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Revenge Of The MP3 Quickies!
An Anonymous Coward wrote in about the Salon article of an unedited transcript of Courtney Love's speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference. Gnutella News wrote in and told us that Inside Music is running a story about the RIAA uncovering very incriminating internal memos and e-mails between Napster executives that the RIAA says is "proof that the service represents a haven for music piracy and should be closed immediately". Also, head on over to Camp Chaos for the latest flash cartoons about Napster, including one featuring the real Motley Crue. There's also a parody over at Everything2 to check out. Also here is a Wall Street article about the copyright office and the age of the Internet.
At first I figured that Ms. Love is serving her self interest which is legitimate of course. Diving deeper into the article however, there's an anger and energy which must be admired. She reveals an artsists perspective (and yes, since seeing The people vs Larry flint I definitely consider her to be an artist and not just a blonde, arse swinging bimbo) about what really stinks in the entrtainment business. Even if taken with a lot of grains of salt, it's an unbelievable gripping speach she gave and the more I dived into it, the more credibility I gave her. Gawd, I really would have loved to be there...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Ohhhhh, no.
RIAA didn't just go there.
Mucking around with company's internal memos is something of a "below the belt" attack in modern corporate warfare. Yes, it happens in all out warfare and when companies are backed against the wall and are struggling to keep the creditors away. But the problem is that every company has internal memos that would be mission critical, quarter close affecting content if it ever gets out communications that occur precisely because if they don't occur, company's blindfold themselves and crash and burn.
Thus only the internally honest survive.
Oh dear God, can you imagine the anticompetitive, anticonsumer, antirecording, pro government manipulation("go bribe that senator with a junket") style messages that fly around the RIAA?
It's a nuclear attack, and a very, very dumb one. The RIAA's internal memos implicate, likely criminally, very large, very powerful, and very vulnerable(deep pockets) corporations. Meanwhile, Napster just screws itself.
There's a reason we don't see this happen much. We're all about to see why.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Man that was awesome, I've never seen so much guts, integrity and brutal honesty all at the same time. Man that blows me away!
Sh*t, does she come off articulate. She has figured out that she doesn't really have anything to lose since her record label has basically pimped her art and left he with nothing but 'nice pants'. At last, not only does a major artist 'get it', she also has the balls to voice it, and with an amazing amout of credibility.
I hope she gets listened to, and that she is successful in starting a new movement in the production and distribution of audio art. More power to her!
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
I'm a BeOS-zealot most of the time, and it has taken a little compromising of views to reach this opinion. I've never been a real big fan of the GPL, but mainly because of the force it carries, given to it by copyright law and IP.
For the third time in this thread, I have to repeat it as it seems so many idiots keep forgetting the basics of the Free Software Movement and bash Stallman by making false accusations against him ... GPL is the implementation of the concept of COPYLEFT, which is an attack and a joke against COPYRIGHT. You're allowed to do basically anything you want with GPL software. You're just not allowed to restrict other users.
Why? because I dont listen to any label artists. I use mp3's almost exclusively, I buy CD-s from non-label artists, and I will be startingh a LPFM station this summer that will play only non-label music. I bypass the RIAA in every way, legally, and that scares them. It scares them that someone like me will let others listen to this non-label music I have, and that I will point them in the right direction to get it. And finally they are horrified that I will be playing on the public airwaves non-label music. I will be spreading to the public proof that they dont have control, that there are alternatives, and that it really is good!
I scare them, and I hope that you will too.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm sorry man, but as relativistic as I am your comments are absolutely asinine. So fucking WHAT if she can "sing and dance"? Give me a good choreographer and I can do the same thing. Do you not understand the fact that she is totally superficial? If it weren't for looks, we'd have zip. She is yet another bubble-gum pop-star that will be forgotten as soon as her tits start to sag.
Let's flash back to the 80's... Remember Tifanny? Or Debbie Gibson? How about Samantha Fox? And where are they today? How have they recently made your life better? Examples abound of pretty-girls that have two, three hits and are tossed aside by the next new thing. Talent requires staying power, imagination, originality, and meaning. Spears' talent is skin deep. You've been sold an odorous pile of shit, pal, no matter how fuckable it looks.
Spears is the music equivalent of America's Funniest Home Videos: occasionally humorous, but ultimately forgettable.
- Rev.It is obvious you know less than nothing about how the internet works, so here is a quick breakdown for you.
Fact: the internet is a peer-to-peer network. This means that no centralized control exists. The closest thing we have to controlling the internet at the protocol level is the DNS system (which is making attempts to decentralize) and the loosely-knit agreements between ISPs and backbones to provide connectivity. Beyond that, every packet is routable through *some* means, and every packet is treated the same (it is a "dumb" network).
Fact: The primary means to search for information on the internet is via a search engine. Most all search engines use a substring glob search, with the more advanced ones allowing for regular expressions. What this means is that there is no definitive way to find any particular page or piece of information on the internet. When you use a search engine, you get "close enough" to the result that you can follow the links to where you want to go. More popular sites are easier to find, obviously.
Fact: People on the internet like low-cost to no-cost services. Consider pricewatch.com, ebay.com, any local newspaper or TV station - all of these offer up-to-the-minute content that often serves as a replacement for conventional media. This also lowers the cost of distribution dramatically as the cost-per-character is vastly lower than paper.
Fact: People have no morals. As the RIAA itself has demonstrated, profit and economic gain rule the marketplace. This is not limited to corporations - call it "Trickle down morality" if you will, but people have taken their que from businesses and also seek out the best ways to maximize their profits. This is an excellent example of true capitalism.
Conclusion: Here's where we put it all together. In a nutshell, you cannot control the medium as it was engineered specifically to resist centralized control - the US military built it to survive a nuclear blast.. I doubt a few lawyers can cause that kind of damage to the network. The network routes around failure automatically - if you kill an ISP another takes over the previous services. The network has mirroring capabilities and built-in redundancy. You cannot shut down the network. Next, due to the way search engines work, you cannot a) locate all of the material you want to remove -OR- b) quickly and efficiently identify that material. This means that if you plot the amount of money put into removing information log-log with the amount of return, it will rapidly drop to zero and infinity, respectively. In short - there will always be a sizeable percentage of "forbidden" material available. Even with no mirroring, napster, or crawlers.
Guys, you do not need more lawyers, you need more engineers. Evil engineers. Go build an internet that's trademark and copyright-friendly. And good luck getting everyone else to use it. :)
Come on, they knew they were going to be facilitating trading of music for free. They should have made the service more all-purpose, rather than choose to only distribute a file format which is used almost (but not quite) exclusively to distribute copyrighted material. I think the Napster fiasco will alert others to go with something like gnutella or some other general purpose transfer mechanism. Hotline was my favorite on the Mac. By restricting the type of information being traded, Napster opened themselves up to all sorts of scrutiny that Hotline never did, even though copyright violations were rampant on that service which last I used it (3 years ago).
Logic ... merely enables one to be wrong with authority. -- Doctor Who
There is no catch-22. COPYLEFT was created as a protest to abusive COPYRIGHT law (to put it simply), and it uses such copyright laws to subvert them from the inside. If there was no COPYRIGHT abusive laws, there would'nt have been the need for COPYLEFT. Thus it would'nt have existed. Therefore accusing the GPL of hypocrisy as some people did in this thread is not just fallacious, insulting and libellous, it's just plain dumb.
Below is an Article that Steve Albini wrote a few years ago about how working for a major label is a huge sucker bet. It was published in The Baffer and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll under the title "Some of Your Friends are Already this Fucked"
This is an archived article off of Google
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Napster brings about death of the CD
And...? The subscription model doesn't? Hell, the DVD-Audio model doesn't?
Isn't it ironic that everyone wants the CD dead? Techies want compressed digital audio, industry wants your ossicles to be trade secreted.
And yet, I can't imagine anything else that could have killed the CD...
Record industry may be unwilling to support this transition (gut their bottom line)
And...? An existing oligopoly might be afraid of making less money?
Record stores (Tower Records) obsoleted.
This is incriminating? Boy. CD Now is screwed.
Of all the things to call incriminating, these sure don't qualify. Transitioning an entire industry into a new level of technology which lowers margins for some players and entirely eliminates others...last I checked, we did have some kind of public policy which advocated competition. This is starting to reflect the ugliest aspects of the Microsoft trial.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
That has got to be one of the most harsh and caustic things I've read in the past month. She is absolutely brutal. It was great.
One of the most revealing quotes: Put simply, the antitrust laws in this country are basically a joke, protecting us just enough to not have to re-name our park service the Phillip Morris National Park Service
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
I keep hearing MP3 and Napster, et. al., discussed in the popular press, and no one is getting it right. They (including Lars) keep talking about "perfect digital copies (pdc)." But no one is swapping pdc's, and MP3s are no such thing. They're compressed, lower quality copies. They are the PC equivalent to the cassette tape. They may sound the same on your cheap PC speakers, but pump them through a stereo and crank the volume and the difference is very clear, especially at 128 Kb/s, which is the encoding bitrate most used on Napster. (Ars has a review of different MP3 encoders and how their output compares to the original here . If they were pdc's, would there be a need for this?) A pdc is the wave file from the CD, which runs about 50MB for the average cut from a 10-cut CD. That's too large for the average use to pull down over the net with anything but a blazing connection, and even at that, you aren't going to be able to pull many down per day. It can be done, just like you can rip DVDs and post the movies to the net, but only the very persistent and very lucky (others on your LAN?) are going to be able to pull them down illegally. Please call into talk radio/TV/whatever and draw this disticntion, the RIAA has convinced the press that MP3=CD quality. Stop the misinformation!!!
There were a billion music downloads last year, but music sales are up. Where's the evidence that downloads hurt business? Downloads are creating more demand.
Precisely. Ms. Love's right on the money here. What I want to know is why more bands aren't up in arms about the fact that they are expected to swallow the cost of thousands of promo CDs.
Promo CDs, for those who've been under a rock, are the "For Promotional Use Only" discs that get sent to reviewers, radio stations, and the like. Sounds like a perfectly legitimate use for those discs, right?
Think again. You know those CDs they sell through record clubs? Think the artist gets a full royalty from those sales? Wrong. Those are considered part of the promotional-copies budget at many companies.
A fairly standard provision in agreements with American artists is that they receive one-half their usual royalty rate on sales through clubs and that no royalties are payable on bonus or free records distributed by clubs.
-Syndey Shemel, "This Business of Music". 1990. 61.
In other words, if you buy CDs from a CD mail order club like Columbia House or BMG, you're shortchanging the artist as well -- and that's a legitimate, legal form of screwing musicians. The argument that "MP3s are taking away profits" is sort of disingenuous, given that the vast majority of the people I know use them the way they're used on the radio and in record store listening booths (IOW, "try-before-you-buy"), not as a replacement for the disc.
My belief is that Courtney Love is on the right track. Give folks a few songs for free on the band's Web site -- if the music's good, they'll buy the disc. Hell, after reading this, I'm going to buy her next disc. I've liked Hole's stuff in the past, and never found the discs not to be worth the $15 or so I spent on 'em. And just think... if she's that confident about it, I'll bet it doesn't suck like Reload.
Chance
http://imc.dyndns.org
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." -Albert Einstein
I have been in the minority for a long time in saying that Courtney Love is a great artist that even the caustic Bill Hicks would respect. She's not just another talentless bimbo a la Britney Spears or Celine Dion. She is intelligent, can act pretty well, and has a lot of experience under her belt. Plus it is my opinion that Hole rocks pretty hard.
But this speech solidifies the fact that there are brains above that sexy belly-button. Her comments are dead on right, and are anti-establishment enough to warrant deep respect. Maybe this will put the final nail in the coffin of the "riding Kurt Cobain's coattails" meme.
- Rev.So I was over at Best Buy the other day, getting a new hard drive 'cause my old one is like totally stuffed full of MP3s, ya-know? An' the aisle with all the drives was blocked by these 2 fat kids tryin' to decide which joystick to buy. So like, I was inna hurry, 'cause my cd burner was just about 10 minutes from spitting out another Metallica disk (screw you, Lars), so I went over to the next aisle to like, go around, ya-know? An' I saw all these boxes that I never noticed before an' they were all playing music, like for free! They were like way cool and totally portable, so I grabbed one an' I got my new drive an' took 'em home. The box didn't come with no good instructions but it gets free music and downloads real quick, like right away when you turn it on. I don't have to logon or wait for a connect or nuttin'. Without the instructions I haven't been able to figure out all the options but there's a lotta music choices even if I can't figure out how to get it to do anything but play right now. It works real good, although after every couple of songs ya gotta listen to a pop-up ad from some luser company that thinks I care.
Anybody got any info on this box? The guy at the store called it a "ray-dee-oh."
A slashdot reader who gets it!! Finally!!
My #1 biggest fear by far about Napster is the fact that music will be reduced to songs. Albums will no longer be produced because they will be too expensive to download, and because everybody will demand catchy three minute jewels of pop.
Most serious music lovers know that albums are complete works, to be listened to and ejnoyed in full. Today music lovers dictate the music industry; they spend much more money on music than casual fans. When casual music fans (e.g. Napster users) begin to dictate the music industry, it will be destroyed. And we will have nothing but catchy songs - not albums.
Today musicians are incredibly free; they have 75 minutes to do whatever they want on a CD. When online distribution becomes the norm, the artistsic goal of every musician will be to make a jewel of pop which sounds good and catchy on a $400 Compaq over a 56k modem. Is this where you want your music headed?
You hear many casual fans say "why pay $18 when there are only 1 or 2 good songs". Obviously, they are listening to radio backed top 40 music, and nothing serious. All of the best music contains no filler on the albums. In fact, most albums end up leave me wanting more.
I have logged on to Napster, and I found music of _none_ of my favorite artists, who are slightly or very off the beaten path. The only artists available on Napster are the top 40 hitmakers. I had literally hundreds of choices of where to download the latest Ani DiFranco and Dixie Chicks hits, but nobody was offering any Lucy Kaplansky or Rebecca Pearcy.
My fear that online distribution will homogenize the music industry has already come true; the average Tower records has infinitely more selection than the meager lot available on Napster: the ONLY music available on Naspter in quatity is stuff like top 40 hits, techno, and other related teeny-bop genres.
My god, there is somebody that really _GETS_ it. Perhaps even better than the average Slashdotter. And this person is COURTNEY LOVE! Man, I told you to stop bitching and give Lars et al. a chance to speak. She hit the nail on the head, very hard.
We are so obsessed with our revolutionary "gift" culture, we forget that music has been working on the same premise: write cool stuff, hope people like and use it, and you will be karmically rewarded. We need to step the fsck off and give artists a chance. They are NOT trying to shut down free music distribution for greedy ulterior motives. They are trying to get these channels to work WITH them instead of with the record companies that are fscking them over. I would be pissed off too if people profited from my work by making deals with those who were exploiting me. It's like the artists don't even exist to these companies. Artists WANT to embrace the internet and the freedom it brings. They don't want to be chained to the record companies. They are trying to make all us IPO-crazed geeks realize that we can do GOOD by artists as well. We have tons of audiophiles among our ranks.
She even quotes Stephenson! My god...if I only knew that I really *was* on "their" side when I was 15...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?