Slashdot Mirror
At Last And At Length: Lars Speaks
1) Whose decision was it?
by fprintf
Was it your decision, your manager, your lawyers or record company that made the call to go after the Napster users?
Lars Ulrich: Obviously, it was our concern, 'our' meaning the four members of the band. The record company had nothing to do with it whatsoever. There has been no [support] from the record companies; they never instigated anything, so we took it upon ourselves, there was never really much in term of support. There's been the occasional pat on the back, the occasional call, but I would say that I'm quite, I'd say, more than surprised, I'm quite stunned at the lack of communication and input from the record company. Obviously, you know, with record companies we never really usually depend much on what they have to offer in terms of creative things, but I am stunned at the low volume of support from the record company, both publically and privately. That leaves the record company out if it.
The managers? I mean, obviously, Peter and Cliff, our two managers -- they're our closest advisors -- we have been, they've been advising us for 18 years now. Our managers are basically the fifth and the sixth members of the band. They're a total partnership. We view both of them as equal. And they're equally involved in this. And they of course helped strategize, and they filter things and so on, so obviously they're very involved. Our lawyers are obviously involved, but in a different way. I mean, they take -- the six of us strategize, the four of us [in the band] and the two managers, and then we tell the lawyers, obviously like with any situation, confer with the lawyers and give them direction, you know, what to do. The thing that surprises me a little bit about all this stuff is that people that know Metallica well -- and obviously, when you're dealing with something at this level, not everybody knows Metallica well -- but people that know Metallica well know how the inner structure of this thing works. And Metallica is a very very inward. very independent and actually I would say quite selfish unit, in the fact that we sit down and make our decision sort of proudly by ourselves, and work very, very closely with Peter and Cliff, our two managers. The record company's not involved in this, like I said, and the lawyers are more, sort of, they get directed and guided, and obviously we listen to their advice once in a while.
I think the question was who's idea was this. You have to understand one thing, that I am very personally -- when it comes to my relationship with the Internet and with my comptuer, the fact is that we don't spend a lot of time together. So you have to understand that I would never know what Napster was, unless somebody told me about it, you know what I mean? That's what you pay your managers for, you understand? (laughter)
I mean, I can just barely ... I know how to get onto AOL, and I will say that I have used AOL a couple of times to check some hockey scores. When we were in South America last May during the Stanley Cup playoffs. But other than that, it doesn't really amount to much. So you have to understand that I guess the question was 'Whose Idea Was it?' Well, obviously the information gets, comes to us ... now it's a different thing, but where did I first learn of Napster, I learned it from my managers two and a half, three months ago, but now it's a different story. I open ten papers, and just get bombarded with it. Like I said before, I actually find it kind of fascinating. It still hasn't changed my -- I mean I don't spend particularly more time on my computer or anything like that, but I think that this is a very very interesting topic, and forgetting about my role in it for a second, I think that it's just a fascinating topic, and I think it's one that's just so deep and on so many levels that I think -- you were asking before as if it's sort of a pain in the ass, and I'm actually quite enjoying it because I'm learning so much about it also.
2) Time well spent
by cwhicks
With other programs such as Gnutella, Freenet, etc. that are anonymous and are not controlled by a centralized company which you could sue, like Naptser, don't you think that you should be spending your time and money developing your own Internet solutions from which you can profit, rather than trying to push back the flow of technology which will only become more and more difficult to combat?
Lars: Well, I mean, obviously that's a valid question. But the bottom line is, whenever somebody -- whenever somebody, whenever we feel that somebody -- I don't want to sound too combative here, but you know, when somebody fucks with what we do, we go after them. You don't sit down and sort of try and sort of justify yourself, well, 'Maybe our time and energy would be better spent thinking about something a year or two from now.' We feel the story is pretty well documented about how this all sort of came about. We really felt that it was time for somebody, an artist, with a potential of a public platform, to get involved with this. What the RIAA has been doing has obviously been strong, but it has been sort of in a closed legal forum, and we really felt the issue here really is not just about Napster itself, it's also about the perception of what this whole thing means, it's about the perception of the Internet, it's about the perception of what my rights are on the Internet, it's about the perception of how people have become so comfortable with the computer as a tool that they feel they have a right to these things.
So Napster is, I would say that a month into this now, that Napster is really just one of the things that -- obviously there is a clear, specific legal battle going on with Napster, but I find that the other battle which I think is equally important, is the battle in the public forum, about a public debate, about a public dialogue, about presenting different points of view, about respecting different points of view, about everybody having a chance to go out there and say what they feel and so on. That is also important.
Now, are we aware of the Gnutellas and all these other things? Of course we are, but you can only take it one step at a time. And I believe, and the people that we talk to about this, we believe, that the minute some of these companies become active, when they basically come to a point that they become fully funcitonal, we believe that there will be technology and a way to go after them in the way they can invent this technology and make it untraceable. We believe that as quickly as they can make it untraceable we believe that you can find a way to fuck with it, and we have already heard about different ways of doing that. So I think it's clear that there is nothing that people can talk about for the future that becomes bulletproof. So it's sort of like -- the thing about this sort of mob mentality, what we call the 'Internet Extremists,' it's all kind of cute -- 'Yeah, we want to fuck with the system,' 'Yeah, we have a right to get everything for free.' But I believe that if you have the energy and the resources to chase 'em -- and that's one thing we have is a lot of energy and a lot of resources -- We believe that there will never be a point where they will be uncatchable, and we believe that obviously there will come a point, that we will, this is the question that was asked, where we will sit down and figure out what's right for us. Right now, you know, we know what is not right for us, which is Napster. And we know why it's not right for us, which is that we do not condone and want to be part of some kind of illegal trading of our masters through sources we have not authorized, it's that simple.
So of course there will be at some point -- we are not stupid, of course we realize the future of getting music from Metlalica to the people who are interested in Metallica's music is through the Internet. But the question is, on whose conditions, and obviously we want it to be on our conditions. We don't want these 3rd party services like Napster taken for granted, taken for granted that we want to be part of their system. That ultimately is what the biggest beef about this whole thing [is], is that Napster could have so easily avoided this whole thing. It's like, OK, 'It's January, my name is Napster, or I'm Sean, or whoever the CEO was at the time, we have this service, we would like to know if you are interested in being part of it.' If we'd said Yes, then there's no issue, if we'd said No, then this whole thing would have never -- it's really what this is about, it's what this whole thing ultimately comes down to, you know. We own and control these masters, we feel that we're the ones that have the right to decide where they get used. It's a little bit, what we have called the Book-of-the-Month scenario, which is this whole thing about, it sort of ends up being the reverse; we're the ones who look like assholes for chasing after what we feel, for getting off the service. It's a little bit like the book-of-the-month analogy, where you get a book sent to your mailbox once a month. And if you don't return it within 7 days, you have to pay for it. Do you know what I mean? Are we assholes for wanting to get off this service that I was never asked if I wanted to be part of in the first place?
3) Art vs Commodity
by HeghmoH
In several articles about your actions against Napster, you were quoted as saying something like (paraphrased): "Napster takes our music and treats it as a commodity, instead of as art."My question is, how is it that trading your music for free over the internet makes it a simple commodity, but selling it for far too much money through record companies and stores makes it somehow "art"?
Lars: Yeah. I mean, OK, 1st of all, let's start by making sure that I am not the one who decides that a Metallica CD should sell for 16 dollars. That's a whole other arguement, one that at some other time I'd be glad to partake in, OK? I'm a consumer just as much [as anyone else] ... just because somebody feels that that CD is too expensive doesn't give them a right to steal it, in the same way that if I go down to the car dealership and want to buy a new Suburban, and I feel that paying $47,000 for a new Suburban is too expensive, that doesn't give me the right to steal it, right? It's sort of like, you know what, fair enough, I can certainly respect and I would certainly somewhat agree with the fact that paying 16 bucks for a CD is probably, you know, pushing too much. But, it's the marketplace that dictates that, not me. And people who live in the United States live in a Western capitalist society, where most of these things become about marketplace and about fair competitionin the marketplace, and that's what ultimately dictates these prices. That does not soldify that my only other option is to steal is it. My other option is to not buy it.
It does happen in certain other instances. If there is a full-on consumer boycott of a product, whether it's toothpaste or Suburbans or CDs, sooner or later the people whose livelihood depends -- not the artists, but the companies who are selling these toothpaste or CDs or whatever, will take note. But the way to combat a $16 CD as being unfair is not to go out and steal it, that just bcomes sort of the anarchy, the mob rules. But the reason that I will say, of all these things that I've been quoted as saying in the last month on this, I would say that the quote that this person refers to is probably not one of my finer moments. What I was trying to say by that was ... there's one thing that people kind of keep forgetting, which is that Napster, they have this sort of innocent smirk in front of their face and they hold up their hand and they go 'We're not really pirates, we're not really doing anything illegal, we're just offering a service,' but what people have to remember, and obviously some of this has developed in the last month, is that Napster is a corporation, OK? They just got $15 million in funding from some of the major venture capitalists out here. They have all along, ultimately getting to the point where they could have a major IPO, which is the one option, or get basically bought out by an AOL type of company. So at some point there will be a major, major profit going on for the people who've invested in Napster. And that money is basically the same as profiting from stolen property.
Understand one thing: this is not about a lot of money right now, because the money that's being lost right now is really pocket change, ok? It's about the priciple of the thing and it's about what could happen if this kind of thing is allowed to exist and run as rampant and out of control for the next 5 years as it has been for the last 6 months. Then it can become a money issue. Right now it's not a money issue. I can guarantee you it's costing us tenfold to fight it in lawyer's fees, in lawyers' compensation, than it is for measly little pennies in royalties being lost, that's not what it's about. And also, we're fortunate enough that we sell so many records though the normal channels. Where it can affect people, where it is about money, is for the band that sells 600 copies of their CD, ok? If they all of a sudden go from selling 600 copies of their CD down to 50 copies, because the other 550 copies get downloaded for free, that's where it starts affecting real people with real money. And so I don't know if I've sort of been jumping around a lot, it's just that there's all these points of view that tie into it. So back to the question again, the 'commodity' really becomes about it being traded around illegally, and rather than the art that it is. OK, that wasn't the finest quote ever, but that was also the first quote, six weeks ago. And we've all come a long way since then, including us.
4) home taping vs. napster
by commodoresloat
Have you read the 1989 OTA Report (http://www.wws.princeton.edu:80/%7Eota/disk1/1989/8910_n.html) on home taping, which concluded that so-called "bootlegging" was no threat to music industry profits, and that it in fact served as free advertising? It turned out that the users making tapes illegally were also both more likely to buy more music themselves and more likely to encourage other fans to do so. While obviously the technology has improved significantly since 1989, aren't we really dealing with the same issues?
Lars: Well, 1st of all, you have to remember that you're talking to somebody who advocates bootlegging, who has alwyas been pro-bootlegging. We have always let fans tape our shows, we've always had a thing for bootlegging live materials, for special appearances, for that type of stuff. Knock yourselves out, bootleg the fuck out of it, we don't give. We believe that there is a major, major difference between the old -- obviously one of the scenarios we hear a lot ... 'How is it different from home taping?' I guess is really the question. You know, home taping 10 or 15 years ago really was about, you had vinyl records, and you had the neighbor down the street with you know, his Iron Maiden records, that you wanted to make a tape of so you can play in your car. There is a difference, I think, let me think of a word here, I'm sorry, all of a sudden your mind goes blank (laughter), comparing that kind of home taping to basically going on the Internet and getting 1st generation, perfect digital copies of master recordings from all the world, is just not a fair comparison. We're talking about a network that includes millions and millions of people, and tens and tens of millions of songs that these millions of people have, they can trade. So the old 'home taping is killing music,' well, OK, so you borrow your neighbor's Iron Maiden record, blah blah blah, you know, some guy down at school. There is a long way from that to what's going on right now with perfect first-generation digital copies of music that's available to millions of poeple all over the world. We -- it's not so much once again, it's not so much -- look, our record sales have gone up in the last three weeks, OK? We obviously follow and monitor this. It's not so much about whether it hurts or whether it benefits.
What it ultimately comes down to, and this is really the simplest way of saying it, is 'Who controls it?' And I want the right to control what is mine. And if I decide to give -- I respect the next guy, who wants to put his music on Napster, but I want him to respect the fact that maybe I don't. It's that simple. It's really the point. This is what the whole point of this country is, you have the right to make your own choices in this country, and we were not given that right. People take for granted that our music should be out there and be traded. What if we don't advocate that? They shouldn't argue with that. Napster has the right to exist. I support Napster's right to exist, OK? But I want them to support my right to not be part of it.
And that's where it got, sort of like, wacky, because we believe that when they sat down -- this is another misconception in the last couple weeks, this whole thing about 'Metallica serves Napster with 300,000 names.' You have to remember, they asked for this, OK? That's a point that not a lot of people include. They asked. They said, "If you can give us the Names (ha ha), of people that are doing this (ha ha ha) and we'll take them off (ha ha ha)," like you can't. It was sort of like a dare. And then we hired somebody to basically -- and they could have gotten, you also have to reremember once again, , they [Napster] could have gotten that information themselves. So it became once again our burden, back to the book-of-the-month or the cd-of-the-month scenario. You know, I have to go out to my mailbox, I have to pick this fucking book up, I have to send it back where it come from so I don't get charged for it.
The burden is on me again, I have to sit there with these guys, the names of people trading our music. And you have to remember, the only thing that Napster really has, because legally they realize that it's very very thin, the only thing they have is sort of a public thing where they can pit Metallica fans against Metallica. That's the only thing, that's sort of their, that's their only strong thing, is trying to make us look like assholes in the eyes of the fans, and they're doing, I think they're doing a pretty good job of that. And it's sort of pathetic, because the fight is really obviously between Metallica and Napster. It's unfortunate that the fans become pawns in this, but understand a couple of things. The 300,000 names that were removed from Napster, ok, we believe, from who we've consulted, that Napster has the technology to block Metallica songs off its service, so it's not just about ... we go to them with a piece of information: 'This guy has traded among other things, Metallica songs.' So they take him off the service instead of just taking the Metallica songs off the service. Do you understand? Then this guy hates us, we become the assholes, and that's what they're trying to build their counter case on. And that's kind of a little bit sad I think, it's kind of pathetic that that's really the only shot they have, and obviously because they realize they don't have any shots legally. I don't think it's a fair comparison with 1989.
5) Is your speech free?
by Frank Sullivan
Are you free to answer any way you please in this interview? Or has your label requested that your responses to our questions be reviewed by their lawyers before being posted back to Slashdot? And if so, did you agree to this?
Lars: I think it should be pretty obvious to most people that I am really on my own here. What I know about it, most it comes from reading and educating myself on it. I feel I know a lot about this. Every day, I get all the press sent to my office, I spend the first 2 hours of the day reading, catching up to date with what's going on. Nobody tells me what to say, I don't have to check with anybody. That's sort of the thing we talked about 20 minutes ago, that is somebody who doesn't know Metallica very well, because somebody who knows Metallica konws that the 19 years we have been on our own, we have fought every battle on our own, we don't take anything from anybody. We take advice from our two managers, but ultimately we override them a lot. We are very, very -- about as independent as I believe it's possible to be in this business. But I should also say that we are, we're also, this is going to sound -- make sure you don't edit this! -- we're also, I know this is going to sound like we're full of ourselves, but I know we're also quite smart. And we treat the business side of what we do with respect, and we deal with it as a business so it doesn't interfere with the creative elements of what we do. We try and keep the creative things and the business things as two very separate entities, because my big fear is always that the creative side of what we do can never be influenced, or dictated, or polluted, by what happens in the business side of it. So we are very good at separating the two issues, and we treat the business with the respect that it deserves, because if you do not respect the business side of it, you can get fucked. This, the music world, is littered with the careers of people who did not pay enough attention to the business side of what they were doing and ended up getting majorly fucked.
6) Ignorance of the net?
by imac.usr
In the live chat, you admitted to not being very knowledgable about the Internet or about the technology behind Napster and MP3s. What kind of research on these subjects did you do prior to filing the lawsuit?
Lars: As I said, we were not very knowlegeable about it when we started. Research, research. I mean, we tried to get information from a bunch of different sources. We will always, when we feel we are ignorant about something, we always try to get enough information, we try not to make any decisions until we feel we have the full picture. So obviously, talking to people who knew about Napster, who knew how to operate it, who were dealing with it. People who know about it. We don't sit down and study a Napster operations manual or something, but sitting down and talking with people who understand it. There, you have to remember that Napster came pretty much out of nowhere. I mean, I think I first heard the word Napster probably in December or January, I remember somebody telling me about this "new thing that we're going to hear a lot about in a couple of months," and that guy was right. A lot of the people who advise me are very Internet savvy.
You have to understand one thing; I don't use the Internet a lot in my daily life, personally, because I choose to pick up the phone rather than send somebody an email. That's OK, that's my right, it's a little more comfortable. It doesn't mean I hate the Internet, it doesn't mean I despise the Internet. You know, I respect it, I understand that it plays a major role in a lot of people's lives. But I do also -- and this is one of the things that fascinates me about this whole thing -- I do also see things about the Internet being something that people I think taking for granted, that they're becoming so comfortable with it that the feel they have a right to any piece of information that comes to them through the Internet. The Internet is changing our perception about a lot of things, it's changing our perception about almost everthing around them in society.
And to me, it's just about treading kind of carefully and trying to sort of point a few things out that if you have downloaded music through your computer for the last little bit of time, understand one thing, that's been a privilege, not a right. That's been a privilege you've had; you don't have a right to download my music until I tell you, until the person who owns that music tells you that you can do it. Until then, it's been a privilege that's basically been the result of incompetence and lack of focus by the record labels, and that I don't think the record labels for the last couple of years have paid attention to this. I think that there's been a major, major wakeup call in the last couple of months. The hardest thing for all the major labels is it's very difficult for them to get together and work something out betwenn them. The hardest thing also about this is it becomes very hard to write laws and to generalize accross the board. Because to me this is about individual choices. So you can't sit there and say 'I think Napster doesn't have a right to exist,' because there are people who want to use a service like Napster, but at the same time you also can't sit there and say 'Everyone has to be part of a service like Napster,' because there are people who choose not to. It gets kind of complicated from a legal aspect, and that's where I think the record companies have really let this get to the point where it's at right now, by not being more on top of it, and I think somebody pointed out I think a very very valid thing the other day, that all the people, that are sitting right now, the Sean Fannings of the world, and the guy in Ireland, and all these Internet guys that are sitting there coming up with all these programs and all this stuff, you know what? The record companies should have hired those guys 5 years ago. That is the biggest single fuck-up that they did, was basically letting those guys get to the other side.
7) Skip the Record Company
by cwhicks
How much money do you get from the sale of each CD, and how much goes to the record company? Would you be interested in a system that allows you to circumvent the record company, sell your music for half the price you do now, and get quadruple the cut that Metallica gets on each sale? The internet has the potential to offer such a system.
Lars: Of course, of course. That's something that we have been anticipating for years. For years! I mean, five years ago we had that conversation. Of course, at some point we will get to a place that's close to that. I look at it this way. I believe that there are four -- oh shit! (Lars takes care of something in the background) -- I believe that there are sort of like four links in the food chain here. You've got the artist, you've got the record company, you've got the retailer, and then you've got the consumer. And everybody within the industry has been talking for years about, that ... different people have different opinions; some people think that the record company is going to go away, and others think the retailer is going to go away, and some people think that both are going to go away. What you have to remember is, it's only bands who are fortunate enough to be at the level that we're at that have the option of maybe circumventing the record companies and the retailer.
Because what really, essentially, is a record company? A record company is really essentially a bank, a bank that funds a bunch of money to make records, and videos and promotion, publicity appearances and so on, and they take that shot that one day the artist is going to be so successful that they're going to first of all get all their money back, second of all make a profit. So I'm not necessarily particularly pro-record company, but I do feel that the record companies, they've taken a big beating, because I think people are just very quick to jump on the record company, sort of the Chuck D's of the world -- "Record companies are greedy, it's about lawyers, it's about accountants."
That to me is a little too black and white, because you have to remember that statistically, for every one band that you hear about, for every one band that a record company helps make successful, they lose their fucking shirt on the nine other ones you never hear about, so it's -- that's a whole other conversation that I could talk about for hours and hours, the whole thing about the record companies. But record companies will never be completely extinct, for one reason and one reason only, that there will always be a need to develop younger artists, and record companies will always be able to play a big part of that, because this whole thing about "I'm a young band, I'm an upstart band, I'm going to put my music on Napster, and then I'm going to become successful?" Fantasy. The only way you you will become successful is by having a publicity and promotion campaign behind you that elevates what you're doing above what your competition is doing.
It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time. You can sit there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band. The record companies will never be extinct, because there will always be a need down at that level. Now where the record companies can become circumventable is when you're fortunate enough -- key word, fortunate enough, to be at our level, where you don't depend on the record company to front you a bunch of money, because you're fortunate enough to have a big pile of it yourself, and you don't necessarily need a record company to publicize, to promote you, because you're sort of kind already at that level. Yes, of course, the scenario that the gentleman asked in the question is very, very possible, and we've been looking at that for a long time. And when we are done with our record contract, I would say that something in that direction is somehwere between a real possibility and a certainty.
8) Question to Lars and the band
by acb
You mentioned that we need laws banning file-sharing software such as Napster. How far should these laws go? If in 10 years time, computer users labour under draconian restrictions on communications software under what is titled the Lars Ulrich Digital Copy Enforcement Act, to the effect that sharing music files (of any sort) without the digital signature of a major record label or copyright authority becomes grounds for loss of Internet access and/or legal sanctions, how will you feel about the fans and small-time bands whose attempts at networking are crippled by these restrictions?
Lars: Yeah, I would say that I have certainly through the course of this in the last month, absorbed what I've learned, and listened to other people and respected other people's opinons, and I have come to actually change my position from, I believe that if it's not Napster, then a type of service like Napster has the right to exist, on the condition that the only thing being traded through that service is music by people, artists and owners who have given that service permission. So that obviously changes the thrust of what he was saying.
I believe ultimately -- and this is sort of what I was talking about before -- that the hardest thing about this is to try and come up with a system where it becomes an individual's right to choose how he will want to partake in this sort of stuff through the Internet. That's the hardest thing because it becomes very difficult, it's very difficult to generalize, like I said before. It's not fair to sit there and say, 'Napster can't exist,' because there are people who would like to use it. And it's not fair to sit there and say 'It has to exist and you have to be part of it,' for the people who don't want to use it. That's where it gets really tricky. There are people who are far smarter than me on this, people that will ultimately ... I believe that five years from now, there will be systems in place where the artists and the owners of the intellectual property -- and remember, we're not just talking about music.
And that's one of the fascinating thing here, is that we're not just talking about music. Why is this a music issue right now? The reason it's a music issue right now is because, of major intellectual property, music is the one that is shortest in information right now, therefore it's the most easily transferrable where technology's sitting right now. We believe based on the people we hired that we're probably not more than a year away from where you can basically download Mission Impossible 2 the same day that it opens in the theatre, and basically watch it on a great computer with a great sound system and maybe even find a way to hook it up to a big monitor in your house or whatever. And when that happens, when the next Tom Clancy or whatever -- when the minute they become available, the minute you can download a 1200 page book five minuntes after it's released in a bookstore, you will find that other owners of intellectual properties, not just musicians, will come out there and [fight].
There's a lot of us on the inside who are sort of dealing with this right now, who are like 'You know what? it would be great if you could download fucking movies right now," because you know what? Hollywood would come out fucking swinging. The may be now, but it's still early. If you look at a baseball analogy, I'd say with music we're probably, I'd say we're in the maybe 5th or 6th inning as far as where we are, how far it can go, you know what I mean? I think with movies we're possibly still in the 1st or 2nd inning. I think there will be a major awakening in Hollywood in the next 6 months, and it's not just about music. This is about intellectual property, this is about the perception of intellectual property. Who owns intellectual property, how has the computer changed the majority of people's perception of intellectual property in the last 6 months? And how will intellectual property be reachable to the people out there who are on the receiving end of intellectual property ten years from now? You know, those are the major things that really need to be worked on.
But one of the main things that needs to be worked on for the next year, I think, one of the great things I think, is the public debate about it. People sit there and feel that they have the right to this, and then when they start getting mroe information about this, a lot of people have a tendency to start realizing some of the points we're trying to make, they start seeing things from a little bit of a different point of view, and ultimately that's a great accomplishment. I believe that a lot of people that are saying a lot of nasty things about some of the stuff right now are doing it out of sort of like a passionate ignorance. And I find that most of the people I talk to at a number of different levels, whether intellectual or a little more layman's, or media, or fans, or Newsweek ... whatever, that people start getting it, at least to the point that they say "We respect your right to not want to be part of this, if you respect" -- which we clearly do -- "our right to be part of this."
9) Just something to think about...
by GrnHrnt
I'm a huge Metallica fan. Lars is the reason I'm a drummer today. But something in an interview with James from "Behind the music" (I think) when he was talking about how he started to like the Misfits, when Cliff gave him a tape and they played it in the van all summer long, made me curious. Have any of you (Metallica) ever copied a tape, record, 8-track, CD, etc. from a friend? This is an infringement of copyright isn't it? I don't mean to make you seem evil, but is it simply the scale of Napster/mp3's that is of concern?
Lars: Yeah, I mean I think we answered that before. Of course we have, ok? And of course it's a valid point. The bottom line is the size of it. The size of it and the quality of it. When we go in, and check Napster out, we come up with 1.4 million copyright infringements in 48 hours, this is a different thing than trading cassette tapes with your buddy at school. I mean, 48 hours! So it's the quality, the quality and the scale.
Thanks go out to Sue Tropio and Gayle Fein of QPrime for their help in arranging this interview.
Shit, an all out effort to ignore Metallica and look what happens. Isn't that right dave.
Either whoever interviewed Lars decided to be "creative" with the resulting answers, or Lars needs some hyperactivity meds. /. care to comment? Seriously - I can't follow half of the answers Lars supposedly gave... and I've seen the guy talk in person - one of the more concise/clearly-spoken people I've met.
Anyone from
Actually, it sounds like they wanted (want) to work with it but were never asked. There's a slight difference.
His and the bands loss, unfortunately, in the end.
I can see Lars main point: If it was a small amount, yeah, it'll generate enough buzz to get the high-quality CD out. But 1.4 *MILLION* in 48 hours?!?
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Hi Lars! Good to hear from you. Now, look at _this_:
mp3.com/ChrisJ Go there- and just for the sake of argument, pick up "Dragons" (a pretty innovative electronic album I did- you ought to appreciate the time signatures, nothing is 4/4. Plus the sound is fully professional)
Got it? Good. Lars, I just circumvented the record companies and the retailer- all without stepping on _your_ rights one bit. How's that grab you?
I'll be more specific- hope you guys get to read this, you're clearly sharp enough to understand what I'm telling you. Lars, the mp3.com contract is an experienced musician's wet dream- try comparing it to, say, farmclub.com's contract! You continue to own your music, and in fact you own the mechanicals. You get to back out and mp3.com LOSES license rights if you do, save only what they need to sell or use any existing materials (and they print to order, so there wouldn't be much of that). Here's a big one that you'd know about and not so many other people would be hip to- the mp3.com contract is subject to revision ONLY with the consent of both parties (I see you nodding your head, you'd know about contracts that are unilaterally changeable without consent of the artist- part of the 'being fucked' you mentioned).
But that's only part of it: Lars, I have a fan running around evangelising my music (especially that "Dragons" album) like crazy. I've put up some posters, and got hit with an unexpected 'rip fee' that caused them to cost about 30$: this is chicken feed. I've sold some CDs, and lots of people have downloaded my music. The equipment is my hobby and avocation- it's like a guitar player collecting guitars.
Lars, I've already broken even, in a very real sense. How long did it take you guys to recoup your advances when you were first signed? You're one of the few acts that ever manage to do that, and it's because the record companies are still stuck in the mindset where you drag people into billion-dollar studios and put the result through billion-dollar mastering houses, or you don't even do anything. With that mindset, it's no wonder most artists don't recoup their advances.
Well- I grew up (I'm 31) at the end of the era where mastering records was the realm of big rich companies. I saw the rise of home recording (shitty though it was- woohoo for cassette 4-tracks! ;) ) and getting 1000 records pressed for 999$. And I watched as CDs were invented, initially so crappy, as digital recording became so widespread and the bloom went off the rose and people started trying to do better than the initial cruddy 'perfect sound forever' ripoff, and now it's 2000.
Let me tell you what I have at home, now. I'm still making payments on a 20-bit, 48Khz ADAT- eight-track recorder. It doesn't record on 50$ rolls of impossible-to-find reel-to-reel tape: it records on S-VHS cassettes that only run about $10 for 40 minutes of recording. I have plans for getting a CD-R burner- and borrow one when I need it badly enough. Blanks are a couple bucks absolute max. I print cheap art out on an inkjet printer- but to get serious, the local copy shop has a Color Laser Copier. Damn thing prints better than most glossy magazines, totally colorfast, and at just a dollar a copy plus a 14$ rip fee for when I bring them a disk with the CMYK separations on it, to use the copier as my own personal imagesetter...
Are you beginning to get the picture, Lars? This is all about your remark about circumventing the record companies and the retailer. The fact is, you and I are both old enough to remember when you couldn't produce anything but CRAP out of your home- xeroxed covers from paste-up artwork, having dual-cassette decks going 24/7, all that rot and the result always reeked of 'demo'.
But those days are GONE now. Yes, most musicians still don't have the expertise or resources or experience to put together a total package that rivals what the record companies (expensively) manage to put together. But dude- some of us do, and there will be more and more.
That leaves only distribution- and that's the easy part, there are a million 'e-businesses' dying to get anywhere _near_ the markup routinely charged by the music biz.
The fact is, Lars, everybody gets to circumvent the record companies and retailers now, and you don't even have to accept a loss in quality- DIY, or hire your own people who're good enough, and you're rolling. Copy shops are outputting printed paper as good or better than major label pressing houses. Project studios are kicking the asses of big mastering houses and 128-track monster studios (not hard- when the output media is only 16/44K). It didn't used to be that way as we both know, but now things are very different.
Good luck on getting free of your own record company entanglements- I own my masters, dunno if you guys own yours, and that could be a ball and chain for you. One thing that is very clear from hearing you out, is this: the record companies are _using_ you, man. They are letting you take all the heat for doing what _they_ want done, and they're not helping you, even. They should at least take responsibility for the fact that you're doing _their_ work. At least the old adage "no such thing as bad publicity" is still true! But you don't owe them any respect- I, like many people, expected that all this was driven by the record companies. Imagine my surprise to discover that, yes, they love seeing this happening, yes it's for their benefit, but they are letting a lot of people ruin you guys' reputation and they're not even SUPPORTING you? That's disgusting.
That changes things, for me. I have no gripe with you guys. My complaint is with the labels- my action is to MAKE MUSIC and put it out there without using them in the slightest way. Reading that the labels are letting you fight this whole fight on your own- it disgusts me. You're paying for the lawyers and stuff out of your own pockets? The labels are the primary beneficiaries, they've made God knows how much off you over the years, and they won't even cover the cost of a damn lawyer to protect _their_ interests? That's disgusting! You're being fucked- start making plans for what you're going to do when they no longer own your ass, that's all I can say.
Hope you like my tunes- feel free to make copies for your friends :)
I think a very interesting point that a lot of people are overlooking here is, who says the music industry has some innate right to exist? Who says that it has to be possible to become a millionaire by playing in a rock band?
Evolution and natural selection don't cause individual organisms to adapt to their environment. The primary tool of evolution is extinction.
Industries arise, thrive, and eventually die. Some of them take thousands of years, some far less long.
The music industry as we know it has existed for just about sixty years. Sixty years!
What happened before that? Did we not have music before that? Of course we did. We just didn't have millionaire musicians. We had millionaires, of course, but they did that in other ways.
This is how the free market works. Sometimes, in a profitable industry, the bottom drops out, and you can no longer make money doing it. (Try making money selling web browsers today, for example. Or gas lamps.) The people who are in that dying industry will fight as hard as they can to stave off the inevitable, because it's in their best interest to do so. But that doesn't mean that they have some fundamental right to the continuance of the status quo. Just because it has been that way doesn't mean it will always be that way, or that it's somehow a natural right for it to have ever been that way.
That said, I think this was a great interview, and I'm really glad Lars agreed to it. I understand their point of view a lot better now.
(However, Slashdot folks -- SPELL CHECK! It would have caught the zillion typos you made when transcribing Lars's words.)
If things continue this way, the company that invents and creates the replicator would be sued to oblivion before its potential could be fully realized.
Nah, the schematics would be posted all over the net, and we'd all be running around in t-shirts with the schematics printed on them.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I've been a Metallica fan for the last dozen or so years. I was really pretty ticked off when they sued Napster, because I felt they were missing the target. I wasn't one of those people who was wanting to burn all my Metallica cds and t-shirts and whatnot, but I was annoyed. After reading this interview though, I can see why Lars is upset and why they felt they needed to do something right away, even if don't think it was the right thing.
Now, I think Napster does bear some responsibility here. They operate and profit from the service they provide. They told Metallica what they would have to do (i.e. give them a list of names) in order for Napster to comply with their wishes. I think Lars is right that Napster didn't really think they'd do it, and now that they did, it's being used as a PR club against Metallica. I think it's pretty obvious that the users who were banned were committing copyright infringement, simply because they were allowing anyone to copy their mp3s without any verification of whether that person owns the right to that music.
I think the heart of the matter is that Metallica does have the right to enforce its copyrights, which is what they seem to be doing here. Unfortunately, the way Napster is set up, anyone who allows others to download copyrighted music (that they don't hold the copyright to) from their drives is potentially committing copyright infringement. Now not everyone is actually infringing, because I'm sure that in many of the cases, both the host user and the client user own a copy of the music. Unfortunately, there is no way to distinguish unless you can identify the people and verify that they own the right to a copy of the music. Since that is probably not feasible, we have a problem.
How do artists protect their copyrights without bankrupting themselves with consultant and lawyer fees, while at the same time not interfering with legitimate copying? This is something that needs a solution before the government and the RIAA get together and come up with their own solution, which I can guarantee we won't like.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
The record industry doesn't seem to do all that much to sell the bands except to get them played on the radio and tv. If a band gets a decent amount of radio play, and mtv play, they get popular. Now, the record companies can fund the making of albums and videos, which is why Lars is saying that they're like banks, and that they, or some similar entity, will always be necessary in some capacity. I haven't found fault with his statement yet, so I think he's right about that. Someone has to front the money for the expensive stuff, and whoever it is is going to expect a return on that investment. You can't do it through ordinary banks because that just isn't something that they will fund. Record companies play an active role in the process, and they know the business, which is why they are willing to fund these artists. I'd really like to see an alternative to this situation. MP3.com is a good start, and it would be nice if radio stations would work with companies like that, but they don't front money to the bands for videos and studio time, and if they did, they'd probably want the control, and a return on it just like the record companies.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Credit card numbers may not even be necessary. Most software companies don't require them and they still manage to make a nice profit.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
You could be right. At least partially. But remember that not all performers actually perform live. Many make their music electronically and each song takes quite a long time to assemble. This sort of performance cannot be performed live. I'm sure people can think of other similar cases. We need to be fair to all types of artists. I would hope that in the absence of traditional copyright laws, people would continue to support the artists they like so that those artists have the means to continue to do what they love and keep providing us with what we want. I think this is a lot more likely to happen in the internet age when most or all of the middlemen are cut out. Music and other art ends up costing a lot less, therefore we can all buy more of it and support more artists work.
It seems like a win-win situation. I can only hope it works out that way. It's hard to be optimistic about it though. People often think only short-term and take the cheap way out. This is often enforced by our corporate culture where quarterly profits are everything, damn the environment, workers rights, etc.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Lars sez that that it's all bout control. He's right. The MPAA, the RIAA, the SPAA all exist for one purpose: to give corporations and commercial entities absolute control over culture, usually with copyright being used as the bludgeon.
Here's the deal, tho...copyright law was not devised to give an absolute monopoly to those who create and distribute intellectual property. It was designed to take that monopoly -away-.
The Statute of Anne, enacted by British Parliment in 1710, marks not only the beginning of copyright law, but the fabled "Age of Reason". The Statute of Anne broke the absolute publishing monopolies granted to the Stationers, with the express intent to facilitate learning and a free exchange of ideas. Authors were granted rights to their own works, and given control of them for a period of 30 years, after which the rights would pass into the public domain. Considering the information infrastructure in 1710, this enabled philosophy, mathematics, history, science and other scholarly works to spread like wildfire through the intellectual community, ushering in the modern age.
The US constituition has a provision for copyright lifted whole from British copyright law, with the same stated purpose: to encourage the dissemination of ideas and knowledge. Over the past century, the freedoms of US citizens in regards to the public domain have been whittled away to nearly nothing by corporate special interest, returning us to a situation similar to England's Stationers prior to the statute of Anne, with important cultural and educational works .
Here's the deal: culture is participatory. People share books, movies, music, photos, magazine articles, what have you. The free flow of information and ideas is instinctual. Does lars think all of his drum work, all of the guitar riffs created by his band members, even the style of his entire band, was created in a vacuum? What if the old blues men went to court to assert "control" of how their work was being used?
I have as much sympathy for lars and their record label as I do for buggywhip manufacturers. Civilization has -changed-...technology has taken back the ground lost to copyright and reinstated the public domain by fait accomplii. It's -possible- to "fuck with" new technologies that share culture and the free flow of ideas with guaranteed anonymity, and it's something totalitarian regimes like China and Singapore are working very, very hard on. Does Metallica feel so comfortable in the company of tyrants?
SoupIsGood Food
IMHO, this is exactly what Lars was saying. He doesn't want conflict, but would rather have equal rights to everyone else.
IMHO, anyone who puts their own wants above others needs or rights deserves a visit from the Phantom Flan Flinger. (Tiswas, anyone?)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Errrmmmm
I doubt it was to make the guy look like a moron. They said it was difficult to get hold of anyone, the interview seems to have been conducted over the phone, and you know what the alternative to a verbatim account is; clean it up, send the final version back for approval, and then post it....
Maybe they didn't want to wait another 6 months to post the interview. :-) Anyway, I suspect they asked "you mind if we just run exactly what you said" and he agreed....
dylan_-
--
Igor Presnyakov stole my hat
I think they're missing the point of Napster a bit. Napster was created with the valid purpose of providing a way for users to share MP3s of thier choice, not provide an outlet for certain bands' music to be traded.
While Metallica still has valid reasons to be pissed at Napster, I don't think they really understand how the service is intended to work. Napster is great in concept, but perhaps they do need to do thier best to filter songs from bands that request it. Granted, that can never be done perfectly, but it should be available.
On a side note, I wonder how Metallica determined that the 1.4 million donwloads of Metallica songs were _actually_ copyright violations. I mean, I downloaded Metallica songs during that period, but not any that I didn't already own on CD. Thus, none of my downloads were violations: I just didn't want to spend the time ripping them myself. How can anyone know how many real violations are occuring??
--
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
I *am* against copyright, but not against rewarding public goods, even if it means violating some rights. Copyright does some good by encouraging the creation of information, but it also does some harm by reducing the number of people who can access information, and the ways they can access it. They also do harm by restricting the creation of derivative works, and thus resulting in needless duplication of works (the GPL has this same problem, or at least fails to solve it). In my opinion, the harm outweighs the good often enough that another system could be much better overall.
.. not to a IP thief.
Copyright does not limit who can access information; it limits who can distribute said information. There's a big difference. The whole point of copyright is that it only applies to published works, published meaning accessible. You can't copyright something that no one can view publicly. I know this because I just went through the copyright procedures for our web site, and our lawyers wouldn't let us include anything that was a) a derivative work and b) code that wasn't visible (eg. code that generated code, SSIs, etc.). Copyright is only viewed as limiting when people can't access it the way they want, but copyrighted information is always accessible. It has to be, or it can't be copyrighted.
And while we're at it, there's two different types of rights. There's rights which are deemed 'inalienable' in that they exist because of existence. These include life, speech, individual liberty, decision, and several others. Then there are rights which exist because of laws. These include the right to vote (yes, voting is right for those countries that assign it), copyright (which is a right given to someone to distribute works), right to bear arms, right to privacy, etc. Just because you don't think the law shouldn't make it a right doesn't mean that it's not. Anarchists may not believe in laws, but that doesn't mean that they still don't live under them. You cannot walk into a court of law for a copyright violation and say to the judge, "Artists don't have that right!". The judge will look at you, laugh, slap you with a fine and tell you you have a law-given right to appeal. Then you can exercise your God-given right to decide whether or not to exercise that right.
So, to sum it up, who should we listen to about rights? You, who wants to plant your garden and then make a much-failed copyright example out of it, or the law, under which the rest of our social organization lives and functions? I'll listen the law
As an example, let's say that someone posts the full text of an entire collection of novels on Usenet. The author of those novels finds the owner of the account who is responsible for posting them and, instead of targetting Usenet and seeking to 'shut it down', takes action against the individual responsible for the distcint criminal act.
I thought Lars addressed this very well. USENET is different because it's a decentralized organization. USENET is just a network, a tool that people use for the transfer of this information and no one really controls it. Napster is different. People at Napster have setup this service which they are making money off of that facilitates the distribution of this stolen material. To take Lars' Suburban example, it's as if someone setup a shop where people could take their stolen cars and give them to other people, sort of a market. If it's a free market and people are doing this there, they go after the people selling, but if it's a specially setup market owned by someone who lets this happen right under their noses and who is fully aware this is happening, they'll go after that owner. Basically, the Napster folks are making money off facilitating a large amount of provably illegal activity.
Napster is not just a provider or tool here, but an actual facilitator, and that's where Lars his making his distinction. Personally, I think it'sp pretty valid.
Thats means there were...counting on fingers and toes... 28000 copyrighted songs to every song by an unsigned artist.
All songs, including those by unsigned artists, are copyrighted as soon as they are fixed onto a physical medium. Even songs without explicit copyright notices or on which such a notice has been intentionally omitted are copyrighted under the international Berne Convention, in effect in most countries including the United States.
There seems to be a lot of comments about Lars' poor grammar and what not. Did it not occur to some of you people that this was a transcribed audio interview (but don't try getting a copy and posting it on napster). If you do a word for word transcription of most people it sounds like that.
I think Lars makes a really good point where he talks about the scale of the whole thing. 1.4 million in a weekend, I can believe that stat (some of the other ones I question). That would be somewhere around 100000 albums. Sure not everyone would buy one, but some people would.
An interesting point which he alluded to, but didn't finish is something about emerging bands. Sure it provides an excellent way to get songs to the masses. But what happens once they are signed and people continue to trade all their songs on Napster or Gnutella or FreeNet? What then? Being signed once, they are now a commercial bust with no hope of becoming a commercial success. Which, despite what your saying and cursing under your breath right now, is what it's all about.
I think that Lars/Metallic and other bands would be much more open to a system where it was done on a permission level for bands and songs. It's quite clear that Lars has no problem with people trading bootlegs so they would probably allow those on such a service, but I don't imagine he want's people trading ReReLoad or whatever the next album is, two days after it comes out.
It's clear that Metallica has done their research on this issue, and Lars' shows that (after all who would openly admit to using AOL), so we should give them some credit for that. All of you people that think the record company put them up to this should go back to reading your conspiracy books and try to figure out who killed JFK.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
"rights" may not be the most sensible way to think of what you can do with a CD, given how difficult it is to define these things reasonably. A more sensible way to think of it is in terms of ethics and honesty; in terms of morality rather than legality. If you tape a friend's CD, or rip it to MP3s, that in itself doesn't hurt the performer; though you are morally obliged to buy a copy if you intend to make a habit of listening to it. If you own a CD, lending it to a friend is OK, but putting it online for millions of strangers to download for free is obviously quite wrong.
Actually, that's not quite true. One could certainly sue websites hosting (or even linking to) Gnutella, as the MPAA have done with DeCSS. Whether they'd win or not is another question, though if they stand a decent chance, the lawsuit itself can serve as an intimidation tool.
Do you try to stop the specification from being spread, or do you attack the myriad clients that pop up?
Well, most war3z p1mpz aren't going to code their own clients from scratch just to trade the latest Britney album, so if the same personnel whose job it is to search for pirate sites and take them down add Gnutella clients to their list of targets, that will keep Gnutella from having too much of an effect. Network effects are both its strength and weakness, and the fewer people are using the system, the less powerful it is.
And if you start filtering by packets, what's to stop someone from releasing a trivial change to the packet format that makes it untraceable again?
...and breaking all existing clients. Such defensive mutation will fragment the Gnutella network to the point where there are many small, mutually incompatible networks, which sort of defeats the purpose.
An example: why didn't Microsoft rewrite the Windows API every year or so to lock out competitors? Not because they're nice guys, but because they couldn't.
Thanks! nicely put. I think because math, csci, and programming in general are such rigid disciplines, people less knowledgable of them are at a great disadvantage. A writer might find my grammer and writing style crappalicious, but it's pretty hard to prove it.
Yeah, and I've never understood why there is a perception that they're not. It might go back to the fact that it's hard to prove it. But people who are gifted at art or whatever are no less intelligent as a whole--just misguided:)
Excerpts from the Napster debate on Charlie Rose have been posted, but the whole interview is 20 minutes long. It's available (as a video or transcript) from 1-800-ALL-NEWS (1-800-255-6397).
The cameras do record Chuck D's bemused look while Lars is trying to explain technical issues (like how MP3s are perfect digital reproductions of the original masters).
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
This mob rule mentality that has been adopted by many here is complete bullshit.
Actually, it's not. The Watts riots are a lousy analogy, unless the looters ran around 'copying' TV sets and home appliances without so much as tapping on a window or rattling a lock.
The Boston Tea Party, while not perfect, is a much better analogy.
But there needs to be a way for people to opt-out.
Fair enough. Good luck.
Bottom Line: Metallica and EVERY OTHER BAND distributed on Napster should be forced to PAY Napster for the free exposure and mind-share their service has provided. The book in you mail-slot will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
**>>BELCH
i think it's great that slashdot didn't edit out the comments and left that for us to pull out what was meaningful. and for me there were three comments he made that were of perticular interest. before i quote them here, i do want to make one point: a recent entry of crypto-gram made the point that if the information is brought down to a system there's no technical way to control what gets done with it. no copy-protection, encryption, or proprietary client will stop a determined person from making a (damn near perfect) copy of it. in my opinion there are three ways to stop unauthorised copying: ethics, laws, and ettiquitte. personally i'd rather not use the law and instead work to raise peoples' levels of courtesy and ethics. i think it was larry wall who mentioned that the ethically immature mistake giving for taking? or something of that nature.
... I believe that five years from now,
also, i'm not a metallica fan, but after reading this i have respect for lars. he makes good points. techno-clueful or no, he sees the big picture a lot better than many people who post here. here is where i think he makes his points best:
[...]
And I want the right to control what is mine. And if I decide to give
-- I respect the next guy, who wants to put his music on Napster, but I
want him to respect the fact that maybe I don't. It's that simple. It's
really the point.
[...]
when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up
with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one
downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time. You can sit
there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for
unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and
you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then
we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's
going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and
your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band.
[...]
I believe ultimately -- and this is sort of what I was talking about
before -- that the hardest thing about this is to try and come up with
a system where it becomes an individual's right to choose how he will
want to partake in this sort of stuff through the Internet. That's the
hardest thing because it becomes very difficult, it's very difficult
to generalize, like I said before. It's not fair to sit there and say,
'Napster can't exist,' because there are people who would like to use
it. And it's not fair to sit there and say 'It has to exist and you have
to be part of it,' for the people who don't want to use it. That's where
it gets really tricky. There are people who are far smarter than me on
this, people that will ultimately
there will be systems in place where the artists and the owners of the
intellectual property -- and remember, we're not just talking about music.
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
If you had to live the life of a musician, I doubt you would be so keen on giving discounts.
;) ;) but I _do_ offer insights into the nature of my game that are hard-won over years. I do so hoping that they can reconcile themselves with as little damage to their livelihoods and my community as possible. It's an 'intervention'.
If the alternative is to thumb my nose at poor college students and sow dissention in the fanbase, I'd consider educating myself in the new technology and the irrevocable changes that technology caused right quick.
It's a _tough_business_ and the fact that Metallica has had remarkable _longevity_ is a credit to both their intelligence (not "book learning") and their talent.
It's also a business that has, as its primary profit model, the control and sale of media. That profit model is now, with a keystroke, stiflingly obsolete. They did great in the past by playing by those rules, no doubt, and big respect for that. However, those rules are absolutely and completely demolished by the Internet. The question is: what are the new rules? How do I win the new game?
I don't recall Lars making any suggestions as to how you should do _your_ job or how you should be compensated for it.
Yes, but a large percentage of his income is now dominated by the rules of _my_ game, and I've been playing this game for decades. I don't presume to tell him or anyone else how to do their jobs (except for my lackeys
It was obvious to me that he stuck to talking about what he knows, and where his knowledge was lacking he made an effort to become informed.
Very true, but it should be clear by now that his knowledge is now obsolete. His efforts to become informed are laudable, and my efforts are aimed at offering food for thought, and peaceful ways of migrating his expectations and business model to the new era by applying lessons learned in a similar field with decades of experience facing the same issues.
Perhaps you should quit your job and become a musician, tell you what, just do it for 5 years (should be enough time for someone as savvy as yourself to master an instrument and build a following) and then see if you feel the same way.
I would turn that around and offer Lars the opportunity to become a junior sysadmin and master _my_ instruments (Cisco routers, 3Com/Bay/Cisco switches, Solaris/Linux/HP-UX/Tru64/*BSD, sendmail, bind, apache, bugzilla, XFree, etc...) in order to inform his mindset regarding the internet and its effects on his field of endeavor.
At least then maybe you be somewhat qualified to have an informed opinion.
Not to sound too egotistical (egotistical sysadmin? Moi?) but I'm thinking that at some point, maybe Lars needs to worry about how informed _his_ opinion is?
Remember, and keep this in mind first: the old media pricing model is thoroughly smashed. All other constructive discourse can only start with that as the primary underlying assumption.
Your Working Boy,
---
I might choose to use the word "misinformed" instead of "ignorent". If only to avoid the hostile tone of someone that may occasionally make a mistake.
---
I agree that avoiding a hostile tone is a good thing, but...
'Misinformed' is not knowing the statistic. 'Ignorant' is repeating a highly questionable statistic in a public forum as if it were fact.
Of course, that's assuming that this statistic isn't true - I find it pretty hard to believe though...
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Remember there is a tariff paid to the recording industry for every blank tape and recorder sold. See earlier articles about tacking this same tarif on blank CDR's, and the uproar at the suggestion.
I think that he was reasonably well-articulated, but nonetheless glossed over the cruxes of the argument. Case in point:
you know, when somebody fucks with what we do, we go after them. You don't sit down and sort of try and sort of justify yourself, well, 'Maybe our time and energy would be better spent thinking about something a year or two from now.'
Otherwise known as a 'kneejerk reaction'.
Hamish
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
The scale get is notice but it's wrong either way.
I have agreed with Metalica's right to do with their music from the start. It just like a software developers right to choose a license for their work. I may not always like the choice but I respect it and would people to do the same for my work.
I think it's clear in this interview that Lars is being hypocritical when it comes to copies. An illegal copies is an illegal copy. It doesn't matter how good or how bad your Xerox was.
That is the thing that bugged me about this interview. He flips back and forth from strong ethical arguments to strong cash flow arguments. It's my work I should have control over it's distribution to Well that's different it was an analog copy.
come on...
"...record companies will never be
completely extinct, for one reason and one reason only, that there will always be a need to develop younger artists"
There are artists who 'groom' or, shall we say, 'venture captilize' new artists. They have their own labels, help these up-and-comings learn the ropes, etc.
Seems to me that there are enough successful bands that this sort of a model could be used to completely eliminate the big record companies.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Let me just say that, after today, I will never ever criticize any of the slashdot authors again for grammar / linguistic errors.
Someone who has been given a musical training is going to have a region of his cortex given over to acoustic processing that otherwise wouldn't. All other things being equal that is matter that isn't available to other functions. And all things being equal, the more neural resources you throw at a problem, the better you will do at it.
Now, it's also true that musical training can enhance other types of cognition, including mathematical reasoning, because the associative cortex's structures can be 'lended' to other functions (it's why people tend to use their own fields of expertise as source-metaphors for understanding other fields.) And, of course, someone who is given a good literary education in addition to a musical one will have stronger language skills than one who has had neither; it is most certainly not a zero-sum game.
I do hope you aren't someone who thinks that an exception will invalidate rules, when those rules are about probabilities (i.e., more/less likely, not either/or). However, if we are going to be anecdotal, I will cite my own brother, a Julliard graduate and musical prodigy from age 5, with sadly compromised verbal expression skills - he's a born hemmer-and-hawer, with lots of um's and frustrations trying to express himself verbally. He also has perfect pitch. I've seen this trait in many other musicians, including Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern.
Besides, the only conclusion that I drew was that Lars was incoherent and circular in his interview, and I didn't need an fMRI for that.
And yet it's true. I will refer you to the data when I am back at home, and have access to my library.
Before you dismiss this sort of thing out of hand, you may want to learn a bit more about brain mapping.
Lars' own words (emphasis mine):
... But I should also say that we are, we're also, this is going to sound -- make sure you don't edit this! -- we're also, I know this is going to sound like we're full of ourselves, but I know we're also quite smart ...
This is more a transcript of a conversation, and I think I can accept that without thinking Lars was intentionally made to "look like a moron".
So, I'd say that respecting his wishes to forego anything except minor editing shows very decent ethics.
OK, I acknowledge that a deadbeat is different from a thief (-;
Actually, the economics of it are simple enough for everyone to understand. Let's say that authors are, in total, payed the same under the new system as they are now. In that case, people would, on average, spend the same amount of money.
However, they would have access to orders of magnitude more information.
There are already public libraries and radio shows. I doubt that it would make a whole lot of difference.
A person could have every piece of music ever recorded in his personal collection.
(a) The utiity of this would be somewhat limited.
(b) Not really true anyway, because you'd still need to pay for media asnd distribution.
Once again, problems which are impossible for me to address, as you failed to list any of them.
Allow me to spell it out to you -- when you have a self selected sample, you have big problems. I thought this was self-evident. For example, how many people would be prepared to write down on their tax form that they purchased 100 pornographic videos last year ? Basically, what this idea says is "give up your right to privacy or we'll retrench your favourite artist". I think that if you have a lot of people refusing to cooperate, then it is a big problem. Of course, if almost everyone cooperates, it not a big problem. If you ask people to put this kind of data on their tax forms, you'll have a lot of people that will refuse to do so.
In the example with the scientist, typically, they will be funded by a university. This works well for scientists. It also works well for musicians, some of whom are also publically funded ( again, by universities ). However, I don't see why this model need be practised to the exclusion of the copyright system. BTW, with the inventor, what you are forgetting is that they could patent their invention. This is how companies protect their inventions. So in short, there are also systems in place to protect inventors ( I'm not going to discuss their effectiveness ). The difference in this case is that patent protection which is applicable to scientific discoveries is considerably more far-reaching than copyright protection, and if it's abused, it is more of an obstruction than a benefit to inventors. OTOH, copyrights are rather narrow -- it is quite difficult to independently create a work identical to an existing copyright work.
Sorry, I just disagree. When I was in high school, I listened to all the jazz classics, and they were all at the public library. They also had all kinds of way-out genres of music. I don't think radio is that limited. Many radio stations, using something rather similar to this "street performer" thing you are so fond of, are able to offer a broad range of music. If there was a dearth of good member supported stations, this would IMO be strong evidence that the "street performer" model doesn't work. BUt IMO it works pretty well for radio stations.
b) The infrastructure that will be in place in one or two years will be capable of streaming music into homes for a low monthly fee.
Maybe for upper/middle class Americans who live near the city, yes. For most people, it won't be.
And the problem with allowing the scientist to copyright his discovery is that it will increase the number of people who will be bald and have scales on their faces.
Simply put, NONSENSE. Anyone can write a review of the article that the scientist publishes. Of course, if they invent a cure for something and patent their invention, then that's a different thing altogether. But copyright itself does not impede "the flow of information", it simply impedes plagiarism. I am not violating a copyright by reviewing or summarising the findings of a copyrighted work. BTW, scientific articles are usually copyrighted to the journal in which they are published or the author.
It is better than not for the scientist for him to be able to extort a price based on the utility of his discovery (rather than the cost), but he is in no way entitled to this.
You are talking nonsense. Copyright does not enable him to extort a damn thing. Anyone can read his paper until they understand the phenomenom, and write their own article and release it to the public. This is not a copyright violation.
It appears that you agree that there is no difference between authorship and other public goods (as you have listed none).
In the example you mention ( a scientific discovery ) there are several differences.
This seems to me to lead to the conclusion that authorship should be encouraged by society by whatever means is most beneficial to society, and that authors have no rights beyond that. Do you agree?
You could argue that all rules should only be made for the benefit of society and noone has any rights beyond that. And maybe that's good enough for the average Marxist, or utilitarian ( who are both concerned primarily with the "good of society", but measure this in different ways ) The problem with this is that it sets the scene for a "tyranny of the majority". So I don't really agree with your point of view. The fact that something might seem "better for society" is not in itself a justification. However, I think that in this case, what is good for authors is by and large good for the public. I consider copyrights to be good for both. Tax-dollar funded music is also good for both, but it's not a replacement for the copyright system IMO. The "street performer" idea is interesting, but in practice it doesn't seem that bands have had success in raising much funds this way. The model does work quite well for public radio though.
Have you heard of "member supported" radio stations ? These radio stations basically get their income by panhandling for donations from subscribers, who are usually the listeners. Such radio stations typically offer a more diverse selection of music, and do a better job at catering to niche markets.
The point is that your previous justification of copyright applies also to the discovery. In order for you to be consistent, you must support the ability of the scientist to prevent other people to use his discovery for their own benefit.
No, I don't "have to" support this. The problem with this is that the protections the scientist would enjoy are considerably more far reaching, and indeed could serve as an obstruction to scientists working independently. So in this case, the "protections" given to the scientist could infringe on the rights of other scientists.
I am not even going to address your garden analogy, other than to point out that analogies are great if you don't have a real argument. A piece of music is not a garden, and it does not immediately follow that what is ( or isn't ) true for arguments somehow applies to music.
The very notion of property requires the use of force. The notion of "money" requires laws that forcefully obstruct you from counterfeiting. The fact that force must be used to protect the copyright holder does not mean that there is somehow something "wrong" with copyrights.
As for "nothing wrong with circumventing people's means to compensation", well I don't see how it's substantially different from theft. Circumventing a moral obligation to compense is IMO morally equivalent to outright theft. And yes, if the author wishes to choose the copyright scheme as their means of compensation, then I believe there is a moral obligation to recompense the author as required by the copyright. I think this case is made even stronger by the fact that copyright seems to be the most effective means of distributed payment -- it is the only one in widespread use today.
but to a certain extent we can say that if your occupation couldn't support you on a free market, you have no place complaining when it fails to support you
I don't see how copyrights are an obstruction to a "free market". You could use the same reasoning to argue that laws forbidding counterfeiting are somehow an "obstruction" to the free market. The fact that an asset is intangible does not mean that the law should not recognise and protect it. It seems that some musicians survive well in the free market -- consumers are certainly free to boycott bands that don't use the "street performer protocol", but it seems that consumers are voting for the copyright system in droves, with their wallets.
By the way, I am very glad you raised the notion of free markets. Tell me this -- if the "street performer" thing and all these other freeloader-friendly models are really superior to the copyright model, why haven't they prevailed, when the current law allows copyrights and other models to co-exist ?
Information is a public good.
Copyrighted works are not really "information". And I don't see why they are a "public good". I see this point of view as one step away from simply declaring that "property is a public good". Sure, it's tempting for someone who produces no creative work to claim that creative work is not something that one has the right to receive compensation for. But I think that this viewpoint smacks of an utter disrespect for the value of creativity.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree here. As I've mentioned, I believe that this government action is defensive, because the action of illegaly copying is not at all peaceful. Rather, it is aggression by stealth. The stealth element does not make it peaceful. Dispossesing someone is an act of agression whether you do it quietly or loudly.
Money is, really, a type of contract. The reason it can't be copied is that one cannot sign another's name to a contract.
A software license is also a type of contract. Like money, copying restrictions are necessary to make the contract work.
Obviously you know that the purpose of copyright abolition is to make information more freely accessible to people. The less profitable nature of the creation of information is merely a side-effect. Why would I want authors to make less profits?
I think this says it all. You want to disposses the authors of their creative work and give it back to the "comrades". This kind of Marxist rhetoric has its place, but that place is not in a capitalist society.
No, my proposal is that the current solution in place is an action of government, in spite of the fact that it is not treated as such by people such as you
THe SEC regulations are also put their by "acts of government", but this does not mean that they should not be there. I would ask you what you propose in the place of the copyright system. It's not good enough to advocate vanmdalism of the current system if you are not willing or able to come up with viable alternatives.
Actually, I don't. What are you trying to say? That if I don't like the laws, I should move?
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the current system fosters creativity, and your Marxist rhetoric taken to it's extreme does not. I am pointing out that the end result of an application of your ideas are probably not something you or anyone else will want to live with. Sure, in the short term, the rioting masses, like the LA mob, will get a cheap thrill from the fact that they can disposses others. Unfortunately, dispossesing others does not generate creative works, and while you get a short term flood, the long term effect is quite the opposite.
As for you having "the might", sure you do. This further advances my case that your actions are not at all peaceful. You are using your might to disposses others, in much the same way that the LA mob did. You are no more peaceful than the thugs who broke windows and looted stores, even if you have more stealth than them.
That's exactly like something I proposed earlier in this thread (RMS's suggestion)! Go look it up.
I will. I bet that if RMS likes it though, it's a freeloader-friendly idea. Freeloader friendly ideas simply are not viable, because once you allow freeloading, you provide disincentives to pay up, namely "why should I if I don't have to". Unless you fund it through the tax system ( which is the solution to the policing problem you raised earlier )
It limits what two consenting adults can do alone in a vacuum.
If one of the consenting adults is the copyright holder, this is false ( otherwise, the copyright holder could hold out until the other guy pays up ). On the other hand, if neither is, then you are still wrong, because they are not "in a vacuum" -- the copyrighted work is there as well.
I don't see how extending the realm of government subsidies of the arts to popular music would create any more of a problem.
How do we decide who gets funding ? There are definitely problems using this model as a replacement for the copyright system, though I could certainly accept it as a supplement. Ditto for software. I do not object to the existence of such a system, but I certainly object to it being practised to the exclusion of the copyright system.
And I dispute your claim that "information is free". Firstly, it is certainly possible to build draconian measures to make it difficult to distribute copyrighted works, it's just a matter of making the measures sufficiently draconian that they're impossible to circumvent. However, most authors of copyrighted works have found that at a certain point, it's more profitable to have faith in the common decency of the user base.
Secondly, just because it's easy to commit immoral acts does not make it right. There are many immoral behaviours, some legal, and some not, that cannot be justified by the fact that it's easy, and convenient to commit them. Do not mistake expediency for righteousness.
Thirdly, the fact that something is "out in the open" does not mean that it's free.
On a large scale, it does -- because it reduces my creative work to something worthless. My creation is being widley used but I'm not getting payed. Does this not seem unjust ? If you put in a good weeks work, and then the boss only decided to pay you for 4 days work, would you feel like you'd been screwed ?
You're dodging the point about the money analogy not being applicable, but in any case, a software license only applies to people who agree to it.
If the license costs money, and the copier is assisting a lot of people from purchasing the license, then they are involved in the copyright violation. The people who don't buy a license are not entitled to use the software, and the people that copy the software for the benefit of such people are accessories to this breach.
Rather than answer you here, I'll direct you to my previous post, here
Ah yes, freeloader friendly. Sure to be popular on slashdot because you get something for nothing. However, the problem is that once the item can be freely copied, there's no reason to buy it. Someone can just burn "warez" copies that are just as good sound-quality wise. This is why we have copyrights in the first place.
Based on usage
You can't measure usage based on sales ( which will, incidently, be minimal since there's not really an incentive to buy it once you allow copying ). As for this idea of tracking devices, this idea is objectionable from a privacy standpoint. I don't want the feds monitoring my listening habits. This is worse, much worse, than intel's pentium III number thing. This is the kind of breach that the typical slashdotter goes blue in the face about, but I suppose it's alright as long as the end result is that you get something for nothing.
I have pointed it out. The difference is that in the case of authorship, the standard that should be met is that it should be almost impossible to independently produce the same work.
Applying copyright-like treatment to other public goods shows its absurdity as a right applying to all public goods
Yes, because with other public goods, it's more difficult for anyone to legitimately claim any sort of ownership or right to control -- because it's possible, and often probable, that two parties could independently produce the same public good. Take for example, an algorithm -- it's highly probable that two people could independently come up with the same algorithm, so giving one of those parties a monopoly would clearly be arbitrary and unfair. This is my main objection to applying copyright-like treatment to other public goods.
If there is some reason people should be believed to have a right to monopoly over the benefits of their public good, you have not listed it.
I believe that someone who produces a creative work has more right to profit from it than someone who didn't produce that work. It boils down to the basic idea that there should be a marketplace for intangible assets, whether or not those intangible assets are what you would call "public goods".
Explain the criteria for deciding whether a public good should be compensated by government through forced taxation and direct payment.
I guess I could concede that ultimately, the criterion for deciding any law is whether society will benefit. The specific legislative choices one makes boil down to what you believe is good for society. The reason that we have "rights" in the first place is to create the foundation for a civilised society.
I do not believe that "direct payment" constitutes "compensation by the government", it is merely a legislative device which recognises ownership of the right to payment for a the copying of a creative work, ie it is an extension of the notion of property.
As for your question of deciding whether the benefits should be monopolized by the author, I would suggest that the only case they should be is in the case where the thing in question is really "the authors"; that which is now covered by copyright. You cannot "own" an idea in any reasonable sense of the word "own", because it is plausible and indeed likely that someone else could independently have the same idea. However, copyrighted works do not have this problem -- you are not going to independently produce a precise duplicate of a Metallica recording without copying it.
I am not clear on how theft always requires force. Entering an open window doesn't require force. Breaking into a car doesn't require any more "force" than circumventing a technological copy protection mechanism. The fact that copyright violaters are more like cat burglars than armed robbers does not make a big difference IMO.
Copy protection is unprecidented.
I am not clear on what you mean by this. However, I'll point out that the question of copyright protection is really only an issue because it's easy to copy nowadays. Before it was easy to copy, it was less of an issue.
It's one thing to protect an asset from being taken, and quite another to prevent it from being copied.
You could say the same about money. The problem is that copying money degrades the currency. Likewise, copying intellectual assets destroys the information economy ie it makes it next to impossible for the authors of creative content to be compensated. This is why we have an "information economy" in the first place.
Well, government-enforced monopoly is not a free market.
The government have a monopoly on printing dollar bills, so you could equally argue that this is not a "free market". The fact that you recognise creative works ( or more precisely, the right to control a creative work ) as having an owner does not violate the definition of free market. It simply broadens the notion of property in such a way as to recognise that creative work does have value and can be sold on the market place.
[irrelevant analogies snipped]
If the "street performer protocol" and other methods are really a more efficient way of doing things, then surely, it should replace the copyright system -- because it will give consumers a better deal without harming the author. However, this is not the case. The truth is that these models make it easy to freeload ( which I take it is precisely why slashdotters argue so passionately for them ) and provide an economic disincentive for anyone to pay up ( namely: "I'll just let someone else pay up, since I can get the product anyway" ). Basically, these "ideas" assign zero value in an economic sense to the production of creative works. This is a problem, and the only viable solution appears to be to create an economic system for creative works, which is essentially what copyright is about.
Why would they? If the government is granting someone privilege, why would they voluntarily surrender it?
At least we agree that the copyright abolitionists are primarily trying to make life less profitable for the authors of creative works.
If everyone on the block combines to form a pool to pay a guard together, it's in my best interests not to join -- they'll pay either way, and I'll get the service either way. Etc. Information fits well into that category. It's a common problem, and the usual solution is government.
I see. So is your proposed solution in this instance "government" ? I think someone else mentioned something like "go move to Havana and listen to the state orchestra" -- kind of blunt, but you get the idea, huh ?
The problem is that with creative works, we really need some kind of market place, so that consumers can vote, instead of the government dictating the terms to consumers. In some sense, the idea of having the government directly control creative content is more of a violation of free market principles than simply saying "we need some kind of economic system to handle creative works" and inventing copyrights.
The utility of it greatly decreases, since the main use it has for the author is as a source of income.
If you think my undercutting your prices and beating you in business is "dispossessing" you, then.. well.. then your comments have no place in a capitalist society ;)
You are not competing fairly ! I am making a creative work, AND trying to distribute it, you are merely distributing it ( ie leeching off my creative work ). Do you see the problem with this ??? The problem is precisely that it assigns zero economic worth to the creative process -- the only way to be compensed is by distribution. The artist is doing the "real work", and yet, you are trying to argue that a random distributor is a deserving of compensation as the artist. This I find absurd.
Taxes are not "nothing".
No, they're not. But you'll have one hell of a hard time explaining to the American people why it's in their best interests to pay more taxes. One thing I really don't like about using government funds is that the whole thing would become a political football, and it would be vulnerable to cuts whenever someone who didn't like music got in. The Universities have the same problems nowadays.
Right, and in the face of that sort of competition, CD's would obviously become much cheaper than they are now.
As I said, I don't think that kind of competition is fair, because it completely ignores the fact that the artists contribution, and only recompenses distributors. The artist only receives compensation for their efforts as a distributor, but not as an artist. There's better ways of acheiving the same effect. One is to prevent record distributors from acquiring exclusive distribution rights.
Well, it could obviously be voluntary.
And as such, obviously problematic.
for the reason that you had the option of expending effort on something that is *not* a public good instead.
Well I guess it boils down to whether or not we are serious about creating financial incentives for those who expend effort on what you call a "public good". Copyrights certainly do this. A tax funded system could also do this, but it has a lot of problems -- it's vulnerable to political interference and sudden funding cuts, and the American public are not great fans of tax increases.
If I plant some trees and, through various methods, cut my CO2 emissions in half thus benefitting the entire world, do I have a *right* to payment?
The way I'd look at it is that if you do pollute, you should be penalised financially depending on how much you pollute. Since everyone does it to some degree, the "penalty" should be compensatory as opposed to punitive. It's only fair, you're trashing the public space. Now if you're trashing the public space *less* than everyone else, then I would certainly argue that relative to everyone else, you are entitled to favourable treatment, which means lower taxes.
It is poignant to hear this guy standing up for the rules that every composer/author/producer plays by - and getting smeared over it - but hey, these bad boys are just typecast for it, pay up or go to hell! You want free music? Move to Havana and enjoy the state orchestra. Let's see some garage bands produce records and GPL them, that'd be cool, just don't quit your day job.
BTW - todays UserFriendly is apropos.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
On the other hand, they could have performed a statistical analysis of files from a random sampling of users........... users with lots/few files ... high/low speed etc..... in order to determine what % were unsigned vs commercial artists...
then they set up a farm of computers that duplicate on a small scale offering a sampling of these files (or simply advertize the files for download w/o the actual files) and monitor the download requests from their own equipment..
it's statistical analysis. a measurement of this sort of thing is possible however breaking it down to say "only one" is not good form. There is probably a huge amount of error in this number. As many as 5000 or so indy songs might have been moved around and their sampling only saw one transfer.
Still, it must be said that however the measurement was taken the number of indy band songs that they saw "move" was 1.
English spoken out loud generally reads like that. Most interviews you read in magazines have all the "uhs" and little rambles cut out. It was pretty refreshing to see a totally unfiltered unedited transcript.
If you don't believe me, try this-- grab a tape recorder and go somewhere public (a restaurant or whatever) and record a conversation. Then take the tape home and transcribe it word for word.
You'll notice---
1. People don't listen to each other at all
2. People contradict themselves constantly
3. People very frequently make little sense
4. Conversation is usually aimless, fractured, and repetative.
In light of that, I think Lars did pretty well.
W
PS-- actually doing the exercise above in your area may/may not be legal. Don't get caught. (Alternately, you might go read some trial transcripts where a non-professional witness describes some event.)
-------------------
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Most published interviews are cleaned up. This one was obviously not. I think he made his point clear.
:-)
A sidenote -- Historians are pretty sure that the Lincoln/Douglas debates of 1858 have been preserved nearly word for word. The debates were published by both pro-Lincoln papers and pro-Douglas papers. The pro-Lincoln papers would edit Lincoln's speeches to tighten them up, while deliberately quoting Douglas word-for-word, leaving in all of his incomplete sentences and errors to make him appear to be less coherent. The pro-Douglas papers did the exact opposite. Put the two together, and a complete transcript emerges!
Not that I'm drawing any comparisons. Trust me, I'm not!
Why? Because I suspect that number is self-limiting, in a way that MP3's aren't. Bootleg tapes of studio albums aren't that good. They wear out. Hell, I haven't personally put any music but mine on a tape in at least five years. People tend to buy CD's if they like an album... IF the copy they have now isn't a perfect, non-degrading, digital one.
I probably should have included unauthorized CD copies people have made with their CDR burners and $0.75 blank CD's when I made that point. This technology has been in the mainstream for going on three years (and I don't know anybody who hasn't made an illegal CD).
These are digital copies with no reduction in quality (unlike mp3's, which lose significant quality in the first generation). I suspect of Lars were able to count the number of metallica CD's alone, he would be horrified (and justly so).
Nevertheless, despite 3 years of widespread availability and use of CD burners, and over 1 year of widespread mp3 usage, CD sales are up.
You've got lots of ideas for how a band can get sold among the tiny little group of people who are out looking for new bands. Record companies have found ways to get a new band sold to people who are in music stores. Until you can do that in your business model, you're not improving on anything.
From the RIAA's point of view, the emerging paradigm will certainly not be an improvement over the stranglehold they currently enjoy over marketing, distribution, etc.
The reality is that the internet in general, and mp3 technology in particular, have fundamentally changed the economic landscape with regard to the distribution of mass media. Either you change your business model to take that into account, whether or not it is an "improvement" over the existing monopolistic cartel (from your point of view), or you simply go under.
Legislation, legal thuggary, and the like will do little to stem the tide. Even if the United States were to resort to extreme authoritarian measures to maintain the status quo, you can count on most of the rest of the world (Europe possibly excepted) putting up some resistence. Given the nature of the internet, even one small island refusing to go along with such nonsense will suffice to undermine the entire effort.
Enter technologies like FreeNet and begin to see how fruitless such efforts at putting the genie back in the bottle really are.
In short, adapt to the new reality or perish.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Excellent idea, and extremely well-put. But -- and I don't say this to be a jerk -- what's to prevent passing along the (say) unique serial number on your CD? Is everyone gonna bring their CD to Ticketmaster to get the discount on tix?
If the number were coupled to your credit card number (which would be needed to unlock and activate it) you would provide both a mechanism and a powerful incentive for not passing your serial number along. Numerous ways exist for doing this, from databases of registered "purchasers" (CDs) to standard public key/private key cryptography (for purchased mp3's). The latter would combine nicely with a "buy and download the mp3 now, your CD will arrive in a few days" sales approach.
Yes, there might be theft, just as there is credit card theft and fraud today, but existing law is more than adeqaute to address these issues. In any event, you can bet no one would be giving their credit card number out promiscuously.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
As an aside, my side project, XIR (xir is recursive) has banned me for making a song called "kill everyone who works at mp3.com" bad taste? sure, but it was obviously a joke and I put it in the comedy genre and deleted it when they put it on hold, but now XIR is no more on mp3.com
So is there somewhere else I could download the mp3 from? Preferably with a clear license attached, assuring me its ok to do so? I'm kind of curious to hear the "kill everyone who works at mp3.com" song.
:-)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
They just want to make music, want to sell it, want to have it spread. We want to hear it, obviously, and share it. Can some genius, someone with the right insight and the right knowledge, right now work a system up that puts all of this together and create a win-win situation?
Someone in a previous article suggested a solution that might help - the band releasing a lower-quality MP3 preemptively.
The MP3 would be high enough quality to sound decent, but low enough that you'd still notice the difference buying the CD. Laziness being what it is, this would stop most people from ripping the CD themselves.
The band wins because people who like several of their songs are likely to buy their CDs to get better quality (free advertising). The people win because they can listen to free songs.
I'm not Metallica fan. I like a few of their songs. They seem to be somehwat talented. But I can't for the life of me, listen or read Lars. He's like a damned valley girl in post-op and his thought process is all over the place. It makes it very hard to even get what he's talking about other than a stream of consciencesness. Ugh!
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
He indicated it was pretty low, and it's like asking a computer maker "how much profit do you make on this sale?". Fair question, but if he tells you he's given up his negotiating advantage for that next contract :-).
...for coming through with a great interview. Even if you can't agree with some things he says, he definitely had some good answers there, and if he rambled a bit from time to time, well, that just goes to show it's authentic, not a scripted party line. I think on the whole he did a pretty good job here.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Besides, if it had been edited and cleaned up, then everyone would have been ragging on it being the lawyers speaking, not Lars. This way you can be pretty darned sure it's the genuine article.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
You say that the vision of free exchange of information is Utopian, and you're right in many ways. However, the vision that Lars has that he can actually exert control over all copies of his music is equally Utopian (or Orwellian depending on your point of view.) The simple reality is that you can exert some control in some circumstances. But, you can't stop people from simply creating a new venue for exchange that you don't control.
I think that the music industry can remain relevant and competitive, but not with it's current tact. Take Napster for example. They want to hold Napster liable for the people who misuse it's product. By this train of logic, if people were trading songs via email (a fairly easy thing to set up.), Metallica would be harassing Microsoft for making email programs.
In order to prosper in the new economy, I believe that the music industry (and all other IP-based industries really) need to adopt the following strategy.
First, use the legal system against the individuals who are illegally distributing your music. Can you stop them all? No, don't be ridiculous. But that's not the point. All you need to do is make them hide. Make sure the general public can't find them just by doing a Yahoo search. Any pirate distributor who is dumb enough to make themself easily visible and accessable to the general public is also accessable to your lawyers. Remember, the goal is not to eliminate all sources of pirated material. The goal is to push it underground so that it's a pain in the ass to find and use.
Second, make your music easily available over the Internet on YOUR terms. The public wants to be able to easily download music off the Internet. If it's not on your terms, it's on somebody elses terms. But the bottom line is that your music WILL end up on the Internet. Have a web site where your fans can easily sign up and purchase your music for a reasonable price. If you don't provide this option, they have no choice but to go to the pirates. However, if you make your site attractive, affordable, and a pleasure to use your fans will use it. Assuming that you've done your work in step one and made it a pain in the ass to get music from the pirates.
The bottom line is that the media companies cannot stop piracy. But, they can compete with it.
The time and effort to create the master copy is scarce. That scarcity is amortized across all the digital copies, making their cost nonzero.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I would expect a former metalhead to know more about how word gets out in the underground. The band that only sells 600 copies is the one that has the most to gain from internet exposure, since they're about to go from 600 to 6000, not from 600 to 50.
I participate on a few metal-related discussion web boards. Sometimes, someone will mention a band that no one else has heard of. "Got an MP3?" someone will ask. The MP3 gets around, and the next thing you know, 20 people have just contacted their music vendor to order the CD. And then they start spreading the word...
The kind of people who are interested in a band that might only sell 600 copies, are exactly the kind of people who do have the ethical restraint to keep from pirating whole albums (unless they're out of print or otherwise unavailable), and who understand that the bands need to be nurtured. I'm disappointed that Lars doesn't seem to remember his origins.
It's only the bands that depend on commercial mass media push, that have anything to fear from the mass media losing power. 600 copies to 6000. 6 million copies to 3 million.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I never said you never said anything useful, just that that particular comment was stunningly unuseful.
Go ahead, call names. The fact is, taking people's stuff without their permission is "theft".
Metallica is not trying to "establish control over the industry". He's saying "hold on, you can't just take my stuff". Hasn't got a damn thing to do with the RIAA.
My God, it's pathetic how easily you polarize. You're all into this idea that anyone who doesn't think you have a God-given right to whatever the fuck you can take is somehow an "RIAA whore". Real mature of you. Shows a great deal of analysis of the issues.
You'll notice that Lars was speaking moderately positively of distribution channels like this if they can get the permission thing worked out. Is he saying "death to all record labels"? No, and in your eyes, that makes him an RIAA whore. I think he's just responding to the fact that he *does* know something about the industry, and you don't know jack shit about it. He's decided that he thinks record labels may be doing something useful, and that we shouldn't just write them off.
He's come to this with an open mind. You're so obsessed with the idea that anyone who doesn't want you stealing their stuff is some kind of evil scumbag, that you'll never realize that their experience might have something to show you.
I don't like the RIAA particularly. I don't think Metallica is a big fan of the RIAA. However, that doesn't mean that anything that might be of some benefit to the RIAA is necessarily wrong. Get over your attitude. You're a lot more ignorant than Lars is; he at least knows when he's guessing.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Nice try. I particularly like how you copied my slashdot sig into an anonymous coward post. We all know the software appends your normal user .sig to AC posts, right?
SHEESH. I haven't signed as "-seebs" since I was a teenager.
If the best refutation you can come up with is to forge a post from me, well, that pretty much sums up your argument. "What I can do with technology must be ethical". Great logic, kid.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Well, by the same token, it's totally unclear that people have any intrinsic right not to be killed; we created that one with law, too. :) You have to decide whether or not you like the law. If you don't, may I recommend Singapore? I think they have pretty lax copyright laws.
How about this: Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that we want musicians to be able to be professionals; that we want it to be possible to earn a living producing music. If we accept this premise, then we must resolve the question of how they are to get paid.
Before you dismiss copyright law, please suggest an alternative.
The burden of proof is on your side. The law, for all its flaws, is the best we've been able to come up with. It represents a serious effort by people who gave the matter serious thought, to attempt to come up with an equitable solution. The best argument you've had so far is "information wants to be free" - and it's not clear that this even applies, because creative works are a different category from the purely factual and informative information that phrase originally referred to.
If you think the law is wrong, provide a better alternative. In the mean time, yes, musicians have that right, for the same reason that you have a right to expect certain minimal standards from resturaunts, and the same reason that people aren't supposed to hit you with their cars. Because we all agreed to play by a set of rules.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Well, if we hadn't created copyright law, you'd have a very good point.
However, we *DID* give the artists the right to withhold music.
You talk about "peacefully sharing information that will result in greater profits". First off, you're making a big assumption. Secondly, *IT IS NOT YOUR INFORMATION TO SHARE*.
Don't like it? Move to a company with no copyright - and not many artists.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
"Information wants to be free". So, we were wrong to ever create copyright law? The GPL is a joke and shouldn't be enforcable? How about a little basic consistency here.
Why do we need a music industry? Because, as a species, we're a bunch of cheap-ass fucks who would not, in fact, pay for art if we didn't have to.
Anyway, if we, as a society, have given artists control, then yes, it's wrong for us, as a bunch of computer geeks, to ignore that decision. Laws can be changed, and if the law is so obviously wrong as all that, we can probably get it changed. As soon as we offer a better alternative...
It may be that you, personally, just disagree with Lars. That's cool; your opinions are probably just as well researched as his, or mine, or anyone else's. What bugs me is the people who are using his non-techie nature as justification for trashing his beliefs. You see, he's thought about these issues too. He may have come to different conclusions than I have, or than you have, but that doesn't mean he's wrong, it just means the debate's still going.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Count the generations, though.
A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an MP3 is indistinguishable from the original MP3.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Technology can't make copyright infringement ubiquitous, any more than it makes burglary ubiquitous.
Anyway, I'd *much* rather have copyright than some system based on taxation, because a system based on taxes will *never* support the kind of variety we enjoy today. The religious right will veto Trent Reznor's albums because they encourage gratuitous sex. Rap albums will get no funding, because some rap star says something misogynistic.
It's doomed.
Right now, it's possible for a lot of people to get paid for music. It is in our best interests, as consumers, to preserve this state until we have a *better* alternative - and not just more convenient for us, personally.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The CD's are an interesting question. I see no benefit to duping CD's; I already have the ones I want. Even then, it's still not a *distributed* medium; even if I were letting friends dup my CD's, the copies wouldn't be going to thousands of people.
MP3's are *not* widespread. Not by comparison with, say, CD players. MP3's aren't even close yet. In a couple years, when MP3 market penetration is in the tens of millions, and at least a few million of those people have portables, *THEN* we'll see what effect it has.
Also, "CD sales are up" and "MP3 is widely used" are not necessarily related. We're also, if you hadn't noticed, in a period of fairly strong economic growth, with record low unemployment, meaning, a lot of people who couldn't afford CD's in '98 may be able to now... We have no evidence for causality. (We also have no real evidence against it. My instinct is to guess that, right now, MP3's are having only marginal effects either way on CD sales.)
So, here's my question: Let's say that the music industry *can't* find a way to adapt to the MP3 thing, because there's nothing anyone cares about once they can copy MP3's. So, they go under.
What are we going to listen to? It may turn out that, once perfect copies are that easy, it's not worth it for anyone to go "pro". Touring may not be an option, if you can't make enough money on album sales to fund the marketing...
This is why I think we need to find a solution that keeps the musicians paid. The alternative might be a serious drop in the quantity and quality of new music produced.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The reason used CD sales got laughed at is the first sale doctrine. When you buy a physical embodiment of a copyrighted work, you can do *ANYTHING* with it except copy it. You can even copy it, for personal use, as long as all the copies stay "associated" with that original. You can sell a book that you've bought, even if it's in perfect condition. You can sell a CD, even if the sound doesn't degrade.
What you can't do is make copies and sell them, or make copies, and sell the original, or anything like that.
This is not the same shit at all. Fussing about used CD's is dumb; every used CD is a CD the record company *already* got paid for. At any given point, only one person owns that CD.
Fussing about Napster and MP3's is different; every new person getting a given MP3 is another *copy*, without any revenue for the copyright holder.
Not the same at all, and trying to make it look the same is either disingenuous or stupid.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
"freedom of information" is not a "fundemental law of cyberspace" any more than "freedom of bicycles" is a "fundemental law of guys with hacksaws".
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Yeah, "do it for the love of music". That means no full-time efforts on producing albums. Crappy recordings because you can't afford studio time. Using lower-quality equipment so you can't get the sound you really wanted.
Imagine if you couldn't get paid for programming, so you were stuck using a 386 laptop running Windows 3.1, but you did it because you "loved programming". An improvement? I don't think so.
Get real; professional musicians are a good thing in terms of availability of music.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Not especially suspicious. I've certainly never met anyone who used napster to get music that they couldn't have bought on CD.
It's easy to say he's "not the brightest man I've ever run across". Would you come out any better in a verbatim phone interview?
And I certainly don't think he's lying. Too far out of character.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Great job guys, thanks to Timothy, Lars, the people asking the questions and all the moderators (for selecting this incredibly good set of questions). Really good stuff!
With the existence of digital media and the ability to create unlimitied perfect copies, the notion of scarcity ceases to exist. It is impossible to base an economy on the control of something that isn't scarce.
If you want to make money off of an inherently non-scarce resource, you must take a different approach. Once possiblity is to provide services that make the resource more valuable to others. Another possiblity is to artificially create scarcity.
Thus we get to the land of digital media today. Today we are entering a time when the media's scarcity is only loosely enforced by copyright due to the inability to prosecute people en masse. So, with no scarcity, money can not be made on control of the media. So, the record companies and bands can take either or both of the options.
They can try to focus more on live performances, providing was to help people manage and get the music they want, etc. They can also take the approach of creating artifical scarcity, using encyrption, etc, to prevent the free copying.
Their smartest pick will be option 1. The second approach, although creating an economic model they are familiar with is ripe for falling apart. Entropy suggests that things always want to return to their natural state, order become chaos, buildings crumble, etc. Encryption, and artificial barriers must be maintained, and they will always be try to self-destruct.
---
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Bootlegging is OK.
Dubbing Metallica albums onto casette is OK.
Trading those casettes with people is OK.
But trading an MP3 is not?
What difference is it, other than the alignment of bits on magnetic surface? Would Lars be OK with it if Napster users traded MP3's of tracks ripped off explicitly off casettes?
I can understand Lars being pissed. I would be too. But the situation mandates he examine his own logic before attempting to scrutinize someone else's.
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Given his own admission. His pulling out of lawyers is not an admission of not caring, just of his reliance on the standard system, instead of trying to change the system.
At least, that's my take
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
A lot of people through out the idea of micropayments: Per minute or per song...
This isn't a bad idea, I guess. I was thinking there should be more, though, because you're paying for the distribution mechanism. What's stopping people from reposting the song back onto Napster or Gnutella once they pay for a copy? Perhaps the songs that Metallica releases should have a 'digital fingerprint', and go after Napster/Gnutella legally/technologically?
I would think membership and fan clubs, and as other people have pointed out, access to merchandise, t-shirts, concerts, etc, after showing proof of ownership, or by being a member.
Dunno, I think that's as many good ideas as I've seen today
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Don't get me wrong by the way-- I'm all for downloading music and movies in a digital format, with one critical condition attached to it: that the artist and/or company representing the artist has put it up or given permission for distribution via the source where I download it.
Which IMHO may even include charging me for the download. Anything else isn't fair to the artist/company.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
One of the points Lars makes is that people have been taking for granted their right to the free exchange of information. Meanwhile, he is taking for granted his right to own information. In the U. S., this is a right granted by Congress. It is supposed to represent the will of the people. If the people decide that it is not in their best interest for ideas to be legal possessions of a sort, then that right can be taken away.
I don't think that this is the point Lars is trying to make at all. You don't have the right to downloads Metallica's MP3s just because you can find them on the net any more than you have the right to use other people's credit card numbers to make purchases because such information can be found on the net.
People should remember one thing when discussing copyright law.
Copyright law exists for the benefit of society as a whole, as do *all* laws. This is the primary purpose for the creation of laws. The purpose of law is *NOT* strictly to 'keep musicians in business' or to 'keep the industry going'.
IF it turns out that a large percentage, say, over 50% of the music buying crowd stops buying music and starts trading it 'illegally', would 50% of society end up in court? no.. as if it is literally half of society that is infringing, then it is the LAW that needs changing, as the law exists to better society.
What did you expect? Do you have some illusion that all big 'artists' are highly educated, perfectly articulate public speakers?
Most people I know would speak about the same way.
I'm quite HAPPY that we didn't get an edited-by-five-publicists review.... we got it from Lars' mouth.
And he has a point. Regardless of where future technology is, napster is making money by helping people pirate music. Plain and simple.
He's not as illiterate as it seems. That is a transcribed audio inteview. Were I to interview you the same way, your speech would no doubt come out exactly the same way.
Copying tapes from friends is illegal still? is it? Really? I mean... it's not commercial, and it's not really wide distribution. There *IS* a legal difference between giving out a cople copies of music and giving out billions.
THE LAW is not software, it is not pure logic. It is fuzzy and open to interpretation.
No artist cares if a few people give copies to their friends, but when one person gives copies to 100,000 people in a weekend, that is totally different.
Hey... in some cities, cops don't prosecute and imprison people for minor posession of marijuana, but if you have a truckload you are fucked. Oh.. but by your logic, both are totally illegal, so both should be prosecuted.
And dude, protecting works that you have a legal right to protect is *NOT* censorship.
I agree with your comparison on a purely technical level. Dont' shoot the messenger.
But instead of a subway, think 'trucking company'.
Now.. some drug baron uses this trucking company to transport drugs. Is the company at fault? No...
But let's say that the trucking company was started because the owners KNEW there was a huge market for smuggling drugs, even if they don't precisely know which shipments have drugs in them.
Let's say that they are aware that the vast bulk of their shipping time is being taken up by drugs, but they don't actually *ask* what is in each shipment, and pretend not to know. now this 'trucking company' is very blatantly doing something illegal. Their business is based on the tranport of illicit drugs.
Napster is making money (or at least, trying to) based on the fact that they know their service will be popular because people want to pirate music. Period. And this is illegal.
Free Software has absolutely nothing to do with the napster/music/mp3/copyright issue. NOTHING.
Bands who 'GPL' their music? But they DONT gpl their music. Should they be able to use napster like services? Sure... but napster DOESN'T cater to these people. It helps you find things you already know exist. It is 99.99% piracy.
This is fascinating. Before I read this, I really thought it was yet another attempt by music companies to stop/control yet another medium. And of course, it is.
BUT...
What was great about this interview (besides the free-form, flow-of-conciousness style interview, which we should see a lot more of please!) was that you can actually see Lars struggle with the various shades of grey involved with this case. I mean, how many times do you hear somebody in his position say "well, I've rethought my position on this" or "I probably shouldn't have said that".
So, while I still think Metallica needs to take a much different tack, I can really appreciate that they are truly trying to wrap their arms around this, and are trying to do what they consider is the right thing. Who knows, maybe through their continuous education on the facts, they'll see the light.
Then again...maybe it IS about the money. :-)
Yeah, I want to see an interview with the Hard Rhymer.
This is my signature. There are many signatures like it but this one is mine..
I will absolutely agree with you that Asian Man is an all around better label than Virgin. The point I was going for is that downloading a Johnny Socko mp3 is every bit as illegal as downloading a Metallica or Britney Spears song. That is Johnny Socko/Asian Man's intellectual property and you are using it without permision. If you want the mp3s that the band wants you to have, go to the web site, they're giving away 4 song clips off the new album along with some older stuff and one whole live show. If you want to use Napster to get free music, go ahead (I know I do). Just don't use the justification that it's ok to do it for small bands because they're not available at Wal-Mart.
-B
Lars in a Suburban.
And there are so, SO many programs to rip a cd, turn it to mp3 and NAME it for you, that it can be done on mass scale. Hell, for my own mp3 theatre at home, i've ripped a total of 7 cd's in the past 5 hours. 192 bit, hard to tell the quality difference unless you have good hearing AND a very good set of speakers.
---
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I think you're right it is a good interview. I think he brushed off the last question because he had answered it at length before. I think that the non-degrading digital copy is the issue.
I have to say that i'm glad to see that Metallica has though about and researched this, and I'm also glad that it is not the record company pushing this. The thing i think he says that is the most insightful is that the biggest SNAFU is the fact that the record companies didn't embrace the idea of electronic distribution, rather than damning it and ignoring it.
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
But like alot of people, I am sure, I read the interview, and am extremely happy that I have been given the opportunity to read about the real issues instead of just hear the spin, and I have changed my mind about Metallica.
How do you mean "changed your mind"? So instead of being greedy assholes they are now just misinformed assholes? (not looking for a flamewar, I'm just curious if that's what you meant)
And what were those "real issues", while we're at it? Was it Lars' "spin" that changed your mind?
--
+&x
A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an MP3 is indistinguishable from the original MP3.
But the MP3 (taking into account standard 128 - 160 kbps, stereo, 44khz) is always distinguishable from the CD.
-- iCEBaLM
Well, besides the complications of serving many thousands of simultaneous connections (which I can't comment on really -- all things are possible, after all), it's faster to read than to listen.
The recording is not great quality; analog cassette recording through a radio shack linda trip special, of a phone call is really not easy listening material;) The nature of model recorder I have is also that my voice is thunderously loud, while Lars is much lower. Not stereo, so it can't just be level adjusted that way.
Besides, my voice is not radio friendly except to the extreme tone deaf, or maybe the tone dead.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
When I first heard this Metallica vs Napster thing I was a little puzzled. Most MP3's I've heard sounded really crappy, and due to the lossy recording methons, the smaller the MP3 file the lower the quality. For me MP3's are a waste of time. I like to hear the imperfections of a live performance.
This is not about Lars being wrong because he is a non-techie - this is about Lars being wrong because he is wrong.
For an example of a non-techie who is getting a lot of respect in a related case, look at Martin Garbus in the DeCSS trial. He is a lawyer (already that should make us hate him if the stereotypes were true), he admits to knowing very little about technology, and he has litigated a lot of cases where he was defending peoples copyrights. But in this case, he gets it. I haven't heard anybody trashing him because he isn't a coder.
Lars is wrong because he claims that artists have a right to control the spread of their work. They do not - information wants to be free, and nobody has the right or should have the ability to control it. As a society, it is in our interest to compensate artists and innovators so they can work on enriching the world without starving, and in the industrial age this has been done by giving them legal control of the information they produce, but the issues of control and compensation are actually unrelated.
ps, I don't know shit about the music industry. I don't care to. I don't see why we need a music "industry", I sort of wish there was music artistry instead...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
"Information wants to be free". So, we were wrong to ever create copyright law? The GPL is a joke and shouldn't be enforcable? How about a little basic consistency here.
In my opinion, yes. And, I have yet to hear Stallman or anyone attack us for the fact binary code based on GPLed code that is uploaded cannot be removed from Freenet. Does anybody here truly believe that distributed data networks pose a serious threat to free software because people will use them to distribute mods without source? If you do, lay off the crack pipe for a second.
Why do we need a music industry? Because, as a species, we're a bunch of cheap-ass fucks who would not, in fact, pay for art if we didn't have to.
Well maybe then, as a species, we don't deserve any music. I'll tell you what price I, as an individual who regularly buys CDs without complaining about the price, is to cheap to pay for music - and that is my freedom.
Anyway, if we, as a society, have given artists control, then yes, it's wrong for us, as a bunch of computer geeks, to ignore that decision. Laws can be changed, and if the law is so obviously wrong as all that, we can probably get it changed. As soon as we offer a better alternative...
It is neither right nor wrong since is not our doing. Nobody in particular invented the freedom of information, it is a fundamental law of cyberspace. If you want to point fingers about it, point them up - the fact that information cannot be contained without censoring people is a fact of mathematics, and that _cannot_ be changed.
It may be that you, personally, just disagree with Lars. That's cool; your opinions are probably just as well researched as his, or mine, or anyone else's. What bugs me is the people who are using his non-techie nature as justification for trashing his beliefs. You see, he's thought about these issues too. He may have come to different conclusions than I have, or than you have, but that doesn't mean he's wrong, it just means the debate's still going.
I did not see Ulrich once questioning his position that he has an a priori right to control the information. He just takes that opinion and bases all of his arguments on it. He is wrong about this, and that is neither my wish nor my opinion, but a simple fact of how the universe works.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Lars: Yeah, I mean I think we answered that before. Of course we have, ok? And of course it's a valid point. The bottom line is the size of it. The size of it and the quality of it. When we go in, and check Napster out, we come up with 1.4 million copyright infringements in 48 hours, this is a different thing than trading cassette tapes with your buddy at school. I mean, 48 hours! So it's the quality, the quality and the scale.
I'm sorry, but if you had the ability to track all the trading of cassette tapes and burned CD's, you'd find that 1.4 million in 48 hours is not at all understated. Its just nobody keeps a large log of everything that gets traded.
Doug
Venn ist das nurnstuck git und Slotermeyer? Ya! Beigerhund das oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
The users are in control of what they offer and what they download.
Not even strongly encrypted, non-centralized, anonymizing networks.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
You know, I've read both sides of the argument about distribution of intellectual property across the Internet. On the side of applications like "Napster" are people who basically say two things: (1) I should be able to download stuff for free because it's overpriced at the store, and (2) we're a movement, and so we don't fuckin' have to follow the existing rules of the established order.
The first one sounds like a justification for theft.
And the second one reminds me of the riots here in Los Angeles a few years back, with hoards of people in Watts running around, breaking into stores and stealing home stereos and TVs. The police couldn't stop them because there were just too many rioters. And when interviewed on TV, many of the rioters basically gave the same justification: "there is just too many of us for the police to stop, and all this stuff is too expensive, so we're going to get ours and stick it to the established order."
When pressed on the second point, the reply is often about things like DeCSS and encryption technology and distributed information distribution: that is, you think it's hard now to track and prevent the virtual riot in progress, just wait until we apply technology to make the virtual rioters anonymous.
Well, the folks in Watts who rioted a few years back after the Rodney King trials could have also applied technology to make their riots even more effective: masks to hide their faces from the cameras, radio jammers to prevent cops from effectively communicating, rocks to help break into stores. But does the addition of technology justify the riots?
I think there is a time and a place for all this anonymous information exchange technology, and there are unsigned bands who would love to have the free publicity and are willing to work with technologies like Napster to distribute their music. But there needs to be a way for people to opt-out. We get pissy when we aren't allowed to opt-out of on-line advertisers gathering information on us, and we get pissy when a company steals rms's code and distributes GNU licensed software as if it were proprietary, so why should we get pissy when a band like Metallica wants to opt out of Napster?
This mob rule mentality that has been adopted by many here is complete bullshit.
Man, people should stop frothing at the mouth and just hear these guys out. I too was skeptical that Metallica had just been corporatized into some homogenous profit generating machine.
/allowed/ this to go on. It is a matter of principal. Unfortunately, when it is not the underdog challenging it, we sometimes have a (perhaps healthy) knee-jerk reaction to discount somebody sticking up for their principals and their rights. This is not a record company issue. This is not a homogenous borg corporation issue. This is a band whom a third party didn't ask about enabling the free distribution of their stuff. Yes, it is a matter of degree. I can copy their stuff and give it to a neighbor. I can give it to the whole town. But after a certain order of magnitude increase in degree, it really becomes a whole different /class/ of problem and has to be dealt with differently. So Napster is NOT comparable to spending time and energy to make physical copies and physically distribute them to friends. Napster is enabling the irresponsible reproduction of their IP. That is their beef.
That's not the case.
Listen to what they are saying.
They are NOT arguing that MP3 trading or selling is some invalid activity. Hell, they even note that they allow bootlegs and couldn't give a damn what people do with them.
But there is one difference: Allowing bootlegs is THEIR choice! THEY got to make the decision. THEY got to decide who heard their music and what people did with it. Metallica is NOT fighting MP3 here. They are NOT fighting all us people who rip CDs to disk, or to tape, or even hand a friggen copy to our friends. What they are fighting is for their IP. They are fighting for the RIGHT to dictate the terms upon which their music is distributed. As they mention Napster never asked Metallica, "Hey, we have this really cool system here, do you mind if people rampantly exchange your IP on it? By the way, we would like you to have a say in the manner and limitations on which people exchange your stuff." No, that did not happen. Napster basically opened up a service which, although it may not have been designed explicitly for it, has enabled and promoted the exploitation of these guy's work. They are denied their IP and their copy rights. They are angered at Napster for denying these rights. They probably don't give a damn about the fans. In fact if they were ASKED they might have even
I think we should get off their case and stand behind them in saying that the definition and respect of IP rights are the most important thing in this brave new world. They are NOT on the other side of our "free community". They are on the SAME side. They want the freedom (not beer, as they say they couldn't care less about the pennies lost), to dictate how their IP is distributed. After all, isn't that what the GPL doesm in effect?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Regardless, no one has made any sort of convincing argument as to why these users deserve free music.
No, actually Lars himself gave the reason in the interview.
Ok. Lars says that it is ok for a person to copy their friend's music. Now, this amounts to one person copying another's music using a tape deck or CD burner. This is no different than one person copying another person's music using Napster!
Lars mentions that that one person copying a friend's tape is lower quality than using Napster, but this is not a valid point; is it ok to copy a tape, but not a CD? Many people have CD burners/duplicators. If tape copying is ok, CD copying is ok too. After all, who among us can really tell the difference in a master tape and a copied tape (assuming a good tape dubber)?
Lars' last point was the quantity of Napster. This is just silly. Ok, Lars, why don't you tell us exactly what the cut-off on copied tapes is? If one is ok, is 10? Can I copy 20 of my friend's records? 100?
I second those thoughts!
I thought the same thing. NetPD didn't give the details about how they got those names because it's very likely that they did it illegally. I hope this comes out sometime soon.
Who knows, maybe they managed it comepletely on the level. heh.
um, I don't know who you listen to, but I don't think this is the norm. I've only run across 2 mp3s that I wanted that were less than CD quality. Actually, one has a skip in the middle, the other has some ne'er-do-well playing along with the song. ya.
So I think when someone says that recordings are being distributed at high-quality, they are speaking for the great majority of songs.
Maybe the genre you like doesn't have a huge following. In that case, the same people would be trading the same inferior copies around amongst themselves. With stuff that has more than a few listeners though, you can count on one of those copies, among the hundreds, being straight from the donator's own CD.
Then the issue isn't really that people are trading music, it's about some INDIVIDUAL who somehow obtained a copy of a not-yet-released album, and then used Napster to distribute it?
That can't be the issue, because in that case Napster isn't to blame, it's the person who originally put the copy out.
I've read enough about the issue that I consider myself well-informed. I understand that the unreleased album is the straw that broke the camel's back, but after reading all this one should also understand that that isn't their focus. If it were they could easily and quickly stop it. Instead they've chosen the shotgun to shoot the rabbit.
-Adam
The church is near but the road is icy;
the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.
-- Russian Proverb
Just imagine a chat transcript between Jon Katz and Lars. The conversation would be a terabyte long.
The statistic about *ONE* unsigned artist is particularly sobering.
And you aren't the least bit suspicious that that number is cooked up?
Just think for a second about what would be involved in coming up with an accurate number of unsigned bands being traded on Napster. I think he's either a) Ignorant (he isn't the brightest man I've even run across, after all) or b) lying.
--GnrcMan--
I think he said a couple of dumb things, but his basic thesis---that people should be able to control what they create---is sound. You seem to differ?
Actually I would ignore this whole Napster issue when evaluating Lars' intelligence. It's undeniable that he does have valid points on this issue, and I have no particular problems with how he expresses himself. The problem is that the guy has a long history of being an idiot, which has hurt his credibility in this case. And when he starts throwing around numbers like "one unsigned artist traded on Napster in 48 Hrs" it frankly doesn't help.
--GnrcMan--
You're free to change your mind. But if you change your mind at the
same time as everyone else, without any new information coming to
light, you risk being labelled a sheep.
The advantage of the verbatim transcript is that not many people are
gping to think that this is the 16th version that finally made it
through a panel of lawyers review. I'm guessing Lars wanted it this
way. I don't think Slashdot are guilty of treating this interview
casually.
This is an interesting view from their side of the story, and I am happy to see that it is personal, and not filtered through 10 different lawyers.
I have not been following this much, so this was the first statement that I have heard from them. It would be easy to dismiss this by saying that they don't understand napster or the technology, and because of this are making a mistake. This is not necessarily the case. The statistics that he provided we very sobering to the idea that napster helps both independent and major label artists (napster, not mp3). We must look at it from their side as well as our own, and understand that they feel threatened by napster, and when we feel threatened it is a natural reaction to fight. What tends to be ignored on slashdot is that they are legally just in what they are doing. It is their property and we must respect that.
On the other hand, I bought S&M after listening to mp3's of it, gotten from napster. I honestly think that what they are doing is not in their best interest and only time will tell. I also believe that any laws banning something like napster would set a dangerous precedent, akin to banning paint because people sniff it.
Try knowing what the hell you're talking about!
>the download was done because somebody wanted to
>avoid buy a CD, not because somebody wanted to
>check this no-name band out.
I happen to own ALL THREE of his CDs!!!
A quick check of his website shows that those three (self titled, Making Love, and A soceity of People named Elihu) are the only releases he's had in CD form (excepting the limited edition Fracture release).
Yeah, I downloaded some of my Atom MP3s before I owned the CDs. But if you know who Atom is, then you know that it's HARD AS HELL to find his CDs in stores! This ain't something tou can pick up at best buy, tower, or virgin. I was living in Orlando, FL at the time, and even most indie stores had no idea what I was talking about. Finally, almost a year after I first heard "Avenger", I found a guy working at DIY Records who knew who I was talking about and was able to special order them for me. And even then, it took about a month and a half for me to get all three.
And guess what? The entire time, I was downloading every Atom MP3 I could find! Not because I wanted to avoid paying for the CDs, but because I didn't want to wait till I could find a store that knew what I was talking about. And you know what else? Napster made the search easier!
So I had a few MP3s BEFORE I owned the CDs. Bog F-ing deal!!! I guess the admission I paied to see him live TWICE, when he toured through Florida, the Shirt and sticker I bought, and the purchase of the three CDs means SQUAT because I had a few MP3s before the CDs. Napster stole from Atom.
Yeah right.
You can take your "the download was because you wanted to avoid paying for the CDs" arguement and stick it up your ass!
john
Imagine all the people...
>Johnny Socko is hardly an unsigned band.
I wasn't sure for 100% that none of the bands I listed were signed on indie labels.
But you have to admit, even though Asian Man has more quality bands signed than Virgin, that it's still a VERY small, independant, label.
Signing with Asian Man is vastly different from whoreing yourself out to the RIAA labels like virgin, sony, etc.
john
Imagine all the people...
>maybe if you said it right, i bet you asked about
>"adams package" or something. hard
Okay dickwad, if I thought the name was "adams package" how did I get a search string that returned "Atom and his Package" in napster?!?!?
Now, the list of links you found with "just one search"
http://www.cpcn.com/articles/091798/ear.person.
http://www.atomandhispackage.com/ -- You have to send money to some outfit in Gainsville to order CDs -- no SSL credit card option -- Yeah, riiiight.
http://www.midheaven.com/bin/state.cgi/20473562
http://val.looksmart.com/eus1/eus52213/eus15622
http://atomandhispackage.webjump.com/ -- Can't order CDs -- Takes forever and a day to load
http://expage.com/page/atomgo -- Can't order CDs
http://audiofind.net/atom_and_his_package.html -- Can't order CDs -- but you CAN DL MP3s
I'm not gonna bother with the rest of your links. I suspect they're just as defective as the first few. Only ONE of the links offers his CDs for sale, and that ONE just tells you to send money to Gainesville w/ NO secure credit card option. Not bloody likely.
>theres an electric fetus in just about
>every city.
Really?
(http://yp.yahoo.com/py/ypResults.py?stx=electr
Sorry, no electric fetus found in or nearby Orlando, FL. )
Not in Orlando.
Care to try again, asswipe?
john
Imagine all the people...
>They said they only saw one download from an
>unsigned band int the 48hrs they were monitoring
>traffic
Do you have ANY clue how napster works? I guess not, you're just another AC troll. But since you *are* just an AC, and too dumb to figure it out yourself, I'll elaborate.
Napster is ONLY a search engine. Logging on to it, as metallica claims that their mercenarys had done, you could determine how many people were OFFERING a given MP3. But you could NOT track how many people were downloading those MP3s. ALL file transfers are peer-to-peer. The MP3 files NEVER pass through Napster servers. To do what you claim metallica did, you'd have to monitor ALL traffic between EVERY ip address logged into Napster; something very detectable, and highly illegal.
YOU've exposed YOURSELF as being not just clueless, but a complete cretin as well.
john
Imagine all the people...
Yeah, it was pretty sweet. I usually alternated between PRK and Real Radio WTKS. Howard in the morning, Monsters during lunch, passed on Phillips in the afternoon usually for WPRK, Drew at night, and, after thet got rid of love lines for that phil hendrie guy, WPRK again at night. All of that interspersed with TV, work, and a doven other things tho.
I moved to California about a month ago, and have been hurting, radiowise, ever since. The only thing radio stations here have on Orlando radio is better sponsered concerts and music festivals.
What REALLY hurts is that there's no SanFran equivelent of Real Radio (at least not that I've found so far).
Ameoba Records in Berkeley, however, puts DIY to shame, as much as it pains me to say it.
john
Imagine all the people...
>In addition, the fact that Metallica only went
>after those they believed (although I still
>believe screen and file names are not wholly
>legitimate forms of proof) to be trading in
>*their* music
Oh really? Then where was the news story about metallica dropping their lawsuit against napster after the 300,000-odd users were banned?
>suggests that they are not in favor of destroying
>Napster and those like it,
Have you so soon forgotten the yahoo chat where he said that the ideal outcome would be the total destruction of napster?
He's pandering to the audience. He knows that slashdot users are more pro-technology than the common dirty metalhead type. So for a hostile audience, he tries to appear more conciliatory; whilst with their core metalhead hive, it's "destroy anything the masters don't like".
john
Imagine all the people...
>I know how to get onto AOL, and I will say that I
.wav's or AIFFs are NOT being traded, MP3s are. MP3 is a lossy compression scheme and delivers far from "perfect digital copies of master recordings". You might not be able to tell the difference of crappy computer speakers, or the $2 POS headphones that come with your discman (assuming you convert MP3s to red book). But on a REAL stereo with GOOD speakers, you *CAN* tell that the MP3 leaves much to be desired! Perhaps metallica has blasted their eardrums in front of 50KW amps long enough thay THEY can't tell the difference. But on MY stereo, *I* can tell the difference!!!
>have used AOL a couple of times...
So he's an AOLuser! That should be enough to show his uter cluelessness right there, but...
>Now, are we aware of the Gnutellas and all these
>other things? Of course we are, but you can only
>take it one step at a time. And I believe, and
>the people that we talk to about this, we
>believe, that the minute some of these companies
>become active
Please enlighten me lars. What company is responsible for gnutella? Freenet? FTP? IRC? Usenet?
>We believe that as quickly as they can make it
>untraceable we believe that you can find a way to
>fuck with it, and we have already heard about
>different ways of doing that.
Just what way does he know of to "fuck with" Freenet? Gnutella? IRC? Anonymous remail posts to usenet? Somehow, I have more confidence in the intelligence of the computer geeks of the world than that of lars' army of metalhead and legal drones.
>if you have the energy and the resources to chase
>'em -- and that's one thing we have is a lot of
>energy and a lot of resources
>there will never be a point where they will
>be uncatchable
Uh yeah... look at the resources to takes to trace down the author of a virus, either melissia or love bug. It takes joint evvorts of the FBI, NSA, and heaps of other police agancys to track down ONE person sending out an illegal file. Imagine going through that for EVERY metallica MP3 ever traded. Does anyone thing that then feds care to go through that much trouble? Methinks lars thinks his army of metalheads is bigger than it is. And with the advent of Freenet, it'g gonna get MUCH HARDER to track the originator of any given file.
Given enough resources, the NSA could intercept and decrypt every 4096 bit encrypted email too. Only problem is that those resources (gobs of supercomputers) wouldn't fit on the surface of the entire Earth.
>going on the Internet and getting 1st generation,
>perfect digital copies of master recordings from
>all the world,
Complete ignorant bullshit. Plain and simple. The
That's why if it's an MP3 worth listening to in the first place, I make a point of getting the CD ASAP! There IS a noticeable difference. And if the MP3 is not worth getting the CD, it's not worth listening to anyway, and gets deleted in short order. No harm done. No loss of a sale. Too bad metalheads are too dumb to understand this.
>when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three
>weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million
>downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one
>downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the
>whole time.
More lies! More bullshit! When I first started useing Napster, I was *easily* able to find MP3s for several bands I like who are NOT signed to a label; not within 48 hours, but within *FOUR* hours!!! Some of those are listed in a seperate post of mine on this topic. I won't bother repeating them. I HAVE bought several CDs from these bands... the ones that HAVE released CDs that is. Some of the bands I have on MP3 have ONLY released MP3s ao far!
Simple lies, arrogance, RIAA propaganda, or for whatever reason, metallica has displayed a COMPLETE lack of clue.
john
Imagine all the people...
This interview is the first (and I have read about every GD one of them) that gave me an insight on what is going on in his head. (Maybe its the train of thought transcript.) /. can appreciate.
Did anyone else think he is mellowing? He seemed to be more excited about the argument itself than the points of the argument.
He also seems to be excited about the technology, which I think
Yeah, I think he is still a greedy SOB who is only concerned about money for himself, but I think now that he understands it better, he isn't as scared. I'm thinking fear, caused by ignorance and lack of control was his main driving force to start this whole thing. The first several interviews I saw with him, he was almost ravenous, spitting and foaming. Now, he can laugh about it. He had clear and lucid points, I thought.(Not a one that I agreed with, however.)
I think it has been so long since he was a fan that all he thinks about is shipping units. So when he saw people downloading stuff he thinks their point is to rip him off of units, not because they are having fun with friends, and doing just what he would have done at their age.
Or maybe he just had some good doobage before the interview.
- I like pudding.
I release my own cds. I have my own label. My distribution blows, and I could hardly consider myself a MINOR label. For all intents and purposes, I am unsigned. Yet (and mostly for copyright reasons) all my .mp3s mention a label in the headers (or they should anyway). So am I unsigned? Technically, no. Am I smaller than metallica? Of course. Does Lars give a fuck about anything other than his ego? evidentally not.
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
The source code (the actual music sheets and lyrics) is out there and free as far as Lars is concerned.
... wait. You want HIS compiled version of the information done by Metallica (a beowulf cluster of Alphas) not the one done by you (a TRS-80).
Possibly. But not as far as the RIAA (or US copyright law, for that matter) is concerned, just FYI.
If Lars had a unique painting and made a few prints of it for his friends, would you complain?
If I could have enjoyed that painting at absolutely no cost to him at all, yes. The difference here is that paintings are currently scarce, just like recorded music used to be. But with the Internet, recorded music is no longer scarce. Using the legal system to force everyone to pretend that it still is distorts the market and prevents the widest possible distribution of people from enjoying art.
So the information is completely free. What are you complaining about? Oh
Um...the point of the saying "information wants to be free" is that anything which can be transmitted at zero cost will proliferate to market saturation. Thus "information" in this context is anything which can be sent over the internet--which includes "compiled" recordings, not just (equally "pirated") sheet music. Binary software wants to be free, too, and if you spend any time looking you'll find that most of it is. The difference is that software companies are much more clued-in about the phenomenon and have added many non-"information" addons to their products, like official support, manuals, etc., in an effort to slow down warezing.
Well, it is his performance, so he can do it for you at your every whim, or do it when the hell he wants and charge you for it. If you were in his shoes, which would you prefer? Honestly, now?
I don't care. It shouldn't be his decision. He should have a larger say, but it shouldn't be his decision.
This whole thing is a battle about the future direction of the law, and whether we really want to criminalize behavior which most knowledgable citizens find completely ethical and in fact engage in. As such, this decision about where to take the law should be made by society as a whole, and in the interests of society as a whole. Now, those self-interests have to be enlightened, and thus ought to include some way of solving the problem of making sure musicians still have the resources and incentives to make the best music possible. But that doesn't mean the musicians get to decide. Society gets to decide, and our decision should be what's best for us, not for Lars.
Of course, most members of society are too poorly informed to care much, and thus it will probably be RIAA dollars that decide, at least in the short term. The war on copying will likely be long and drawn out, if not so ugly (after all, I have yet to see any ideas on how to crack down on Freenet that would even come close to surviving a Supreme Court challenge).
In the end, though, enough people will figure out that this is important, and their collective opinions will make the decision. It could be that most of them will end up agreeing with you. But I don't think so.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. That is all." -- Robert A. Heinlein ("Life-Line")
Somewhere, a publicist is tearing her hair out.
A carefully crafted "rock outlaw" image is turned to ash. Lars in a suit, sitting in an office.
With bifocals, I'll bet.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
So, maybe he's ignorant, or lying, but maybe he's just unknowingly using misleading statistics, which isn't the same thing.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Here's a link to today's comic that will still be there tomorrow:
Today's UF
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
What I take away from this interview, is that you did not, for whatever reason, answer this one question.
It is sad that this is all that you were able to take away from this interview. I was able to learn so much more from it, regardless of my views before or after reading his letter. I am pretty "middle-of-the-road" in this matter, but I would have to say that in view of how much was said in his interview, statements like this are representative of the closed mindedness of many of the participants on both sides of the fence, and are overall detrimental to dealing with the real issues at hand.
That being said, IMHO, the question of the artists stake in the sell of a CD was more of a lead into the real meat of chwicks' post, and likely more of a rhetorical question. Regardless, Lars' concession as to the artist's portion of the profits being low essentially answered the question, and the remainder of his response was at least as on par with the overall question, and its relevance to the matters at hand.
"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson
1) The fact that they are recognizing that they cannot shut down the system, or future continuation of the "napster concept" is good. I agree completely that copyrighted material should NOT be shared.
2) The cat is already out of the bag, so to speak. MP3 is not going away... and there will always be software to rip them from CDs. The Napster Concept isn't going away, because it has been done, and everyone understands and uses it. They cannot stop that, and I really wish all of the over hyped media would shut the hell up and realize that. (As well as the strung out Napster users that don't get it and are just flaming angry at the world.)
3) I wish the RIAA and so forth would just wise the hell up and start looking for ways to embrace this technology instead of feel so threatened by it. Like Lars said, its chump change right now, and if the RIAA does something postitive with the situation, instead of just trying to chop the head off the hydra, then maybe we can ALL come to a compromise.
4) Metallica and other old bands should public domain some of their live concert recordings. If they don't care about bootlegging of these concerts, then do some decent recordings and package THOSE up as MP3's and put them online. a) They'll be showing that they are trying to work with everyone and b) people who MUST download it can get it in some form... and will still be likely to go buy the album.
Vulgrin the MAD
I sig, therefore I am.
He's just as incomprensible in person, though I'm sure its his meth addiction that keeps stopping his train of thought every 3 or 4 words.
Napster neatly shows you the kbs of each searched MP3, considering the standard is 128kbps which is near CD-quality you are getting a version of the music which most people can't distinguish from a CD .wav file.
Low quality MP3's are like 64 or so kbs, they're reserved for low quality live tracks. It never made much sense to me, you might as well go with a 128kbs for the best sound vs. filesize equation.
Legally things are either legal or illegal, but in the real world people constantly are making decisions in the "shades of gray" areas. I feel perfectly at easy doing 75 in a 65mph zone, I habitually break drug laws, and I'll download MP3's till I'm blue in the face.
*Everyone* acts and thinks this way, if the laws actually reflected what was right and was wrong, then things would be different, but they don't. Assuming all Napster users are hurtful pirates really doesn't jive much with reality, how many of these users are willing to sell burned copies or imitation T-shirts to alternative teeny-boppers? Probably none.
People will always put their morality in front of the law and I can't blame them as the law usually serves the power-strictures, not the citizen. Breaking laws that you think are unfair and limit your freedoms is perfectly healthy, if we were all law-loving automatons we'd still be in the midst of slave owners, theocracies, and illiterate life-long sweatshop workers.
If you really want to convince the MP3 trading community to stop what they're doing you have to prove that the current copyright laws are more helpful than hurtful and that the industry doesn't artificially inflate their prices. Good luck with those two.
It may be time for you to re-evaluate your management/legal team, Lars. Somehow, their collective wisdom failed to mentioned a few very key points.
1. Smile. Be happy. 1.4 million observed downloads of your music is the ultimate validation of what every radio station was wrong about...your music DOES appeal to a wide-scale audience. Good Job.
2. What are you doing to your own fans? Your average fan enjoys Metallica to the extent of spending, at least, $50, on the records...Is this not enough? Who are you to limit us? Your popularity and income DEPENDS on us... The fans. And yet, despite our investment in your catalogue, you will target ME? For liking your music enough to want to listen to it at work?
Screw the law, man. Metallica is NOT a secret...The people that like your music
already own it. The people that don't already own the music don't like it and aren't likely to be inclined to download it. Wake up.
3. Until you guys stop making crappy grunge records, it's probably best to avoid irritating the fans you have left...I doubt there will be many new ones (Hey, hey, hey??? Here I go now??? C'mon man. Please silence Captain Caveman.)
4. Please rethink your use of the term "art" in reference to Metallica. At one time, there was art. Now, it's primarily poppy rubbish.
Artist defined: artist n : a person whose creative work shows sensitivity and imagination [syn: creative person]
Screaming something in retard really doesn't quite qualify as art...They make Ritalin for that.
"Gimme fuel, gimme fyah, gimme that which I desiyah,"
5. We apologise if you have no sense of humor about these matters. I mean...after releasing S&M? I figured that you guys were the funniest thing ever.
A third possibility exists. That NetPD was not told to watch for such traffic, and didn't. When asked, 'Oh, btw, how many unsigned artists got traded?' they pulled a number out of their collective asses..
.sig: Now legally binding!
If people were forced to rename their songs to Me**llica-RideTheLightning, as you suggest, other Napster users would not come up with any hits if they tried searching for "Metallica". The music is really only available if it's accessible, and if they censor the name, then no one, both Napster and it's users, will be able to locate that song.
You do bring an interesting point about the censorship crossfire for other bands, however.
A Jane's Addiction cover of 'Sypathy for the Devil', unreleased.
This was off of Jane's Addiction's first album which IIRC was only available by import initially. I was able to find a non-import version in a store 8 or 9 years ago and it's a great CD--all high-quality live recordings. Not sure if it's still available It's self-titled, available from XXX records. Also has a great version of Pigs in Zen and a cover of Lou Reed's "Rock and Roll."
I had a crowd of friends around my computer the other night that were amazed at how much impossible (or nearly-impossible) to find stuff they could find on Napster. Yeah, the bulk of what's available on Napster is so pervasive it's disgusting, but the only reason there's so much of it on there in the first place is that it's so pervasive to begin with.
numb
I don't think that this is the point Lars is trying to make at all. You don't have the right to downloads Metallica's MP3s just because you can find them on the net any more than you have the right to use other people's credit card numbers to make purchases because such information can be found on the net.
The problem is that for information to be freely available over the Internet you have to accept that people will share anything they feel like. It bothers me that people would prefer to give up their rights to freely share stuff over the Internet to protect their profits. I honestly believe Metallica will profit well regardless, but who knows for sure if they will profit as well if their music is freely available? However, I think we can be fairly certain that we all lose if we can only share material that someone else has to authorize first.
One guy mentioned how SDMI would be a great method of distribution, but I think the truth is that it's not really a solution at all. If I can get the music to my ears, I can assure you I can make a hi-quality MP3 of it regardless of the original format (assuming the original format is hi-quality.)
Metallica has given us a lot music-wise, and I'm glad they've profitted from it. If they produce any more good music I truly want them to profit from that as well. If we could all just work on the honor system here, and pay them for the music we like, and not pay them for the music we don't listen to, then we're all set. I don't think this is going to happen though. Some people just won't pay.
So, in order to guarantee that they get paid we have to guarantee that people aren't passing around their music without permission. One way to do this would be to monitor everyone's Internet connections, arrest anyone that encrypts stuff so the authorities can't see it, and have someone in charge verify that each transfer falls in line with local regulations. That doesn't work for me.
Another option is to have everyone pay the RIAA a tax for their Internet connections to make up for any lost profits the RIAA and its artists may experience. I don't think this is fair to all the other artists and don't really like this idea either. However, this is the scenario that I expect the RIAA to support. Mandatory payment regardless of quality of production--not a bad deal for the RIAA. We'll probably see some lobbying for this.
Metallica and every other producer of audio, images, and data are releasing their products into an environment where it can propogate regardless of our wishes. This is what we have to deal with. The Open Source crowd is the furthest ahead in dealing with this new fact of life.
In the meantime I release my creations for free unless I'm commissioned to create them in advance. One thing I have realized due to this whole Metallica thing is that I don't know where the fair middle ground in all this is yet--I'm not even sure if there is one. I'll be thinking about though. Lars isn't the only one who's still got a lot to figure out about what the Internet makes possible.
numb
I really like the ideas about Value-Adds. I do think this is the way to go. I hope that Lars & Co read your message. If they are going to try to make any software that allows the free distribution of media illegal, then I'm going to fight. It's not that I don't care about copyright, I do care, it's purely that it's so important to have software that allows such easy distribution. You've given Metallica some options to work within the current (and future) framework and I hope they're listening.
Also, I'm very glad that emmett did a verbatim transcription of the conversation. It's a little hard to read an unedited transcription, but it definately gives a better feel for where Lars is coming from. It definately makes me feel a lot better to have an honest idea of Metallica's motivations. Any chance we'll be hearing this interview on the Geek radio?
I still think Lars and the rest involved have a lot to learn, but I'm glad that they are learning something. Hopefully they'll learn not to fuck with our freedom to write software. I would stand up for their right to say whatever they want on their albums, so I hope they will learn to respect our rights to develop software for distributing music and to use it. I still get the impression that Lars does not realize that none of us gets to control what we write once it's available digitally. I suppose I've just had a lot longer to get used to that idea.
numb
And any attempts to go after Gnutella (a true file-sharing utility just like anonymous FTP) will be fruitless.
Well, your IP address is always available when you're using gnutella.
I mention this only because people are genuinely starting to believe that there's anonymity involved in using gnutella. There isn't. It can all be traced.
Sun Ra is an exception to just about any rule.
If you spend about 12 hours a day communicating non-verbally, eventually your thought processes tend to lean that way.
Much like those of us who keep throwing tech garble into sentences, or trying to figure out how to express a smiley in real life...
You just smile.
Lars was awfully nice about the record companies. If you go back through the history of Metallica, you'll probably find, oh, say, one or two quotes from him that weren't quite so kind.
One thing to remember is that bands/artist != the RIAA. For all of the bitching that everyone seems to do nowadays about the RIAA, noone has been as screwed by them as the musicians have.
Check out the new legislation wherein the rights to music no longer fall back to the artist after 35(?) years. The RIAA lobbyists recently managed to screw musicians out of the rights to their own material yet again, on a federal level.
So what are we gonna do? How are we going to take this medium and empower artists while trying not to feed the sharks?
As of this moment I'm downloading a 120 minute drum n' bass set. This is not something you can get in a record store. Guess who's computer it's residing on? The dj who did the scratching.
This morning I downloaded a live cover of The Who's Baba O'Riley by Pearl Jam. I have seen it on CD, but it was a bootleg sold by a company from Italy.........not a penny to the artist anyway.
A Jane's Addiction cover of 'Sypathy for the Devil', unreleased.
A bunch of freestyles from Eminem and there you have it. A collection of live/rare music that would be impossible to get without Napster.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Whoa... Something just came to me: You put this interview in MP3 format. You call it "Metallica - Slashdot Interview.mp3" and post it up for download. Within minutes, thousands of people have it in their MP3 folders. Let's say a few of those people are running Napster right then. They slap that file in their folder and *boom* that's up on Napster.
Moving on, a user (we'll call him Joe Smoe) on Napster decides to buck the machine and search for 'Metallica.' One hundred results show up and there, near the top of the list is this "Metallica - Slashdot Interview" MP3. He's curious, has no idea what Slashdot is, thinks it's a comedy deal or something and decides to pick it up. He listens to it, laughs, and forgets about it. Along comes NetPD for their weekly trolli... detective work. They find all the users possessing songs with "Metallica" in them. Again, they send a list of users who are "copying" Metallica songs to Napster to be banned. Poor Joe Smoe gets banned and is ticked. He fills out the counter-suit form and sends it in... adding to the 30,000+ people who've already sent it in.
Now, this might be abstract, but *sure* - it could happen and just goes to show that there are more than a few innocent users in the 600,000 has pulled up. Something to ponder about...
I manage geeks in a computer lab, and all the latest tools that eventually get banned at work find some kind of productive life in the lab anyway. We use instant chat clients to collaborate with engineers geographically separated from the core team, and we use MP3s to entertain ourselves.
MP3s get traded amongst friends, just like Lars described. We also use napster. The stuff that gets downloaded is typically comprised of music we own on vinyl that the ex-wife dumped during the divorce 6 years ago, or stuff our toddlers ruined while wandering a destructive path through the living room when no one was watching.
We do not however broadcast our self produced MP3s the internet (otherwise our friends employed at the firewall will get pissed).
And you know what I do when I hear a track from the Who? I go to Best Buy and grab their latest release, Live at the BBC. The guys in the lab are my DJs and I tend to hear a hit several times over, Sometimes just once. Then I just have to get the entire "album" for the cd changer in the car. (the only good part about the commute).
MP3 and Napster can be the equivalent of the Record label, the marketing dept, the radio station, and the DJ. Why is this bad? Especially if the music has been mad available to us publically via radio, MTV, and the library. And, like TIVO, I get to personalize what I want to absorb while working or playing.
I applaud Lars honest discussion and his eagerness to research and understand the issues. I also respect his opinion.
I just wanted to spin the discussion in a different direction. Here a list of discussion points that I have seen yet in the this thread:
1. What if Napster had positioned itself as the next generation radio station, specializing in customized listening, and DID ask permission from artist to broadcast their tunes.
2. What measures are in place for Metallica to decide what is released for air play on the radio? What are their legal rights if radio stations play bootlegged studio material before they have authorized its release? Are there any precedents that should be transferred to the web?
3. Do recordings that have been released publically for purchase, which can then be freely played on the public airwaves, become pirated if they appear on the net? The medium has changed, but has the context?
4. When FM began broadcasting in stereo, and we had Dolby in our tape decks, did the equation based upon quality change?
Did the legal position on pirating change?
Did more "control" shift to the consumer?
Did more money shift from the consumer to the industry?
Did the shift in money nullify any perceived gain of control by the consumer?
I am not advocating piracy here, just discussion. I wanted to share some of the viewpoints that have passed through my mind as I try to make sense of the issues at hand.
Thanks for the rant space /.
Bill M.
Ok, so now we know what Lars thinks. But, I think the question everyone really wants answered is, "what does Al think?"
Wonder no longer. Here are the brilliant insights of Weird Al Yankovic, courtesy of Ask Al Q&A's for May, 2000:
Al has spoken.
I'd bet you could sue a gun company IF they were selling guns illegally. That is to say they were skipping the registration process and knowingly selling to criminals.
You see, buying a gun isn't illegal. Downloading copyrighted material is, so yes if a gun company behaved like Napster then yes you could sue them.
Ride the Lightening Lars! Harvest the Sorrow of all the all who were accused of stealing your music.
Do you really care about Napster or did the record company need a spokes person and you drew The Shortest Straw?
Rip out the Blackened souls of these Napster pirates and torture them till they are on The Frayed Ends of Sanity and they renouce their wrong doing and send you some money, right Lars?
Is this legit, or just some Master of Puppets power trip? Stand up you Disposable Hero and stop this, The Thing That Should Not Be.
Hell, Hit the Lights and Kill'em All. You should feel No Remorse, cuz you're justified my friend, as the poor staving artist. We all know Kid Rock was the first, you could be next! This Napster could throw you down to poverty so fast that you get Whiplash, but you know we will make fighting it as tough as Pulling Teeth.
We all should have guessed you'd be the first to make something of this with yur Seek and Destroy mentality. Don't get all Holier Than Thou because it's Sad but True, you pirate too. So, Don't Tread on Me when you're the God that Failed.
My Friend of Misery, join us, The Unforgiven! May I suggest FREEDOM FOR ALL because, in truth, Nothing Else Matters.....
Me too. He is quite an intelligent guy overall and I think that came through pretty well in the interview. He also seems to have a good grasp of what he knows vs. what he doesn't know and admits what he doesn't know, which is more than can be said for a lot of people. Granted the interview is a bit long and rambling but I think that is partly a function of its unedited nature. Would anyone have rather had a dumbed down edited interview? I would rather have it straight from the horse's mouth so to speak.
I am not sure that what Metallica is doing can be equated to a testosterone-laden pissing contest. I think Lars stated, acurately if not eloquently, that the members of Metallica feel that wholesale distribution of their music by an unauthorized corporate entity is wrong, and that they choose to fight it. This is about distribution channels and how Metallica's music travels through them. Its about their right to prohibit a company like Napster from reaping the rewards of Metallica's hard work without any accountability to the people that generated the product in the first place. Equating this to people making mix tapes for their car has no relevance here. If Record Town decided to open up a bunch of Metallica CD's in their store and allow anyone who purchased blank tapes to tape them in the store without paying, that would be a similar situation and I'm sure the band would take action. They aren't interested in getting into anyone's livingroom and stopping their fans from enjoying the music. They are attacking the corporation facilitating mass copyright violation.
It's obvious from what Larr's is saying that he is on the learning curve and not scared to say it. Now that you have his attention perhaps you can offer him this bully pulpit to speak from every 6 months or so. It would be interesting to hear how his thoughts progress because he is something we all treasure, a outspoken but intelligent newbie with a obvious sense of fairness in his perceptions.
Vista, the single biggest argument for Desktop Linux! It doesn't "Just Work"(TM).
OK. Here is another perspective to view it from. The information is and always has been free. The source code (the actual music sheets and lyrics) is out there and free as far as Lars is concerned. If you download and actually compile (play) it yourself, I doubt Lars would care. So the information is completely free. What are you complaining about? Oh ... wait. You want HIS compiled version of the information done by Metallica (a beowulf cluster of Alphas) not the one done by you (a TRS-80). Well, it is his performance, so he can do it for you at your every whim, or do it when the hell he wants and charge you for it. If you were in his shoes, which would you prefer? Honestly, now?
Music tracks are not information that is free. They are reproductions of something unique. If Lars had a unique painting and made a few prints of it for his friends, would you complain? How about if you had the painting instead, and Lars made 5,000 prints at Kinko's (on your credit card) and gave them away to everyone who wanted them. Suppose those people did the same thing. The prints you gave to your friends wouldn't seem so special, huh?
You have your opinion and he has his. I personally view his as more reasonable, but that does not mean yours is wrong. It means that one of us is misinformed, or that we disagree on this. I try to think of things in metaphors before I make judgements, because I like to look at things in a perspective that others might see it from.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
When did Lars ask you to stop sharing information? He wants you to stop running his paintings through the photocopier (metaphorically speaking). All of the information: lyrics, score, etc. are in the public domain or might as well be. Go compile it yourself instead.
Sure you can make a garden that you don't want people to stand on your grass and look at it with out paying. Sure you can't stop them from looking from the street. You can stop them from digging it up, taking it to the landscapers, getting a copy of it made, and throwing it back into your yard more or less where it was. Just because something is easy to copy, doesn't necessarily make it information. Information is how something is done, a description of it, the wording used, etc. Information is not the product it refers to (such as a reading of a particular piece of poetry) in my book.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
There is a (sort of) browsing function that I use a lot. If you see a person that has a couple of songs from an artist that you do like (or if you see them in a chat room), you can put them on your 'hot list' and view all the songs that they have. Chances are that you'll come across some sonce that you like that you never knew existed.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
Not especially suspicious. I've certainly never met anyone who used napster to get music that they couldn't have bought on CD.
Hey, I'm right here.
There are a lot of remixes of songs out there that are pretty much only available on Napster, along with other music (foreign, mostly) that would be near impossible to get any conventional way. They're never at stores, and the only websites that I can find that have them are in Japanese, which doesn't help me much.
If I was able to actually find the CDs, I'd go out and buy them, but I resort to Napster because it's impossible for me to get the music normally.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
The thing is, they weren't added to anything. Napster didn't say, "Hey, lets put these Metallica MP3s up!", the users who connected to Napster had them and were sharing them.
Using your analogy, it would be like saying that the ISP that a spammer sends mail from is at fault.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
It's like, OK, 'It's January, my name is Napster, or I'm Sean, or whoever the CEO was at the time, we have this service, we would like to know if you are interested in being part of it.' If we'd said Yes, then there's no issue, if we'd said No, then this whole thing would have never
Does anyone else get the impression from this that he has NO CLUE what goes on with Napster?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
It's not what it is, it's something else.
'Uninformed' is not knowing the fact. 'Misinformed' is knowing an incorrect, but plausibly substitutable fact which one sincerely, and reasonably believes to be true. 'Ignorant' is when one should reasonably suspect that he's been misinformed, but chooses to 'ignore' it anyway, possibly for fear of admitting to oneself or others that he does not know the correct fact, and has been tricked into repeating an absurdly incorrect fact instead.
I think it's the latter in this case. Lars & company may be royally pissed when they find out that the mp3s being traded are hardly the "pristine master copies" they've been led to believe by NetPD, or their managers, or, most likely their lawyers (the only people who can still actually profit from this arrangement).
But, by then it may be too late for them to turn around and change their minds due to the sheer momentum of the whole process. They've got to save face somehow, and they're in a position where they'll piss some segment of their fans off no matter what they do, unless they get really creative.
However I may feel about the issue at large, I think Lars, et al. have done a respectable job sorting through the information they've been presented, and the conclusions they've drawn seem reasonable based upon that information.
So, although I certainly won't buy any Metallica CDs until the lawsuit is over (I refuse to fund this legal action.), I'm no longer going to automatically change the station whenever any Metallica song comes up on the radio. As Lars has said, it's important to separate the business and creative sides of the music.
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
I'll start with the bad: Lars seems to think that MP3 is a perfect copy. Although he agrees that CDs are too expensive (hence the wide interest in MP3s), he has no plans for distribution over the internet (which he agrees would be cheaper). For Metallica, Napster is just the first step. They think that after that, they will go after other things such as Gnutella, especially when they IPO. Well, since AOL disowned Gnutella, there is no link to any "funding."
One great point is that downloading stuff from the internet is a privilege and not a right. He's not against the idea of Napster in general ("So you can't sit there and say 'I think Napster doesn't have a right to exist,' because there are people who want to use a service like Napster"), he just doesn't want copyrights, etc. being trampled on. People tout Napster and MP3.com for their ability to let "new" bands distribute their songs hoping to make it big. How many of these bands will really take off without the promotion of the record companies?
Just how in the hell am I supposed to find these unheard/undiscovered bands? Napster lets you search by keyword, not genre or type of music. Am I supposed to type in random words and find bands that way?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I was listening to the CBC radion the other day. A pianist was talking about his personal experiences with mp3.com. He was originally very optimistic about it because his personal weak points were "selling himself" and business sense. He hoped mp3.com would free him and allow him to directly benefit from his musical talent alone.
He registered and put up a few songs for free download. The others were up for sale. He was apparently quite talented, because he quickly got to the top ten download list in his category, and stayed there for months. He was very excited about all of this, and saw possibilities for fame and an honest, hassle-free living.
After four months IIRC, he got his first check. It was an mount of just over seventy dollars. Needless to say he stopped bothering with mp3.com. He still gets fan e-mail, which makes him feel good about himself, but the man has to eat, too. So much for the theory that mp3.com is allowing artists to benefit from their art. Maybe their poster childs aren't so representative of what really goes on.
One thing I didn't realize, or think about, and I don't think most people realize, or think about comes back to scale. No one cared when we were trading MP3s via FTPs and IRC channels. The difference with Napster was ease of use and availability. I've tried Gnutella, but never freenet, and let me tell you. Joe Jock, college football star who wants some MP3s is not going to have much luck with Gnutella. I think that even if Gnutella lives on (which it will), it won't matter because the volume will be so reduced. Last time I connected with GnuTella, I saw about 11 terrabytes online or so. Well, I usually get on the order of 2 terrabytes on any napster server I'm on, and there are many, many napster servers. And Gnutella trades far more than just mp3s.
I think if Napster goes down, the rest will probably be left alone, though I imagine someone will go after Scour sooner or later... that should be a hell of a legal battle. (Scour is funded by Michael Ovitz)
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
I mean, didn't they get what they wanted? I'm not sure what their beef was, I thought when napster banned the names Metallica gave them, that was all there was to it. Why are they still going after Napster?
-------- "All I want in life's a little bit of love to take the pain away" --Spiritualized
I never thought I would hear mettalica make an anti anarchy statement.
"He's a real midnight golfer"
Lars has some valid points, this is true. I really hate to say he doesn't get it, because I do think he has a point when he goes on about Internet Extremists (hellooooo slashdot). So what I'll instead say is that he has views that differ fundementally from mine.
A record company is about promotion and not about "being a bank." There is nothing I like more than getting my music heard, and liked. The best way for me to do that is to promote it. Record companies do just that for me, so they should get money for services rendered. What we have today, sadly, is a gross deformity of a bank/business. I could go on and on about this, but then you'd be hearing more of a rant than a comment, so..
The Internet was ripe 2 years ago for bands to begin online music distribution. Now -- with broadband ever increasing and college students coming to campus with a view of bandwidth being as essential as water -- now the internet is approaching mass consumerization. Mp3.com may not have the Puff Daddy or Britney Spears (in terms of popularity) but they have a lot of music that broadband people can get pretty quickly, and easily. If Metallica had sold their stuff online before they went after Napster, I think they would have had so much less of a problem. Lars thinks that "we're getting to that point" where artists can viably disrtibute online. I think we're past that point.
Digital music distribution does promote independents. It's almost like compilation albums: if I see artists I like, and artists I'ver never heard of in the same place, you can bet your ass I'm going to check out the new people. I know I'm not alone when I say I have discovered countless artists whose work I have purchased after I heard them on MP3.
I believe we do have the right to just about anything we get on the Internet. Actually, practically an entire generation of people believe this. I don't think I have the right to the hax0r-w4r3z version of program XYZ. I do have the right to get what I'd like for what I'm willing to pay. I'm willing to pay a small amount (75 cents) per song for music I get. I can't do that yet, and because the MP3 cat is out of the bag, I'm sorry, but I'm not about to completely stop getting music until someone gets their act together. This is a generation that like it or not is accustomed to convenience. It is currently more convenient to get the music from napster than it is to put down way too much money for it. This is a backlash that's resulting from as Lars put it, the record companies' fuckup, but I think it's way past time people stopped fighting the symptoms and took care of the cause.
I agree with Lars when talks about napster and lack of permission for distribution, etc. Valid, and I agree. The problem is that it's more a matter of people's demand, not napster capability. Napster didn't put the songs there, the people did.
The way I've explain Napster to those who have asked is quite simple. It's basically a giant room where people say "I have such & such a song" and other people are asking for "such & such's song." Clearly you can't say that the room is illegal.. it's just there. Everyone I've talked to always agrees on that point. They may not be thinking, like me, about online distribution models, about convenience, etc. But they do agree, it's pretty stupid to outlaw a room.
These thoughts are my own and not karma-whoring fodder, flamebait, me-too'ing or what have you. I'm telling you what I want. Lars, in all of his research, will hopefully be checking this place out.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I'm impressed, though not at all surprised, by the quality of Lars' response, and I'm glad he gave his time to talk about these things.
It's clear that Metallica regard the Napster issue as one which concerns their integrity, and not only their sales revenue. That in itself makes a lot of the flak (I'm thinking of a certain cartoon in particular) the band has taken over this look spiteful and mean. Whatever else the Napster lawsuit may be about, it's not about Lars' personal greed.
Napster's corporate revenue is another matter. What the comparison I and others made with home taping left out of the equation was the extent to which the trading of files on Napster depends on a large and highly profitable third-party maintained infrastructure, for which there is no analogy I can think of in the world of home-taping. I criticised Metallica for intervening in the admittedly illegal activity of its teenage fanbase - the activity of swapping and listening to pirated music - which I argued was part of the culture out of which Metallica has gotten most of its lifelong devotees. I do not think that the band should be criticised, however, for holding the corporate maintainers of that infrastructure to account for the way they make their money out of, amongst other things, Metallica's music.
It's within Napster's power to make it a lot more difficult for Napster users to trade Metallica's music using their system. I don't think anyone would argue that it's possible for them to prevent it outright, but by doing nothing they not only implicitly sanction that use of their system but show themselves to be content to profit by it.
Home-taping wasn't killing music, and I doubt whether even the most unscrupulous use of Napster/Gnutella/Whatever-Comes-Along-Next will do so either, in the long run. It is more likely that they will continue to subtend, rather than subvert, the commercial culture that enables bands like Metallica to achieve the fame, stature and popularity that they now enjoy. Nevertheless, the responsibilities of corporate third-parties such as Napster should not be overlooked; and the novelty and popularity of the technology they employ should not be used as an excuse for disregarding those responsibilities.
Thanks again to Lars for showing that Metallica are willing to participate in the very necessary debates around these issues, and are not content - as so many others are - to settle for technical ignorance backed by bludgeoning legal firepower.
"Knowledge is the continuation of ignorance by other means"
Of COURSE scale and quality matters. I see posts here trying to literally compare the act of 1 unauthorized copy to MURDER for God's sake.
I can't believe we have people here a) saying making a tape for your friend of a few choice songs is just as evil; or b) letting people download millions of copies of high-quality digital albums is "ok" and even "right".
You people clearly do not understand the way the world works here.. The original poster explained it best by saying there *are* gray areas DEFINED by scale and quality. Murder OBVIOUSLY is not one of them.
The question is surely, can drummers appreciate good music? Many of them have friends who are musicians, but that in and of itself wouldn't necessarily mean anything. And Lars, as far as I can tell, doesn't have any remotely musically talented acquaintances.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I had 4 albums (FOUR!!!) on cassette that were either old and distorted, or broken all together. I downloaded only the songs that I had already paid to listen to. As it turns out, some company all the way across the country sees this and submits my name to Metallica, who inturn, submits it to Napster. Now I find myself kicked off of Napster for downloading Metallica songs legally. Also, I'm sorry if Metallica is losing it's bread money, but I don't agree that Lars can sit there and say that he copies things illegally, but he's just one man . Give me a break Lars. There are how many people in the U.S.? In the world? What's good for you is good for everyone. That's the way the world works. If YOU can copy songs without permission, so can 1.4 million people in 48 hours. Sucks when it happens to you huh? ------------------------------- Trim the fat!!
"Thoughts are more powerful than any weapon, and I don't even let my people own guns." --Joseph Stalin
One thing that I noticed throughout his responses is that he is learning as he's going... he even seemed to be thinking/rethinking his position on some of the questions.
For example; he contradicted himself on whether it is a quantity/quality issue. When discussing bootlegs, he started to go down that path, and then seemed to discard that arguement ("well it's not so much, not so much"). Though he did come back to it at the end, you can see that a seed of doubt has been planted there.
Now, I'm not an expert on the music industry, but I'm wondering, as Lars seems to be as well, why he is getting the backing of his record company on this. As I understand it, bands make the bulk of their money from concerts not CDs, It is the label that picks up the bulk of the cash. Lars describes the labels as a bank, where the money that they make from a big selling band is partially used to offset the losses from a band who doesn't sell, which is more of an insurance company paradigm rather than a bank.
Now this raises a few questions... as a consumer of band x's music, do I really want to be spending extra for a CD to support band Y, whom I (and everyone else) think sucks? The record label would counter saying that (like an insurance company) I would have never found Band X unless that label took a chance on them, like the chance they took with band y (insurance).... the question then, which many have raised, is whether we need the label to help us find the good bands? Let's look at what the internet is doing for other products... when I want to buy a new vid card, pre-internet I would go in to a computer store, see that I had 2 choices, and probably end up buying the card that was being used in one of the 'name-brand" machines... ie letting the labelled computer guide me to what they think is a good vid card... post-internet, I go onto a hardware web-site (or 2, or 3) that I have found I like (we all have our favorites) and rely on their tests to indicate which card to buy. Why not the same transition for music?
After Lars says "no not so much" in regards to it being a quality/quantity issue, he says it is a control thing, he wants to control the distribution... but he doesn't control it now, the label does (partially, let's not get into the whole issue of 2nd hand CDs, though that is of relevance here too)... and maybe Lars started to see that arguement doesn't hold either, as he then returned to the quantity/quality for the last question.
I think the lack of support from his record label has shaken him up significantly, as he says in the start of the interview, as he is defending their right to exist... which he doesn't have to be doing... as an "established band" he/they no longer need the support of a record label... now it could be they are altruistic individuals who like the thought that money being raked in from the sale of their CDs is being used to fund "start-up" bands... but, I don't think that is entirely the case (maybe partially).
If Lars continues his thinking that "What it ultimately comes down to... is 'Who controls it'?" I think he may start seeing the model where the band could have ultimate control if they ditched the label, and suplied their music themselves over the internet... You want control of what is being distributed Metallica? Then open your own harddrive to Napster access and drop your songs down there, then no one else would need to be doing it. Imagine if they did that... it wouldn't take very long for them to hear from their record company then!! Or, if you don't want Napster distributing, put your songs up, in whatever format, on your own site... if you build it they will come (sorry, if I didn't say it, you would still be thinking it)... but, whatever, although on topic, I am off point...
He is, as he says, been aware of the questions about the need for the current distribution channel, and the ability of the internet to serve as a new distribution channel...
the question then, and I think I should call it THE QUESTION, as this is the issue every recording artist is grappling with, is do they want revenue from each individual who wants a copy of their songs, or are they content with the revenue they get from concerts? He says they support bootlegs, but to what extent... I think he seems to be genuine in this support, because I think he really did rethink the 'it's the quality/quantity' issue, even though he came back to it at the end, the seed of doubt has been planted.
Well, I could go on for hours on my personal views of where the music industry is going, the pros and CONS of having the labels (do we really need the Britney Spears of the world, ie. music that is pure marketing no content?)... see I'm finding it hard to restain myself now... but that would be off-topic... the topic being what is Lars saying/thinking.
Cheers all!
Lars comes across pretty well, all told. He looks like he's been doing some thinking -- this could turn into something useful like the Bezos/O'Reilly dialogue.
One interesting point that he makes: Metallica has supported and thrived on the free distribution and trading of certain of its materials (live tapes, etc), but requests (forcefully) that other of its materials, those released on commercial albums, not be distributed. This makes sense: for example, my ensembles, Comma and Gray Code, have lotsa MP3s up for free download ( http://www.metatronpress.com/mp3/ ). OTOH, I would prefer that our studio tracks, which are or will be released on for-sale CDs, not be distributed in this way.
Unfortunately, AFAIK, there is no way to indicate in an MP3 whether it's artist-authorised. It seems to me that some combination of an ID3 field and a PGP-like signature could somehow indicate that an MP3 was authorised by the musicians. A Gnutella-like client could then check that field and alert the fan, who would then be free to choose whether to download it or not based on that person's moral sense of whether the artist's wishes are to be honored. (I recognize that it would be up to the listener whether to use a client which would honor that field, and whether to act upon that information.)
I'm just a good enough programmer to be pretty sure that it's possible, but not how to implement it. But if such a project would happen, I'd eagerly participate. (And if it already exists, I'd love to know about it.)
Any takers?
I just put a couple MP3's up, and forgot about 'em. Last week, I got a fan letter.
I think your statements shows how weak his point about young artists is. I don't doubt that there was only 1 non-label artist download on Napster in 48 hours, because Napster is not a good forum for finding artists you haven't heard of. Try mp3.com, instead.
But his point was that young artists need record labels in order to be heard. This is so wrong. What are your chances of getting signed by a record label? From your comments, I would bet you would agree they are slim. But by circumventing classic (archaic) record labels you got heard, which is more than any record label would have done for you.
So he is wrong to think that classic labels are needed by young artists. And he said himself that as soon as they get out from under their currect contract with a record label, that they will be looking at internet distribution ideas. This obviously spells doom for classic labels.
Other than that point, however, I think he was surprisingly articulate and I can certainly understand his position. Whether or not trading music should be illegal, it currently is, and by law, Metallica should be able to seek some kind of relief. Whether or not what Napster as a company is doing is illegal or not remains to be seen...
BTW, I kept referring to 'classic' record labels, because places like mp3.com and labels like GoodNoise "get it", and fulfill some of the roles of record labels that are still needed.
--Chouser
--Chouser
"To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods." -LL
Like I said before, it's all about mindshare, market bandwidth.
/. agree on, is the philisophical opposition to the fact that talentless fucks can go out, blow a record executive, get signed, and posess this great mindshare for years, or even decades, when great talented bands are swept aside by what is essentially fasion. The mere fact that the record companies make such obscene profits is really beside the point. It's much easier to argue the ethical drawbacks to that issue, but it's not really the point. This is why you hear these intangible arguments like, how bad backstreet boyz are, or brittney spears is.
Lars DOES have a point, Metallica IS in a special position, because they have LOTS of mindshare, mindshare that was very expensively bought by the record companies.
Where he is wrong though, is to say that record companies will always be necessary to generate this mindshare. Perhaps Napster, as it currenlty stands, isn't the best model to generate this kind of thing. But the thing is, people have come to accept this lemming attitude that the major music labels are THE authority on what is good music, and what is not. Sometimes, they hit on good talent, and it gets out. Most of the time, they do not, but it is still sold and hyped and cast upon the masses, and sorry to sound like an elitist here, but the masses buy it, and the record labels make money, and these one-hit-wonders retire, or they go on to capitalize further on their fame. It's largely this fame that keeps them going. Rarely is it excellent talent. When it is, Then, I'd say the system is working, the system is functional.
What I believe that most of us here, on
I think what we're looking for is a mechanism to circumvent the record industry's dictatorship, and a lot of us are taken with technology as the cure-all solution to this problem, because we see it solving so many other things right now.
It's true that in this perfect dream world, that a lot of crap unsigned bands will exist, and will in-effect, drown out the signal of good talent. The fallacy is that we need some kind of authority to "tune-in" the consumer to what is good and what is bad. The fact is, I believe that the strong collaborative power that the internet lends us all, can be harnessed to focus the signal that the few good talented musicians out there represents. I believe strongly that probably, some successor to Napster will be that tool - but it probably will be in conjunction with tools in other media, like TV, print, and radio, which have traditionally been the best promotional tools. They've been the defining and leading tools. I think they need to be tools that follow from what goes on the internet. The internet is where music fans will discuss, SAMPLE, read about, new music, whether it's from crap bands, or good bands, but they'll all be UNSIGNED bands. Perhaps there will be agencies that will promote the bands on the internet, radio, print, and TV, but no longer will those agencies have a monopoly on what is heard and what is not. The reason I use SAMPLE above, in all caps, is because that is the main missing element today. We can't sample the music easily or conveniently. This was the essential component Lars was talking about, the free sample, well, he's afraid that the free sample is a perfect first-generation recording. FACT: it is not. Not even at the highest bitrate is MP3 equivalent to even a CD, which also is not equivalent to a first-generation recording. Where do they want to draw the line? Obviously, what they want is some kind of technology that gives them control of distribution, (like SMDI). At the same time SMDI will let bands who want no control to free it. What they don't want is something that increases supply infinately (which is what MP3 does) because that theoretically drives down demand to 0. Demand for what? for a digital copy of a recording? Profits are made from selling the CD, and from concerts. This is the argument we've made all along. Drive demand for the digital recording down to 0 where it belongs, and you do not devalue the true art, the live performance, and collateral materials (CD, liner notes, cover art, lyrics sheets, etc.) Control the sample with something like SMDI, and the potential is that you could be paying $20 for a single you could listen to one time only. THat's what that kind of control can give you.
It's the capability to eliminate scarcity by the free copying of data, that pops intellectual property like a recording right out of the market equation. It's no longer a commodity, it's a promotional tool. Which is what it should be. It's what videos originally were, promotional tools, not actual products. Tell me Lars, are your videos currently profit centers, or losses? That should illustrate the point.
I just remembered this old Metallica song. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I think that it's a very major point. I gave up on searching through MP3's for new music because there was too much choice and 99% of what I listened I didn't like or thought was sub-standard. Maybe I'm too picky. The record companies pay a lot of more to people to do this full-time. I grew up liking just about everything that labels such as RoadRunner put out. My tastes have changed now, but there is a place for record labels: they provide a selection from which I am more likely to find something that I like. If I want something new, I can look at the (generally indie) record labels and browse their catalogues.
With napster, the tail of the music is always cut off. Usually there is a minute or so missing at the end, more often half of it. This is of course because people's downloads are broken off halfway through, and you get proliferation of broken-off songs that way. The songs can only ever get shorter. Another thing is that the quality is usually very low, either because of the particular encoder, or because of a low bitrate. Or because of a semi-broken cdrom-player it was copied off. All in all I certainly don't agree with Lars about that Napster provides studio-quality perfect digital copies of their music. Napster is no match at all for the original cd's.- ------------------
There has to be a better system; with quality checks at the recording, encoding and download stages. With download you have CRC/MD5 checks of course, but if I am going to pay for music I download over the Internet, I'm going to demand quality ensurance in return. That is one way that copyright holders could still earn money on in the future. Also having licensing info encoded in the recording, free like GPL, or for pay, or public domain or whatever, I want to be able to know what license I have with a digital music file (or movie or whatever).
-------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...
-------------------------------------------------
UNIX isn't dead, it just sme
>How much money do you get from the sale of each
>CD, and how much goes to the record company?
Lars, you did NOT answer this question, or even
attempt to address the question in your response.
I suspect the reason you did not answer the question, is because you DON'T KNOW the answer.
What I take away from this interview, is that you
did not, for whatever reason, answer this one question.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Ever since I heard her on a "smooth jazz" radio station in Florida, Vanessa Daou has been one of my favourite artists. She's probably typical of a whole genre of people who make a living out of their work, but stay frustratingly far from the big time.
She started a web site [ http://www.vanessadaou.com ] to sell her newest CD as an "internet-only" venture. Naturally, being a big fan, I bought it. Sadly she went back to the record companies - I assume she, quite simply, needed their promotional muscle to push the music, just as Lars said in his interview.
As a curious symbol of her return to the record company fold, by the way, her web site has turned Flash only, so I can't even view it properly on my computer! Oops.
Anyway, I thought this might be an interesting data point to confirm what Lars was saying in his interview. I'm not keen on metal-style music, but if you strip off the phone transcript sillies, I think he's smarter than most of you think. And I'm intrigued by his notion that the record companies are sleepier than ever in terms of trying to protect the artists they nominally serve. Interesting interview, Lars; thanks.
D
----
First, I'm stunned. I never would have figured Lars for a genius. What we have here is someone who is just as passionate as we are about this, and just as educated on the issue. Thing is, he is on the other side of the fence. Let's hope he will work with us on this, because the only way we will ever find a happy medium is by talking to people like him about it.
Our problem - We want to participate in a mass media digital distribution network capable of getting any media that we want, be it music, movies, text, or software, to our computers in as fine a quality and with as much speed as possible. Library of Congress on tap, for lack of a better term.
Their problem - Nobody is paying the copyright holders for the acquisition of their property, and it can potentially cause them to lose a lot of money. They don't mind that we are interested in acquiring their media digitally - hell, that's what they want. They want you to buy their goods.
Lars said it - the copyright holders must be able to choose their own terms for this digital distribution. They can charge whatever they see fit (including free) for the media. They can choose to be a part of it or not, but they still retain their rights. That is the only way a commercial service like Napster can remain legal. They have to provide a way to block media that is not supposed to be there - they provide the service, so they bear the responsibility. That's the law, and breaking it will only get you slammed into oblivion because big business runs this country.
Solution - Develop a system that allows firm control of the media that is distributd over it. There's no need to control users or invade privacy. Only the copyright holder of a piece of work should be allowed to introduce it into the system, and on their terms alone. They should also retain the ability to remove it at any time.
Why should they be required to regulate their service, when, for example, an ISP is not required to regulate Usenet/IRC? Simple. Their service exists for the express purpose of providing you with said content, a content that exists ONLY on their service. ISPs are like a phone company. They only provide a medium, not the content. If you provide content, you are responsible for maintaining control over it. Granted, it is a very gray area, and it can be argued either way, however this way would allow the artists to protect their rights, and that's how the courts are going to see it.
THIS WILL NOT STOP PIRACY. It will however reduce it greatly. Most of the people who use Napster do it out of convenience (and to try before you buy). If a LEGAL alternative exists that falls within reason, most people will use that instead, simply because it is legal and moral. Only when it is too expensive (like current CD prices) will it be shunned for an illegal alternative.
Napster in its current form is incapable of this. Everyone can be a server/client, and there is no way they can take that back. That program is released, and it will continue to serve as a vehicle for piracy until a better one comes along, just like Usenet and IRC always have. DON'T waste your time trying to control the things that cannot be controlled. Even forcing Napster out of business will not make people stop using Napster. The software exists with or without the company that created it.
Instead, design and create a digital distribution format that allows people to PAY for the property. Once that system is in place, the vast majority of the users will use that instead, cutting the piracy back down to reasonable levels (like old fashioned bootlegging). Just because some pirate steals it doesn't mean that 10 other people won't go out and buy it. Also, don't assume that the pirate would actually buy it if he couldn't steal it.
Since a system like this does not (AFAIK) exist, everyone uses the next best thing - Napster. Napster should have given a bit more thought to this before they let the cat out of the bag. They have the ability to create such a system, they just took the quick way out, and now they are paying for it.
Lastly - Some might say that this will not be any different than the currently exiting system, and if there are only a few digital providers they can do or charge whatever they want. Not true, for three reasons. First, the copyright holder should set the cost. Second, it is a lot easier to create such a digital system than it is to create, for example, a record label. There will be a lot of distributors, and consumers can choose the one they like. AOL/Time Warner will probably jump on this in half a minute. Third, they cannot justify the cost of charging $10 per song, because they never produce anything. All they provide you with is a means to download digital information, and possibly a central server structure from which to download it.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
People should have a say in where their copyrighted material goes. I think most people would feel pretty bad about writing a book and then having it yanked from your hands and copied all over the place without receving a penny for any of it. ('course I stink at analogies)
Maybe if Metallica themselves uploaded a few MP3s themselves at one time, then all they would be able to say was "oops, I didn't know they would spread like that".. but they didn't.
But I also think it's impossible to control mass distribution of media now. And any attempts to go after Gnutella (a true file-sharing utility just like anonymous FTP) will be fruitless.
So what Metallica and other musicians want may be justified, but it just ain't gonna happen.
Minidisc to minidisc can be done, as I understand it, but it costs extra.
The media are getting cheap, though - not much more expensive than tapes, and they reuse better.
Your point about taping is good. If five of my friends and I share all our vinyl, we're still buying one album per five people. If a million people and I share all our MP3's, we're talking about one album per million, or maybe a little more. Big difference.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Compare your argument with the same argument the other way:
;)
"The guy admits he knows fucking nothing about the music industry, yet he's starting a hugeass distribution mechanism and attempting to bankrupt a record company. What the fuck gives some goober who has no clue what he is talking about the right to regulate the administration of the music industry?"
Getting the point yet? Well, I didn't think so, but there's a reason your post stayed at 0.
Lars is attempting to find a way to keep the technology from wrecking the industry he works in, not because "technology is bad", but because "people ought to be able to exercise the control we have given them by law in this country". If you're willing to be the one to figure out how new bands get promoted and paid without record companies, go make your billions revolutionizing. But don't just sit on your hands and say "it's not my fault that I steal stuff from people, it's new technology".
Lars is a hell of a lot better informed about the computer industry than you appear to be about the music industry.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I suspect that if you counted the bootlegs of concerts, Lars would be not especially surprised, and if he were surprised, it'd probably be positive. I suspect he wouldn't even be surprised by the number of bootleg tapes of studio albums.
Why? Because I suspect that number is self-limiting, in a way that MP3's aren't. Bootleg tapes of studio albums aren't that good. They wear out. Hell, I haven't personally put any music but mine on a tape in at least five years. People tend to buy CD's if they like an album... IF the copy they have now isn't a perfect, non-degrading, digital one.
You've got lots of ideas for how a band can get sold among the tiny little group of people who are out looking for new bands. Record companies have found ways to get a new band sold to people who are in music stores. Until you can do that in your business model, you're not improving on anything.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
That doesn't seem right at all.... I constantly am getting stuff from bands with avante garde names or if I hotlist someone with similiar music taste, you can find some unsigned bands as well.
And there is no bigger rush for myself, then the occasions when I type "bratwurst orange" and see my music up for trade. It's great. Uh, so check out my band too.
As an aside, my side project, XIR (xir is recursive) has banned me for making a song called "kill everyone who works at mp3.com" bad taste? sure, but it was obviously a joke and I put it in the comedy genre and deleted it when they put it on hold, but now XIR is no more on mp3.com
when Push Comes to Shove
Johnny Socko is hardly an unsigned band. They have one album available from cdnow.com and their new one is sold on www.johnnysocko.com. They are definatly on the lowest popularity rung of bands traded on Napster, and they're a "regional" midwest band with a real record contract.
Lars' figure of one unsigned band may be made up, but I don't think anyone could say with a straight face that legal trading of unsigned bands using Napster for publicity makes up anywhere close to 0.01% of all Napster trades.
-B
Regardless, no one has made any sort of convincing argument as to why these users deserve free music. The arguments here all biol down to "you can't stop us- neener neener!" and "you're stupid and misinformed." Guess what- it doesn't matter if Lars is a complete fool (and despite his relative net innocence, I think this interview showed to me that he's not)- he has a right to say what can be done with his stuff. You're welcome to hate him for it. You're even welcome to point out that such efforts don't hurt the industry or bands (which I'm still not sure about, and I don't think anyone else has a legitimate ability to be sure about either) or even that its benefical via free advertising. It's still his stuff, which was released under his terms. Maybe he's behind the times. Maybe it's counterproductive. But that's HIS decision to make. If it kills Metalica's future, maybe he'll learn. But it in no way justifies stealing. It is entirely hypocritical to claim to hate the state of the music industry and then to take their music all the same.
Aside from half the questions chosen being pretty piss-poor and redundant (/me watches my karma drop even more), Lars' answers weren't the least bit useful.
If anything, he proved once and for all that Metallica really doesn't know what the fuck is going on. It looks more like a show of the agressive metal theme being played on a corporate stage. Lars would like it to look like its the scruffy, underdog metalheads fighting the evil, thieving corporation. And in reality its the embittered, out of touch, aging superstars against the geeks. It's feels like an orcs vs. kender battle suitable for a D&D tourney.
I don't know how Lars can take this fiasco seriously. I can understand the "I can take a dare" theory of why they went through the trouble of finding all the names. I mean, hiring someone else to find the names for them. But they have less than a passing knowledge of whats going on. It's not anything like the macho aggressiveness of a street fight, of the sort you would expect from a metalhead, but the cowardly scheming of a rich, well-connected bureaucrat (with lots of yes men) trying to... i don't know... trying to stop the X-Men, or something. What I mean is that Metallica isn't getting so much as dirt under their fingernails over this, but that doesn't stop them from parading at the front of the horde when the gauntlets are thrown.
Enough metaphor. I'm not impressed by any of Metallica's arguments. Lars' answers are full of holes, not only exhibiting his almost total lack of knowledge of even the details of the case, but also repeatedly contradicting himself. Sure, Napster trading isn't causing our income to go down, but it's the principle of the thing -- unless the trading is on a smaller scale, like the guy down the street with the Iron Maiden record; that's a different principle I guess.
The bottom line is Metallica wants to pick a fight, and they can't do it with 600,000+ users directly (their current count), and they can't do it with Gnutella or Freenet (which they haven't quite realized yet), so they do it with Napster. They want to blame Napster for what 600,000 other people want to do with their music.
Maybe they should blame Jagermeister for all those mornings they were ill and hung-over, too.
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Lars mentioned the single download of a nonsigned artist, and the fact that he feels that a small band could never make it without the record industry. However, with a reputation manager, and shared interest manager, his point could quickly be invalidated. Ie, I go through a slection chart listing my likes, dislikes, yada yada, just as is done with amazon. Then, each song can be rated by the individual similar to slashdot, with an added field for additional comments (and possibly multiple rating categories.) This would allow a method for finding quality music by relatively unknowns. Giving them the full power of network effects/pulbicity without the costs.
LetterRip
As many of you might be aware Charlie Rose (on PBS) had a head-to-head interview with Lars and Chuck D. on 5/12/00. Essentially, Lars and Chuck agreed to disagree, however, both were quite "eloquent" in their arguments and I was impressed with Lars' passion for pursuing a public debate. Chuck D. was equally (if not more) impressive in his knowledge of the issues (philosophical and to a lesser degree technical). I can't seem to find a transcript on the internet but if you go to the PBS site you can order the dead-tree version.
I have great faith in fools. Self confidence, my friends call it.
But it really ISN'T an issue of a copy of a copy of a copy! Every person talking in this forum knows someone who knows a person with a metallica CD. At MOST you'll have a second generation copy of a CD, which is the same quality as MOST of the metallica MP3s that are being traded on Napster. You would be lying were you to say that someone in wyoming couldn't get just as good a copy via a friend as they can get via napster.
The fact that you don't have to track down your friend for the tape and time to copy it is really moot. If you are a fan of their music, you'll buy a CD because the MP3 won't be good enough for you. If you are a casual listener, then yes, you are stealing. But you wouldn't listen to the song if it weren't on Napster, and the fact that it is in your MP3 library and you listen to it will make you want a good copy of it.
But then, this is the same argument software pirates make about pirating software: it doesn't really impact the company's profits.
I don't agree with software or music piracy, but I disagree with the methods used by BOTH sides in this 'battle'. Generally both sides take such an extremist viewpoint that one or the other ends up winning, and the end is really as bad as the beginning because the winner runs it too far into the endzone. You either end up going overboard with restrictions or you end up going overboard with liberties.
Metallica is using statistics to lie about the extent of the piracy. Napster is using the 'service provider is not responsible' lie to make it seem like they hold NO responsability for the actions of their users. The Users are using the lies that they will either buy the CD, or have it already. These all contain a good portion of truth, but they are being blatantly exagerated.
The music industry is facing another paradigm shift, and this is just one of the tiny pre-battles which are going to draw the real battle lines. Like many shifts before (shows-> pressed records-> recordable tapes-> pressed & recordable CDs-> computer manipulated and transferred, compressed digital) this one is going to be fought tooth and nail until it brings both the music industry AND the users kicking and screaming into another quiet period of peace and profit.
-Adam
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
It's funny how different the views expressed on this item have a
rather more anti-Napster quality than those in the original
interview. Is the congregation obediently abosorbing Linus' view on
the matter?
>And you aren't the least bit suspicious that that
>number is cooked up?
You might say that...
Unsigned bands whose songs I've DLed from Napster:
Atom and His Package
Skif Dank
Johnny Socko
Discount
Gigolo Big & the Barflies
Don't Know Jack
Nature Kids
The Savoys
Headboard
The Usuals
The Spitvalves
Edna's Goldfish
That's just off the top of my head, WITHOUT going through my MP3 folders to check. Fair bit more than one, eh? Now, some of these may or may not be associated with little indie labels, I'm not 100% sure, but NONE of them have whored themselved out to the RIAA majors.
Imagine all the people...
-p.
Secondly, I'm curious about Lars's assertion that they were able to monitor downloads. My understanding of napster is that the individual clients queried a centralized database of "libraries," which would then act as an intermediary between clients so that one might download from the other.
If NetPD actually did manage to monitor downloads, then that means one of two things:
What I find infinitely more likely is that NetPD was in fact monitoring the contents of Napster's databases for instances of files with "metallica" in the title, noting the user names of anyone who had such an mp3 in their library. Thus, the claim that they only saw one unsigned artist is either misleading or an outright lie.
Further, this leads to the question about the nature of the libraries. It is possible to configure napster to not allow your computer to upload files to another client. If your client were set in such a fashion and you happened to have a metallica mp3 on your computer, you wouldn't actually be infringing on copyright, as you aren't actually granting anyone permission to download the file from you.
One wonders about the nature of this NetPD firm. ...and the nature of their tools.
UF seems to have a grasp of this situation. hehehe ;^)
http://www.userfriendly.org/static/
I quote...
"And I believe, and the people that we talk to about this, we believe, that the minute some of these companies become active, when they basically come to a point that they become fully funcitonal, we believe that there will be technology and a way to go after them in the way they can invent this technology and make it untraceable."
Lars just doesn't get it, and I'm sure their lawyers don't get it either. There may never *be* anyone to sue. They can try to sue a thousand people, like the MPAA did over DeCSS, and that will only spread it around more. Maybe Gnutella has some holes that would allow Metallica to find out who's pirating their mp3s (I don't know if Gnutella has any such holes, I'm just speaking hypothetically) but there's never going to be a company that you can sue for damages. And holes can be patched up.
Sorry, Metallica, it's going to stop being possible to sue *somebody* whenever you feel you've been screwed.
-- "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." -Joseph Stalin
One word: Microsoft.
Most people on /. are not fond of MS. Is the stuff they are doing that much worse than that done by many smaller companies? No, not much. Scale does become a factor in that one, because it gives them the power to pummel anyone who interferes with their plans.
In general, there are a lot of things that people overlook all the time. When you do those same things on a massive scale, people start to care. Kill a bug: who cares? Wipe out a healthy species: Some people are going to care. The scale at which people care varies by person. An entymologist or environmentalist is going to care about someone killing bugs long before your average yuppie. An average Washinton DC politician probably won't care until studies come in showing that many voters care about the fact you wiped out the entire population of mantids everywhere in the world and we now have locusts. It just varies from person to person and what they care about.
B. Elgin
B. Elgin
"Read at your own risk; feel free to ignore."
Lars has admitted here (we all knew it) that their information is screened for them. Lars probably doesn't know how digital compression techniques work, or that the majority of mp3's are noticeably not CD quality, much less master quality.
To illustrate:
There is a difference, I think, ... comparing that kind of home taping to basically going on the Internet and getting 1st generation, perfect digital copies of master recordings from all the world, is just not a fair comparison.
Some .lawyer. decided to tell the band that mp3's were "perfect digital copies" of their masters. Not that under usual use, mp3 is a lossy compression algorithm. Why, I ask, didn't they just request that Metallica mp3's encoded at a bitrate higher than 160 be banned? Because someone told them their masters were in circulation. It sounds like if Lars knew that mp3 had a little quality problem (again, in normal use) he, and presumeably Metallica, would also have a little less of a problem with Napster.
[|]
IMHO it was a really good interview and Lars seemed like he was well prepared for it, but one thing I didn't get is this question:
7) Skip the Record Company
by cwhicks
How much money do you get from the sale of each CD, and how much goes to the record company?
Did anyone else notice that Lars dodged that question better then Bill Clinton and Bush combined? Slick one that Lars is, have to watch him or he'll get away from ya. I would like to get a direct answer from him. Wonder if his Label has him under some non-disclose agreement about that type of stuff??
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
And bTW, what did he actually say which Emmett replaced by [fight] above. I'm guessing he used the c-word?
-- the most controversial site on the Web
A good dub tape sounds much, much better than an mp3 rip. Anyone who has listened to both on a quality hi-fi system and thinks otherwise has ears of tin.
Of course, being a drummer in a heavy metal band for your entire adult life could make parsing out sound fidelity pretty tricky. When Lars says that mp3's are a perfect copy of the masters, I'm sure he is taking somebody's word for it; no doubt everything he hears is blended with a steady "eeee..."
I would have used more "e"s to make my point, but the dang lameness filler kicked in. :(
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
mp3.com is for unsigned artists, yeah. Napster is a corporation looking to go ipo who doesn't give a crap about unsigned artists. THAT'S the whole POINT!!! Napster makes money off the intellectual property of others, under the current system. End of story. Gnutella and some other programs don't, which is a BIG distinction.
--Hail Mary, for she has the largest shotgun of them all.--
As far as I can tell, the main points Lars makes are as follows:
Allowing distribution via Napster to go unchallenged removes this control (Metallica hadn't OKd this distribution of their work).
Tape dubs degrade and generally aren't spread very widely from the source. Files shared across the 'net are always perfect copies and are distributed very far afield from the original purchaser.
Metallica is aware of the 'net (now), but wants to retain control over distribution with whatever distribution method is chosen.
As far as I can tell, these are the main points stated in the interview. Please post addendums if I've missed any.
Interestingly, some people (including a fairly well-known SF/fantasy novelist) are working up an idea to sell stories and other material on sort of a "Storyteller's Bowl" system, similar to the Street Performer Protocol. The discussion is going on over on sff.people.storytellers right now, and a website will be up at some point, as soon as they have the site transferred over to their domain host.
--
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
I think he actually articulated very well. Maybe you don't ramble at all on the phone. I do. I talk a lot like that sometimes, when I'm not in a medium where I can backspace over things.
I think he has a damn good feel for what this involves. Napster is, indeed, totally different from home taping. It is, indeed, potentially going to screw people.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It's very strange. It seems Lars tacitly acknowledges that he's responding out of ignorance and concern. It would seem a good opportunity to use this as a way to change the way the market works. He obviously cares, otherwise he wouldn't put this effort into Napster, MP3s, and the internet vs his music.
How is it that we can use this to our(Lars, artists, and consumers all) advantage? Is there a way to *work* with the artists, like Lars, rather than against them? They just want to make music, want to sell it, want to have it spread. We want to hear it, obviously, and share it. Can some genius, someone with the right insight and the right knowledge, right now work a system up that puts all of this together and create a win-win situation?
I don't think I am that person. I don't know how we can create a system that gives consumers instant access, perfect quality, convenience, and acknowledgement, and the artists the satisfaction of being heard, being paid, and being loved.
Anyone?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
That doesn't really work out.
The key point with transferring tapes or other analogue mediums is that they suffer from degradation when copied. So you COULD lend it to your friends, but after about five friends have passed it on the quality would have degraded so badly that it isn't worth it.
The music industry came close to facing the MP3 problem with the Minidisc format, since that is digital. They staved it off temporarily by slapping the "no minidisc to minidisc" copying rule on, which prevented easy transfer. That, and the fact that the Minidisc media itself it relatively expensive.
MP3s are unique in that they can be transferred ridiculously easily, and suffer no loss in quality when going through the transfer to different people. The music industry is quite justified in their fear of this new format I think.
--
Anil Madhavapeddy
At issue isn't whether, or how such things should be transferred digitally/electronically, as that appears inevitable.
What IS at issue is exactly how the artists will be recompensed for their time and effort. Well produced albums take time and money to produce. Freeloading (those that don't buy the CD) mp3 addicts use the product without paying anything back to the artist.
While Lars isn't the best spoken guy on the planet, and I'm not a fan of most of what he's saying, I think THAT's the issue here, and it's not one that anyone has an answer for yet, TTBOMK.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
And you aren't the least bit suspicious that that number is cooked up?
Just think for a second about what would be involved in coming up with an accurate number of unsigned bands being traded on Napster. I think he's either a) Ignorant (he isn't the brightest man I've even run across, after all) or b) lying.
Let's sya the number isn't accurate. Let's say it's an order of magnitude off, or even 2 or 3. That means while 1,400,000 million Metallica songs were downloaded, 1,000 unsigned artists were downloaded. That's 1400 songs by just Metallica to ever song by an unsigned artist. Now, let's say Metallica is 5% of all Napster traffic. Thats means there were...counting on fingers and toes... 28000 copyrighted songs to every song by an unsigned artist. Which makes songs by unsigned artists statistically insignificant.
Don't get me wrong, I like Napster, and I use Napster. But I hate to see people trying to rationalize what they're doing as being the "right" thing. At the very least be honest and don't try to bullshit everyone about it.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
A looney idea that came into my mind when I heard their 1-download thing and read this post is:
To monitor actual downloads, could they not have made some kind of "proxy" napster client which, say, takes the list of songs some user has, posts to the server that it has those songs, and when somebody requests them, redirects the request to the original source? Maybe this is a little complicated but would give them some idea of how often music was downloaded, without necessarily "breaking into" Napster's computers.
Regarding the interview, I was also pleasantly surprised by Lars' responses, and must say that for the most part, I agree, and have for quite some time, agreed with the arguments he raises. In my opinion, the way to fight this kind of corporate greed and abuse of copyright we're seeing here is not to blatantly ignore and break the laws that have been so important in the past. I think the key is to show our non-appreciation for the abuses by refusing to spend our money on corporate products which support firms that continue to abuse user's rights. That means not buying CDs from signed artists, for example.
The fight is not to actively destroy the RIAA (and by the wayside, the artists their CD sales support, in whatever slim fashion) by pirating every CD you can get your hands on; the fight is to support in a constructive way the struggles of artists who would and do freely share their music, if that's what we truly want.
In order to manage this, however, it is of paramount importance that the freedom of the internet is maintained. The RIAA would naturally love to squash utilities like Napster, not just because they're allowing infringement, but because this distribution method spells out their doom in all its electronic glory.
My suggestion would be this: let them dig their own graves. Don't give them any excuse to attack you; Napster should live up to its claims that it is just for "struggling" artists and indie groups; why not block songs matching "Metallica" from their database, for example? As Lars was saying, he doesn't want to be the one to constantly have to search the Napster network and find and report the people trading his songs. Can't Napster compromise?
Let the Metallicas and RIAAs block their songs from Napster. All it means is that the hordes of Napster users will be left with... guess what, only free, indie music to listen to. Some of which is damned good, I might add. They won't throw money at concerts and CDs because they heard the mp3. Instead they'll buy indie CDs, t-shirts, and concert tickets. We've been using the argument that mp3s increase sales, well dammit let the RIAA prove it to themselves!!
Lets stop being hippocritical and actually act on the arguments we've been using, people! Long live free music! Down with RIAA's crap!
The medium that music is distributed on has essentially reduced the 'product' itself to software: a product which is easily and cheaply copied and distributed for essentially zero cost to the consumer. That's the atomic bomb I wrote about, when your business model is entirely media-cost based. So, this strange new world is baffling and scary, where do you look for guidance?
The software industry. That industry has dealt with the piracy problem for decades, and has evolved some interesting ways to continue to profit (hansomely!) in the face of piracy. The fundamental question to ask is, how do you keep people buying media which is easy to obtain and distribute for free?
Software companies have solved that problem by applying a concept called 'Value-Add', which means that their profits are not pinned just on the sale of the media, but on the sale of service and support based on the operation of the software contained on that media. For example, technical support and upgrades, as well as software consulting services (for installation and 'integration' into existing software systems) provide reliable profit over and above the actual cost of software. In addition, to qualify for those services, you need to prove that you obtained a legal copy of the software media, so that drives legal ownership and prevents piracy as well.
Now, you might ask, how does this apply to musicians and the music 'product'? Clearly, one cannot expect to derive value from providing technical support when it comes to packaged music, but consider what you have when you use physical media here: you can include a unique identifier on each distributed disk, which the media buyer can use to unlock additional content available to legal music owners. Some examples of content might be:
These things comprise what I feel are the most obvious 'Value-Adds' to your licensed media products, and are ways which you can use to both reduce piracy and involve fans further in your world. There are many more (like pay-for-play, corporate/private 'commissioning' of work, etc) that wouldn't even apply to the traditional software business! Metallica.com could be the site that provides the value-add community (you already have a 'members-only' section, why not restrict full access to those who have a compact-disc with a 'key' on the label?) so you can continue to record and derive legitimate profit while reducing your exposure to piracy (and fan hostility)?
I realize this address is the fanclub address, but I'm concerned about this issue, and I hope that if my message has some useful points and is not entirely incoherent it might make its way to Metallica and hopefully provide some guidance on how to pursue the whole Internet/MP3/Napster issue. I feel that coming to terms with the internet in a way that faces reality in a creative way can provide opportunities that will end up proving more profitable, fan-friendly, and sustainable than the current system, at the expense of the 'middlemen' and non-creative members of the recording industry that absorb most of the margin in the business.
Hoping that your suit is on the merits of copyright and not some duping concotion by your lawyers to generate fat fees,
Your Working Boy,
This of course begs the question, how would NetPD even come up with a figure like this? If you want to get a list of everyone who's pirating Metallica material, it's pretty easy, you do a search for "Metallica" and maybe a few other variations and then pick all the user names out of the results. You could pretty easily devise an automated tool to do this, you run the search all weekend and presto, 300K odd names.
But claiming to know how many times a track was downloaded is a much more difficult problem. You have to somehow convince users to tell you how many people have downloaded a particular title. Obviously the server itself can do this because requests go through it, but as an outside client? Maybe the protocol lets you do this, but I doubt it.
Then, to find out how many unsigned artists were downloaded, you essentially have to track every client on the whole system and how many times every track was downloaded and then figure out which tracks were by unsigned artists. This essentially means having a master list of all signed artists in the world and doing some sort of text match against all the titles listed on Napster to eliminate signed artists. I find it highly unlikely that NetPD did this. I suppose you could develop a list of "known unsigned bands" (maybe scrape it from mp3.com or something) and see who downloads those tracks, but this is hardly accurate (And a great way to undercount.)
My guess is that this figure is invented. Whether NetPD or Lars invented it, I can't say.
I did not expect such candor from Metallica. Lars made points which were completely valid. As Utopian as free-exchange-of-information and globally accessible libraries of music via Napster and Gnutella and such is, it still comes down to the fact that it is their product. Their music and art.
I cannot walk into a store and say that I feel the television they are selling is outrageously overpriced, and thereby justify walking out with it in my arms, thumbing my nose at the clerks and owners.
In addition, the fact that Metallica only went after those they believed (although I still believe screen and file names are not wholly legitimate forms of proof) to be trading in *their* music, suggests that they are not in favor of destroying Napster and those like it, but enforcing copyrights which are infringed through it.
As an example, let's say that someone posts the full text of an entire collection of novels on Usenet. The author of those novels finds the owner of the account who is responsible for posting them and, instead of targetting Usenet and seeking to 'shut it down', takes action against the individual responsible for the distcint criminal act.
All I see Lars promoting is the right to do with your music as you wish. Contesting that right is rediculous. And as he points out, the fact that the price of a CD is unjustifiably high and that musicians earn a very small amount of the overall profit, is a seperate discussion entirely.
The act of music piracy cannot be justified by the legal (but unethical and grossly immoral) practices of the music industry.
I've been a Metallica fan for a long time. They're the only 'metal' band that I listen to. So I've followed this thing pretty closely and even felt rather enraged at Metallica over the way they've handled many parts of this fiasco. But in the end, their views and reasons are just. I no more want to see James' and Lars' creative work traded around like a cracked copy of StarCraft than I do anything I've written or created.
Just because Metallica is unbelievably successful doesn't mean they own anyone a damn thing. Not the record companies and not Johnny College Boy bogging down his school's bandwidth downloading Metallica's S&M. If Johnny were downloading, say, Beethoven or Mozart -- or even modern compositions or alternative music from new bands who have expressely made their work publically available without cost, then that's great. But just because Napster and Gnutella can be used for this, doesn't mean that they are being used for it. (I do not, however, support holding Napster any more responsible for this than I do the manufacturer of a newsreader program that allows you to post anything you want to Usenet -- the violation is still an individual act and should be treated as such).
Anyway, Metallica makes great music. I don't believe this should diminish their respectability as musicians or 'rebels'. Just because they don't sell their CD's with the same sort of legal agreement that would allow you to freely distribute the contents of a RedHat CD that you may buy, doesn't mean they're some sort of corporate vulture praying on music-lovers. (Their record company is a different thing all together, though...)
---
icq:2057699
seumas.com
That's a very shallow analysis of the situation, and one that Lars addressed directly and powerfully in his interview.
First, the tape copying example you use is not the same threat (or perceived threat) to Lars et al. as is the copying of music in a digital fashion. Tapes aren't worth copying after the 5th generation or so, meaning that you're limited to about 62 friends being able to get a copy of the tape at all, let alone a good copy. And those friends aren't really able to give copies of these tapes to other people, once again because of analog degradation.
But secondly, and probably more importantly, the internet is a distribution medium _far_ more powerful and quick than you and your buddies dubbing a few tapes. You aren't limited to the number of buddies you have, you aren't limited to speed of transportation (e.g. when's the next time one of your friends is hopping a flight to X random city on another continent? and does he remember to bring the tape?), etc.
Please don't interpret this posting as to say that I don't think that there's an issue worth exploring in great detail with this whole Metallica / Napster legal battle. I just think that your example of buddies copying tapes being "more or less the same" as Napster in terms of being an effective distribution network is very weak.
If you look at the history of artists being paid, the recorded era is an aberration built on scarcity of the physical media.
Before the printing press or the record or photograph, copy protection was a natural result of the process involved. It was too difficult to copy a book or painting. Someone could listen to a storyteller or musician and "steal" their work, but it inevitably changed in the process, such that the stolen copy was noticeably different.
Artists made a living by performing or producing new material. Most producers had very little luck getting royalties, even when the concept existed. Beethoven worried about copying. "What have you done for me lately?" was the question, and the answer was, "Next show at 9." There was no concept of living off the past. They had to keep producing or keep performing to make a living.
Recordings changed that, and good communication enforced it.
The net will turn things back, with more hobby artists and fewer mega artists. The scarcity aspect is fast disappearing. Contrary to what Lars thinks, it won't take huge marketing budgets to promote artists. Reputations will spread by word of mouth, searches, and respected sites. Without marketing and retailers gobbling up 90 percent of the retail price, artists will be able to survive on far fewer paying customers. More artists will produce merely because they want to. People will support the artists they like, though nothing like the inflated way of today. Concerts and new material will become more important. Most artists will forego the expensive and lengthy editing which studios and book publishers have used to justify their huge take.
In the 1930s and 1940s, when records were just taking off, Fats Waller usually went with his first takes. In the 1960s, the Beatles came out with, what, 5 albums in a couple of years? Nowadays music is so heavily produced that bands are lucky to come out with one album a year. Is the music really that much better?
--
Infuriate left and right
Since by definition an unknown artist is, well, unknown, who the hell is ever going to find their songs?
That's a good point. However, you can use the "browse user" feature and browse other songs a particular person is sharing, and stumble across stuff this way.
The problem with doing this with napster (at least for those of us conscientious about downloading only music we have already paid for in another format) is, how do you tell what is legitimate "mp3.com" material, and what isn't? Other than the big-name RIAA bands, of course, which obviously aren't.
A mixture of mp3.com and FreeNet is what is needed. An mp3.com style interface, overview, etc., coupled with FreeNet's inability to be censored. No more banned music or songs, in any country.
We can't stop unauthorized recording, or trading of illegal copies, whether its on cassette tape or in mp3 format. We can, however, maximize the exposure of underrepresented bands, put mechanisms in place that provide the opportunity and encouragement for people to behave ethically, and accept the fact that teenagers and college students will get allot of their music for free (just as they do now on the radio or via friend-sneakernet and cassette), and that these same people will buy their music when they can afford it.
I think if Lars had the ability to count the number of bootleg tapes people have (live bootlegs which he allows, or copies of studio work, which he doesn't), he would be shocked by the number. The fact that such statistics are easier to track on the net than elsewhere has perhaps contributed to his sense of panic. In addition, I have downloaded numerous songs multiple times (once at work, once onto a laptop, once at home, once on a friends PC to play the song for her, etc.). Since I own the song these aren't 'illegal', or at least 'unethical' but they would certainly show up in the artist's statistic as multiple 'illegal' downloads.
I understand his fear and concern, and he has the right, however misguided, to persue whatever means he feels he needs to to protect his rights to his work, but as another pointed out in his question, he could be spending his time and energy far more wisely in developing a business model tailored to the new technical reality which has, for better or worse, completely changed the economic landscape of mass media distribution.
If Lars & Co. are wise, they or their agents will get in touch with mp3.com. Their contract may not allow them to have any business or distribution arrangement, but they could learn a tremendous amount from the conversation regardless.
In the meantime, I will personally continue my boycott of RIAA affiliated music for philisophical reasons, irrespective of how much I may like or dislike a particular personality.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Call Lars and ask if you can get permission to release the conversation in MP3 format.
Seriously! It's a good application for the format, it'll solve the "is this really him" debate, and if he authorizes it, it's totally legit.
The cool thing is, this would be a way in which Lars could shove a rusty railroad spike up the RIAA's colective asses, by visibly and publically endorsing the use of MP3's for some purposes.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Yes, scale makes it wrong.
Is it net abuse to send a single email to a single person asking about a possible economic relationship? No.
Is it net abuse to send a few million? Yes.
Many, many, things are problems only if done on a large scale.
Most people have come to the conclusion that morality and ethics have to allow for grey areas, as something gradually shifts from harmless to harmful.
Concrete example: If I touch someone, I probably kill a skin cell. This is not a problem. If I killed enough of their cells, it would be a problem. How do you decide whether causing cells in someone's body to die is immoral? Well, you look to see if it's doing measurable damage. At some point, it's clearly doing damage. At some point a little before that, it's ambiguous, and you have to look at the context.
Bob's Nearly-Successful Band probably doesn't care if I make a copy of their band for my wife. However, if I give away thirty thousand copies that are good enough that people don't buy their album, they may be screwed.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Okay, quick show of hands, who believes that was orchestrated by the record company execs?
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
I think he's got damn good points. The statistic about *ONE* unsigned artist is particularly sobering. Let me share something with you all. I write music. It's not very good music. I don't have the bandwidth to post a URL here. I just put a couple MP3's up, and forgot about 'em.
Last week, I got a fan letter. Someone liked my music. That was fucking awesome. I am also nowhere near making any sort of a living at this.
Would I like to see something like Napster make it easier for me to make a living? Yes. But I'd like them to do it by *ASKING MY PERMISSION* before letting people distribute my work.
Hell, the fact is, I'm not sure that Metallica would have said "no" if they'd been asked; if you read the interview, they're pissed because they weren't asked, not necessarily because people are copying their music.
Anyway, I'm really glad it's Metallica doing this, and not a pop band that gets its entire mindset from the record label, specially shrink-wrapped.
Not a bad interview at all; really, it frankly totally exceeded my expectations; how often do you see a public figure in a debate like this give any ground at all, or admit that the issue is more complicated than he thought at first?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
So, what is it with this? Whence the instinctive assumption that people who aren't "into" computers can't possibly understand their implications? Can non-drummers appreciate good music?
I work in tech support, and I laugh at all the stupid-user jokes, because I've *talked* to those users. But I also believe that the jokes are symptomatic of a tendency to assume that one's own field is the important one, and that it's not that hard and people could do it if they really tried.
In fact, most people who don't know how to use computers are about as smart as the people who do know how to use computers. Just like I'm probably as smart as many people who can perform brain surgery safely. Same deal; I haven't put the time in to know jack shit about the medical field. Now, as some people recently established, newbies tend to overestimate their understanding of a field, and indeed, many geeks cheerfully make proclamations about how much they understand about nutrition after reading a single web page.
But never forget that we, too, are hopelessly, laughably, ignorant. Maybe in different fields, but we're just as ignorant.
Lars admitted, quite frankly, and right up front, that he's not a techie. That computers aren't his thing. How many slashdotters have the balls to admit that we don't know a damn thing about the music industry?
Me, for one. Anyone else?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Part of the bootleg taping issue is that the MP3s are often NOT CD or perfect copies. The fans which download this stuff, most of which are on 56k lines still, are getting cassette quality crud because it downloads faster. Someone has sold metallica a boatload of crud, Lars believes that everyone on Napster are making/getting perfect copies.
Metallica: Whoever you have chosen as you technology advisor, get a second and third opinion.
-Adam
As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
I'm amazed that Lars can say that the taping vinyl is OK but MP3ing vinyl isn't, purely on the basis of scale and availability.
Assuming I was incredibly rich and created millions of tapes of one of his albums and made them freely available to everyone in the world, is that the same as taping or MP3ing?
At what scale does it become unethical? It's such a bogus argument, it's almost unbelievable, it's either alright or it's not, there's no half way.
... where he refutes lars?
Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides a non-exhaustive list of factors to be examine when determining whether the particular use of another's work is permissible. They're not long, so I'll post them: "In determining whether the use made of a work in a particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--- (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for non-profit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." Obviously, factors 3 and 4 reflect the weight of Lars' argument. The difference in quality between a digital MP3 and a tape cassette copy of a vinyl recoring might easily fall into the scope of the "substantiality" term. Also, the NET Act (No Electronic Theft) Act amended the copyright law placing volume and dollar value thresholds for criminal copyright violations, closing the so-called "LaMacchia Loophole", which enabled an MIT student to escape liability because even though the computer service he provided (IIRC this was pre-WWW) allowed people to pirate and otherwise infringe the copyright of computer games, he did not personally profit from it. Disclaimer: I'm a lawyer but I'm not your lawyer. And I dont' practice right now anyway.
It's okay to bootleg concert performances.
It's okay to copy an album to tape for a buddy.
It's all about quality and scale.
Sherman, set the wayback machine for the early 1990s. A new trend had started among the big retail music chain stores. Used CDs. Racks and racks of them. This got the ire of the music industry to threaten stores with no more new CDs to sell if they didn't yank the used ones. Drugstore cowboy singer Garth Brooks made himself the pulpit boy for the cause. The claim was that used CD sales is "theft" from the artists because the sound quality on used CDs degrade. A used CD sounds just as good as a new one. Brooks and the RIAA wanted to ban used CD sales or at least to 'tax' them with the kickback going to the RIAA to make up for loss to artists (/me scratches head at logic here). The issue was LAUGHED at by the public at large. Garth Brooks was seen as a raving idiot and the issue faded away.
Now it's Napster. Same shit all over again.
I hope this post doesn't get lost at the bottom of the pile, but it took quite a while for me to sort through the ramblings to understand what he was actually saying. I think his main point is that the creator of a work should control how it is distributed. Isn't this the same point of the GPL? Otherwise just release open source into the public domain. The band (or a programmer) created a song (or an app) and wants to decide how it should be distibuted. I don't think that sounds unreasonable. Just because the internet is a relatively new medium doesn't mean that all laws and ethics should not apply to it. Would it be ok if I linked up my server to the internet to freely distribute all my MSDN and MCSP apps to the world (I know, who would want them... but you get the point). They may not have done the best PR job in the world on this, but I think they are working from a valid position, and taking reasonable steps to protect their works.
Of course I use Microsoft. Setting up a stable unix network is no challenge