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Napster Court Date Set For October 2
DaHat writes: "According to Maximumpc.com the trial of Napster vs the RIAA is set for October 2nd, or at least round 1 of it." And just so we're clear on terms, DaHat points out that the MPC story goes on: "The RIAA has even been so kind as to educate the masses on the different terms used for illegal distribution - From the RIAA Web-site:
1. Pirate recordings are the unauthorized duplication of only the sound of legitimate recordings, as opposed to all the packaging, i.e. the original art, label, title, sequencing, combination of titles etc.
2. Counterfeit recordings are unauthorized recordings of the prerecorded sound as well as the unauthorized duplication of original artwork, label, trademark and packaging.
3. Bootleg recordings (or underground recordings) are the unauthorized recordings of a live concert, or a musical broadcast on radio or television.
4. Online piracy is the unauthorized uploading of a copyrighted sound recording and making it available to the public, or downloading a sound recording from an Internet site, even if the recording isn't resold. Online piracy may now also include certain uses of 'streaming' technologies from the Internet."
Am I wrong, or is the RIAA trying to write-out fair use? I had always thought that recording a broadcast off the radio [or TV] for personal, private purposes was considered fair use! Wasn't the Betamax case all about just this?
And now the RIAA is trying to tag FAIR USE with the slur of "Bootleg Recordings". I cry foul.
People are already "work boycotting" the RIAA members (and I'd guess the MPAA members are next, if it hasn't started already). There was an article in the LA Times about this in July. The gist of the article was that the record labels were finding it impossible to fill technical positions, in part because of the image created by their recent legal battles.
Serious about your frustration with the RIAA and corporatism in general? Try Civil Disobedience. No, really. Be willing to get arrested for possessing the tools we take for granted. I am. But read on...
First, a summary, since this is long and will get chopped:
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We can't win if we look like the bad guys. Therefore,
we must clean up our act, both public and private, and be
willing to address the real, underlying concerns of our
fellow artists and consumers.
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Corporations don't trust individuals; individuals don't
trust corporations. Therefore, we must gather all of the
individuals together on our side, artists and consumers
alike, instead of allowing the corporations to divide us.
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The future is change; everyone is scared. The industry
is afraid, but also opportunistic. It believes it can secure a
future for itself built by legally forcing nature to behave
itself. It attacks the fears of consumers to create this legal
impetus.
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The "Tragedy of the Commons" is worrisome. Individual
artists are afraid that if they open themselves up to a
meritocracy, they'll be raped. We have counterexamples, and we
also need to set expectations.
We can't win if we look like the bad guysBefore you don your DeCSS Shirt, it's important that we get our act together and learn the very powerful art of spin . Don't sneer and say that's beneath us. Right now, the RIAA and MPAA are mobilizing a very powerful political engine. They are engaging in a classic tactic, painting our community's members as pirates and criminals in the public's eye. It's our job to spin right back at them, to recast the debate in terms that make us clearly the good guys, and them clearly the corporate Goliath, out to trample the rights of individual artists and consumers. Here's how...
Start giving props to artists. Start decrying the fact that there's no widely available, secure, trustable infrastructure for "tipping". Start pitting the labels against the individual artists, whom you would compensate directly, if there were a reliable means to do so. Blame the corporate hegemony for this situation. Traditional corporations exist for one reason alone: profit ; profit to the exclusion of all else, including the rights of artists, and the rights of individual consumers. Start pitting the labels against consumers, by using inflammatory phrases like "abrogation of our rights" and "corporate hegemony" (please understand what they mean and be able to defend them calmly, though). As soon as we can swing the focus of our fellow consumers' mistrust and cynicism to the industry, as soon as we can paint ourselves the David in this battle, we will begin changing things.
The reasons for this are simple:
My freshman year in college, someone stole 250 CDs from my dorm room. 250 CDs that I had worked very hard to afford, and had worked very hard to acquire (many rare imports, anime, etc.). I felt hurt, violated, confused, angry, and all of that. The RIAA and MPAA are trying to connect with those feelings in the consumer public.
We need to be going for the same connection, while also making the connection between individual freedom and liberty. We need to make it clear that we're all for just compensation, and that we don't need Goliath's hand to ensure that compensation. We need to show our fellow consumers that the industry is just in the game for the sake of revenue, and that they don't give a damn about consumer rights, nor do they trust consumers in the least. Yet they ask for our trust that they will justly compensate artists, that they will respect our rights to fair use, that they will treat us as equals (IANAL, but a corporation is legally considered a person.)
Corporations don't trust individuals; individuals don't trust corporationsThe RIAA and MPAA would have you believe that every artist and "legitimate consumer" out there is on their side, and that everyone else is a pirate. We know that's wrong, but what do we do about it?
Get all the individuals on the same side. Artists are individuals. Consumers are individuals. Everything in between the two is corporate infrastructure. The internet makes that corporatism irrelevant to the kind of relationships we could be building with our fellow individuals.
If I play your song, and I like it, I'll give you a tip. If I play it all the damned time, I'll give you big tips, frequently. If Metallica pulled their heads out, they'd understand that they'd make a lot more from me letting me tip them than they are right now, since I won't buy anything new of theirs (even though I really want to).
The future is change; everyone is scaredThings we've taken for granted, as a society, as individuals, and as corporations, are all in the process of changing dramatically and radically. Specifically, traditional notions of property become more meaningless with each passing day. We know how to treat tangible items as property (you're stealing it if you deprive me of it without my consent), but we don't know how to treat intangibles as property; after all, if you copy it from me, how are you depriving me of it?
And if you think that distinction is cut-and-dried, and that it just means we need two classes of property, intellectual and tangible, think again. What's going to happen in a decade or three when nano-technology makes tangible property available to anyone with a handful of garbage, a replicator, and a design?
Now, it's understandable that corporations might be afraid. After all, they might disappear. Or have to reinvent themselves radically. I think they're pretty well aware of that fact. The issue, ultimately, is one of control. The industry wants to control its destiny, but it doesn't have that kind of power. It seeks to create that power, artificially, by lobbying to create laws like the DMCA, that curtail individual rights that are far more powerful than they were when they were granted, 225 years ago, before there was an Internet.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to be controlled by a corporation. I want the freedom to interact with my fellow individuals, to share and communicate and transact by our own rules. I want to write code and trust that you'll compensate me for it justly. And I do. Literally. I have a 100% GPL clause for the work I do. And I trust the community and individuals to be faithful to one another, and to support one another. I don't need a law or a corporation to enforce what ought to be human decency.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" is worrisomeThe idea that some people will steal all the goodies is worrisome. They can't. Unlike the commons about which "The Tragedy of the Commons" was written, you can't trample up the grass around an artist. You can't turn a director into mud by copiously copying her work.
You can refrain from contributing to their livelihood. You can enjoy their work and simply not tip them, even though you can afford to tip them. Fine. We already have a really good term for that in place: cheap asshole. Perhaps we could get it made into a legal term?
Anyway, there are natural responses to the problem of the cheap asshole. The first is the pillory, metaphorically speaking. A good tipping infrastructure will allow you to leave your tips either anonymously or with credit. An advogato-like trust metric will allow folks to rate your generosity in comparison to your means. A well-deployed micro-accounting infrastructure will make artists, producers, technicians, and so forth, accountable for how they spend the tips in pursuit of their art. All of that means that assholes will be highlighted in red, and the object of public scorn.
This is as it should be, and there is a long tradition of such treatment. Read A Christmas Carol if you doubt me. Everyone hated Scrooge because he was... well, you know. A c.a.
The second is based on what I call "laws of information physics". The two fundamental laws of information physics are:
These laws can be exploited to prevent the c.a.'s from propagating:
Such infrastructure can be exploited in a lot of other ways that bring back our ability to trust one another, and to build community even in the massive scale of the Internet and a global economy. People who've had hard times could "get a break." Or if you're a real hard-liner about people overcoming circumstance, you could set your own metrics to shun anyone who claimed hard times, or anyone who was rich without working for it, and not generous with their wealth. "The possibilities," as they say, "are limitless."
Getting there from hereI'd recap, but you can scroll to the top for that. The bottom line is that we need to pay attention to the fears and concerns of our fellow individuals, and address those, and not just go spouting off about how we're going to do whatever we please and the industry can't stop us. We all believe the industry can't stop us, because ultimately, we can hide. But who wants to hide? And who wants a world in which sharing is a criminal act? So don't feed their fire. Help your fellow artists, consumers, individuals understand how we can build a better future together, without corporate hegemony.
And be prepared to get arrested in the meantime. But when you do, make sure you come off sane, rational, and reasonable. Make it clear that the man is putting you down. If you're not calm, careful, and likable, your fellow consumers and artists are going to see exactly what the RIAA and MPAA want them to see. And away goes your freedom and their freedom.
P.S. I'd have crossposted this to advogato, but I'm not certified by anyone as having done anything special. So if you're of a mind to, and have a decent cert there, please certify me if you think I can add value to the discussions there. Thanks.
You need to pay a little more attention to the intellectual property implications of labels vs. mp3.com. mp3.com does many things horribly (annoying page layout, tottering servers, terrible messageboards) but if you look at their artist agreement there are some extremely important points that I sure hope potential competitors take seriously:
- Nonexclusive contract, with the artist continuing to OWN the mechanicals. Contrast this with any majors contract in which the label owns the mechanicals, the songs, even the band name and the website or the Artist's name itself (!)
- Contract is only renegotiable with the agreement and acknowledgement of the artist! If this seems obvious check out some music biz contracts- see how often the contract is unilaterally renegotiable by the label. That means 'we can change it to whatever we want, after the fact, and you already signed off on it'.
- 49.9999% royalty none of which is recoupable- compared to a tenth or hundredth of that much, already pledged to recoup recording costs mandated by the label. In other words, on mp3.com you get $40, or maybe $400 (what I'm hoping for in the mail) or even $4000 if you have a _lot_ of listens and CD sales- and on the major labels you watch a lot of money go by and keep none of it, nada.
Honestly- it's good to be skeptical, and there are plenty of reasons to knock mp3.com. The deal they offer is not one of them. For all intents and purposes, and even with all their flaws, mp3.com is something new, and the key point (to me) proving that is the nonexclusive nature of their deal- 'sign' with mp3.com and you continue to be totally free to move. Worst that can happen is that you decide to remove your stuff and mp3.com are slow to do it- they make no claim or attempt to own your IP, they just ask for very extensive RIGHTS to USE it, which is waaaaay different, and nothing like as harmful as signing away your creative work to a label.I try to avoid obsessively posting all over mp3 threads with my little links and all ;P but I needed to open my mouth here, because even if mp3.com itself doesn't survive the next decade, as an artist I need something LIKE mp3.com, something that will strike the same terms for use of my music. I'm happy to sign over quite extensive rights to _use_ the stuff- but I'm going to keep the mechanicals, and keep ownership of myself and my name and the tunes, and I'm going to want to see that the contract doesn't get to change the rules about this without my okaying it. And mp3.com walks this line very honorably. It's almost as if they were behaving like some more honorable industry and trying to come up with a fair contract for artists. *shock!* *horror!* ;)
If you want to sell me a mass-market album, a software package, or a video in a consumer setting, there should be no shrink-wrap licenses, no click-wrap licenses, no UCITA, and no DMCA-enforced access controls after the sale. Just your merchandise, my money, and the normal copyright / sales / private property laws.
By the way, if you look at the current version of the GNU Public License closely, you'll see that it differs in a very essential respect from most shrinkwrap "licenses".
Shrinkwrap "licenses" start from the bogus premise that you are bound by them, and then proceed to try to take away rights that you, as an owner of a legal copy of a copyrighted item, already have under the law. The GNU Public License acknowledges that you have rights under copyright law, and states that you do not need to agree to the GPL to exercise those rights. The only reason for anyone to agree to the GPL is to gain authorization to perform additional actions (most notably redistribution) which are not part of the default rights you get from copyright law.
To put it more succinctly, shrinkwrap "licenses" are BAD because they distort contract law in the service of taking away your right to make use of your own property. The GPL doesn't do this.
How could this be applied to CD sales? One way might be to include a license in the liner notes that allows buyers to give away copies of songs. Say, "if you accept this license, you can share promotional MP3s of these songs, encoded at a rate of 64Kbps" ... or "you can make CD-quality copies of these songs beyond the limits of Fair Use if you go to http://www.mymusicsite.com/ and pay for the songs you copy." The key here is not that everything is free (as with GPL) but that you would be offering extra value to customers, instead of beating them with a stick.
As Detritus said, Copyright was originally created to promote censorship and create a publishing monopoly. English copyright was perpetual, and only publishers were granted copyright -- not authors. A publisher could take any text he wanted to, even a public domain text, publish it, and claim exclusive copyright. Copyright at this time was completely understood to be a monopoly for the sole benefit of book publishers, and not an instrument of social progress.
In 1664, support for this system waned, and the laws were allowed to expire. To simplify the story, seeking to regain their monopoly, the book publishers tried a new tactic -- promoting copyright instead as an instrument to benefit authors. The resulting 1710 law, the Statute of Anne, was the first copyright law that recognized, in a limited form, the authors of a work as the proper beneficiary of copyright, not the publisher. United States copyright law is based on this principle.
I'm including two somewhat lengthy quotes from the paper, both to encourage people to read it, and because it sheds light on many of the hottest current copyright issues -- the behavior of the MPAA and RIAA in relationship to artists and with respect to copyright on the internet, the DMCA, and the emerging systems of "pay per use" for printed materials -- i.e. digital books that charge you to read them.The second quote is a little bit off topic for this thread, but it addresses the question as to what is wrong with laws like the DMCA that grant publishers the right to control the use of copyrighted works after publication:The publishing industries are attempting, through the DMCA, to reverse 300 years of copyright progress -- to return to copyright as an instrument to enforce publishing monopolies, instead of an instrument to promote learning by providing an incentive for authors to create a public benefit by openly publishing copies of the works they create. Hence the creation of inaccurate, misleading terms like "copyright protection."
Once again, I highly recommend taking the time to read the paper.
- John