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The Software Police vs. The CD Lawyers
guerby writes: "Dan Bricklin's (author of Visicalc) article
The Software Police vs. the CD Lawyers recently reprinted
on the ACM Ubiquity magazine provides
an interesting (and debatable) parallel between the
SIIA (Software and Information Industry Association)
and RIAA (well known to /. readers ;-) strategy against 'pirates.'" It does raise some good points -- and helps explain why groups like the BSA don't raise hackles the way the RIAA does: they tend to go after the large-scale counterfeiters, not kids with a cracked copy of Photoshop.
I think we are looking at a future when all music is totally free, and artists will make there money through other channels (live performance, for example). Even better, the recording industry itself might die a death. Just imagine - no more intense promotion of artists, hype etc. Artists would have to start from the grass roots.
One thing I wonder about, though, is books. What if a novel equivalent of napster appeared (please excuse the pun:-)? How would authors make money then? Through publicly reading their works? I don't think so. I can't think of a mechanism whereby authors could continue to make cash, which is why I would be much more scared of the internet if I were a novelist rather than a musician.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
"Special programs"? Does this sound familiar to anyone? Take out a loan and buy a clue, RIAA and MPAA and friends -- people just don't want to put up with complicated protection schemes. Most people probably don't want to pirate material in large volumes. But they also don't have any desire to put up with inconvient copyright schemes (cough, cough, SDMI), regardless of whatever "noble" intentions ("Let's stop those pirates!") they might be designed with.
Look what happened to Circuity City's DIVX. It failed not because it was immoral or evil, but because people just didn't want to have to put up with such an awkward system. And, ultimately, nothing that isn't accepted by the mainstream populace will ever be worthwhile. They can throw out new data formats and encryption schemes until the cow comes on, but if puts too much of a burden on the average consumer (who just wants his movies / music), it will simply never catch on.
After all, the customer is No. 1.
Green Monkey
The software industry went after large counterfeiters, instead of users. They also seeked to educate users, and scare corporations.
There are NO corporate buyers of music, so you'd HAVE to go after the individual. However, the RIAA hasn't gone after individuals.
They went after the "large-scale" copiers (MP3.com) and the "large-scale copier enabler" (napster).
I personally think that MP3.com is in the moral right (although not the legal right) and Napster is in the legal right (and moral right, but I maintain that copying for personal use is fair use).
HOWEVER, the parallel to the counterfeitting shop is the napsters of the world...
The article is flawed, the RIAA is doing what the SPA did... Go after the big boys, and leave your customers alone. SDMI was a bad idea, and the pricing model sucks, but they haven't been suing people for using napster.
Alex
digital piracy has the potential to tear down an infrastructure that we see as RIGHT, even though it may not be.
elaboration:
music piracy is a really great thing. i hope it sinks the recording industry. the recording is EVIL. it steals artists rights and property and benefits very few, very successful artists. artists have very little to gain from the recording industry. for instance, even the biggest artists, metallica for intance, don't make more than 50 cents per 15 dollar compact disc. so if they were to sell 10 million albums this would amount to 5 million dollars. not chump change, but FAR below the amount of money Metallica makes every year. metallica makes all their money on tours and merchandising, something that they don't need record companies for.
imagine if all music were distributed over the internet for free, if the music were good enough, people would go pay to see the artists perform the music. much the same way people buy cds and go see the artist if they like the music. digital or physical, it makes very little difference. except that w/o the recording industry the artist would be able to keep their publishing rights, not worry about distribution and not get trapped into unfair contracts for money needed upfront to record albums. artist would get paid for performing (where most of their money comes from anyways) and record companies would go away. sounds perfect to me.
software piracy has the potential to do much the same thing. it would be a wonderful thing if every copy of Microsoft' windows were pirated. or if all commercial operating systems were pirated for that matter. in essence, this would lead to a free OS for all. it's been shown that a quality OS can be made by open source communities with free labor. imagine if your operating system was free and had mass user acceptance.stealing from MS and other is actually a good thing. if ms went bankrupt people would use a free os that would eventually (if it hasn't already) surpassed windows in quality.
stealing applications has nearly as much potential. obviously at some point programmers need to get paid. but do you think that adobe or microsoft pay progammers nearly enough? even if you make 200 thousand a year hacking away in redmond, it's nothing compared to the money MS makes off your labor. imagine if all applications development were shareware based. developers could reap the fruits of their labors much more directly. it's not too different than big corporate farming versus small organic farming. small organic farmers actually earn MORE than by being a part of some huge corporate farming collective that buys their crops too cheaply. a small nimble software company that operated on a shareware model, could compete effectively and make more money for the individuals. because they were relying on a shareware model, they wouldn't have to worry about distribution costs and their small size would allow them to be price comptetive.
think how kewl it would be if there were 20 different small companies that created word processors that all used a standardized (ISO standard maybe) .DOC file. or we have today's 100 mb word process full of bloat
that doesn't even handle it's own proprietary .DOC file correctly.
now i'm not advocating that digital piracy is always justified. nor am i saying we should all go steal cars and computer. what i am saying is that digital piracy has the potential to change software and music for the better.
revolution through stealing? hey, it worked for robin hood ; )
Here's the interesting points:
The tapes were propritary.
The decks the tapes played on were propritary as well.
The music company owned the tapes, as well as the equipment that played it.
From what I had gathered from the whole thing, the coffee company paid the music service, not on a flat one-time fee, but on a continual basis, due to the fact that the music was considered a 'public performance' Sound familiar?
(as a final note of little interest, my beloved, yet much persecuted opera tape was found in the sanitizer one evening, quite melted and dead. No one confessed to the act, and instead of a decent burial in the trash can, it had to be sent back to the music company for supposed credit or replacement. I never did see that tape again... )
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
Piracy is ALWAYS wrong. It is the equivalent of theft.
Except when you steal something, the original is not there anymore. When you pirate software or music, the original is still there, but the profits aren't. It's not quite the same.
--hongpong.com
Is it just me, or does the "Information Industry" part of the SIAA name sound a little odd? As in, it used to be STUFF people peddled, now it's INFORMATION, which is an entirely different beast.
:-) Witness:
At least they are FAR more clueful than the RIAA, though.
-- all of those nasty copy-protection schemes of the '80s, like bad floppy sectors
-- now, you don't get none of that
-- serial numbers (think windblows) keep honest people honest, while not affecting the dishonest
-- the industry mostly realizes that the battle against the user is not worth fighting
-- instead, they go after the biggie counterfeiters
And, I think we all know that the RIAA is currently at the top of the list -- silly protection schemes to try and prevent all users from doing anything the RIAA doesn't want you to. Hopefully, they will progress down the list further in the next ten years.......
Oh well. I don't care too much whether the RIAA lives or dies, as long as they don't buy legislation (in the US of A mostly) that affects me. In other words, I don't care much for their music. Classical rules!
-----
Piracy is illegal, and pirates should know that they are commiting a crime, but the crime in question is not theft. Theft is the act of *taking* something away from its owner. At worst, pirates simply don't *give* something to the owner -- the owner doesn't lose anything that they had already. It is simply Orwellian Newspeak to call piracy theft.
The recorded music industry is less than 125 years old. To suggest that humanity was deprived of culture for the preceding three million years is ignorant at best.
Fin-de-siecle France, or early Nineteenth Century Vienna (the former emerging when recorded music was only in its extreme infancy) were almost infinitely more "cultural" than 20th Century teen culture where all recorded music is simultaneously and instantaneously available, but yet most youths would rather play a Moby or Nine Inch Nails song really loud, than experience anything resembling serious cultural dialectic.
Although you wouldn't know it from Bricklin's tone, in its heyday the SPA did raise a lot of hackles with its tactics, which basically amount to bullying businesses to open up their systems for SPA audits (which would only find unlicensed copies of major packages published by SPA members) and discouraging people from trading any software via modem and floppies (conveniently forgetting the existence of shareware and free software.) The software publishing industry had to be dragged into the present day kicking and screaming, and the audio and other media publishers are destined to follow the same torturous route.
Complicated 'protection' mechanisms are no longer found on many pieces of software. As they said, they found they still got paid even when they did *nothing* technical to prevent piracy.
Someone else brought up a good point that I think holds a lot of truth.
If we look to the software industry, for example... those little warez dudes who 'hoard' tons and tons of warez... so what? These software houses *don't give a shit*. It's not worth fighting, and they know it. WOuld any of those warez kiddies actually have a reason to buy the software? no. DO they need it ? No. Are they a 'lost sale'? No. Are the people who get it from them? No. Let's face it. 99% of the 'warez' scene are just people who like being part of the scene.. plain and simple. They are not threat to the outside world.
I don't disagree with Bricklin's ideas, I just think that his article should have balanced his details a bit more. It seems like he devoted so much time to explaining where he came from that he ran out space to explain his ideas.
~=Keelor