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Paul McCartney Goes After MP3.com
sarchasm writes, "Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's publishing company MPL Communications is suing MP3.com. It's good to see that another poor starving artist is helping to fight the big bad MP3 movement. For more info, see the story on Yahoo.
"
what's up POAG?! I totally agree, you have him here! what a fucking dumbass hippie. I hate em all.
That was Lennon's song.
Counter-culture hippy turned lawsuit-throwing mogul.
McCartney was never a hippy (sic). However he has been known since the Beatles breakup debacle of being one of the shrewdest musicians/businessmen in the league of Bowie and Jagger. Hippie? Don't think so.
McCartney has always sucked; listen to the absolute tripe he put out after leaving the Beatles.
And he's a kook too; he doesn't even feed meat to his dogs, despite the fact that they are carnivores, and need meat. What a maroon.
Fuck McCartney. Bring on the MP3s.
From American Heritage Dictionary:
1. To take (the property of another) without right or permission.
This obviously includes copying because copying is taking the property of another without right or permission. And obviously you do not understand the costs behind the development of producst, please read my BMW exmaple in the original post, or the exampel of the GAP I replied to in anothe rpost in this thread. They would be cases most peopel would refere to stealing which follow the exact same guidelines as copying of mp3s. NEXT TIME READ MY POST. Someone elses work is their intlectual property, you have no given right to have access to it, in the same manner you have no right to someone elses physical properties. There really is no clear distinction that can be drawn. Trying to make one is useless, I'm not going to repeat arguments I made earlier because you obviously didn't bother to read them.
i hope he can shut them down
The two big problems with this "information wants to be free" is that no one has really defined information beyond a string of bits. I find it wierd that we consider mp3s information, because canonically, I don't think poeople would consider music information in the same sense they consider historical facts or mathematical knowledge information. So if people are going to go spouting this mantra, I think they need to define information outside of computers, a string of 0's and 1's is not a sufficient definition imho. Even if someone comes up with some definition and it fits with our intuitive ideas of information, there is another problem. Most of the products produced in the U.S. are more based on information, e.g. (music, medical drugs, chip designs, computer software, etc., etc., etc.). Thus, by parrallel logic, all of this information wants to be free. That draws us subtly (insidiously even?) into communism. I don't see how you can make a distinction between these various types of "information". I don't have a too large problem with communism (well supposing that it could be work), but I do have a problem of being trying to be pulled into something I'm not being told about directly.
On the nature note, my understanding of the universe is that most of it is a vaccum. Besides that, I believe that the equilibrium state of the universe will be when the mean temperature is absolute zero -- complete vaccum.
On the gas analogy, as gases expand, their concentration in one area dilutes. By the same token, if we allow people to freely expand information created by others, the authors of the information will have less incentive to produce more information. The quality of our information will dilute, just like the gas.
Ok, I appologize for the harsh tone reguarding /. muscians, it was uncalled for. What I meant to say was that just because some wierd economic model worked for one musciain, doesn't mean it will work for most. If you are a musician, and you use mp3s to distribute your music for free, because YOU WANT TO GIVE YOUR MUSIC AWAY, then you have decided that. Obviously not all bands have decided this and in my opinion a /.er doesn't have the right to force them into a descision. The desciion should be a free one.
Assumptions are the root of evil. I don't work for the record companies and I'm not an economoics major. I am just a poor student however I am angered by this sense of "I have a right to anythign I want" attitude. Its very immature in my opinion and impuslive in its nature. Doesn't seem to show very much thought to it. Your post doesnt refute my arguments, instead you use condescsion to try to ignore and avoid them. That's really effective. I think it is clear who the 'troll' is here and who isn't.
baaaaa! baaaaa! baaaaa!
(translation: give more money to the man, and be a good little sheep)
I thought he was dead?
Elvis, was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me, a racist, straight up and plain, mutherfuck him and john wayne. -Chuck D.
Yes. You asshole.
Is it at all possible that the lawyers are just another means to extract more revenue from a saturated market? Or are these companies too honest for that?
Are you completely lacking in imagination? Do you really think that the only way for an artist to make money is to "product-ize" their work and stamp out copies to sell? How is it then that music existed before recording technology?
that's like calling everyone who owns a tape deck a pirate. It's just a damned storage method.
"Assumptions are the root of evil." Read your own post.
Where are my assumptions, point them out..
What arguments? You came out guns blazing. And I've had it with people who impulsively assume mp3 = stealing.
AGAIn, you obviously didn't read the post. I didn't say mp3 = stealing. READ BEFORE replying is that so difficult? The arguments are enumerated with bold roman numerals, they are not that difficult to find.
Secondly you did not at all quote any particular poster to show which attitude you were talking about.
Of course I didn't, I collected arguments from a variety of posters and refutted each one I recalled. If you would like to tell me an argument I did not list in (I-V) that can be used in support of piracy, PLEASE do tell. The point was not to attack a poster, but to refute the whole stance. The stance in my opinion, is idiotic. If you don't believe there are people who believe in the pro-piracy stance on /., then you can view my post as a pre-emptive strike against establishing such a notion.
Don't bother replying to this post unless you actually completley read the content of the origianl post and this post. THEN reply. Completely reading != SKIMMING.
If I built my own BMW, I am not stealing; just copying.
Stop being an apologist for the scum who control the major label music industry. It's not worth it.
It is funny how much moral outrage one can pour into this privacy invasion issue. The technology exists. People will spam you. Just like junk mail on paper, it will not be prosecuted because it is not feasible to do so. I don't believe in "you can't stop it so accept it as right" morality. That's the morality of a bully. Eventually the IP industries will simply move to technologically secure models. Ten years from now you won't be able to buy a CD. You'll be able to type in your credit card number to access a personalized encrypted stream that stays encrypted all the way into your serial-numbered USB speakers. And yeah, that future sucks. But that's where the pirates and warez doodz are taking us.
People talk about the beatles sound. Been around a hundred years before I was born. MP3.com; HAS THE TRUE ANTI-PARENT CULTURE SOUND! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
McCartney and PETA suck. If a mountain lion comes near my house, I'll shoot it for you. Maybe I'll make some burritos...
McGuinn: Talented Musician
McCartney: Untalented Kook
So is this your argument? That the recording industry is making too much money, so that makes it right to steal from them?
God, is slashdot filled with junior high school students or what!?
Good one!
Love Love Love. Love is all you need.
Radio and television ads are targetted to local markets. I love how people think advertising is the source to great riches... and yet at the same time people gripe endlessly about doubleclick.net and their actions.
or was that Davey Jones? I can never tell those two apart.
I'm afraid that this is a rather trite anaology. Has the RIAA ever filed a lein against someone, or confiscated their property because they failed to buy a CD? Come ON! This a free market issue, and the ONLY thing that's happening with unfortunate regularity is that people are using technology (MP3, Napster) to get AROUND the rules. If you don't like the prices, then DON'T BUY IT. Customers DO have control over the RIAA (or more accurately, its members). These companies depend very heavily on the money that YOU'RE willing to spend on their products...if YOU don't spend it, THEY don't get it. If enough people understand this (and god forbid, put it into practice), you can bet your bottom dollar that the record companies will adjust their business model accordingly. If you violate the copyright in response (as MP3.com has done, and as countless people have done with Napster), now you've given the attorneys an excuse to dip into the cash flow, and instead of a simple response to market pressure (that is, peoples' willingness to buy the CDs), you've got a mess. The RIAA will dig in their heels, and of course, the "I-shouldn't-have-to-pay-because-it-costs-too-much " crowd will do the same. And so it goes.
Sarcasm or kiss ass, I'm too wasted to tell!!!
Amen! I'm a member of a relatively large band (who's name I'm not allowed to disclose). We tour approximately 300 days of every year, and have been doing so for about 5 years. We started off about 10 years, and spent the last ten years of our life busting our asses harder than 90% of you could even imagine trying to get where we are today. We don't play trendy pop music (although I love it) so we don't get a lot of money in royalties for radio play, and we only have one video, which is very infrequently played on MTV and Much Music, so that provides us enough money for a decent meal once in a while. The music industry is not some playground where everything is fun and dandy and we all make tons of money. It's not even close to that. I guarantee that in the last 10 years, I've worked harder than most people work in 30 years of a regular 9-5 job. Now, in the last three years we're finally getting recognition for the time we've spent. We have a sweet distribution deal, and our CD is available in every major record store I can imagine. A few weeks ago I logged onto napster, and did a search for one of the songs we released as a single. There were more occurences of that song on napster than than there are CD's containing that song in circulation (this was a song from a very old CD which didn't sell too well, our latest CD is gold). I'm not an idiot, I know that probably less than 10% of the people who have the mp3 actually purchased the CD. There is no justification for this. None. Whether these people weren't going to purchase the CD anyways or not, I've poured my life into this music, and I dont' think that anyone should be able to listen to it any time they want without me receiving some sort of recognition. I read all these posts that people make trying to justify ripping ME off, and it's ludicrous. Microsoft doesn't want you running they're operating system unless you purchased it. You can't just walk into an art gallery and photocopy a famous painting for your living room. And you shouldn't be able to possess a copy of my music unless you pay for it. People don't understand what goes into making music. Hundreds of people are involved, and these people need to be paid. The lady who calls the music stores to find out how many copies of the CD's they distribute were sold that day is not making millions of dollars and can afford to make a bit less money because you think music wants to be free. You hurt hundreds of people every time you don't pay for a CD. Period. There is no rational justification for this bullshit, so grow up kids. Later. Mike
Simple- do what I do and buy used CD's. I have yet to encounter a scratched CD and the prices are always lower.
With the ability to record MY OWN cd's to mp3, i can now get my moneys worth and listen to them all day at work. Instead of them collecting dust. The rest of you are just too damn cheap... Gee maybe a Lexus is just to expensive to buy. Hmm, I'll just have to steal one... If you cheap, lazy bums ever had to work hard to create something yourselves, then I dont think that you would be so fast to steal it from another person.
This is not some wishy-washy, 'censorship' issue. There is no 'free speech'. This is piracy, pure and simple. Mp3.com BLATENTLY ignored the copyrights on Mr. McCartney's works, and now they must pay the consequences for their criminal acts. You rob someone, you go to jail. Plain and simple. And don't give me the line about 'I download mp3s to see if I want to buy the album'. The same thing is said about software piracy, which is no less a crime. And it is still false. Do you think all the drunken college kids are going to pay for their 'Limp Bizkit' or 'Jay-Z' albums?
Mp3.com broke the law, and I hope they get shut down, like Napster.
and wallow in the crowds, watch them kicking people's ass
You're all assuming that he has any say in the matter. The post says his publishing company is the one suing. Were talking corporations here. That is the real world... You really think Paul gives a rats ass!? or more importantly do you think he really has any say as to what his publishing company does?! Welcome to the machine boys and girls...
McCartney used to sail the Caribbean and landed in Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas on more than one occasion. Local legend has it that he was seen at a waterfront pub one evening (Sparky's Waterfront Saloon, now gone) where a local solo entertainer was taking requests from the audience, including the ubiquitous Beatles' standards.
Within a couple of months the pub owner received a not-so-routine shakedown unprecedented in this area [BMI I think] demanding paperwork and past dues.
He may consider himself chief torch carrier for the cause, but there comes a point at which you bargain away a bit of your soul in the process...
I'm no stranger to artist unions (having filled out playlists for BMI and ASCAP when I worked at a local radio station) but the Sparky's shakedown was a "sucker punch for chump change" -- in the very same casual, live performance venue that is at the very root of the Beatles' success.
holy shit . . . the mother of all mp3 collections . . .
how many 75gb deskstar's would it take to hold all that?
Clue alert!
Before copyright, artists didn't starve.
Where the hell do you think the term starving artist came from?! Art takes a tremendous amount of dedication, time and money. Fortunately, there are lots of schools and better paying jobs so that artists can subsidize their own work these days, but its by no means easy. Copyright also gives an incentive for publishers to subsidize somebody's work and handle the trivial things like, oh, advertisement and distribution. Get a clue -- copyright may not be a true right, but neither is your right to free entertainment. If you like something, help support it financially.
Then again, I read Slashdot and love to loathe the boy too :) It's only because he's right above everything :)
Thank you,
Elmer Ponz
Art critic at large
he's a big ass sellout, John was the good one and some asshole shot him
Why does he have to sue mp3.com do they distribute his songs?
Let's all shed a tear for the island-owning, crappy movie producing (Give MY regards to Broadstreet) Beatle. Does distributing his soungs on mp3 mean that he'll have to wipe with 18K gold leaf toilet paper instead of 24K? Boo Hoo.
As I read over the last paragraph, I know that I've sort of presented a convuluted argument,b ut I don't know how to word it better. An easier approach to rejecting the idea would be to for the sake of argument accept the principle you outline. This same idea can then just as easily be applied to the fields of medical drugs, technological products, etc. etc. etc (unless you can find a reason why it should not be -- the fact that most people cannot so easily achieve 'copy' things in those fields is irrelevant). E.g., say company A spends a billion dollars developing drug XYZ which can cure cancer. According to the idea, anyone can reverse-engineer the drug and do whatever they want with it. The problem with this is that if we allow this, company A will never spend billions of dollars to develop A because there will be a large chance they will never see a return on their investment. The idea borders communism. Unfortunately that model hasn't worked in the past, and the current model has been working very well. Eventually we might get there, but that time isn't now, imho. I think the only time actions as you specified (or just outright theft) are permittable are when human safety or well-being is endanged if theft does not occur. This is obviosuly not the case with music.
Well, a few thoughts. Capitalism does not equal freedom. Free enterprise often implies the ability to restrict other people's freedom. The American national pastime of sueing everyone over every little thing is an illustration of this. Anyway, I'm a little disappointed with Sir Paul McCartney's behavior in this matter. I still love his music, and so does my 3 year old son. But this is going too far. Whooa! Hold on. Or maybe he did not initiate this action at all? Some suits doing it in his name? Copyright holders shouldn't worry so much about piracy. You see, there's two kinds of people: those who can afford to pay the royalties (read: buy the CD) and those who can't. The former will buy the CD anyway (pirated stuff just doesn't have the same appeal as the real stuff, IMHO), and the latter won't buy it no matter what, so what's the harm in letting them copy it? (free mouth-to-mouth advertising if they like it, anyone ever thought about that?) Rubbish like "there are 4 million illegal copies in circulation, therefore we are robbed out of $60,000,000" is too silly to even discuss.
Why dont all the musicians just hord some cash, then do a 12month sitout/strike, no new songs for 12months would KILL BMG/SONY/EMI.
But all those musos are smoking so much they dont give a ratts ass.
We all know corprate events are costed 10x, ive been to private paid for $10k raves that have had more cool stuff there then $5million concerts.
Is this a troll? Were you around when the music industry reported record sales of nearly 15 billion dollars last year? Sure, sales don't equal profits, but, even if the industry were only pulling a $1 profit per disc sold, they'd've cleared $1.4 billion dollars. What do you consider a "profit leader"?
Ok, let's think a minute about the "Internet radio" idea... Well, obviously, you want to provide a pretty decent sound to your consumer, correct? At least reasonably equivalent to what they hear on the radio. So you're going to do 128Kbps MP3... or WMA, RealAudio, whatever. Now a T3 line comes in at about 45Mbps. That's going to let about 350 users at any one time hear your audio stream. A T3 costs you about $40,000/month. Now obviously you'll probably want more than 350 users... so start adding more T3 lines, or maybe an OC-12, or whatever. But the bandwidth costs money... the server hardware costs money, the people resources costs money. How is this FREE?
You obviously didn't read the article yesterday about artists who hate MP3s for stealing their livelyhood.
However, lots of artists are for MP3s (I'm one of them).
And I dislike the editoralizing that's inherent in this newspost. Besides the fact that it's not actually Paul. In today's society, a poor starving artist who *did* feel they were being ripped off, can't afford to bring suit against MP3.com. (not that I'd agree with them, but everybody should have their day in court).
Welcome to Corporate Capitalism, where only corporations have effective access to 'rights' of free speech (TV ads) - Oh, minus Ross Perot, who got to do it a few times - and access to all the other fundamental parts of freedom.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
The difference, moron, is that the holder of the license to the music has decided how they wish to distribute it.
Not a perfect analogy, but if you own a car, don't you get to choose which one of your friends get's to drive it?
Blank tapes, Video tapes, CD-R's etc... all have a tax attached to them which goes in a big government pool and is redistributed to the recording industry based on market share, whatever.
Go read the copyright law.
Why dont we all start using AAC instead or even AC3 (2chan,192kbs)
NO one says WE NEED mp3s, just we could use anyother codec. There are better ones.
We just need those popular dumbass apps to support em, instead of making more skins, make more codecs you loosers
So you're going to shut down my method of communicating and giving my music to my fans? Are you going to pay for studio and distribution fees for me to make an album, which will get even less promotion than is available on MP3.com?
And you're going to do this because a few people are stealing (or you are *alleging* that they're stealing... Hmm, maybe they actually own the albums?) music from someone else? And you're going to let the thieves get off scot-free? This is just?
Thanks for stealing my voice.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
All your points are PURELY up to the partys involved. So unless you did'nt get married to the girl you were saving yourself for because she had a backstage pass at wings concert, you are'nt party. THEY were the PARTY!
I agree with Paul on your last point
Cows like Beer. And unless they are allowed to drink Beer, the Milk just is'nt as healthy as it could be. So drink beer FOR the cow instead...
If I sued MP3
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
I used to like that fucker.
The way i understand it is that if the police tried to stop Paul from singing, he say "But music is speech and speech is free." Then he does a 180 and says, this speech is not free, pay my rich butt more royalties. Intellecutal property is an oxymoron; a legal fiction that creates objects where there arn't really any, very similiar to In-corporating a business. well we're about ready to call bullsh1t on this normative framework of the honkeys and move to a paradigm compabable with the reality of networks and routing around censorship, even if it's the original producer of the work and his agents trying to do the censorship. coersion is damage to be routed around. paul used pre existing (public domain if you must) ideas about music and didn't invent the guitar or drum or rhyming. all speech is derivative to an extent. cordoning off whole areas for rent-seeking speech nazi's is so last century!
I still don't understand how from:
- p1: you can't really assign an intrinsic value to a 0 or a 1.
- (agreed, but info can be stored in many formats)
- p2: reproducing strings of 0's and 1's in computers (storage of information) is simple and cost is negligible
You can conclude something like "information wants to be free". The logical conclusion is reproducing information on computers costs nothing. There is obviously a gigantic, unsubstantiated jump from the logically inferred conclusion to the purported one. Information does not have preference to its freedom, it doesnt have consious. This is gross distortion, "geeks" should not do such things. Also to claim 'mp3s' are music is a somewhat dubious assertion.Ugh, I should go to sleep, that last sentence should read "Also to claim 'mp3s' are information (in common-day usage of the word) is a somewhat dubious assertion."
That may be true of the really big superstars, but most artists, musicians, and especially graphics artists don't get paid as much as doctors, lawyers, or scientists. The same is true of most athletes. The ones that turn pro are only good for a few years, so they have to try to make their big money within the period of time they're most active. The same is true with music. Music styles come and go. Madonna, Brittany Spears, and Jennifer Lopez know they aren't going to be at the top of the charts forever. One way to protect them is offer them some means of income through royalties. On the web, graphics artists are applying digital watermarks to their images, whatever good that does, to protect their writes, and in hopes of being compensated if someone infringes on their rights. I'd like to see much better art on the web, but until the artist's rights are protected, I don't think we'll be seeing it soon.
Even the independent bands who want a small bit of recognition are complaining that they still aren't getting the recognition they deserve. Nobody's happy with the situation, even those whom you'd think could benefit from it. The only one who's winning are the ones who are listening to bootlegged music.
How about the talented artists whom we've come to know and love who for whatever mental or physically challenges can't go on the stage anymore. Take for example, Barbra Streisand. She suffers from stage fright and can't do onstage concerts any more. Yes, she's rolling in dough, and spends a lot of time online trading stocks, but she still deserves the revenue from her CD music.
Good to hear that McGuinn can be so generous now and still make a little money. But that's going to change quickly, if internet appliances take off. Everything will be coming to us from the internet, and nobody's going to buy and change those bulky CD's anymore. So, I hope McGuinn is also looking to the future--in the age of internet appliances, the CD will be extinct.
let's face it, a few (very) high end musicians will lose money because of mp3's -- but a lot of lower level musicians will get exposure that would never have gotten from the machine.
all these lawsuits have the situation completely misread. they should be going after piraters, like the kid who goes to college with 40 GB of mp3's in his machine and starts running napster to the whole campus.
or, if your like me, suppose to go to a swap meet or junkyard -- and there's someone with a truck selling the entirety of the Beatle's works on 3 cd's for $30.00 -- 200 mp3 songs per cd. that's where mccartney and others take a beating. go after those people. not that i have seen this yet, but it can't be that far off.
other than that, i think mp3's are (more or less) helping people spread the word about their favorite bands at internet speed. i'm sure (as is oft mentioned here) that many people go buy the cd after hearing a couple songs from their friends.
i just don't see a model down the road that continues to be based on the purchase of a $22 CD with 8-12 songs on it, of which perhaps 3 are worth listening to.
the future is probably going to be massive download sites where you pay $1.00 or something for a song. there will always be piraters, but as long as the more outrageous ones get busted, the college kids and others will probably stay down in the noise.
as far as i know, the music industry is making more now than they ever have, so gimme a break.
How on earth could you claim that it is anything other than information.
All you need is love....and a ferocious team of bankers and lawyers. Anyone who tries to prop up the greedy, bloated music industry will be washed away along with it's foolish distribution ideas, overblown marketing, and political agendas. I dont think any agrees that all music should be completely free (or that the artist doesnt deserve compensation). I think that people are fed up eith that industry. Most positive change in the world has had some basic personal betterment for the people involved.
Oh don't take offense to this, it's funny. Besides I'm a vegetarian myself. Just like my gay friend who can't go two minutes without cracking a gay joke.
First off, mp3.com rules. Second, I didnt read the article. Third, the Beatles suck ass. Now that the Moderators have me down to -1, Id like to say I have NEVER downloaded illegal music or stored it on my machine. I think its wrong and everyone whos done it should be locked up in jail. Now that I have flaming twenty line replies, Id like to say I am a compulsive liar, and that I have a five gig mp3 collection, everything from KMFDM to Sublime. I would also like to state that Napster sucks, and (plug!) undernet is great for getting your illegal 0h-d4y warez. #cablewarez rules, as well as any channel starting with cable. I love my cable modem. Gosh Im completely OT here now, I havent thrown in Grits or Natalie Portman or the Aibo yet, so sad. To sum it up fuck that English prick, as if he didnt have enough money. Bye! Spring break = Paris, France in 4 hours. bwahahahah@#% check out http://24.11.33.135, Im gonna see if my windows box will stay up for a week with ftp (new/new port 21), AIM, ICQ, and winApache. BWAHAHHAHHA@#% It wont last an hour.
[w00t@freaky.bish]# rm
I have noticed that mp3.com doesn't offer copyrighted mp3's unless you verify that you own the cd prior to downloading. It is completely pointless to sue them, they are doing nothing wrong. All they are doing is allowing someone to download music that is free or as a backup of something they already have. I have had many cd's get scratched so they I can no longer listen to them, and as the law says somewhere, if I have the original, I can have as many copies that I like. So if they sue mp3.com and win, then all blank tapes, all blank cd's, all vcr's and ANY recording device whatsoever should be taken off the shelf because Paul McCartney has his head up his ass. The Beatles suck anyways... the hype they went through 40 years ago is over, the ones that are still alive should fucking retire for gods sake, not take innocent people to court.
I speak ere now to correct your errant ways. You, too, ave angered Im by uzing te most poisened of all te letters several times in your faux correction. I pray tat e does not come onto te eart tonigt to rid us of your foolis cicanery.
For your convenience, a corrected version of your corrected version of te original fella's post appears below:
tank you
I take it you meant to say "over something that I really don't think anybody needs or wants". Well, I for one love their BeamIt service, so you can't say that nobody wants it. I supposed I don't need it, but I feel that I have a right to it as I'm using it to listen to music that I have paid for. Anyway, you should give BeamIt a try. I use it at work all the time, and I find it so incredibly useful that I even use it at home sometimes even though I have my entire CD collection sitting right in front of me (because it is a very convenient way to make playlists, among other reasons). And it works great on Linux.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
You're right that you don't have a right to ask for Win2000 in whatever media you want, but even Microsoft will allow you the right to back it up on whatever media you want once you own it.
I don't think the RIAA feels the same way.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Funny you should mention Dave Matthews; didn't they encourage a lot of bootlegging of their music early in their career, and that's why they started becoming popular?
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Please excuse me for following up on my own post, but I missed a close blockquote symbol after the first paragraph. The first paragraph was someone else's, the rest mine.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
You left a sentence fragment there...or did you mean too?
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Tori sounds fine at 256kbps.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
It's incorrect that when some creates music, that it is released to the world as a privlege. All human creative endevors are part of as collective culture - AS A RIGHT
http://www.mrbrklyn.com/amsterdam.html http://www.brooklyn-living.com
Well, the poor guy is a vegetarian...
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
OK, I never liked McCartney anyway. I don't like his music, but that of course says nothing, everybody can have his or her own tastes and it's impossible to tell which music is better.
But one thing that really got to me was when I heard him in an interview a few years ago denouncing John Lennon as a second-rater and claiming that all that was original in The Beatles' music came from him.
DOH. John Lennon has been dead for 20 years now and can't really answer. So is it really surprising what he's doing now?
Ok, I'm really tired now, and having just had my original emotional post consumed by netscape's instability, I'll try and make my point briefly.
0 3-penguin_4.html
I love the beatles. I'm 22 and grew up with the band. The contribution of Paul alone will likely never be repayed in royalties.
However, consider the situation.
Sometimes I want to go back and visit some of the old classics. Maybe there's a great song like "Without you, I'm nothing", done by Placebo and the great David Bowie that I'll likely not be able to find in the stores any more. I download the MP3, and feeling a bit guilty I think about buying the album.
Ok, so here's the drill. I go to the record store, days or weeks after the initial craving for a certain song. I pay thirty Australian dollars for a piece of plastic that should last years under all sorts of horrible stress, but of course gets a scratch a few days after buying it, ruining at least one song, and in the case of the beatles, probably a whole album. They are well known for the flow of concept within a record.
Of the thirty dollars I pay, most goes to recording companies who's politics and fundamental ignorance of the creative process are crippling the art of my idols.
The Beatles were the core of a marketing machine that persists today. The difference is that while they still managed to get their message across, that outlet has been denied many modern artists.
I would beg McCartney begin reform of the industry he benefited so much from, and then think about the nature of the mp3 community's thefts.
There are plenty of new business models to choose from, I leave as a reference but one suggestion:
http://linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-2000-03/lw-
I really hope this message gets back to Paul. You never know I suppose.
Ven. Jhanrato
2. This is a ridiculous excuse, if you only like the "hit single" only buy the single. Or at least try the album out in-store first, I'm fairly sure that if Australian stores will let you do this others will.
You complain about stupid arguments that are being repeated over and over again, but you do exactly the same thing buy arguing that copying digital information is the same as stealing it. To "steal" means to "take away", not "copy". The information/music/whatever isn't lost for the legitimate owner. At least you underline your weak points with strong language, a sure sign of lack of confidence in your thoughts. How honest.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Then I honestly don't think you can call yourself a capitalist at all. This is fundamental to capitalism: the right to private property. If you dispute the legitimacy of copyright, you implicitly dispute the legitimacy of private property.
I don't believe that these money grubbing record labels should have the right to add a surcharge on ignorance.
How nice of you to decide for me whether I can or cannot pay "too much" for a product. Value (economically speaking) is subjective: the value of a thing is what *I* am willing to give up in order to obtain it. On the other hand, for you the value of that thing is what YOU are willing to give up for it. This fact is hidden to a great extent by the efficiency of the pricing system in this country, but it is no less true.
Furthermore, how is it that you think that you have a right to dictate to anyone the terms under which they will sell what they own? After all, this is the force of what you are saying here when you say you think they ought to have their ownership rights restricted.
This sounds noble, but it is unworkable. It cannot reasonably be applied to economics generally. Are you making a special case for hatred of music companies? That's rather arbitrary. Especially for something that is so trivial as music. Tell me, do you have similar loathing for the long distance companies that charge more than rock-bottom? Do you violate the law to obtain long distance service as a form of "protest"? Or cable TV?
I don't believe they should be allowed to deny the rights of others to provide an alternative to their collective monopoly.
They have no power whatsoever to control the distribution of music for which they do not own the distribution rights. This means that any independent band may set up its own website and sell their music by the download if they wish. No one can prevent it.
On the other hand, no one has the right to subvert copyrights.
By shutting down MP3.com, napster, and other such legally-iffy institutions, these people are denying my rights to use them, if in the off chance I wish to use them legally.
Later in your post you practically admit that you do NOT use these things legally, when you say "I choose to willfully do my best to fight that. Yes, that includes breaking copyright law." So your alleged concerns about having "legal access" to MP3.com seem rather empty.
Setting that aside, however, I honestly don't see how you can possibly demonstrate that MP3.com can protect copyright, short of requiring its users to actually send in their own CDs. As it stands, a user can simply claim to own a disc, but there is no way to verify that.
Yes, that includes breaking copyright law.
Are you a programmer? Tell me, do you apply these same "scruples" (ahem) to your code?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
This occurred to me after I posted. It is a brilliant point, and the pirates here who crave "free music" would be singing a different tune if it were GPL'ed software that was at stake.
Copyright, boys and girls, is the ONLY thing that gives the GPL any force whatsoever. Take away copyright, and you can kiss your "free as in speech" software goodbye. It's time to get over your crass hypocrisy and realize that copyright is fundamentally important in a free society.
Or are you really communists after all?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Before copyright artists had patrons who subsidized their work by providing a living for them. Those who had no patron didn't live well (to say the least). Your "argument" (cough) is no refutation of anything I said.
You assume that controlling data is the only way to make money off of it. The Free Software movement shows that that's not true.
In the first place Richard Stallman isn't exactly living large on the return he has made from the software he has written. In the second place you falsely assume that GPL'ed software is not controlled. It IS. The GPL is founded wholly and solely upon the legitimacy of copyright. Absent strongly enforced copyright there is NOTHING to prevent a commercial entity from sucking up all this 'free' code and creating a new and proprietary and fully binary software product under their own label and with no mention of any indebtedness to anyone else in the world.
Do you GPL your code? Would you like Microsoft or any other corporation to take your code and use it as they see fit without any regard for your wishes? If you don't care, then why not place your code in the public domain? If you do care, then quit being a hypocrite and give the musician the same right to do what he wants with his product -- even if that means selling it to those big bad record companies you loathe.
I do feel that I have a fundamental right to any piece of non-private (not personal / financial) data, yes.
What a fine and self-serving definition of "private" you have. So would you mind if I came by your house and took your car? It's not "private" by your definition.
You don't think that there are financial costs associated with the production of music? You don't think that artists should be compensated for these costs?
denying it to me is creating artificial scarcity.
You really don't understand economics, do you? Music is intrinsically a scarce good because its supply is NOT unlimited.
you must be consfusing Free software with Open Source
No, I am NOT. Why don't YOU go read this, where the FSF says (among other things) "we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can." Further, I believe that if you ask Mr. Stallman you will find that he is opposed to copyright violations because he knows that the GPL stands upon this foundation ALONE. You will not find arguments for software piracy (or any other form of piracy) at www.gnu.org.
If you're going to look to Stallman for inspiration for your loony ideas about music, be sure you look at everything he writes first -- not just the parts you like.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Are you completely lacking in knowledge of history? All you need to do is look at the state of classical music today for your answer. There is nowhere close to a large enough market for this music to produce employment for as many symphonies as there are. That is why the VAST majority of them are subsidized. In the past it was no different.
Producing art for free is not a growth industry. The costs are too great, and someone is going to have to pay.
Do you really think that the only way for an artist to make money is to "product-ize" their work and stamp out copies to sell?
Please, deliver me from my ignorance. Tell me exactly how -- without copyright -- we can have the same quantity and quality of music we presently enjoy. Put up or shut up, friend. Show us how it can be done, now that you've insisted that it can be done.
No offense, but I won't hold my breath.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
You, sir, have not the slightest clue about the subject.
Don't you remember basic economics? A written or recorded work is private property: it belongs to the person who produced it. There were costs associated with its production: time, money, effort, and so forth. If the owner of that private property wishes to share it with others, he has the fundamental right to do so under conditions that are acceptable to him. NO ONE has the right to dictate to him the conditions under which he will do so. If he wishes to be paid in money for his work, that is his privilege. If he wishes to give it away, that is his right as well.
Copyright is NOT "just like normal patents." This is a gross misunderstanding. A patent prevents others from using/profiting from an idea that a patent holder had. Copyright protects the particular expression found in the copyrighted material. You and I can both write a book about the postage stamps of Bolivia, and unless we plagiarize each other we are not violating copyright. On the other hand, if you invent a new method or tool for tilling the soil in the hilly areas of Bolivia and then patent it, I am enjoined by law from both copying your idea AND from coming up with something on my own that is substantially similar to your patented work. This is vastly different from copyright.
Lastly, it is copyright which is the fundamental protection behind all software. Unless you're a warez boy and just don't care, you had better realize that no software is safe if copyrights are abandoned.
Copyright is NOT "anti-capitalist." That is the most preposterous thing I've read today.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
So how much money would an artist make if there was no copyright protection on his work? Answer: approximately US$0.00. There would be no economic incentive for anyone to pay for music that they could obtain for free. I'm sorry, but it seems to me that you are no friend of "starving artists" if you really think that their interests are better served by abandoning copyright. If they are dissatisfied with the amount of money they receive from the record companies, then they have a simple solution: don't sign unsatisfactory contracts with record companies. You seem to be suffering from the misconception that these "starving artists" were somehow coerced into giving up control of their music to the record companies. Nothing could be further from the truth -- especially in an age where "starving artists" can use the Internet to distribute their music themselves.
But if we abandon copyright on music, then they can't even make money THAT way, can they?
Second, I have to pay for music.
Poor poor pitiful you. You do not realize that there are costs associated with creating music? You do not think that music creators have a right to be compensated for the expenses associated with making music? You think you have some sort of fundamental right to free and unlimited access to music created by others?
If this is true, I weep for your country.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy
Richard Stallman is hopefully not so blind as to fail to realize that it is copyright that gives his GPL any force whatsoever. Remove copyright from GPL'ed software and what do you have? You have software that can be made proprietary by anyone who wishes to do so. If you GPL your software, you had better realize this fact. If you do realize this fact, then you need to abandon the hypocrisy of opposing copyright on music.
Lastly, unless I'm quite mistaken Mr. Stallman is NOT opposed to the idea of paying for software. He simply wants access to the code. So I really don't think you can go looking to the FSF for a defense of abandoning copyright OR "free music."
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I disagree completely. The two are linked. It's not a direct, one-to-one correllation, but the connection is obvious and compelling. One need only look at one or two pathological cases to see my point. In the Soviet Union no one had private property at all -- and no freedom at all. The same situation exists in Communist China, but with a twist: The government has permitted some capitalism to exist, but they now are struggling to keep the lid on the liberating force that private property actually is. Arguably the circumstance is more complex than this caricature, but it is simply undeniable that prior to the introduction of a tiny measure of capitalism into the PRC there was *far* less freedom (and even less impetus to liberty) than there is today.
It's just that the blind assumption "the USA is the most capitalist country, and the most free, therefore capitalism = freedom" should be challenged.
I did not use the US as an example. I do not think that we are particularly free today; certainly we have lost a great deal of our liberty. I believe that it is no mere coincidence that the restrictions on the free market that we see today (contra the situation during the 1800s) have developed at the same time as the restrictions on our liberty.
The unfortunate side effect is that big corporations with a lot of money can force the little guy with no money into a legal settlement, simply because they can afford the outrageous legal fees that the little guy cannot. I'll admit that that is more a problem of the legal system than the capitalist system.
That is correct. The legal system is rigged to a very great extent against the little guy now. But the justice or injustice of the court system doesn't seem to me to have any necessary connection to the economic system, except as it enforces (or fails to enforce) the existing laws relating to private property.
Of course, the fact that there are defects in the legal system does not in any way change the fact that copyright is a legitimate and necessary feature of a capitalist and free society...and that the record companies are therefore perfectly within their rights in attacking MP3.com -- until or unless it is is demonstrated that MP3.com has not infringed upon the copyrights held by the record companies.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
I believe you ought to extend the same courtesy to the music industry. And just as it is up to you to decide what is "proper" compensation for your work, so too it is up to them to determine what is "proper" for theirs.
Of course, market forces may agree or disagree with both the music industry's and your assessment of whether that compensation you want is actually "proper" or not. I'm guessing you are gainfully employed, so the market seems to agree with you.
And in the same way, the market seems to agree that the music industry is not overcharging for their products -- whatever you or I may think.
By what standard do you arrive at the conclusion that present music prices are "immoral"?
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
While other things may be important to capitalism, private property is the sine qua non of capitalism: In its absence there is no capitalism at all.
if you oppose murder for hire, then by your own logic, I don't see how you can call yourself a capitalist.
Neither a free society nor capitalism can exist in a moral vacuum. Among other things, the right to private property must be protected -- no one has the right to steal your stuff, right? No one has the right to destroy my property, either. So how absurd would it be for us to suppose that private property is protected but our lives are not?
Can contracts survive where honesty and truthfulness are not valued? Of course not! You think you're being clever, but you're really not.
Simply because somthing CAN be used illegally is not grounds for making that something illegal.
This amazingly irrelevant statement is attached to a quote that you cleverly ripped from its context. What I said had to do specifically with the poster's professed willingness to violate copyright while at the same time being upset about not having legal access to MP3.com. A person who is willing to violate copyright is obviously not particularly interested in what is legal, so it's pretty silly to pretend to be all worked up about not having "legal" access to something. If you will look you will see that this is exactly how the poster understood it, and it was in fact my intent. I'm sorry you didn't get it.
Notwithstanding all this, your point is completely irrelevant in the present context. I never said anything that could be reasonably interpreted to dispute this point. The problem with MP3.com is that it is SURELY being used for illegal purposes -- it is not a question of taking away something that merely *might* be used illegally. If MP3.com can demonstrate that their system is designed and secured so as to effectively REQUIRE that its users actually own the CDs for which they're getting MP3's, then I can't think of any particular reason why I'd be bothered by them. Lastly, to borrow your gun analogy -- I assert that law enforcement would be fully within their rights to shut down a gun shop where illegal arms trafficking was occurring right alongside legitimate firearms sales. Such an event does NOT represent an attack upon legitimate ownership of guns. In the same way -- if MP3.com is trafficking in pirated music right alongside legitimate music, I have NO problem with law enforcement shutting them down. This does not mean that either they or someone else is not free to act within the law in a manner that is perhaps even substantially similar to the way MP3.com does business now. It does mean that thievery will not be tolerated. Perhaps the MP3.com folk mean no harm -- but then they have an obligation to ensure that no harm is done using their systems, just as gun dealers can't just turn a blind eye to the law as it pertains to guns.
If I infringe your copyright, you suffer no loss.
This is simply ignorant. If you infringe my copyright I lose the compensation -- of whatever form -- that I would otherwise have enjoyed had you honored my copyright. If enough people engage in this practice, I might decide that I am not being sufficiently compensated to bother with the costs associated with producing my copyrighted goods -- and then YOU lose, too.
In the long run the result of the abandonment of copyright is this: less of the goods that were formerly protected by copyright. Why is this? Because fewer people will agree to share their art with others for reduced or zero compensation.
Lack of gain != loss
You fail to understand economics. Lack of gain == reduced income (reduced by the amount you failed to pay me). If this is done by enough people, my income approaches zero. At some point prior to that I will surely conclude that I am not making enough money in this business, so I may as well go on to something else. Result: YOU lose production of a good you previously valued enough to at least steal.
have I stolen from Ford by buying a Chevy?
Ford's income is reduced by the amount of money that you spent on a Chevy rather than on a Ford. If enough people do this, Ford goes out of business.
On top of all this, you are apparently incapable of distinguishing between patents and copyright. You need to fix this. The two are different. Copyright does NOT extend to the ideas presented in a work. It extends to the particular expression of those ideas -- namely, they are MY words put together in (hopefully entertaining or educational) sentences of MY construction. The ideas themselves are fair game. This is very different from patents, which are all about ideas: I can't make my own version of a cotton gin -- even one that's better -- as long as Eli Whitney's patent on the gin is in force. Differing expressions of the same idea are forbidden by patents, but not by copyright.
I'm getting pretty sick of the histrionics of people who claim copyright infringement is theft.
Judging from your post, we don't have a monopoly on histrionics. :-)
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
The two are really inseparable though different. There is no true liberty where there is no right to private property, and there is positively no capitalist system where private property rights are snuffed out by the state.
Free enterprise often implies the ability to restrict other people's freedom.
The only "restriction" free enterprise places is on the fact that a man has the right to control his own property, and that another man does not have the right to coerce him into disposing of it in ways he does not want. But that works both ways: everyone's property is protected.
The American national pastime of sueing everyone over every little thing is an illustration of this.
The litigiousness of American society cannot reasonably be said to be a necessary feature of capitalism. The fact that this litigiousness has only appeared in the last century demonstrates this. The U.S. was far more capitalistic in the 19th century, in that there were far fewer restrictions upon how a man might use his private property. It is only with the growth of additional restrictions upon that freedom that we have seen the explosion of lawsuits in this country. I don't believe that the demise of capitalism and the rise of the lawsuit are particularly linked to each other, but certainly litigiousness is not in any way a feature of capitalism.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
These costs are substantially lower when the citizenry respects the property rights of the copyright holder. When people have a massive disrespect for property of others -- as is the case in the U.S. today -- then indeed the costs are greater -- but only because the people have become morally degraded.
The whole apparatus of copyright registration,
There is no such thing. A work is copyrighted immediately upon being produced. There is no additional "registration" involved in enjoying the benefits of copyright protection -- at least not here in the United States (I have no idea what the situation is like in other countries). Publishers will register their products with the Library of Congress (in the United States) because they perceive there is an additional benefit to doing so -- but it has nothing to do with copyright. Look around you -- do you REALLY think that all these millions of copyrighted materials have been vetted by some clerk in Washington/London/Sao Paolo/wherever?
investigation and prosecution of criminal copyright cases, courts to hear civil and criminal copyright cases, prison cells for people convicted of criminal infringement, is a substantial cost.
Yes. These are costs of a free society where private property is officially respected. If the citizenry does not itself respect copyright, then these costs will be high -- but this lack of respect by the public cannot reasonably be said to be a virtue. It is in fact a gross hypocrisy (see how people yelp when THEIR stuff is stolen!)
If the end result is not a significant benefit to the public, then Copyright should be abolished.
Copyright is massively beneficial to the public. They would not have all this music to listen to without it. They would not have all these books to read without it. They would not have movies to watch and software to use without copyright.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
What are "natural rights" ? Who says that the right to property of any kind is a moral absolute ? I put it to you that it isn't. It's also a "legal invention for the benefit of the public", though perhaps a somewhat older such invention. Other rights like the "right" to free speech are somewhat newer.
IMO, the significant benefit of copyright is that it provides a means for authors of creative works to claim compensation, and as such, furthers the development of such works. It also allows ordinary people to dollar-vote for such works, whereas further back, the musicians could only write what the aristocracy wanted them to, because patronage is something only the wealthy can sponsor. I call this a "significant benefit to society".
If this is true, why do we see so many high school bands these days ? And some of these bands are darned good. Most of the students in them will not become professional musicians. They just do it to broaden their education. I also did this and don't regret it.
Too many people see making music as a brass ring - that you make music in hope of making a huge pile of money. The vast majority will not, and forget the main reason to make music - pleasure.
Yeah yeah yeah ... teachers should do it for love, professors should do it for love, so should doctors. And many of them do. But all of these guys would be equally pissed off if you said "you have no right to make money in your line of work. Get a real job".
Actually, this is backwards. Artist play concerts to sell CD's. There is no profit in a concert (except for TicketMaster), its done to increase sales of CDs.
The Record Companies usually fund concerts, driving up sales of CDs, increasing the name recognition of the artist and the label. If the artist has a good contract (good money that McCartney would, bad money that N'Sync would), they gain more money based on increased sales, or have better bargaining position with their next contract.
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
The ever-genial Chicago native agrees that the Byrds albums never sounded better than they do now, but if you assume the 57-year-old Pete Seeger idolizer is sitting around contemplating the past, guess again. This morning alone, McGuinn's already answered hundreds of e-mails generated by his Mcguinn.com Web site, and is busy setting up microphones so he can record the latest addition to his continuing "Folk Den" song series, then make the results available for no-cost downloading. At Seeger's request, he's cutting another trad gem, "Dink's Song," adding that a "Best of Folk Den" project will see its way to retail shelves soon. The first three volumes of the series are available only on MP3.com.
"They retail for $7.99, because there's no middleman, and I get 50%," explains McGuinn. "If they sell 1,000 CDs, I get $4,000. It's unheard of! You know how long it would take to get $4,000 in royalties from a [label]? Maybe the answer is never."
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
should be http://www.auschron.com/issues/dispatch/2000-03-17 /music_roundupb9.html
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
>>It's an abusive and immoral institution
>Copyright is abusive? Immoral? Ho ho. To the contrary, it is fundamentally capitalist.
Actually, yes, IP law is anti-capitalist, it provides a government mandated monopoly, just like normal patents.
ICQ#2584116
-- d'arcy poirot
Their gripe isn't about backing up... its distributing. I'm not sure that Microsoft would be fond of people backing up their Win 2000 disks on machines they (the customers) didn't have physical control of. If all you want is a back up, there's plenty of ways to do it in a more accomodating fashion.
No... if there was no copyright and no GPL, there'd be no way to enforce people who distributed changed versions of GPLed software to return the source. There'd probably be less going on in the free software movement, because everything would end up acting like the not-so-loved-around-here BSD license, where people could make changes and not return source. Without the GPL sitting around mandating what happens to GPLed code, the entire idea behind this "movement" would be dead in the water.
Ahhh... After all the talks the past few days about how distributing MP3's couldn't possibly hurt an artist, and how it could only stand to increase their earnings, this comment arrives.
It doesn't matter how much money someone has... If he's being ripped off to the point where one can go "oh, maybe he'll have to...." then ever wonder what it means to the less successful artists? The ones that won't merely need to switch toilet papers, but maybe switch career aspirations as well?
But you can't decide how to recieve the data... I can't phone microsoft requesting they make Win2000 available through wrapster and i'll pay them for it, probably. I also can't buy windows 2000, again, put it on wrapster or an ftp server somewhere, and say "okay you can download this, but only if you already own it".
I don't agree with the music industry trying to tell people how they can listen to their music (trying to ban the rio, for instance), but i completely agree with them in wanting to have final say in how their music gets distributed. It's theirs, they own it. And no one here has come up with anything near a clear plan on how artists would get paid, except for things like an honor system.
CD's cost a lot more to produce than just the 25 cents to press a CD... everyone here appears to want to over look that fact, though.
Forget that, and just put it in "geek speak":
The GPL is based on copyright. People are believed to have to observe it as a valid license because of the copyright implications. IF you tear down the walls on copyright law, all of a sudden, that oh-so-precious GPL license is also equally meaningless.
Did you read the salon article yesterday? The one with artists finally standing up and saying they were pissed as hell about napster because they can't figure how they'll be paid? If not, go read it... Maybe when you see that all this squabling between MP3 afficianados and the music industry is not taking into account the artists wishes, you'll step back from the "me me me" mentality and try to figure a workable solution for all involved.
Tapes and MP3's are completley different, here's why:
Tapes are impermanent... they degrade, as they don't exist in a digital sense.
The more times you make copies of tapes, the more they degrade.
MP3's degrade only once, when they're converted, and then can be copied enmasse forever.
That's the scary thing about digital. In the analog world, copies were worse than the original, there was no aarguing that point. But now, a digital copy is bit for bit a copy of the original... It's understandable that the industry doesn't like the repurcussions of that.
As far as I've always known... Tour's only really make money for the REALLY SMALL and REALLY BIG BANDS... all the medium sized bands tour mainly to promote their record sales. And record stores take a much larger chunk than just the $1. It's more around $3-4 on up.
But you're into music right? Read an essay by steve albini (a la big black, shellac, rapeman fame... along with engineering a slew of albums). It pretty much shows artists getting hosed already... But taking away their CD royalties pretty much destroys their means of recording as a means to support their careers.
You can back up your data however you'd like. I was more referring to people distributing copies of music... If i give you a tape of something, then you make a tape of that for someone else, each of those copies will successively get worse and worse. Not so with mp3's.
And let's face it, mp3's do have legitmate uses - i've got something like 96 hours of music on my hard drive at work... but it's all from cd's i own and brought in to rip... ANd other people do that to. But mechanisms for sharing mp3's open up so many more possiblitities that the legitmate users are in the very small minority of actual users. When that happens, something needs to be looked at...
Like microsoft - everyone says they never get it right on their first try. But they try and try and somehow get whatever they were doing "right". Mp3 users should do the same, rather than being so hellbent on making their first ideas be the ones that work.
Everntually, music will be distributed via the internet. But things need to be worked out so that everyone gets their fair cut. Artists get paid. Promototers, managers, producers, technicians, and yes, record labels. They all serve purposes in the world. And all the schemes people think of about reimbursing artists have a few flaws: They assume the only cost in making a cd is in the actual pressing, and that only the 4 or 5 band members are the ones that should be paid. There;s other people involved, besides just an artist, a cd pressing plant, and a record label.
No society is economy is truly an economy of free market because it wouldn't work. Taxes, unions, etc. are also anti-capitalist.
I like r.e.m. In fact, I'm on my way to having every one of their songs/albums. Now, due to their recent actions, I refuse to support the RIAA with my money. So, how do I aquire the rest of r.e.m.'s music? If you can figure out a way that does _not_ include either mp3s or buying a CD, I would love to hear it. To make an analoge (sp?) to the first poster, I want to drink tea but I don't want to have to pay outrageous taxes. So, what are my options?
I propose that all citizens of the states who signed the Geneva Copyright Conventions should be given a data filtering brain implant at birth. The US patent office, the library of congress, the Ministry of Truth or some other suitable agent of the treaty could centrally control each citizen's access to coprighted and patented materials. Thoughts about copyrighted or patented works would simply be erased or crippled by neural noise. Visual and aural sensory data from copyrighted works could easily be blocked at the appropriate receptor sites in the cereberal cortex.
Not only would this give the artists and scientists a tremendous degree of control over their works, but whole new classes of intellectual property the laws regarding which were previously unenforceable or too cumbersome to legislate will now fall under the purview of copyright, patent, and trademark laws.
For example, employees who are privy to discoveries and inventions in the course of their employment could simply be mentally "frisked" when they are terminated or when they "defect". If any company property is found in the contents of their mind, such property could be returned to its rightful owner. The company's assets would be safe from the threat of plunder by defecting employees.
The public school system would also stand to benefit from this technology. The implant could be use to measure proficiency level much more cost effectively than standardized tests. Market pressures could be brought to bear on school trustees and administrators by making schools taxes commensurate with educational quality. You only pay for what you learn! Schools that don't measure up academically will be forced to improve or go the way of the dinosaur.
Also, this technology would remove the archaic and arbitrary restriction against patenting mathematical objects. American businesses can then leverage control of such useful technologies as the number 2 and the notion of a set. This will give them an instant worldwide market of billions of users, together with all the revenue and high-tech jobs that accompany such productivity boosting technological advancement. In a global marketplace, American businesses need to be as competetive as possible.
All this could be controlled by a single command center, ensuring the maximum return for creators of intellectual property. The NSA's Echelon project probably has the infrastructure in place to manage the worldwide access rights to American intellectual property.
Ease-of-use combined with tremendous value-added features make this the right technological solution for protecting the fruits of genius' labour.
LL
Errr... here's one that doesn't:
Heh, if it wasn't for mp3s, I wouldn't own all four of their albums... but not all artists like mp3s. Oh well.
There was an article (and corresponding story on Slashdot) yesterday that addresses artist's reactions to mp3's. Specifically Napster.
I was only trying to point out that there can be more then one viewpoint on things. My position is defensible, infact I had an assignment once to defend that position in a history class once. By the end of the class period, we had convinced many of the people there that the brits were right (This was in middleschool, it had more to do with charisma then anything else)
In any event. Its certanly posible to look at the events in this manner if you want to. And it is certanly possible to look at the MP3 situation from many posible viewpoints. The American revolution was certanly against the law at the time no matter how you look at it.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
There is no questionability of this service, it only provides access to songs that you already own. How could that be illegal?
If they want to do it, then they should be allowed to do so, dispite what the record companies want.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
but I'm sure most artists make about $1 per CD (if not less).
Actualy, its more like a dime, unless you're a huge band like the smashing pumpkins or whatever.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I think that the poster may have been talking about the American Home Recording Act, which imposed a tax(I'm not sure if"tax" is technically correct, but that's what it amounts to) on various forms of blank recording media. The money is collected under the assumption that anyone who wants blank media intends to use it for purposes of piracy. The money goes to the RIAA and other, similar organizations.
I strongly disagree.. those people don't care about art, they are called artists but are just entertainers. Artistic value is very hard to judge, but I'm sorry, I just can't believe people are buying cds to listen to some music for its artistic value.
artists are still starving today
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
find it at www.chords.com
Pork is not a verb
Easy. The theory behind "information wants to be free" is that you can't really assign an intrinsic value to a 0 or a 1. The cost of (re-)producing them is basically reduced to the initial buying of the technology (a computer). Once you have this, you can multiply (or reproduce) those bits indefinitely at almost no cost (disregarding memory/hdd cost). So "free-flow of information" advocates would argue that putting a price on the flow/access of/to information has no basis on fact, and as such is arbitrary and unjust. What they often forget about is that unlike the creation of material goods (say, a blow-up doll
I strongly believe that trying to be clever is detrimental to your health. -- Linus Torvalds
They copied these albums illegally
Yes, it might hinder MP3 stuff later on, but for now its just hurting MP3.com more than anywhere else (ie, your home). There will always be more sites providing mp3s than suits filed against them, and CD-ripping progs aren't going away anytime soon either. Newsgroups and Napster live on.
Imagine this: What if there was some way that you could buy the rights to the MP3s of a record? How would one keep up with it? Would you post them on Album_Name.com ? Could you only allow X number of downloads? How would you keep track of those being passed around? (This is impossible right now..I think)
However, to get back to my point, Paul is doing what anyone would do if someone was stealing a whole shitload of money away from them--stand up and say "Hi, that music's mine, and you didn't pay for it."
Note that the Yahoo story says that "McCartney isn't personally suing the fledgling company." As usual, it's the record/publishing companies who grub for every cent they can get while the actual artists don't give a darn.
As for the rest, I have two comments. (1) There aren't any natural rights, as history demonstrates quite nicely; and (2) the 'public interest', as embodied in your example, is not the best benchmark of Good and Evil. Racism may be a bad thing, but if the owner of the property doesn't want to sell to blacks or Jews, then I wouldn't simply invalidate his stupidity. If it's his property he can do what he wants with it, IMO. (OTOH, I might pay for a lawyer to look through the covenant for some way to sneak around the requirements without violating them. It's better to be clever than to sue.)
That's the crux of the matter, isn't it...
MP3's enable the "shareware" model of music distribution. If the ultimate distillation of the shareware software distribution model is something like Linux, then it's likely that a real "shareware" music market could grow!
Hmmm....
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
I suspect I'm being trolled, but....
Why do I think (C) is the wrong way to do things? Because it doesn't work. It doesn't work on 2 levels: first, ARTISTS CAN'T MAKE ENOUGH MONEY. Second, I have to pay for music.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy
has a detailed discussion.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
At this point, I butt in. Here's the deal. MPL is a publishing company. What purpose does a publishing company serve? Very little, it was an archaic little idea from the early days of the "Modern" music industry designed to suck more money. Your indy labels like mine ( P20 Records ) have to put up with a lot of bullsnip thanks to publishing companies. There are ways around them. More or less the publishing companies are the people who grant rights for the music and some other stuff and they act similarly to say companies like Sierra that publish other people's games and software. However software has a better model where the Label and Publisher are combined, creating more cash for both the label and the software company. The only decent purpose the publishing companies serve is they act as a 3rd party in contract disputes and have the final vote. Which does very little these days where usually the artist or thelabel is also the publishing company, For instance Alice In Chain's publisher is Buttnugget Publishing,and Jerry Cantrell is the President of Buttnugget Publishing...LAbels have subsidiary publish companies in most cases...and the purpose of one of those 2 parties being the publisher is to (honestly) screw the other party over. Now in this case the publisher who does own the rights to this music is sueing a company for something which doesn't violate any copyright, patent, liscense or contract. Now in most cases an artist gets 3-5% of all albums sold. Let's say you buy a CD here in atlanta for $16.95, there's a 6% sales tax you pay $17.97. Well You can thank the Georgia State Government and the City of Atlanta for $1.02 of that. You can thank let's say oh Alice Cooper for $.62 of that, mind you that $.62 is spread among him and anyone who played any instrument or did back up vocals for him, or let's say he had to pay a royalty for something ont he album, it comes out of there!Just imagine if he used a choir for BGVs!?!? Probably $1.50 of that goes to the Publishing company (guestimate). Now at this point prolly $1.00 went to the store your bought it from. $2.00 went to the distributor. The other $11.83, goes to Producers, sound engineers, et cetera et cetera, then finally the studio, the record label who all have employees to pay. Bills to pay. Liscense fees to pay. Oh let's not for get the $.10 per CD (even higher for small labels who press in less volume!!!!) so. Album sales do not make money. Royalties don't even make money! Tour do. LEt me make sure you know everyone...EVERYONE involved makes money off the tours. So tell me, is it really all that bad that your pay that much for a cd? Is it REALLY that bad?! If it's to much, tell record labels to ditch publishing companies, tell the government to get rid of operating liscenses, sales tax, and tell utility companies to stop charging for their services. Do that and you can cut the cost and thereby the price by maybe a $1.00 or $2.00. Either hush your cry baby mouths, or just don't PAY it and don't enjoy the music. And yes, my label is making plans for MP3 distribution. Derek Greene Punk Rock Guitarist/Vocalist Record Label Dude Programmer Technician Linux Freak
Derek Greene
Did they steal someone else's songs? WEll not that we know of. Btw, black rock'n roll played got their inspiration from swing which came from jazz, which came from classical, and past that it doesn't matter. No one cares if the rock'n roll "originators" were black or white, it doesn't matter! If someone steals music McCartney has rights to, he has a legal right to sue them.
For your information one of my favorite guitarists is Chuck Berry, another Jimmy Hendrix yet my favorite bands of all-time: The Crickets, MxPx, The Ramones, Alice In Chains.
Whine Whine Whine. Eww you're just a rascist, that's prolly the comment coming to your mind now but guess what, I'm not. But, you certainly are a liberal who supports a Cop Killer.
Derek Greene
DMB and the Beatles all have used multi-track recording. Multi track recording has been around for decades...it was jsut analog before. with bands that actually play instruments, like DMB what multi tracking is used for is adding effects in later or correcting a mistake ont he recording, instead of re-recording it. Which i don't see as bad, since, after-all alot of music is written in the studio. Practice before the tour is what makes them sound so good live, but constant touring before studio time typically doesnt give this opportunity. That's also why alot of songs are done differently live than ont he album.
Derek Greene
Aye, you're right...my monetary figures were more "Let's jsut say" type of things. I have to disagree about tours only makign the money for really small and really big bands. All bands do their touring to support their album...but that's a bullship term honestly. Cause like I said Album sales don't mean much of anything. Where album sales really make bands money (i try to do this whenever possible) is at the merchandising section at their concerts. They can charge a dollar or 2 less than the stores, which makes it attractive, but, they need not go through distributors to get it, so they can make cash off that. All album sales REALLY do is, pay recording costs. This also goes into why TLC (the pop/R&B/rap group whose music i don't enjoy but it's a matter of personal taste really...) files for bankruptcy a few years ago...after going platinum: they didn't tour enough.
Derek
Derek Greene
Well, I can see you're a bigot. "Mumia" is a cop killer, proven cop killer. Why free him? he should pay his debt to society like any other killer. Elvis is not my hero, his music is boring. How do you know if the music i like is bad? you've never heard it. Oh wait you're dumb, I'm sorry I forgot. I don't care who originated it, it's music, simple as that! It's music, I enjoy it, I enjoy making more of it! The only people who give a rip are these racists and these bigots who think black people are superior to whites (when it's the person not hthe group of people tha tmatters anyhow!!!!) or just plain hates people of any other race than black.
Derek Greene
Wait. Allow me to get this straight. It'd be wrong to do this to a poor, starving artist, but its somehow alright to do the same thing to a successful artist? So by becoming successful, an artist forfeits his or her rights to their work?
The problem with patents, particularly in use with software, is that people are claiming they own things that are in fact just permutations of mathematics and science, things that can be argued have already 'existed' for all of eternity, or are at least destined to be learned as scientific knowledge advances. Things like the Amazon patents amount to claiming ownership of millenia-old business concepts, like the two-for-one sale or something similarly trivial....its like charging the whole world everytime they tie their shoes or something.
Copyright is a whole different story, it is designed to protect creative ideas, things that arent inherent at all to any amount of understanding of math, science, and/or what exists already, they are something that has come "from nothing", i.e. the copyright owner's imagination, and are making a contribution towards the culture of society, rather than the scientific knowledge of society.
On one hand he has a right to speak, as is your first point.
But on the other hand he also has the right NOT to be heard by those he doesn't want to.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
1. This is a flame, as the poster admits.
2. What is Mr. McCartney, or any artist, suppose to do, just sit there while their life's work gets copied to oblivion?
There is nothing Interesting nor Funny about this post.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
>Keep your ten track waste of a CD and let me buy track by track with the proceeds going to the people who deserve them.
I heard this alot from people defending the whole mp3 thingy. I'm not saying I'm an angel but if you look at most mp3s out there its not entire CDs but just singles played on the radio and videos.
So I wonder, if music companies did allow you to buy individual tracks (which they do btw, in the form of mini-cd disc), would everyone automaticlly move from mp3s to the record stores?
Right now, they are getting it for free. If the music companies changed, we would have to pay $1. Which one would you do?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Female Prison Rape in NY
Why shouldn't I be able to listen to their mp3 of the CD track when I can listen to an identical mp3 of an identical CD track legally? Does one of the identical mp3s cost the artist more?
Obviously not.
Actually, obviously so. Here's an obvious example:
Suppose you pay $10 to me for a copy of an artist's CD, rather than paying $10 to get the CD directly from the artist. Then, despite the fact that the data from each is the same, one transaction does, indeed, cost the artist $10 more. Obviously.
Well, you just realized wrong. Someone who closes Linux over Windows is declining to pay for something they don't want to use. MP3 traders are declining to pay for something they very much want to use. They are stealing.
No, all human creative endeavors are the works of individuals with rights and a definite need for food and shelter.
Those who say that no one has any rights to control one's own creative work or sell it as one chooses have never created anything anyone else would want. This even applies to folks like Stallman, who impose strict conditions (always include the source, frex) upon people who download their "free" intellectual property.
MP3s are allowing anyone to publish their music for virtually no cost.
Every time a company (mp3.com in this case) does something that extends the capability of mp3 (makes them easier to use and access), SOMEONE in the current music industry ends up sueing.
The reason is simple. Technology has made "the old way" obsolete. Now in order to hold onto their $millions (or $billions) they need to rely on the court system to slow down every else while the established players "get up and running".
I has everything to do with protecting their income, controling the industry and forcing everyone to do things "the old way".
I honestly don't know why so many people here on slashdot want to defend multi-millionaires from the big bad internet. If technology is hurting your $millions a year income then you better get with it or lose.
One last note. "worked hard and put his stuff out into the world as a priviege, not a right, with the understanding that isn't on his terms"... blah blah blah. He didn't have to release his music for general consumption, you are right. However, if he had NOT released his music, he wouldn't be the multi-millionaire he is today and wouldn't even be having the capability to sue.
The exchange of information will ultimatly become infinate. If people can't find a way to prosper in an age of free information, it's their own damn problem, not the problem of those who HAVE figured it out.
Personally I think that e-mailing him might be a Bad Idea (TM), as he's likely to receive more flames than he would receive well thought-out, constructive e-mails. But if he dropped the suit, that would definitely be a good thing, I agree with you there.
--
linuxisgood:~$ man woman
Restating the obvious since nineteen aught five.
But other factors are involved with MP3s and Napster, etc. besides "a bunch of people who want free music":
- Music fans being sick of being ripped off in terms of money
- Music fans being sick of being ripped off in terms of quality (one hit single and 10 crappy songs per disk)
- Music fans feeling manipulated in terms of the "industry's standards" (having to switch from LP to CD to who knows what)
- Music fans wanting the amzaing flexibility that Mp3s offer (less physical space, easy to create mixes, easy to integrate listening music with other tasks like working at a computer)
- Musician's who aren't famnous's desire for a level distribution playing field
- The desire to sample songs without having to listen to those awful Disc Jockeys
- The desire for a cultural shift in the way we listen to music we like
- The desire to be on the cutting edge of technology
- The desire to see what all the big-wigs are fretting about
- The desire punish certain companies that certain people may hate
I think it is unfair to say that the rampant adoption of MP3s is only based on the fact that they are "free beer." That plays a role, I'm sure, but it is not the only factor, by far...These folks work *hard* for their living, and they're not rolling in dough. They play as often as they possibly can, plus they *teach* on the side. I know you didn't specifically say artists have it easy, but intimating that we treat them better than scientists or doctors leads me to believe that you think making art isn't really work at all, and artists certainly should expect to make a decent living from what they're hearts lead them to do. Bullshit.
The full time jobs for musicians and other artists are few and far between. An opening for a part-time piccolo player in the New York Philharmonic drew over two hundred applicants, many with masters degrees from highly regarded music conservatories.
The *rest* of the folks who love art and want to devote their lives to making things of beauty and bringing a little happiness into the world must take any job that comes along and works for them economically. They must teach as many students as they can fit in between playing jobs. And when they aren't playing or teaching, they're practicing for hours in order to prepare the art that you so love to see, hear, watch. Between all these various engagements that they must attract and manage for themselves, they can make a living.
What about job security? They rely on their reputation for every meal, they don't know where the next job is coming from, if it's coming. They don't know if their students will continue to play, paint, sing, sculpt. They buy their own insurance.
Artists are the original consultants, and they've had to fight for ever scrap of dignity they've attained.
Artists work just as hard as the rest of us, usually harder, they cater to anyone who is willing to hire them, and they work for a reasonable fee. They bringing enjoyment to their patrons, no matter who they are.
The artists making a million dollars a year are such a tiny percentage of the total number of professional "artists" in any medium, that it's ridiculous to hold them up as examples of the typical artist's situation.
As to your other point, there was *never* a time when only the rich could afford the arts. It is still true that no one who doesn't make a decent living is going to commission a symphony or have their portrait painted. But the "common man" has always had access to symphonies (The English Ball), paintings (Sistine Chapel?), and the other arts.
If you think we're treating artists better than doctors or scientists, or especially "the people who run the country" (politicians?) then you're out of your mind. You owe the artists of the world an apology for the hard work they do and the crap they put up with from idiots like yourself who haven't bothered to look at the true situation.
Does anybody have any REAL idea what dent copied music is putting the pockets of the recording industry? Think about it. Modern copied music has been around since tape recorders were cheap enough for the public. How many of you have a tape copy of a CD a friend made for you, Hmmm? I have a copy of a Beastie Boys CD, and I had the tape since I was in high school. The tape wore out years ago, so I bought the CD because the tape format started failing on me. I could make lots of copies on tape and send them out in trade for other tapes (like a non-ROIO version of a tape-tree), but that would be expensive. Now I can send some rather low-quality music by email or upload. Wow. And only people who have the right hardware can play it, and such hardware costs a bit more than a walkman. And not everyone has a system for playing MP3s. I bet more people have a half-decent CD player/tape deck. Copying music has been around for years, and the recording industry seems to be doing alright. Is it wrong? Yeah, but life can suck that way, eh?
If the artists were not bound by nasty contractual agreements with their distributors, I'd suggest writing up a nice little letter expressing your support, plopping it and whatever amount of cash you think the music is worth in an envelope, and forwarding it directly to the artist. Then, go download yerself whatever tracks you want. Sure, it's an idealist concept, but as an artist, I'd much rather have a million people sending me anywhere from $2 to $20 bucks for whatever music they want than have the pittance percentage given by the distributor. Yeah, it's on the honour system but I'll pay for a good thing so long as I'm paying the originators for their work as opposed to some pompous middle-men.
"The majority of the stupid is invincible and guaranteed for all time. The terror of their tyranny, however, is allev
The Beatles' final burned out enterprise to do good, a world bank that opperates expressly to help the disadvantaged. I guess he wasn't being cinical when he sang Live and Let Die, he meant it. Yes I want free music, from independant artists. Not for an old hippie wannabe.
All art should be free? I beg to differ. I should be able to choose who I give my creations too. Without this basic IP right, you or anyone else can take a painting, a song, a poem away from my girlfriend who I expressly and explicitly created it for.
What kind of society would sponser that kind of system?
Here's a flame. Would the slashdot kids jump up and down and flame and babble about somebody not conforming with the GPL? (say, using code published under GPL in a closed source app.). Of course you would.
But you don't respect artists right to release their music under a license of their choice? What a joke. I detest MP3z, Napster etc. as much as I detest violations of GPL,BSD license etc. They're all about infringing other people's right to publish ideas how they want to.
With all of the resources wasted to protect "intellectual property" that could be used actually producing, there's got to be a better way than the current system (or maybe just attitude?) of copyright.
-1
This is the most ridiculous statement to which I have been privy. I, being an artist, take great offense to your invalidation of my career choice. Science is a wonderful thing. Art is a wonderful thing. Your generalizing statement not only offends; it shows your complete lack of intelligence as well. Oh great man of science let me paint grand pictures of you and sing epic ballads to honor your great works. You are truly a Supreme Being and warrant my steadfast admiration.
Byzandula
HA! you expect someone to read a post that
/. moderation (good when applied by those who have no trigger finger or have recently cut it off) has failed here. Kind of embarassing to see a simple statement overruled by some guy's ignorant manifesto. So far as I've seen it's the Remedial Economics 097 dropouts who are flaming.
long?
I hate to say this, but
And if you read closely you can hear the letters crying at having been arranged that way.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
your fake indignation
Now there's a statement.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Gawd! I'm going mad.I love controversy as much as the next guy,but this just goes in circles.
What have we seen?
1.The RIAA representing the music industry (perhaps eventually to be defunct as a buggywhip factory)doesnt like mp3 and fights the world.
2.Copyrights are capitalist in nature *yay*
but are perhaps too strong and restrictive to
allow mankind to progress in an orderly fashion.
3.New business models are needed all 'round
even though some will lose their ass(tough shit,
nature has only one law:ADAPT OR DIE.)
What are the possible outcomes?
1.RIAA wins,we get the same crap shoveled
to us from the industry:High prices,Pretty faces
forced on us and called 'art',artists getting
screwed on all fronts,fatcats get richer and more proficient at their game.
2.The people win,Music is marketed in a new
yet unannounced way,lots of familiar faces dissappear having been discouraged,New honest talent rises like cream on a level playing field,
but not before lotsa turmoil and trial and error.
3.No-one wins,the controversy continues
infinitum benefiting only lawyers and other
cockroaches while innocent geeks inflame their
pulsating ulcers ripping at each others throats
in columns just like these.
4.The X-ists win wiping the whole mess of the
pink bastards off the planet.Bob puts me in charge
of my own planet where i am a SEX GOD and live
in a state of perfect Slack FOREVER.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I wasn't arguing over whether or not the MP3 movement is a revolution, but rather arguing against this statement by Delmoi:
The American revolution was nothing more then a bunch of freeloaders who didn't want to pay there taxies, after Britain spent hundreds of millions defending the country in the French and Indian war.
-Patrick
Hosting for Creators: http://rpg-works.net
So someone gives away a free newspaper, I am then not allowed to pass it on to someone else once I've read it?
threadeds blog
Regarding IV:
Your position in this area seems logical. However, there is a similar argument associated with the ability to pay that is often lumped together with the one you address and is not addressed directly. Here it is.
Take some album we'll call X.
Suppose I don't have enough money to buy X and I will never have enough money to buy X. If I decide to copy my friend's X, it would be incorrect to say that the industry had incurred a loss due to this, because I would not have been able to buy X in either case.
This leads us to a similar scenario: Suppose I do have enough money to buy X, but I do not buy it. Instead, I copy my friend's X. While some would claim that the industry had incurred a loss due to piracy, i.e. that the industry did not recieve the right amount of money from me because I pirated X, it is more correct to say that the industry lost the money when I chose not to buy X.
Clearly, one has the right to choose to buy or not buy X. Why should the fact that I also choose to pirate X affect this right?
Now, I don't mean to say that piracy doesn't break rights protected by copyright law; those rights rest on the doctrines that a) people should be fairly rewarded for the use of their work and b) people should have a certain amount of control over what happens to works they create.
However, it is important to consider these points when assessing damages for copyright violations. Pirates must make amends in the following two ways: they must pay a fee of a fair amount to the artist for the use of their work if they break a), and they must pay fair compensation for violating the author's wishes if they break b). Note that neither of these items necessarily have anything to do with what someone would normally pay for X in a store.
Well, no... Technically, the mp3s are created from the copies of the albums that mp3.com purchases. Uploading it to the listener who has demonstrated posession of the album is a grey area. But how is mp3.com encoding it from the copy they purchased in question?
No, but that's not at issue here.
Why shouldn't I be able to listen to their mp3 of the CD track when I can listen to an identical mp3 of an identical CD track legally? Does one of the identical mp3s cost the artist more? Obviously not.
Huh? Of course. That's how they get them. The beam-it program doesn't upload the music.
""Its like having a huge warez site, with a message at the front saying "You can only download these backups if you own the original software." Why does everyone suddenly change their stance when it becomes music rather than software?""
Why are attitudes different? You must run the beam-it software to submit samples for hashing to prove that you posess the CD before you can play tracks from it. If you had to submit similar samples for verification through a digest/hash mechanism to a warez "backup" website, the morality and legality would be similarly unclear.
Arrgh! That isn't at issue here. Read the @%!#ing article before posting!
MP3.com should just kindly explain that it was an accident that his albums got pirated and that they will rectify the situation immediately. After all, who going to believe that someone intentionally tried to get a hold of that crap, even for free?
Deosyne
I really think artists would have a lot to gain from allowing people to freely copy their music. Most of the revenues from CD's go to music stores and music companies, but I'm sure most artists make about $1 per CD (if not less). Artists make money with shows. CD's are just a way to have people hear their music so they go to the show.
Now if artists start putting their music free for download, that makes a lot more people likely to hear it and more likely to go to their show. The main thing that needs to be done is more organization and more marketing power for free music. I'm sure if a "Free Music Foundation" becomes as organized as the open source mouvement, artists will think twice before giving up their copyrights to music companies for $1/CD and less people hearing their music.
I forgot the other key issue is to have the radios play this "free music"... Though internet radios could do that and give a hard time to the "normal radio".
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Puleeese!! Who cares about getting your music heard, if you are never going to sell it? If the people holding MP3 versions of songs, whether they were originals, covers, or previously recorded material had to pay someone for it, the whole picture would change. Try this analogy -- you go out and buy 100 CD's, and a jukebox. You put the juke box in your finished basement on freeplay, and let the fun begin! If no one ever paid for the plays, or brought in new CD's, how often would YOU change the CD's About as often as MP3 outfits pay royalties? Does that make it clearer? Or is the joyful prospect of picking Paul McCartney's pocket stiill clouding your reason?
Who gives a toss about Macca anyway, it's just more advertising for mp3.com
Whatever record companies decide on the mp3 debate, it's not going to solve any problems until they can control what people upload and download.
I wouldn't call mp3 a movement, but it's definatley a small revolution in the way people listen to music - blah blah blah - yawn
That aint music, that's the way ya do it,record that guitar to mp3,
This aint piracy, it's just the way we do it,
after all, we own the CD ?
I want my, I want my, I want my mp3
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
I for one love it. I no longer have to carry my CDs back and forth from home to work to car, etc. I can log in from home or work and listen to the bulk of MY Cd collection. NOT pirated mp3s not stolen music. This is music I happily played for and am tired of carrying around a huge CD case so I can play one song off of ten different CDs. It is also much quicker to point and clik on a song/CD than it is to find it, load it, then skip to the song. Good luck mp3.com.
I am 31337 or something.
Thsi really makes me sick... These so-called artists suing places like mp3.com. I used to think that mp3.com was like this huge repository of "free" music, but that's only for "not-so-big" artists... The only real advantage is that once you've bought your DAMCD from them then you can listen to it over the Internet... But as for yahoo's story claiming that you can then "illegally" copy it -- I can't see the logic in that
As I sit here day after day listening to the music I've bought or been given by my musician friends I record them on to mp3.
.oO0Oo.
If every home I went to had broadband access then I could listen to my mp3's wherever I was because I would be running my own mp3 server at home just waiting for me to connect.
Oh, I have and I do and it's marvellous.
Come on Paul McCartney. I'll eat your Linda's vegetarian sausages and pies but you can spin if you think I'm scared of you.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
but you can give them to the birds and bees. I want money.....
.oO0Oo.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I've got an mp3 server. It's stacked with my cd and record collection all put on to mp3.
.oO0Oo.
My friend has bought some cd's and knows I have them on my mp3 server. He asks if he can have access to those cds. I write a user interface for it so that both he and I can choose what to hear. Before long the bandwidth he's using starts costing me money so I ask him to chip cash in for it.
"Sure," he says, "and to reward you for taking the time and effort for setting up the server I'll buy you dinner sometime."
"Great," I reply.
At dinner he says that a friend of his would like to use my server to and would pay $ for it. I go for it.
Before too long he send's me a few CD's to rip for him and put on the server. After a week or so I send them back. The next time he feels like sending some he just send's me the cash to buy them the next time I'm in town.
Seeing what artists he likes I notice a new CD from one of this guy's favourites (guess who) and buy it as well. I rip it and e-mail to say as soon as he buy's it too I'll give him access.
Paul McCartney and his friends show up and take me to court.
I wind up penniless and destitute.
All for doing someone a favour and taking a few $ for my time.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
From the article:
``This represents the first lawsuit against MP3.com's undertaken by independent publishing companies,'' McCartney's spokesman
If it does not involve him at all, why is his personal spokeman talking about?
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
McCartney or any other owner of copyrighted music is absolutely and completely within his rights to seek to protect what is lawfully his.
Legally, this makes sense. This makes a lot of legal sense. I understand what you mean. But I happen to disagree with it, and I happen to disagree with the laws that protect it. I don't believe that these money grubbing record labels should have the right to add a surcharge on ignorance. I don't believe they should be allowed to deny the rights of others to provide an alternative to their collective monopoly.
If you ignore copyright -- if you make or own pirate copies of copyrighted music -- you are implicitly denying that a private property owner has the right to do what he wishes with what he owns within the bounds of the law.
Yes, yes I am. You have the right to do whatever you wish, as long as what you do does not infringe on others' right to do the same. By shutting down MP3.com, napster, and other such legally-iffy institutions, these people are denying my rights to use them, if in the off chance I wish to use them legally. They don't want to protect their artists from losing money, they want to protect the economic strangehold they have on music and music distrobution.
You are thereby undermining your claim to be a capitalist, and you are similarly undermining your right to be outraged when someone steals something out of your house.
Ok, so I'm not a "pure" capitalist; I don't believe anyone should be able to do whatever they want just because it makes them money. I believe that the people responsible for the production and distrobution should be fairly compensated. I believe that these people are taking advantage of the ignorance of their consumers in order to fill their pockets, and I refuse to willingly support that. In fact, I choose to willfully do my best to fight that. Yes, that includes breaking copyright law.
Then I honestly don't think you can call yourself a capitalist at all. This is fundamental to capitalism: the right to private property. If you dispute the legitimacy of copyright, you implicitly dispute the legitimacy of private property.
;) ), yet McCartney's label isn't suing any ripper programs. Instead, they attack the most visible and the most threatening source in order to protect their source of revenue.
:)
You are incredibly overstating my position. Perhaps this is because I have not done by best to clarify, so, let's try to correct that: I do not believe that the idea of copyright or intellectual property is immoral, abusive, or whatever else I said. I believe that the recording industry's interpretation and use of it is. I agree that one has the right to have, own, and sell property. However, whenever you interact with people, you have an obligation (perhaps not legally, but morally) to represent yourself in an honorable and respectable fashion if you expect to continue that interaction.
Value (economically speaking) is subjective: the value of a thing is what *I* am willing to give up in order to obtain it. On the other hand, for you the value of that thing is what YOU are willing to give up for it.
That value is artificially inflated for no other purpose than to make money, and is proliferated by the ignorance of the people. I believe this is morally wrong and I do my best to avoid it whenever possible. People who try to expose that ignorance or provide an alternative are shut down and threatened with legal action. That's wrong and I refuse to support it or defend it, despite the legal issues behind it.
Are you making a special case for hatred of music companies? That's rather arbitrary.
Absolutely not. I have a similar disdain for computer retail outlets like Best Buy or CompUSA (and especially Circuit City, but that's another endless debate). It's not particularly arbitrary either; I encounter these things quite frequently and I am exposed to endless examples of corporate abuse in this sector. Yeah, maybe some multinational mop conglomerate is selling mops at a 200% mark-up, but I don't buy many mops.
Furthermore, how is it that you think that you have a right to dictate to anyone the terms under which they will sell what they own? After all, this is the force of what you are saying here when you say you think they ought to have their ownership rights restricted.
I am expressing my opinion, in the hope that some will see it, understand it, and agree with it. Yes, I believe that their ownership rights should be restricted. I hope others agree with me and would change their buying practices to reflect their beliefs. Before you go and jump on that last sentence, I am not advocating that anyone should violate the law, merely that they express their beliefs in the manner which they sit fit, according to their moral values.
They have no power whatsoever to control the distribution of music for which they do not own the distribution rights.
Tell that to their lawyers. If they believe you, I'll be surprised and overjoyed. They are doing their best to prevent the perceived misuse of their copyright by suing the most visible of the competitors, in the hope that these competitors don't become too visible, and, god forbid, begin competing at a fair level.
So your alleged concerns about having "legal access" to MP3.com seem rather empty.
Once again, I am at fault for not clearly identifying my positions. Whether or not someone does access MP3.com for legal purposes, he is given the right to choose whether or not to do so. This is why guns, knives, and other lethal weapons aren't banned; if there is a legal use, there is a reason to protect our right to use them. To remove MP3.com or Napster would mean someone, somewhere, is denied the legal use of their legal services.
The purpose of our government is not to restrict what we might do, but what we will do. If you cannot prove to me within reason that that gun will be used to kill, you have no right to deny it to me. That "within reason" part is where the lawyers come in. And by manipulating the public ignorance, they convince the media and the public that their fair competitors are nothing but criminals because someone, somewhere, might be abusing the service for illegal purposes. By logging on to Napster and by using MP3's software, you are assuming the risk and the obligation to use it legally. It is not MP3.com's fault that some users aren't following directions.
Setting that aside, however, I honestly don't see how you can possibly demonstrate that MP3.com can protect copyright, short of requiring its users to actually send in their own CDs. As it stands, a user can simply claim to own a disc, but there is no way to verify that.
They can and do verify that you have the CD. If you have the CD you can rip the songs without ever using MP3.com's software (can't MP3.com change their name? typing it out is getting on my nerves
Are you a programmer? Tell me, do you apply these same "scruples" (ahem) to your code?
I have released nothing worthy of being used, much less pirated.
It is my belief that I should be properly compensated for the work I do.
X*(time spent)/(consumers)
where X is the [debatable] ratio of money to time.
Where I disagree with the recording industry is this rate, which I believe to be immorally inflated.
It's greed that is proliferated by manipulated stupidity. This is the same sort of thing that caused the formation of unions, though perhaps not as severe; workers were happy enough to get a job and didn't bother to think about how little they were really being paid, the lack of benefits, and other things. MTV'ers are happy enough to get the music and don't bother to think about the accumulated greed that drives them.
It is my belief that their compensation is not "proper." They do not agree with me and that's where morality comes in. Your definition of proper is something central to yourself, and I try to convince others to chance their concept of proper to combat the abuse inherent in the system. It is my personal sense of morality that drives my belief that they are unjustified in their application of copyright law. Certain other anti-competitive practices are also counter to my sense of morality.
I think it's obvious by now that you don't agree with my concept of morality. My philosophy in this matter is simple: greed is not ok. Neither is the abuse of misinterpreted laws or the exploitation of ignorance. By patronizing the competitors and supporting them any way I can (indeed, sometimes illegally and perhaps immorally), I am doing what I can to insure that this sort of abuse does not continue.
And in the same way, the market seems to agree that the music industry is not overcharging for their products -- whatever you or I may think.
That's what I hope will change in the not so distant future.
"A company wich owns te rigts to much of is music is doing someting to MP3.com"
Even your correction included the so-called 'Devil's Letter.' Of course, we all know that the Devil's Letter is in fact the letter 'E.'
It's an abusive and immoral institution protected under the law that I am peaceably and nonviolently protesting. Call that illegal, but I call it a moral objection.
Yeah, I want free music. I'll admit it; I'm a capitialist, something for nothing or less is always better. But what I want even more than that is music that isn't insanely overpriced in order to put cash in the pockets of all the wrong people. Here's a hint: they're not the starving artists. Keep your ten track waste of a CD and let me buy track by track with the proceeds going to the people who deserve them.
If and when the recording companies feel the hurt of the "MP3 Revolution" in the pocket, we will see change. As it is now, consumers are largely uninformed about the issues behind that 15 dollar CD and open their wallets without considering. So, the recording companies target the small fries, keep it out of the limelight and isolate their opponents as thieves and criminals. This is not right, this does not protect the rights of anyone, and above all, this should not be allowed to continue.
How is any radio free? How is TV free? How are web sites free? One word: advertising.
And after you're done with all the ads, look atWill I retire or break 10K?
MP3.com buys the CDs it rips. The user "copies" the CD (fair use, 17 USC 107) to an account using the Beam-it client, and MP3.com simply retrieves the copy. And most artists still get less than one percent of MSRP on each CD.
So go getWill I retire or break 10K?
Only digital media intended to record performances on consumer equipment have the tax. Let me make myself informative:
- Blank audio and video cassettes do not have the tax because they are analog, and analog copying loses a generation.
- Blank CD-R media with "MB" instead of "minutes" on the label is incompatible with consumer audio equipment ("minutes" CD-R media has special codes) and does not have the tax.
- DAT no longer has the tax because they don't make audio DAT anymore (DAT is mostly used to back up hard drives); MiniDisc (which is taxed) filled in that gap long ago.
But there's still no tax onWill I retire or break 10K?
Why dont all the musicians just hord some cash, then do a 12month sitout/strike
And get taken to court for breaking their contracts?
Are you prepared forWill I retire or break 10K?
Mr. Mcartney'suit is a natural response to protect art that he's bought as much as art that he's created. Paul has bought the catalogs of many artists as an investment. (I see you played "Peggy Sue" by Buddy Holly on your radio station Wednesday at 2pm. That will be a nickel, please.) This is about his investment portfolio, not his unique creations. What I'm seeing is a whole bunch of companies and people who were dedicated to delivering music in a certain way. (If you want my genius artistic vision then you have to buy a CD with 14 helpings of it!) A large portion of music consumers are ignoring the old system for one that the consumer finds more useful.(Screw You. Only tracks 2 and 8 are worth a shit!) And the people who ran the old system are trying to save their asses by suing instead of figuring out how to use the new system. Why sue instead of adapt? Because the consumers can now be more selective and that automatically make Paul's portfolio diminish in worth. If I had his millions, I'd be figuring out how to get my catalog on the net and charge for every viewing. Wait a minute! Don't about 3 million amateur porn stars do that now?
My wife is like Unix. Lots of commands. Lots of arguments.
Oppressive taxes (stamp taxes, etc)
Most of these were being spent on defending America. It doesn't seem too excessive to be expected to pay for your own defence.
Lack of representation in the British parliament.
Most of Britain didn't have representation in the British parliament. There were whole cities with no MP.
Obviously there was a valid reason for the revolution, otherwise the colonists wouldn't have bothered, but I think the taxation and representation were among the less important factors.
"But I have yet to see a single actual artist take a stance against it."
:) explains why he thinks more artists haven't spoken out against the format as well (ignore + the fear of being seen as greedy, even though they are only asking for what is rightly theirs). On a side note: I've seen MANY people talk about things like t-shirt sales and tours and stuff, if you actually read that article, actual artists explain that unless you're someone like Dave Matthews who sells out stadiums, you don't really make all that much money from t-shirts/tours.
Did you miss the article posted yesterday on The Dark Side of Napster? It has several artist speaking out against it. Creed frontman Scott Strapp (misspelled in the article, those bums
>yourself a capitalist at all. This is
>fundamental to capitalism: the right to private
>property. If you dispute the legitimacy of
>copyright, you implicitly dispute the legitimacy
>of private property.
Private property is *one* fundamental tenet of capitalism. Intellectual property is *one* facet of property ownership, with it being debateable whether or not it should be treated the same as physical property (discussion below). Seeking to weaken one disputed facet of one tenet of capitalism does not make one a non-capitalist. This isn't a black and white issue here, there's a range of beliefs between "lasseiz-faire capitalist" and "state socialist." Basically, absolutism is bullshit, and that's what you're guilty of here.
Wouldn't you say it's just as fundamental to capitalism that if you desire a service that I provide, I should have the right to sell it to you? To take your argument to its logical conclusion, anyone who opposes murder for hire isn't a capitalist. After all, assassins provide a service that their customers desire and are willing to pay for. Isn't it socialistic to prevent them from selling this service? The government intervention in this area is preventing the assassins from utilizing their talents to make a living by providing a needed service and supressing what could be a thriving market. So if you oppose murder for hire, then by your own logic, I don't see how you can call yourself a capitalist. You can argue that murder for hire, drug dealing, and providing alcohol to minors should all be illegal, but your only arguments come from utilitarian or religious principles, not capitalistic principles. So if you oppose murder for hire, then by your own logic, I don't see how you can call yourself a capitalist.
>Later in your post you practically admit that
>you do NOT use these things legally, when you
>say "I choose to willfully do my best to fight
>that. Yes, that includes breaking copyright
>law." So your alleged concerns about having
>"legal access" to MP3.com seem rather empty.
Wrong. Simply because somthing CAN be used illegally is not grounds for making that something illegal. Do you support lawsuits by the families of murder victims against gun manufacturers? It's exactly the same thing. Historically, it's been the perpetrator of an illegal action that gets punished, not the one who sold them the means to do so, unless the seller had certain foreknowledge that the means would be used illegally in the specific incidence in question. A gun manufacturer knows for certain that one of the weapons they make will be used to commit a crime, but they aren't accountable unless they know that this *specific* weapon will commit this *specific* crime, and choose to sell it anyway. Same with mp3.com.
mp3.com can and is used for a purpose that is legal under fair use. The fact that it can also be used illegally is NOT sufficient reason to shut them down, or to permit the RIAA to shut them down by burying them under lawsuits.
And no, I've never used mp3.com or played an mp3 of a song I haven't purchased, so your little straw-man argument doesn't work against me.
>Setting that aside, however, I honestly don't
>see how you can possibly demonstrate that
>MP3.com can protect copyright, short of
>requiring its users to actually send in their
>own CDs. As it stands, a user can simply claim
>to own a disc, but there is no way to verify
>that.
And it's not their job to do so. It's the responsibility of the owner of a copyright to police it. mp3.com has the legal responsibility to cooperate with the copyright holder in any legal investigation, but it's not their responsibility to police it themselves, just as it's not Best Buy's responsibility to make sure I don't violate someone's copyright with the blank tapes I buy from them.
On whether intellectual property is property, do you believe patents and copyrights should expire? If so then either
(Just to throw your absolutism back at you.)
From the US Constitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Phrase by phrase:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
This makes explicit the purpose. It is not to defend property or the rights of the inventor, it is to create a utilitarian good. The faster progress of science and the arts creates more good than is lost by the restriction of the right to distribute it.
by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries(emphasis mine)
If IP is truly property, why is it only yours for a limited time? If I make a car, it's mine until it falls apart or I choose to sell it. We're back to the choice above; either the Founding Fathers(TM) were flaming commies who believed in taking, or they did not intend for patents and copyrights to truly be property.
Furthermore, if you look at other writings of several of the framers, you'll see that they believed that knowledge and art in fact belong to humanity collectively. (Sorry, couldn't dig up online references.) It is the reward of the inventor/artist to control the use of their discovery/creation for a period of time, so that there's some incentive to do it. But because it truly belongs to everyone, that control is limited. This is also one of the justifications for fair use.
Finally, I'm getting pretty sick of the histrionics of people who claim copyright infringement is theft. It isn't. When I steal something from you, you lose it. You are directly harmed by it, which is why theft is traditionally a criminal offense. If I infringe your copyright, you suffer no loss. You simply don't gain anything of mine. You are not directly harmed by it, which is why copyright infringement is traditionally a civil matter. (Though obscenities like the DMCA and UCITA are trying to change that.) Lack of gain != loss. Or have I stolen from Ford by buying a Chevy? By stealing a Chevy? In either of those cases, I'm depriving Ford of potential revenue, just as I'm depriving the holder of a copyright of potential revenue by infinging. So DON'T give me that theft/piracy bullshit. That's just an appeal to the emotions of the feebleminded, and you know it just as well as I do.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
>While other things may be important to
:))
:)
:-)
>capitalism, private property is the sine qua non
>of capitalism: In its absence there is no
>capitalism at all.
But opposing the strengthening of one part of it, when it's debatable whether or not IP actually is private property (I notice you didn't even touch that argument; shall I take it you agree that IP is public property that a limited monopoly is granted on?), is not opposing capitalism. I seem to recall you bitching that I was quoting you out of context?
>Neither a free society nor capitalism can exist
>in a moral vacuum. Among other things, the right
>to private property must be protected -- no one
>has the right to steal your stuff, right? No one
>has the right to destroy my property, either. So
>how absurd would it be for us to suppose that
>private property is protected but our lives are
>not?
All capitalism is, fundamentally, is any economic system that supports the ownership of capital (i.e. the means of production) by individuals. Just as socialism is simply the ownership of capital by the state or by the people collectively. There's a lot of baggage attached to both terms, but fundamentally, that's all they are. Copyright is in no way means of production, it's protection of the end product. Therefore, seeking to weaken copyright (or, more appropriately to this argument, opposing the strengthening of copyright) does not in any way make one opposed to capitalism.
Also, by this definition, capitalism is orthogonal to morality. It can very easily exist in a moral vacuum; the owner of capital can wield sufficient physical force to enforce his ownership. See most of Africa, they're the most capitalistic countries in the world. A company can very easily operate there completely free of government regulation. Simply because you don't like the end result doesn't make them less capitalistic. A free society can't exist in a moral vacuum, but it's no impediment to a capitalistic one. However much you try to claim it, they ain't the same thing.
>Can contracts survive where honesty and
>truthfulness are not valued? Of course not! You
>think you're being clever, but you're really not.
Why not? See my above point about force. All it takes is to make reward for compliance, the penalty for noncompliance, and the probability of being caught breaking the contract sufficiently high. And why are contracts more fundamental to capitalism than the right to sell your services? If anything, contracts are a part of that right.
Not to mention I don't see what the legality of paid assassination has to do with truthfulness or honesty. If anything, it would be valued even more highly. Who'd employ an assassin they couldn't trust? And wouldn't you be a bit more careful about being honest if you knew a lie could cause you to end up with a bullet in your head?
>This amazingly irrelevant statement is attached
>to a quote that you cleverly ripped from its
>context
Not really. It was a restatement of his argument. Your claim was that it was perfectly OK for you to stick your fingers in your ears as he made a logical argument, simply because the argument was in his own self-interest. I don't have any self-interest in this area, so you'll have to address it this time.
>What I said had to do specifically with the
>poster's professed willingness to violate
>copyright while at the same time being upset
>about not having legal access to MP3.com. A
>person who is willing to violate copyright is
>obviously not particularly interested in what is
>legal, so it's pretty silly to pretend to be all
>worked up about not having "legal" access to
>something. If you will look you will see that
>this is exactly how the poster understood it,
>and it was in fact my intent. I'm sorry you
>didn't get it.
Oh, I got it. I just don't agree with it. If a law is wrong, I feel no responsibility to obey it. I will break it as I choose, and I will accept the consequences if caught, but I will continue to fight to change the law. And any logical, rational arguments I make in favor of changing the law are no less logical or rational simply because I'm making them. Since I don't feel this law is wrong, I don't violate it. However, it wouldn't detract from my arguments if I did.
>The problem with MP3.com is that it is SURELY
>being used for illegal purposes -- it is not a
>question of taking away something that merely
>*might* be used illegally
And MY point, which I'm sorry that you don't understand, is that this is absolutely, completely irrelevent. To go back to the gun manufacturer analogy, a gun manufacturer knows that many of its products will be used illegally. Not MIGHT be, WILL be. Similarly, mp3.com knows that much of the disk space and throughput they provide will be used for illegal purposes. Neither mp3.com nor the gun manufacturer is responsible for this illegal use; the only responsible party is the one who made the knowing choice to use a legal product or service in an illegal fashion.
>Lastly, to borrow your gun analogy -- I assert
>that law enforcement would be fully within their
>rights to shut down a gun shop where illegal
>arms trafficking was occurring right alongside
>legitimate firearms sales.
>if MP3.com is trafficking in pirated music right
>alongside legitimate music, I have NO problem
>with law enforcement shutting them down.
They aren't. I'm not sure why you haven't gotten this yet, since you've been told repeatedly. The MP3s that mp3.com sells are legally theirs to sell; the artists have signed contracts allowing mp3.com to distribute the songs over the internet via MP3. mp3.com also provides a service allowing people to upload music to their servers, so they can then stream to any internet-connected device. It's this service that is being abused, and it's being abused by mp3.com's customers, not by mp3.com itself. What if that gun store provided secure gun lockers in the back, and people started selling or giving away the combinations to their lockers? Should the cops shut down the gun store?
>You fail to understand economics. Lack of gain
>== reduced income (reduced by the amount you
>failed to pay me).
(snipping only one sentence from those paragraphs in an attempt at brevity, for a change
I'm afraid it's you who refuse to understand. It isn't income you're losing, it's *potential* income. How can you say your income is reduced by the amount of the sale? I might well have chosen to do without if I couldn't copy illegally. Also, I suggest you take an arithmetic course. x + 0 != x - 1, no matter what economists believe. It may be a loss as far as tax status goes, *but you are not losing anything you currently have.* THAT is the key difference between theft and copyright infringement. And I'm not suggesting abandoning copyright. I'm suggesting not overextending it so that copyright infringement is treated the same as theft of a physical object. Once again, so you can't mistake my point: COPYRIGHT GOOD! BUT COPYRIGHT NOT SAME AS PHYSICAL PROPERTY! DON'T TREAT COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT AND THEFT SAME WAY, LEGALLY OR MORALLY! Get it?
>Ford's income is reduced by the amount of money
>that you spent on a Chevy rather than on a Ford.
>If enough people do this, Ford goes out of
>business.
*But is it theft?* That was my question, and you didn't answer it. How about is it theft from Ford if I steal a Chevy? After all, I might have bought a Ford in either case. So Ford's losing *potential* income in the same way a copyright holder does due to an infringement.
>On top of all this, you are apparently incapable
>of distinguishing between patents and copyright
I'm completely aware of the difference, thank you. However, the section of the Constitution I quoted applies to *BOTH*. The arguments I used apply to *BOTH*. Therefore, I referenced *BOTH* in my arguments. What in my argument applied only to patents and not copyrights? If you can't come up with a real argument, then please be quiet.
Oh, and care to actually address my point of whether you believe copyright expiration is government taking? How about patent expiration? You can stick your fingers in your ears again if you want, but they're still connected.
>Judging from your post, we don't have a monopoly
>on histrionics.
Really? Care to point out the histrionic parts of my original post? Care to tell me WHY they're histrionic? (Yeah, I saw the smiley, but I'm not going to let you even jokingly give me a name I haven't earned.)
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
I would like to see a janitor retire and then claim that anyone who uses the bathrooms he cleaned twenty years ago owes him money.
Honestly, nothing against Paul McCartney, but hasn't he made enough money already? For god's sake, he's just a musician. I respect his right to earn a buck, but why can't he realize that society has already compensated him extremely well for the work he's done?
A choice of masters is not freedom
The real problem that I persoanlly have is that I happen to like Paul McCartney/Wings/The Beatles very much. I have @ 40+ CD's by just them. And I have also ripped every one of them to MP3, I can take them with me, at the quality that they were intended be heard at, for little to no effort. I am torn between my like of the artist and his work, and what I know is right in the MP3 format.
Yes, 'Paul McCartney' is not suing MP3.com, but he is the head of MPL Comm. And the fact that people think that MP3's are steaing money from record companies means that people need to do a little more research.
Of the pople that I work with in my company (800+) I can count less than 20 who actually know what an MP3 is, much less how to do anything with it.
The point is, I will go generous and say that there might be up to 50 people in my company is that condition, which leaves roughly 750 of of 800 people (93.75%) still buying CD's religously at their local Tower Records, donating their hard earned money to the man. Get over, it, times they are-a-changing.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
I think Beatle albums are still one of the largest selling groups even after 30+ years. The Beatles formed their own record company because they got tired of getting a raw deal from record companies. The problem is that they were taken advantage of by some less scrupulous artists and ended up folding up the buisness. Maybe Paul could be convinced into investing in and sponsering MP3.com.
PS I cary around several CD-Rs full of MP3s, these are either downloaded from sites like MP3.com or music from my own collection.
Subsolar
I'm going to say that it would require "a Beowulf cluster" of them :P.
Green Monkey
If an artist can sell million$ of fake recordings of themselves, but in live performance can't sell out a stadium, that ought to be an indication that their actual success is due to studio gimmicry, gloss, and marketing, not to musical talent. Dave Matthews and his band beat the shit out of most of the performing artists because unlike 98% of top 40 radio music THEY CAN PLAY THEIR INSTRUMENTS. Mp3's are the best thing to happen to music because they're going to take the hype and cash out of musical performance and start drawing people towards the real thing again. Before the invention of multi-track recordings, artists (even the Beatles) had to be able to actually play the songs that went on the records. Now it's not necessary. If the drummer can't keep time, quantize him! If the singer can't sing in tune, digitize him! If the guitar player fucks up all the time, splice him!
My take is, if they can't make music for real, fuck 'em!
It's true, maybe the 'mp3 revolution' will destroy the big music corp's, and the music they own. Or it's quite possible that the corp's will destroy mp3's. What is more likely, given the manner in which culture tends to move is that nothing particularly 'revolutionary' *will* happen, outside of the slow, steady direction that it is already headed. That is that technology is becoming cheaper to the point that we are able to watch that which is cutting edge become thrift store crap in within a few years. There *is* a downside to this, which is that many people's livelyhoods are flushed with the passing of each of these technologies. The upside is that regular people are able to aquire last years cutting edge for next to nothing. For example, the fact that the average person can create a home studio for very little money. (nothing if a person knows where to get the software for a 'discount') What this has been doing for the past decade is that the power has been taken out of the hands of the music corprations and given to anyone who wants it. You want to record your music digitaly and them master it? Now you can. You no longer need to sell yourself to some big wig. With a little hard work and some searching on the www. you can set up your own tour across a north america. And yes, if you want to get your music out to a world wide audience for 'free', now you can, thanks to mp3's. So is this 'good' for the music majors? NO. Is it good for the average musician who knows his/her fans through the intimacy of a stadium? NO. But you know what? Who cares. There has never been a better time for the average person to go out and make a 'living' off their own music. They may not get rich, but that will make sure that they continue to put effort/creativity into what they are creating, because it's their meal ticket. Wasn't it Woody Guthrie who said something to the effect of, "I may not get rich, but as long as I have a guitar and a song to sing, there will always be someone to share with me a bowl of soup and a place to sleep." (ok, I'm not sure how he put it, but that's what he was getting across =)Maybe we'll even get back to the era when people made music because it was an art form, not a commodity. Wow, what an idea. Anyone who knows anything *knows* Paul and his rock star contemporaries haven't done anything resembling 'art' for many, many decades.
have any of you ever actually worked for something in your life? and how would you like to get ripped off. sure he has lots of money but how do you think he got it? think of it like this, mp3s are to music what open source is to operating systems. except that the programmers are willing giving the code away. these musicians arent. do you people have any integrity?
Protect us From Independant bands that would like a small bit of recognition..
From Those that would like to listen to music that they have purchased in various ways...
..
Aw.. Naw.. What I really mean is
"please lord protect the huge profit margins of large entertainment megoplexis's... including Mariah Carey, Brian Adams, Paul McCartney..etc..."
-
air and light and time and space
I don't know if you've thought about it but my.mp3.com isn't giving anything away for free. Their idea is for users that own the albums to be able to listen to them anywhere they have computer access. You have to have the cd in your possesion in order to put it on your account. How many other ways is there to get this music if you have the cd already in your possession. I don't see anyone filing a law suit on sony for their recordable cassette tapes or for their stereos that will dub these tapes. As far as music goes it has always worked off the honor system. There is just too many ways to pirate it.
He helps PETA. Do you know what PETA is? Do you know who and what the "Friends of the anchovy" represent? PETA stands for "People For The Ethical Treatment of ANimALs" Every year they invade my forest with legislation and screw the balance of nature. They think that they can protect the fluffy mountain lions from being hunted. Because of the Moutain Lions being protected, the dear are overhunted by the mountain lions. Every mountain lion must kill and eat one dear every 6 days. When there aren't enough dear around, they move into residential areas and prey on my "fluff" and "blitz" Those are my pets(cat and dog). When they get desparate, they'll start looking upon human prey that they think they can overpower. Do you know what happens when you kill one in defense and fear? Those fagets of the 70s put you in jail and you get to spend the night next to some phornicator who was arrested for accidently breaking her dog's backbone while being graciously humped.
Well, that is Paul Mcartney's frame of mind. It is true! I am not a liar! What does this have to do with the MP3.com lawsuite? Well, all of his crappy songs raise money that is contributed to PETA. If he thinks someone put his voice in a pickle jar and thinks he is entitled to a salary of XXXX dollars a month, he thinks that he can sue the owner of that pickle jar for any amount he sees fit! He has raped the forest for all of its worth and when he moves into suing legitimate private business only to steal from them using a damn lawyer, he had better get some back surgery because he is going to start rupturing discs from trying to dodge people's bullets! He should go back to his gay accoustic guitar and piss up a rope for all I care. And to go below the belt, I think his voice sounds like sandpaper being played through an 8bit chinese soundcard.
without prejudice
The two are really inseparable though different. There is no true liberty where there is no right to private property, and there is positively no capitalist system where private property rights are snuffed out by the state.
How are they inseparable? I agree that that capitalist systems uphold private property rights, since that is a premise for a capitalist system in the first place, but I don't see how that proves your point.
What I actually meant was that the automatic connection between capitalism and freedom does not hold in my opinion. Yes, capitalism implies a greater economic freedom than other systems, but that does not mean that it implies a greater personal freedom. Having lived most of my life in Europe, my experience is that although most countries there implement a weaker form of capitalism than the US, personal freedom is actually greater than in the USA. Arguably this has different reasons than just the economic model. It's just that the blind assumption "the USA is the most capitalist country, and the most free, therefore capitalism = freedom" should be challenged. I'm almost afraid to say it, but as much as I love to live in the US, it is not the country with the most freedom in the world. Sorry.
Free enterprise often implies the ability to restrict other people's freedom.
The only "restriction" free enterprise places is on the fact that a man has the right to control his own property, and that another man does not have the right to coerce him into disposing of it in ways he does not want. But that works both ways: everyone's property is protected.
True. I guess I wasn't clear on what I meant to say. Free enterprise enables a big difference between economic means. That's all fine. The unfortunate side effect is that big corporations with a lot of money can force the little guy with no money into a legal settlement, simply because they can afford the outrageous legal fees that the little guy cannot. I'll admit that that is more a problem of the legal system than the capitalist system.
The American national pastime of sueing everyone over every little thing is an illustration of this.
The litigiousness of American society cannot reasonably be said to be a necessary feature of capitalism. The fact that this litigiousness has only appeared in the last century demonstrates this. The U.S. was far more capitalistic in the 19th century, in that there were far fewer restrictions upon how a man might use his private property. It is only with the growth of additional restrictions upon that freedom that we have seen the explosion of lawsuits in this country. I don't believe that the demise of capitalism and the rise of the lawsuit are particularly linked to each other, but certainly litigiousness is not in any way a feature of capitalism.
Nope, it's not a feature of capitalism, but a result of capitalism. Or, at the very least, a side effect. The more money a big company has, the more you can sue out of them by spilling hot coffee in you lap. Again, the twisted legal system is also responsible for this.
MSN 8: Now Microsoft even has bugs in their ad campaigns.
You must be a complete friggin idiot. Did you even read the article? Do you even know what an MP3 is? Think before you post. Are you familiar with the MP3.com case? Have you *any* understanding of the implications in this case? You need to go here now and get some background before you embarrass yourself further. =P
I have found one use for MP3's and that is to record all of my music at home to bring into work, so I don't have to worry about losing my originals.
Unfortunately, MP3 is a rather poor media format. When one records tracks with any sort of complexity to the content, for example from Tori Amos, there are obvious digital artifacts and just plain weird stuff.
It is suitable for my purposes. But the idea that people are going to pay to obtain music in this format is ludicrous at best. It's not even the quality of a prerecorded cassette tape, and people have rejected those for years compared to the CD. My assumption in this regard seems to be born out by the fact that MP3.com is losing money, and has not shown any clear revenues to artists.
Again, this is not to say that there is no place for MP3 on the internet. I think it's a wonderful format for the recording artists to provide samples of their CD's. This has influenced a ton of purchases I have made from cdnow.com, which provides mp3 and realaudio samples of some music.
But the basic idea that there is a revolution here with regards to MP3 and the distribution of recorded music is a distortion of facts.
There is no revolution here. While MP3 is an interesting technology, and has it's place... what is constantly brought up by MP3 apologists is plain simple music piracy. It's the exact same thing that we used to do when I was in college with a cassette recorder.
It's not a question of the music industry "just not getting it". They "got it" when we were copying our tapes, and they "get it" today with MP3.
As it sits today the music industry is not a huge profit leader. For any given label, the profits of their top 20 artists help to support the publication of the remaining 1000 or so artists.
Now without further ado, the rebuttals to the weak arguments in support of 'piracy'.
I. There seem to be a number of slashdotters who have some belief that (p1) "information wants to be free". Can anyone clearly articulate why this is true? I have yet to see *ONE* good reason why this is the case. Saying that it p1 is true because information wants to be free is CIRCULAR. I'm sure you know what that means. Its absurd. LAst time I checked information didn't have an opinion on its freedom. OF course new break throughs in information theory that I am ignorant of might have changed this. Please, somone, please do tell me how you have a right to other's work. PLEASE I really want to know the logic behind this.
II. There are a certain number of slashdotters who see mp3s as ok because muscians don't deserve that much money. Who gave this group the right to decide who deserves what? Last time I checked, the majority obviously thinsk they do,l and they do so by deciding with their wallets. Actions speak louder than words. These people are obviously jealous that muscisions do a job they love while they are stuck in some job they hate. That is the only reason I can see for even posting this absurd argument.
III. There is another gruop of /.'ers who believe that the majority of muscisions supports mp3s and want to kill the RIAA. There have no been 2 posts to the contrary, I would really like to see a some real statistical research into the matter. Research that doccuments the income from various (randomly chosen) muscisians, so we can see where their income comes from (these /.ers would have us believe that cd-sales is a minimal sourc eof income, which really sounds absurd from what I know). That is why I think honest research is needed. Some of these /.'ers have changed their opinion now to label muscisans as greedy. How convienant. I don't want some anecdotal evidence from a /. musciain. So don't even think about replying to this comment with that. We all know how valid anecodates are. So unless you are going to point to a study from a reliable source, don't even both replying. Of course the argument can still be refuted, but at the moment, I don't see the point of wasting hte effort until someone meets my requirements.
IV. There is yet another group that justifies music through the fact that they do not have enough money to buy it and thus by stealing they are doing no harm. This is truely an absurd argument and arises from some idiotic notion of 'the man'. By the same reasoning my stealing from Macy's does really no harm, because I don't have the money to buy the clothes, the clothes cost nothing to produce (they are produced with child labor in most cases), and thus no one is harmed. YEA RIGHT!. Stealing is wrong because it is morally wrong. Even small children understand this. I don't understan how slashdotters can't realize this. I'm not going to justify why stealing is wrong here, there are many other sources that can do that far better than I can. This "no one" gets hurt mentality is idiotic. If you don't have to pay, neither does anyone else, and thus no one pays!. Then pepole do get hurt! I can't afford a BMW and I know this rich BMW dealership that could easily afford the loss of one BMW (I'll even 'pay' the costs of the raw materials ~ 5k if that). It doesn't mean I have the right to take it just becaue Im poor. Thats idiotic.
V. There is another group of slashdotters (they could be branded as a subgroup of I) that believe they are entitled to entertainment and thus have the right to download mp3s. Sorry! Please justify this principle of being entitled to others work! Its absurd. Besides that, the principle is psychologically absurd. Anyone whose taken psych 101 knows that. There is only 1 thing humans NEED, that is food. To a lesser extent there is a need to avoid pain and a need for reproduction. But entertainment is not a psychological neccesity. That is BULLSHIT.
I could go on and on, but I believe the aboe summarizes the major /. pro-piracy arguments. All are truely pathetic. Now I'm going to switch topics, because I'm really in an irritated mood, and going to rant on /. in general.
I am seriously getting sick of /. using the word 'geek'. WHAT KIND OF DAMN HYPOCRACY IS THIS? These so called 'geeks' use this word in the same exclusionary way that 'jocks' and 'cool' people use those terms. HYPOCRACY! Come on!. I really want to puke everytime I see this word, as some sort of generalization fo what the audience of /. is. Some sort of stereotype. UGH, please don't make me throw up. I'm a damn individual, not a stereotype. The hypocricay is even more evident when you see the ferveront anger /.ers display to non geeks (e.g. jocks, capatilists, theists, now muscisans, etc. etc. etc.). PLEASE someone save us from the hypocracy. I have been on slashdot since before the corporate buyouts, before moderation (censorship), and before users. This term geek has been used by /. for purely hypocritcial marketing purposes. Back in the day /. ran way mor etechnical articles, it is clear today articles dealign with social problems are by far in dominance. These types of articles promote the disgusting behaviour I mentioned above. These types of articles are in dominance because they bring in more viewers. Can we say hyporcarcy for the billionth time (and NO I CAN'T SPELL, but this is /. so thats ok). *Cough*Sell out*cough*. I have a right to rant, selling out is a cause of indignation. I will rant, it will fall on deaf ears,b ut thats ok, I feel obliged to rant. I'm serverely disgusted.
End of Rant.
Well... you've outright said you're not listening to _me_. I've been playing music for almost 20 years, I've paid money to take music business courses and educated myself about the reality of the situation and devoted some hard thought to what's really going on here but I'm coming out for mp3s so you're going to ignore it by default. I've been talking to an LA producer who likes my stuff and ought to be able to get some people listening to it, and _he_ doesn't bat an eyelash at this sort of thing, yet you strike up a noisy bad stance and expect to be taken as the voice of reason.
If you refuse to listen to my 'anecdotal evidence' even though I'm demonstrably a musician who happens to be a /.er, why on earth should I listen to you? I think you're trying to reduce a new situation to a series of easily defeatable strawmen. In doing so you're attacking MY resources. I really, _really_ don't appreciate your trying to kill off the only form of media that remains entirely within my control...
While this is generally true, that artists tend to have no control over their music after they sign a contract, in this case the article says that McCartney is the principal owner of MPL -- so it's his company that is filing suit.
So yes, in this case, it's fair to blame him.
Some people might toss around the phrase ``information wants to be free'' as some kind of moral statement, but I've always interpreted it more along the lines of ``nature abhors a vaccuum.'' Obviously neither information nor nature have any feelings on the matter; both phrases are anthropomorphisms that describe properties of the world.
Information, by being infinitely duplicable and not tied to a physical object, has the tendency to expand far and wide, just as gasses have a tendency to to fill a container.
It's possible that Maxwell's Demon can keep those pesky molecules in line, and it's possible that information can be tightly controlled and treated as a subject of property just like physical objects can be.
But it's not bloody likely.
In this case it isn't strictly a backup. It's a person making the music that they've purchased available to themselves from any location where they have access to a computer and the net. It's similar to making a cassette copy of a CD to play in your car, something that courts have already ruled legal. In this case you're making a digital copy on the MP3.com server so you can listen to it at work or some other place.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
We should get a bunch of people together and dress up like indians. Then we go dump all the REM CDs in Boston Harbor! That'll teach 'em!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
(currently testing something about signatures here)
I don't have to prove you wrong, Patrick. I just have to read a history book from the British point of view rather than the relatively biased one put out by the Americans. :-)
No, I don't actually believe that, but a hell of a lot of British "subjects" (and people from Canada and the like) do. Some of them believe stuff that's even more detached from reality, that I won't go into here. My point? That any social phenomenon can be mischaracterized as "a bunch of selfish jerks who want something for nothing;" even the space program. Don't let them get you angry, because then it looks even more like what they're saying is true.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Yes, producing an intellectual or expressive work has a cost. Copyright says that the creator can derive an *unbounded* profit from a *fixed* amount of labor, for only the ongoing tiny cost of making copies. (And that particular cost is not one that is incurred if the users make their own copies; the copyright argument is based only one the cost of creation.)
I have a small ethical problem when someone derives unlimited control and profit for doing a small, fixed amount of work---or worse, having someone else do the work and then claiming ownership of it.
Copyright infringement is merely illegal. It is not unethical. At one point in U.S. history, it was illegal for a slave to run away. That didn't make it immoral. Copyright is the new form of slavery: intellectual slavery.
Copyright has an even lesser ethical basis than slavery, which already has zero. When a slave runs away, it can be argued that there is an economic loss. When an ``unauthorized'' copy is made, there is no loss to the original. The entire economic expenditure is suffered by the ``pirate'', who comes up with the target media and the machinery for reproduction. There is no backward effect to the master copies owned by the creator.
Copyright is not capitalism; it is a government enforced monopoly that was designed to promote science and the arts. Not to line the pockets of greedy culture merchants and giant, rich software companies.
Copyright needs to be reduced to only one or two rights; the attribution right to have your name carried with your creation, and the right not to have your name associated with a twisted version of your work.
These rights are really just common sense; someone who receives a copy of something should be given honest, correct information as to the true origin of that something.
So now the wolves have scented blood and are closing in for the kill; the RIAA and others are suing MP3.com for a service which is admittedly on shaky ground. Some say that if they win they could get billions of dollars in damages.
Could MP3.com be sued into bankrupcy? If so, we could see its assets (the domain name, roster of tracks, &c.) sold off, possibly bought up by (and subsumed into) one of the major music companies. Then we could see the situation of the new MP3.com being at the vanguard of phasing out the insecure MP3 format in favour of SDMI.
Now that would be a coup for the RIAA.
What if there was some way that you could buy the rights to the MP3s of a record?
There is. You buy the record.
You then have the right to possess and listen to tapes dubbed from that record, CDs sampled from that record, MP3s encoded from that record, or whatever other format you think is most convenient.
Well, we wouldn't want the guy to starve, would we?
Some people just need to realize that they have more to fear from becoming irrelevant than they do from MP3. The scary thing for these people is that MP3 speeds up the process.
TOo bad for them, I guess.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
But that really isn't an issue, is it? To use my.mp3.com, you are required to own the original CD - correct?
Sure, you can bypass this system by sharing logins or borrowing CDs - but you can do the exact same thing with a decent tape recorder. It's just another tool that people can abuse or use right. It's up to the person.
This isn't really a distribution method, although technically data is being shuffled around. By 'beaming' your CDs, you are essentially making a copy on a server for later retrieval. You already had the original music distributed to you in the form of a CD - the record company made their cut.
I just don't see the problem. It's almost like you and a friend own the exact same CD, and your friend makes a copy to tape and gives it to you. Now you have a CD and tape copy of the same data - what's the problem? You already payed the licensing rights for that music, no?
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Why is that a problem? The only reason I can see a record company caring is that they want the original media to degrade to the point where I have to buy another copy. That hasn't been a problem, really, since CD audio hit the mainstream.
So why is it a problem if I make a digital backup for my own use? Why is it a problem if it lasts forever? If I can keep the original media forever, why shouldn't I keep the backup forever? In the computing world we'd be pissed if we couldn't make long-term backups - why should it be any different in this case? My backups are legal today, they should be just as legal 10 years from now.
Should the recording industry stop people from making CD burners (which many people to make their own mixes)? They make exact duplicates as well.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
What exactly is so questionable? I own a certain number of CDs - I 'beam' them to mp3.com's service, and then listen to them at my leisure. I have purchased a license to listen to the music, not the media - I am perfectly within my rights as a consumer.
This can be abused, sure. So can other types of media. Tape recorders, VCRs, TiVo, your hard-drive, your CD burner, etc. are every bit as 'guilty' as mp3.com's service is.
If the recording industry can do this to mp3.com, they'd _better_ be prepared to tell the consumer to his/her face that he/she cannot purchase a tape recorder.
And yes, they tried that once as well. Stupid, stupid, stupid...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
---
I could be wrong, but a service that gives you access to your own songs seems unneccessary.
---
BTW, for some reason, this statement seems incredibly... Odd.
What is so unnecessary about a service that allows you to stream your own personally purchased music from elsewhere? I'd rather not carry my entire CD collection around with me. As long as I'm near _any_ high-speed internet connection, I'm good to go.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Fair enough. I pretty much agree with everything you've said. I personally gain much from the recording artists out there, and would love to see MP3s and successive technologies give more to those artists than the recording companies.
However, I still don't see where this applies to my.mp3.com. Like tape recorders, CD burners, etc. this service has the potential for abuse. With all of these technologies, it is very easy to abuse. Yes, this needs to be looked at. Yes, my.mp3.com should try hard to make this service secure.
But should they be sued? No. At least, not if they're not going to sue manufacturers of CD burners, tape recorders, and so on. My computer is capable of making recordings either from line-input or off of a CD - should the any member of the recording industry sue Apple next (guess what - they've already tried)?
I think the degradation issue is moot - my rights to the music I purchase don't expire in 10 years, and if I find a more viable means to back up my music, I have the right to use it. I think what people are saying is that the recording industry has the right to do whatever they wish to protect their intellectual property, _as long as_ it doesn't stomp on our rights as consumers. Suing a company that comes up with yet another mechanism to listen to your _already owned_ music is just petty.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
>Oppressive taxes (stamp taxes, etc)
Yup, we got those, they're called CD prices, among other things.
>Lack of representation in the British parliament.
No customers control the RIAA or the MPAA, just some studio honchos and lawyers.
>Horrible diplomacy on the part of the British
'nuff said
>Heavy-handedness
Did you sleep through all the lawsuits?
So... by your definition it is a revolution indeed.
ICQ#2584116
-- d'arcy poirot
There have been conflicts in the past due to technology. The liner notes on one of my CDs (Duke Ellington at Carnegie Hall) makes a reference to a "strike" by ASCAP members in the 1940s over royalties from radio stations who were members of the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters). This resulted in the creation of BMI. I've never been able to find a good description of the conflict and its resolution.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The institution of Copyright also has costs, for the government and ultimately the citizen. The whole apparatus of copyright registration, investigation and prosecution of criminal copyright cases, courts to hear civil and criminal copyright cases, prison cells for people convicted of criminal infringement, is a substantial cost. If the end result is not a significant benefit to the public, then Copyright should be abolished.
Copyrights, patents and trademarks are not natural rights, although some people would disagree with that, they are legal inventions for the benefit of the public. Licenses and contracts will not be enforced by the courts if the result is judged to be against the public interest. I've seen real estate covenants that say that the property may not be sold to Blacks or Jews. They are a legitimate part of the deed but they will not be enforced by modern courts.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Paul, you'll be happy to know that I do not make use of the MP3.com service you are suing over. I have no need to, having already downloaded most of your songs with gnapster.
Finkployd
Vinyls' "LongPlay" seems more like a blip-vert!Compared to a half-full HDD or CD in MP3 format.
So I've started recording my LPs, and compressing them as 256kbps VBR MP3's so I can ENJOY THEM.
Sorry, I dont re-buy music I own unless the price is right.
I, and the world DIG your music Paul! My parents collected from your first trip over here. I now store the collective familys worth of LP's, 45's, and some tapes.
We have all sorts of Beatles, Wings, and George and Richards stuff, Even those cardboard Beatles head coat-hangers! We all saw Yellow Submarine in a movie theatre. (WAY more color depth on FILM TOO by the way.)
In fact WE PAID hundreds of dollars in these last 4 the DECADES. Those 60's dollars invested are worth some big bucks now, huh. Even your percentage, of the percentage is a lot of money now. Hmmmmm, who GOT most of that money?
Alas, You did'nt get 50% of WHAT WE PAID, DID YOU PAUL!!!? (You CAN NOW. If you sign with MP3.com...)
We dont want to listen to those scratchs and pops. I can only hope you'll save me the trouble of compressing every last LP myself, and sell multi-year sets of you bands music in MP3 format.
It would be a good idea to price it under ten dollars, and you dont need no stinking S.D.M.I. Paul...
ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE PAUL!
...now go and make your lawyer quit his job!
If you need money, go with MP3, and you'll GET 50% of it THIS century!
Joe Torre - X - HardwareEngineer @ Amiga Inc & ZapMedia Amiga, AmigaDE, BeOS, Linuxz, QNX, Rebol, Windoze, ZME: So
This has been hashed and rehashed, but there are still two valid sides to this issue. MP3.com doesn't promote or condone piracy. Lots of people use MP3 to pirate, though, and artists are naturally (and rightfully) afraid of losing their works. This doesn't make going after MP3.com any less indefensible, though! If you want to go after pirates, there are plenty of laws against it already. Sue the pirates. It is silly to sue the makers of every device that makes piracy possible-- if we do that, we'd better make sure we get the inventors of pencils, paper, carving tools, paint and canvas, and so forth. Creation and archival tools will always have the side effect of being copying tools as well. Owning them is not a crime. Pirating is.
So Mr. McCartney's company's lawsuit is quite frivolous and misguided, but it *IS* a natural human response trying to protect what he has created. It is so much easier to go after a central source than individual pirates, and until that changes, companies will always go after people in the middle like MP3.com.
If you can think of an agreeable way to fix these types of situations so both sides are happy, do it and get rich. And soon, so I can quit worrying if my right to make backups is going to disappear.
Please don't look at this a 'another artist struggling against MP3's for his hard-earned money'. Paul McCartney is work about $900Million currently, it's not becuase of music he's written. He's invested heavily in other people music catalogs (i.e. Buddy Holly) and makes money from the publishing of and distribution of those songs. To put this even more into the arena of businessman and not artist, he does NOT own the writes to most of the Beatles songs, so music that he's most known for, he doesn't make squat from anymore. (Micheal Jackson owns most of the Beatles music catalog, anothter example of someone who has more of a bussiness then artist interest in MP3's)
So don't view Paul as someone who is defending the inspiration and sweat of the songs he wrote, he's as bad as the MPAA itself, only worried about the money he makes, or might NOT make from lost sales from MP3's
Then again, if I only had $900Million, I'd be worried about making ends meet too..
--knick
As much as I love free music, and Napster, and all the rest, I find it pretty hard to justify MP3.com's (a website that is REALLY trying to gain legitimacy) need for this service.
They provide legal MP3s, it's what they do... there's no reason for them to suddenly start providing access to questionably legal stock, especially without first asking the recording companies. Now, instead of giving access to the music of up-and-coming artists it's going to have to battle in court with the major labels over something that I really don't anybody needs or wants. I could be wrong, but a service that gives you access to your own songs seems unneccessary.
--
RumorsDaily
Basically ASCAP wasn't giving artists royalities from public performances of the artists songs (radioplay etc), and so BMI was made to give the artists those royalities.
I guess it was resolved when ASCAP saw people were moving to BMI and started doing the same.
(NOTE: This is from memory of a Pop Music of the 20th Century course I took 1.5years ago, so is probably wrong)
Paul McCartney is doing NOTHING to MP3.com. A company which owns the rights to much of his music is doing something to MP3.com. Artists may literally sell their songs and figuratively their souls to the record company, but power of attorney as well?
I wonder how much I could have gotten for selling the right to blame things on me to, say, Union Carbide. "We're not dumping PCBs naked into the environment, it's that bastard Phil who's doing it!"
"If it's his property he can do what he wants with it, IMO. (OTOH, I might pay for a lawyer to look through the covenant for some way to sneak around the requirements without violating them"
I hate this crap. Look it's his property but it's not his country. He has to obey the laws of the city, county, state and the country his property is located in. Just because it's your property that does not mean you can rape somebody on it does it?
But judge it's my property and I can do any drug I want to on it! Yea right.
War is necrophilia.
Sure, the users may have to prove they own the music, but does MP3.com have a CD for every MP3 in their database?
Yes, they do. They have actually gone out and purchased every CD that is available for their Beam-It service. They have hired people to rip the CDs, which they do almost 24 hours a day. So you might say that the record companies are actually getting a bonus, since MP3 has to buy the albums, as well as the end-user.
-- "God, Root, what is difference?" - Pitr, "User Friendly"
Oh, come on, it's not a movement, it's a bunch of people who want free music. And no, he's not a poor starving artist, but he's someone who's worked hard and put his stuff out into the world as a privilege, not a right, with the understanding that it's on his terms. He has every right to enforce those terms, as he created it and he didn't have to release it in the first place.
What does "wanting free music" have to do with MP3.com? The only "free music" they have on their site is the stuff that artists are intentionally letting people listen to for free. All the stuff on my.mp3.com you have to prove you own the CD FIRST.
Sure, you could borrow a friend's CD to feed it, but if you could do that, you could make a personal copy almost as easily.
-- "God, Root, what is difference?" - Pitr, "User Friendly"
The American revolution was nothing more then a bunch of freeloaders who didn't want to pay there taxies, after Britain spent hundreds of millions defending the country in the French and Indian war. Please, there was nothing 'movement like' about this revolt
.sig Instructions .sig here
There's a difference between people who think that paying some tarriff is too much for the price of tea, and the people who think that paying ANYTHING for a CD/cassette/8track/LP/(insert your favorite traditional music medium here) is too much.
The people who think that the RIAA and individual recording labels are big, bad and evil for opposing mp3s are just freeloaders, they're not even close to revolutionary. They want something for nothing. They're spoiled, and chances are, they've never actually released a product where they have tried to earn a profit from its sales.
_____________________
step one: place
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The American revolution was nothing more then a bunch of freeloaders who didn't want to pay there taxies, after Britain spent hundreds of millions defending the country in the French and Indian war. Please, there was nothing 'movement like' about this revolt.
I'm not sure if you're actually serious, or just trolling, but I'll risk responding to a troll to reply to this.
Although the motivation not to pay for the French and Indian War was present others factors were involved
In short, I suggest you find a history book and do some reading, as I can't see how you can logically support your conclusion.
Please prove me wrong and post a more complete support of your argument.
Patrick
Hosting for Creators: http://rpg-works.net
Forgive me, but what's the difference?
threadeds blog
"Mp3.com BLATENTLY ignored the copyrights on Mr. McCartney's works,"
If they wanted to blatently ignore the copyrights, why would they check that the user already possesses the album they want to listen to?
"You rob someone, you go to jail. Plain and simple. And don't give me the line about 'I download mp3s to see if I want to buy the album'. The same thing is said about software piracy, which is no less a crime. And it is still false. Do you think all the drunken college kids are going to pay for their 'Limp Bizkit' or 'Jay-Z' albums?"
Yes, but that's not at issue here. Your failure to bother even reading the article is obvious. What is at issue here is using other peoples copies of albums that you already own.
Man.... Will you people please stop seeding the discussion forums?
I'm not saying I agree with Mr. McCartney nor his record studio, but this seems like a case where the record studio may have a chance. MP3.com made a bad move, without even consulting the studios. Sure, the users may have to prove they own the music, but does MP3.com have a CD for every MP3 in their database? MP3.com has been toying with the RIAA, too, adding a mad-lib to the letter that the RIAA sent them (which I must say was hilarious). If this doesn't work for McCartney, I forsee many more lawsuits after MP3.com...
Its like having a huge warez site, with a message at the front saying "You can only download these backups if you own the original software." Why does everyone suddenly change their stance when it becomes music rather than software?
:o)
Surely the record label / publisher / artist is well within their rights to stop mp3.com from distributing their works if there is a strong possibility that an illegal act is occurring? No, Mr McCartney doesn't need the money, nor does his label, but enforcing their legal rights is, if you'll pardon the expression, their right in this society. After all, we all have the right to free speech to criticise them at every turn, don't we?
Game dev and music blog
It is funny how much moral outrage one can pour into this mp3 theft issue. The technology exists. People will copy music. Just like piracy on audio tapes, it will not be prosecuted because it is not feasible to do so. Neither side has a moral vantage point. What the music industry needs is some good old fashioned propaganda ... All they need to do is convince people that only dirty unshaven hax0rs listen to poor quality mp3s ... if you care about audio quality, go buy a delux (insert n adjectives here) CD.
demitraides.
"Elvis Presley aint got no soul. Bo Diddley is rock and roll. You may dig on the Rolling Stones. But they aint come up with that shit on they own." -Mos Def "Rock and Roll"
My god! Where have we gone? We pay our artists more than we pay our doctors or scientists, more than the people who run the country and take care of us... There was a time when only the rich could afford the arts... OOPS, i guess it's not over yet.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
McCartney may or may not be taking an active role in this, but in effect he is hurting me, something I do not appreciate. I have not ever downloaded a _single_ thing off 'My Mp3.com' (their commercial-music mirroring service). I _upload_ to mp3.com (links siggified, knowing that slashdot gets royally sick of hearing the same plea 27 times in a row!) and get over 100 megs of web hosting for my music at no charge, in exchange for giving only _nonexclusive_ rights to 'em. McCartney is looking to take this away from me- though I doubt he's even thought it through.
Part of the reason I even picked mp3.com for this, knowing that they are the focal point for these attacks, is because I want to be in a position to take part in a sort of judo-like attack back at the RIAA and these other attackers. If they manage to harm the _original_ part of mp3.com significantly (I really don't care about My Mp3.com) then they are harming me and a _lot_ of other musician types, many of whom take the music mirroring concept a lot more seriously than I do. Can you say 'class action suit'? I knew you could... If these litigous idiots manage to hurt MY ACCESS to media as an independent artist (christ, I'm not even asking for equal time for promotion, or whatever- it's fine if I just sit there on mp3.com having to fend for myself to get publicity- I'm talking about losing access, about building a web presence that gets harmed through a lawsuit to a _separate_ part of the site!) then I will seriously want to be part of a retaliatory lawsuit.
Go ahead and get them to kill the commercial music mirroring, Paul- I can see the argument that this is important and the wave of the future, but it's clearly also a very daring attempt to redefine the law by acting on what it 'should' mean.
But all this defending of the faith is mostly the protecting of a music machine that built _you_, Paul- they have been selling _your_ music for 30 years and more, and have increasingly little interest in making any new 'product'. And maybe you, personally, have had ENOUGH from that work done 30 years ago. You're trying to still be paid to this day from work you did literally before I was born. Record some new songs if you want new money- I personally have no problem with your insisting that every note is commerce and must be bought and paid for- my problem is when your actions begin to step on my ability to have access to media (I'm thinking of the mp3 format in general here, and the mp3.com site in particular as a 'prime location' due to the domain name and size of it).
I hope this all ends up with My Mp3.com either dead or not- but the mp3.com _I_ use still alive. In some ways the mp3.com guy reminds me of Malcolm McLaren, though I know he's not really that clever. If your band can't get a gig- get them arrested. If the band isn't even popular enough to get arrested- get yourself, the manager, arrested! And so he is.
I just hope it stirs up curiosity about what mp3.com used to be- it's incredibly insulting if mp3.com, with tens of thousands of bands and songs of all different quality levels, is treated as just an illegal pirating website for _industry_ music. Putting that spin on it is _amazingly_ insulting.
You are assuming that popular artists make a lot of money, and less popular artists make a little money, and things like MP3 will take money out of all of their pockets proportionally.
That's wrong.
The reality is that a handful of superstars make a lot of money, and all other artists make exactly nothing.
Small artists stand to benefit from free internet distribution of their music because it will get their music heard, since now they can go around the profit-sucking middlemen in the record labels.
This is not about artists losing money, this is about lawyers losing money.
Paul McCartney is NOT suing MP3.com. Be careful; there's a very big difference between an artist and said artist's label.
You know what's interesting? Many record labels have taken up arms against MP3.com and the like. But I have yet to see a single actual artist take a stance against it. Every artist I've seen who's had anything to say about the matter has been in favor of the format.
Guess it goes to show you who really stands to lose here. The recording companies screwed up big time when it comes to digital music. If they'd gotten in on the ground floor, found real ways to market music online, they would have flown. But they didn't, and technology is simply passing them by as it evolves. I suppose it's kind of sad, to see companies fighting to stay alive, when the only people to blame for their problems are themselves.
The American revolution was nothing more then a bunch of freeloaders who didn't want to pay there taxies, after Britain spent hundreds of millions defending the country in the French and Indian war. Please, there was nothing 'movement like' about this revolt.
Ok, so people want free music without paying for it, and there doing it in mass. Is it right? Maybe, maybe not. It's illegal to pirate music, but then most revolutionary ideas are when they go against the fiber of the current entrenched power. Will ultimately harm the music industry? Probably. Will it harm the quality of music? Who knows? Even so, Marxism ended up being detrimental, but you could hardly not call that 'movement'.
In any event, the MP3 'situation' is definitely destabilizing the music industry right now, it is an agent of powerful change, and could have long lasting effects. Despite how you might feel about there motives and objectives, it is a movement.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
And, in turn he owns most of the company. I'm sure he knows whats going on here...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Give me a break. There's nothing "movement-like" about mp3s.
flame(on);
"You say you want a revolution, well, you know.."
Oh dear. Looks like Mr. McCartney is now staring his revolution in the face, and he doesn't like what he sees. Counter-culture hippy turned lawsuit-throwing mogul. Like he's one to talk about "musicians rights"..He doesn't even own his own work anymore! His entire body of work from 1960-1970 is owned by Michael Jackson! Sheesh!
Saying McCartney isn't going after MP3.com is like saying Bill Gates didn't try to undermine Netscape--he just happened to be the one who owned the company! Gimmie a break.
Welcome to the 00's, Mr. McCartney. The cat's already out of the bag, and a hundred lawsuits wont put the cat back in it.
flame(off);
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
The development of recorded music, which really became an important industry in the mid 40's (even though the first phonographic tubes were credited to Edison's lab in the 1880's, I think) changed the way we understand music in such a dramatic way, it's almost unimaginable to us now. Before that time, the popular music industry consisted of songwriters who would write and sell sheet music: musicians would buy the music and perform locally. Once a musician bought the sheet music, they would pay a royalty for public performance, but home performance was, of course, unlimiited. This practice goes back at least to the 19th century (as did the practice of paying off performers to promote songs.) Musical works in the US were protected by copyright from 1831, The music was preformed locally: that meant that one hit song could provide a modest but real living for a large number of local musicians (remember them?). Radio often consisted of live performances of music, and the same royalty practices would eventually apply to radio. The definition of the recording of a performance as being another performance, and thus something to which the artist had rights, grew out of a series of court cases involving radio and TV broadcast.
With the advent of recorded media - i.e., performances - available as saleable objects, the production of music completely changed. Rather than a large number of local performances and productions, it was much more profitable to resell the same performance over and over again. Thus was born the era of the "pop star;" a musician who would get much, much richer than the composers and songwriters on whom he relied, whose single 'performance' would be renumerated again with each purchase of the media, and again with each public playing of that media. Obviously, most of today's music stars are the beneficiaries of this system: local performance is just an adjunct to the business of creating and distributing media.
This has created a chiaroscuro of winners and losers: for one thing, mediated mass appeal became much more important than before; local musicians often struggled, as did those who relied on serious music audiences (classical and serious music was and is sustained by performance attendance, as well as by public and private grants and academia.) Paul McCartney, obviously, was a Big Winner, as was the whole industry involved in the production and distribution of little pieces of plastic. Some niche musicians were able to distribute their audience much farther than they would have been able to before the development of reel-to-reel, LP's, CD's, etc, so sub-genres of music (folk, punk, goth, trance, industrial, etc.) could thrive, as long as they could find a popular audience - and sometimes a symbiotic relationship with the manufacturers of youth cultures would develop.
The engine of technology is about to exhaust this model, however, and there is no going back. Music is again going to be a service, not a commodity. Some people will thrive in this environment: artists who manage to create live experiences which draw audiences, composers who get grants to create complex works and get them performed, or who have academic careers; musicians who are paid to produce music for games, film, and theatre, and amateur composers and musicians who are motivated by a passion for the music, who then might find themselves with an unexpected audience (ever hear of Daniel Johnston?) The people who will lose are largely those who were winning in the old system. It would be blithe to paint them as spoiled whiners who deserve to suffer now: many of them were talented, creative people whose output might suffer in a post-commodity musical millieu, and some types of music will frankly get less money than before. Also, there will probably be new opportunities for vultures and parasites, for agents and headhunters and plaigarisim lawsuits. But, thanks to the distributed and grassroots aspect of the new technologies, the cat is solidly out of the bag. It's just a matter of how long it will take before enough people are sharing music digitally, that the old industry infrastructure simply collapses.
This is reminiscient of something the RIAA tried to pull about 8 years ago. I used to work in an independent music store and suddenly we got the word from all the big music distributors (Sony, BMG, Uni, Polygram, etc) that they would be pulling ad support for stores that continued to sell used CD's. Their reasoning was bizarre to say the least, claiming that we couldn't resell a CD we bought from a customer because the artist wasn't receiving any royalties. They even lined up Garth Brooks as the industry mouthpiece to say he didn't like it that music stores were profiting from something he created, never mind that he'd already received royalties on that CD once.
Anyone who has ever worked at a music store knows that the profit margins are pretty slim. New product from a company like Sony cost about $9 per and to compete with places like Best Buy we had to resell it around $12. A used CD on the other hand we could buy for around $3.50 and sell for $8.50. Needless to say, we definitely emphasized the used CD part of our business. Eventually NARM (National Association of Music Retailers) got their collective sh*t together and protested and the RIAA eventually dropped it. And poor Garth continued to sell 5 million units every year.
This case will be a little different because NARM will believe they stand to lose as much as the RIAA if mp3's are still distributed. It just sounds like Paul is the designated industry voice in this case, most likely because it will appeal to the people in their 40's and 50's who have more control over what's going on, at least in the legal area.
The whole controversy over mp3's is a smokescreen anyway, just the RIAA wanting control over how music is distributed. The bulk of what you'll find on the Napster is top 40 radio crud that will still sell no matter what. Sure kids'll download a few Britney Spears singles but she isn't going to be missing any of the money. The bands who are really hurting for money, the ones that barely get by anyway, won't miss it either. Bands like that tour and sell T-Shirts. Plus, I've searched the Napster numerous times for bands like Fugazi and I might run across one or two tracks at the most despite the fact that they've sold tens of millions of CD's over the past 15 years. People who like the independent/local bands will continue to buy their product because they want to support them. When the used CD thing happened, I asked a member of a band that was on a major label what he thought and he said to go ahead and buy the used CD because he'll never see any of the money anyway.
Less popular bands are essentially indentured servants to whatever label they are on anyway. The record company might give you a million dollar contract (over 4 or 5 albums, no less) but then they'll want you to make a video and go on tour and guess what, they charge you for that and takeit out of your royalties. Then when it comes time to record your next album, they'll make you pay for the studio time out of your contract as well.
Face it, the RIAA doesn't give a crap about the artist unless the arist is a "radio-friendly unit-shifter" (thanks for the term, Nirvana). They just want to control how the music is distributed.