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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.
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
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. :)
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!!!
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.