the Internet as a popular medium, the physical barriers that allowed tight control of the producer->audience have been made obsolete. Before, musicians had to sign up with a big label to get known and get their music out. Now they can set up a web server in the back room.. The corporations and organizations who control the current system of limited physical distribution, yet do not themselves produce content, are essentially obsolete. They are now trying to stall their demise by erecting non-physical barriers to protect their business model (IP law, lawsuits).
In closing my opinion, I would like to make a few predictions regarding the future of electronic media distribution:
1.) Business entities that control, own, and manage distribution of others IP, but themselves produce no content will gradually disappear or drastically change their business models (such as the RIAA, MPAA, major labels, etc.)
2.) Producers of IP will create individual businesses around their IP to increase profits. (ex. musicians selling their own music).
3.) New specialized businesses will meet the auxiliary needs of producers that were previously provided them by large labels (such as studio time, production management, advertising, arranging concerts, etc.)
4.) Producers will adopt whatever form of IP management they feel best suits their audience and business -- anything from a "give away music and sell T-shirts" approach to forms of pay-per-view.
5.) Consumers will be better off as the popularity / availability of content will be judged by the market rather than by the big players who decide for us.
6.) Appreciation of the arts will become more diverse.
7.) Piracy will decrease drastically as there will be little incentive for it.
8.) We'll finally see an end to these ridiculous lawsuits. (-:
Legal analysts are pleased as well: "We thought after Y2K flopped we'd be out of work come March 1st, but now we've got plenty to do" said Dir T. Lawyer.
...into one big Official Entertainment Industry Lawsuit of 2000 case. Then we can take away all the miscreant technologies with one foul swoop!
If only old media could adapt to new media--
"In individuals, insanity is rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule." -Nietzsche
On the face of it, MP3.com is really stretching the notion of fair use. There's a different way to look at this, though. It's some strained logic, but stay with me here...
It's pretty clear that if you were actually uploading the data, then RIAA most likely lose this suit. MP3.com would be operating a remote backup server, and nothing more.
But you aren't uploading the data to MP3.com...or are you? Forgive me if I get details wrong, but I seem to recall reading about compression systems based on Huffman coding, where the Huffman tree is predetermined and not transmitted. Common symbols are replaced by smaller symbols, based on a predetermined scheme. It's nominally a substiution cipher, substituting smaller symbols for larger ones.
By now you can see where I'm going. Beam-It uploads very highly compressed copies of your CDs. The compression works by replacing a known symbol (the audio data on the CD) with a much smaller one. (the same catalog number that CDDB uses)
If MP3.com's lawyers can explain that to the judge, they might have a chance.
-Zandr
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
Sorry if I'm not towing the party line, but if I've read the situation clearly, I think the RIAA has a strong case.
Yes, owning the CD gives the user every right to MP3 it for their own use. There is nothing harmful about the user downloading an MP3 with Beam-It if they already own the CD.
But for the Beam-It to work, MP3.com had to amass a huge database of commercial music, it seems. They don't have the license to re-distribute it, regardless if the listeners have the right to receive it.
If a person without a liquor license makes a habit of selling alchohol in a commercial setting, it doesn't matter if they only sell to people over 21. Selling drugs to a diplomat with diplomatic immunity will still get you thrown in jail. These examples are a stretch, I know, but the point is MP3.com was redistributing copyrighted materials which they did not have permission to redistribute.
Of course, I could be wrong and it's possible mp3.com did not redistribute anything they didn't have a right to redistribute.
In short, I think the RIAA might actually have a case. If only they'd stick to pursuing those lawsuits in which they do have a case, rather than attacking CSS-auth and LiViD, we'd all be a lot happier.
--
The RIAA's letter to MP3.com is here .
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The response is here
If your interested, I've compiled a quick list of links pertaining to this case below
You can find the mp3.com press release here.which includes the full text of the suit that was filed.
Cnet has coverage here.
And last, but not least, if you like zdnet.com, then you can get their story here .
The following was directed to all RIAA members by Hilary Rosen.
I regret to inform you that a suit was filed this afternoon against MP3.Com for copyright violations.
I regret us having to file this litigation because, as you know, I do not view litigation as the best means to a business strategy. I had hoped that we would have a different result and tried to work with Michael Robertson over the past few days to encourage license negotiations.
He ultimately refused to negotiate and therefore, a lawsuit seems to be the only way to resolve this.
I continue to believe that the best way to protect our rights on line is by your continuing to do creative deals, being in the on-line business aggressively and modeling good licensing approaches to Internet companies.
I know you agree.
Attached pleased find my letter to Michael Robertson as well as a useful Q and A for you to use as you confront questions about this action.
All the best,
Hilary Rosen
President and CEO
Recording Industry Association of America
DrD