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P2P vs. RIAA: RIAA Wins
revscat writes: "Salon has a nice writeup of the persecution and eventual success of the RIAA vs. commercial MP3 entities. And while alternatives exist, they "may eventually succumb to the might of the RIAA, which is already making noises about targeting software developers, ISPs and individual users of the network with lawsuits." Basic gist: for profit MP3 has consolidated into the hands of the recording industry." Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
mp3.com is now owned by Universal. Artists have to pay off mp3.com to get timely service and be eligible for 'payback', and agree to a contract that Universal can change at any time with no warning. Plus, artists also agree to give Universal perpetual nonexclusive rights to their material, and give blanket permission for editing and alterations to take place at Universal's discretion.
When mp3.com blew it, it blew it BIG.
What you are thinking about is currently more like ampcast.com. Ampcast has an infinitely better contract, has just gone live with a _true_ audio CD program (send in a Red Book master and they dupe it as needed- full CD quality for indies at burn-to-order availability), and seems to be dedicated (even down to their mission statement) to providing an alternative to the majors.
Ampcast isn't big, but doesn't look to be blowing it any time soon. If they did, there will just be somebody else, because it's simply not that hard to dupe and print up full quality CDs anymore. Just because mp3.com blew it doesn't mean there won't be others.
How have you been censored?
By not being able to copy the latest Britany Spears song from some guy in Vermont?
This is censorship?
Since when? you didn't create the song, you don't own the rights to the song.
It's amazing how bloody stupid people can be these days.
Nonsense!
The artists SHOULD earn money for their creations.
The music industry on the other hand, they should be eliminated since they are no longer needed in the Internet age.
If a smart geek could figure out a system to get the same amount of money tranferred directly from the consumer to the artist as today - but bypassing the record labels - that would be something.
The artists are currently not paid well.
(No, I'm not an artist)
-- From Denmark
The internet is based on standards. One of the issues that any litigious organizations will encounter is that once a standard is in use and assisting people, it is _very_ difficult to get rid of it. A standard (defactor or dejure) once proven beneficial is not something that can be recalled since there is no _owner_. So. Why not create a file-sharing standard. Create something that will easily allow the creation of a multitude of different file sharing programs that use this standard. Napster, Gnutella, Aimster, etc. etc. all could implement the standard, provide repositories etc. The ease of creating a client which utilizes the standard protocol/library/interfaces/etc. would encourage a diversity and flexibility to the file sharing "industry" which would be incredibly hard to repress. And if the standard is Open and Free and if people build Open and Free libraries on top of the standard, so much the better. (Yes, I know, TCP/IP, FTP, etc. are all protocols which could be used, but they don't really address the broader issues of searching, distributed repositories, security, etc. OTOH, I could certainly be unaware of exactly such an effort - if I am let me know!)
http://www.oomind.com/
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
You state the most common argument from the free software camp. Philosophically, I agree with you. Practically, I think we're both being naive.
For most of us, ISPs constitute choke points. Threaten enough legal action, and I can forsee filters not at every ISP, but enough to reduce P2P below the critical mass necessary to threaten the RIAA/MPAA business model. An yes, we can always come up with ways to weasel P2P around those filters and chokes. But in order to remain beyond RIAA/MPAA ability to block with lawsuit-inspired filters, etc, they probably remain beyond the average Win-user's ability to install and use. The net effect is the same.
And I can agree with you that in the long run, they will fail. I guess I don't really want them to fail, I just want them trimmed down to size. After all, in my post I did recognize their 'editorial' value. Content is not free to create, after all. Plus there is truly editorial value, in the classic sense, in filtering the quality before it goes out. (One might look at the summer movie lineup, or at TV in general, and argue that they've failed miserably at this.)
But I'd rather they be trimmed down to size in my lifetime, preferably within the next decade. After all, Rome was around for over a millennium, and the Catholic church still has quite a bit of power after longer than that. I'd rather not think the RIAA/MPAA chokepoints have that long to go.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The appearance of broadband has made a 4 MB mp3file very easy to download, so what does take time and resources to download now ?
Some Swedish computer magazines have identified the DivX media compression as a successor to the "king-of-piracy-file-format". They showed how to download, and even provided several programs on the bundled CD, such as gnutella.
I wonder if we will have a company providing .mpg and .avi exchange in the same way. Why dont they just write a more binding licence agreement and start over with a new mediatype ?
My 2 bytes
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
I think you're on to something with the penalties idea--that's really what the RIAA are good at, massaging legislators to put laws in place to protect their interests (usually at the expense of the consumer's interests).
But I don't think you'll see any "indemnity boxes" and if you do they'll be a joke. P2P is such a huge buzzword now that people forget that it is pretty much just another way of saying 'the Internet.' You don't need a fancy application for this stuff; IRC, FTP, HTTP... Gopher, even, if you wanted to resort to that... all of these are 'file-sharing' technologies and there's no way that the RIAA or anyone can tell that the packets you're swapping are copyrighted material or not. Even if you're using a detectable client, the onus is going to be on RIAA to prove that you're swapping stuff they own, not your own files. Legislation is not likely to change that--it's too firmly embedded in common law and common perception. But the penalties... you are quite right; those are a different matter.
No relation to Happy Monkey
They should sue any maker of ftp clients or servers for inevitable infrengement using their software.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
sheldon writes:
How have you been censored?
By not being able to copy the latest Britany Spears song from some guy in Vermont?
This is censorship?
Since when? you didn't create the song, you don't own the rights to the song.
It's amazing how bloody stupid people can be these days.
Assuming that I am not a criminal and I used Napster to find unknown artists who have choosen Napster and other P2P means of distributing their music with their permission, then I have been censored by a court-induced filtering system that is so paranoid that it returns no songs for the word "dog"!
Its the equivelent of a court ordering all file servers to filter their files to prevent piracy. Searching for "windows"? You must be a pirate, since there is no free software that uses the term windows. Or how about "office"? Most people can only think of one software company that releases a program that has the word "office" in it. Thanks to the RIAA, the precedent has been set for this sort of action.
I do however have to agree with your sig. :)
their case for public good is quite a strong one: protecting the livings of musicians. I know the musicians get a unfairly small slice of the pie but thats a different issue. The fact is that if everyone could get music for free the musicians dont get any money, so they dont make music. No music != public good.
.could. be used for piracy?
Now if someone can show P2P operating with the orginators of the music getting money then this case goes away. Napster hasnt done that (saying 'oh.. err, well how about if we add subscriptions?' doesnt seem to have cut it) and thats why napster is dead.
The trouble is, the RIAA will never let such a system exist unless it's under their control. That, in a large part, is why we have yet to see a successful, profit-making online music system. Everything that has come along has been killed, crippled, or bought out by the record companies. Even Napster's subscription model could have been a success...sure, they would have lost a large portion of their user base, but they might have been able to retain enough users to make a profit and pay the artists. That's probably not the case any longer, with the droves of users who have already abandoned the almost worthless file sharing system for other P2P networks.
The only pay music networks that we're going to see will be the ones owned by the labels, and on those, the consumer is going to be paying absurd fees for music they can't burn to a CD, transfer to their Rio, or even move to another PC. And they won't even be buying this music...that would be far too unfair to the record companies. No, we only get to rent it for a short time. If we want to keep it longer, we pay more.
A point to make here is that CDRs werent banned when people started copying CDs with them. Why should it be easier to ban a non-physical medium which
There's a difference between CDRs and P2P systems...CDRs have a very obvious, proveable, legitimate use as a data storage medium. As much as the RIAA would probably like to use their legal clout to restrict CDRs, they haven't figured out a way around that legitimate use. P2P file sharing networks, on the other hand, are a new technology, and, unfortunatly, no one has really come up with a useful, widespread, 100%-legitimate use for them. There are probably many, many legitimate purposes for which P2P could be used, but we just haven't figured out what they are or how to apply P2P file sharing technology to them. Unfortunatly, with our legal system, that makes the entire P2P file sharing concept a target, because the precedent seems to be that you must prove something can be used for a "substantial legitimate purpose," or else it is automatically considered illegitimate if it could contribute in any way to something illegal.
DennyK
Yesterday the RIINS (Record Industry of Intergalactic Normal Space, a descendant of the RIAA of Earth's 20th Century) filed suit in Galactic court against GOD. While it is a well-known fact that GOD was a fictional char of the past thanks to Oolong Caloophid the RIINS believes that the very creation of the universe has been damaging its profits for near a millennia.
A spokes person for the RIINS is sums up the chain of events that leads to the damages generated by GOD.
Well, the Millennia old battle of profits driven by corporate greed continues, Full story at 11:00.
Contractual Obligation
I hate to say it, but maybe it's a good thing that online music will start out, now that these skirmishes are largely decided, in the hands of the RIAA. The reason is that, they're going to mess up big time, and the long-term benefits of them faltering may be better than the short-term benefits of easily trading music.
:-)
See, they've already been found guilty of price-fixing on CD and tape sales for the last 15 to 20 years, and although nothing has really come of that finding for the consumer, we know that the RIAA will not be able to resist charging similar prices in cyberspace to the ones they charge in meatspace. Well, what is the music industry's excuse for expensive music? "We don't own the whole process, not only are there promotional costs, but production costs for the cover art and costs of the actual press run blah blah blah blah blah." In reality the conglomerates which are the record companies own the whole process in subsidiaries, so the actual costs are next to nothing.
But on the Internet, there is no need for a press run. Costs of duplication are effectively equal to bandwidth costs, which are small relative to a meatspace CD press. And there is no need for shipping costs, no expenses for space at the retail store, etc. So when the music industry charges almost the same thing to download an album as it charges to buy the physical version, there will be a backlash. And thanks to a few enlightened ones like Orrin Hatch, Congress will get involved. I predict that in the long run the current high price structure, and lack of sufficient pay to artists, will be forcefully ironed out when the transition to cyberspace sales is made and the RIAA members try to keep charging their insanely inflated prices.
But that's just my opinion; I could be wrong. But let's hope they shoot themselves in the foot, eh?
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
It is ironic that the RIAA's web site has a headline item about "freedom of speech" and how they want to protect it.... yet, with this and similar actions, the RIAA is at the forefront of using frivolous lawsuits to censor people all over the place.
Imagine a world where ISPs, to avoid liability, install "indemnity boxes" on their connections. These detect and block P2P file transfers, are updated frequently, and can check their own integrity. By the time the average user has heard of a P2P program, the indemnity boxes block it. ISPs who do not install the box become liable for contributory copyright infringement; after one lawsuit agaunst such an ISP has been won, with ruinous damages awarded, everybody else quietly folded.
Meanwhile, P2P software has been ruled to be every bit as much a "digital crowbar" as DeCSS. You can find it, but it is deep underground.
The RIAA have the means to achieve this; they have billions of dollars to spend on winning court cases and buying legislators. The very survival of artificial scarcity as the foundation of information-age corporate capitalism depends on them winning.
Of course, if the measures prove to be ineffective, they will do what is always done: increase the penalties. Instead of blocking file-sharing software, they will switch to tracking users and making examples of them, with high-profile prosecutions. After a few pimply-faced teenagers get jail sentences for criminal conspiracy, people will be a lot more afraid to use this software. It will become a high-risk activity, much like the illegal drug trade.
their case for public good is quite a strong one:
.could. be used for piracy?
protecting the livings of musicians. I know the musicians get a unfairly small slice of the pie but thats a different issue. The fact is that if everyone could get music for free the musicians dont get any money, so they dont make music. No music != public good.
Now if someone can show P2P operating with the orginators of the music getting money then this case goes away. Napster hasnt done that (saying 'oh.. err, well how about if we add subscriptions?' doesnt seem to have cut it) and thats why napster is dead.
I think is scandelous that all P2P has been labelled 'MP3 based piracy', but lets face it, 90% of it is.
A point to make here is that CDRs werent banned when people started copying CDs with them. Why should it be easier to ban a non-physical medium which
And I hate what the record co's do in terms of commodotizing and exploiting art on the one hand, and justifying their anti-piracy on the grounds that we shouldn't be stealing from these poor, hard-working folks who are pouring out their souls to us.
But i'll go on record as saying that if there's one group of people who can solve this problem today (although not really retroactively) it's the artists themselves. They need to decide, now, that they're going to market and distribute themselves, that they don't need to be on TRL, that they don't think that garnering 13% of gross sales is fair, that while they're in it for the money, they're rock and roll stars, for god's sake, and there's lots of ways to make money that don't involve telling your fans all the things they can't do.
The house-negro-field-negro paradigm applies here quite powerfully (although, of course, I make no pretensions that ip rights as they relate to music are in the same league of injustices as black slavery in america). Artists have depended on record deals for a long time. It's what they've strived to get, it's the measure of success, and it sure would be nice to get to ride in a limousine rather than shlepping our crap around in this van. They've come to identify the music industry's interests as their own. And by keeping the supply of success low, the industry has kept demand high among those working hard out in the field.
And just as this paradigm was invoked to make people see how pathetic it was to be happy being a house-slave, although it was understandable, the best, and simplest way to make all of this argument and litigation go away is for the *artists* to stand up and walk out. They don't, cause they like cash, and who doesn't? But they're getting the table scraps, comparatively, and they thank and defend the industry in return. It's sort of sad.
There's nothing to argue over if the artists themselves realize that they've got a monopoly on whatever it is they do, and that they don't need to sell the rights to distribute in order to be heard, or in order to make money (although lots of smart people are trying to figure out the best way to do this). The record companies are being jerks, but at least they're doing it in their own interest. The artists, they're doing it because they're too lazy, stupid, and well-trained to see what a shitty situation they're in.
god is just pretend.
their case for public good is quite a strong one: protecting the livings of musicians
First, I am a musician (IAAM?). Second, this post is hogwash. Musicians don't have a "RIGHT" to make millions of dollars off their music. Good music from LOCALS is good for the public, not over priced, over engineered crap. I know many musicans that have 0 to do with the RIAA, and are NOT negatively affected by any form of piracy. Musicians will always be around for the public at clubs, on the Internet, and at festivals - without the RIAA.
Thanks to real musicians who love music as an art, the entire "music industry" could collapse and we'd still have great music for all to enjoy.
Heck, our music would probably be more cultured and less expensive to enjoy.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Just as an interesting thought; corporations are granted their charters for the "public good," right? What I wonder is who is doing the community more good, Napster (who have encouraged communication and sharing) or the RIAA (who encourage closemindness and destroy that feeling of community. As a society we need to stop abuses like this so we can takle control of our nation once more. James
I've frequently thought about how cool it would be if we could think of a "legitimate" use for the Gnutella network, so that
- an ISP can't possibly feel itself justified in shutting down anyone shoving gigabits through the Gnutella port (you've already heard about this probably...), and
- so the Government can't try to stop Gnutella (company?) from distributing Gnutella software (it wouldn't matter if it did: Gnutella's already out there and since it's P2P the government can't do anything to get gnutella company to shut down the service, but:)
- Or worse, to try to go after the users and to make it illegal to use gnutella! (Which isn't so farfetched...)
The government or RIAA can say today, "Look, there's no justification for using gnutella since it's basically only used for piracy, so anyone that's shoving data over it has every reason to be denied that right."But if we could say: "Uh, actually, it's just a distributed internet surfing system with encryption, which also happens to work as file-sharing as part of its distribution scheme, since it doesn't differentiate between html documents and binary documents, which isn't a meaningful distinction anyway since you can MIME encode anything into html if you want,"
THEN the government will be forced to say: "well hot-damn. We can't have ISPs shutting down distributed information sharing, which is the only thing WEB-SURFING can be construed as, since it would be a denial of freedom of speech (denial of right to know. Freeedom of speech, although IANAL, only is a meaningful right as long as those who want to listen to you have the right to listen to you.)
There's little the Government or any ISP could say against "It must be encrypted so that the information becomes available to users under a totalitarian regime. It must be distributed so that that regime cannot shut down a web server and cause the source of the information to cease."
The upshot: the government, your ISP, the RIAA, etc, etc, will have NO way of keeping the ENCRYPTED, DISTRIBUTED, "stuff" that you share from happening to be pirated. They can shut down Gnutella of today to some extent by making the software illegal to own, since they would be fairly justified in saying that it is used almost exclusively for illegal purposes. If you started doing web surfing over it, there is no such argument.
For this reason alone, all of us should start doing all of our surfing through this new system as soon as it's featurey enough.
Besides, at the very least, if we started doing that, then whatever we do websurf will be hidden from our ISP by being encrypted, and documents will probably come over much faster under a distributed system. Well, static documents would at least. Maybe this system would also serve to route you around faster, mimicking IPV6, so we could still do better to use it than surf straight. There's no limit to how much good we could get from doing all of our surfing through a distributed, encrypted system, and since the fact that it would make piracy easy is an inherent but small side-effect, it would mean that no one could stop it.
Long Live the Freeedom to Rip Artists Off!
(Which I happen to disagree with, but to a far less extent than I do with the RIAA's trying to force us not to share our files. If artists included an address to send money to in the extended descriptions fields of their MP3's [yes, artists should distribute their own mp3s], I know that I for one would take advantage of it and give them their due. As it is, it's far too much trouble and far too much of what I would pay would go straight to the record industry's pocket. That reminds me of a joke, which is actually a good analogy for why we share name-brand artists instead of no-name artists, even though name-brand artists are being whored out by the record industry.)
~
While I beleive your references are sound, I don't think your conclusions about the inevitable outcome of the fight are.
First of all, those who are currently 'beat down', Napster, Scour, MP3.com, etc... were stupid. They were trying to make money off of an already existing artificially scarce resource.
What the 'Second Generation' P2P models all strive for is freedom of information duplication and transmission, even over control. Take Gnutella, for example. Everyone in my office used Napster, once upon a time. Those that were too lazy to setup Napigator once Napster started filtering now use Bearshare, which uses Gnutella protocol. I'm using it right now. Gnutella use is skyrocketing, according to the Salon Article, and I beleive it.
The *only* way for the record industry to get rid of Gnutella is to somehow make it illegal, as the MPAA has tried to do with DeCSS with very little success.
Layer all the other 'free' P2P clients such as Freenet and CDC's new project on top of that. It can't be stopped.
Look at Usenet. Gigabytes and gigabytes of the most illegal information ever in the form of Warez, pirate MP3's, porn, bomb-making instructions, etc... pass through the alt hierarchy on a daily basis. Newsfeeds has a NNTP servers dedicated to both MP3 downloads and Warez downloads, yet you don't see anyone trying to shut them down.
The 'publishers', the RIAA, the MPAA, and all the existing book publishers are fighting a rear-guard retreat. Sure, they have more money, more influence, and can crush any one person into fine paste, but what they don't realize is that they're not fighting individuals or even other companies. They're fighting progress.
The Roman Empire tried to do it. Look where they are now. The Catholic Church tried to do it, and even succeeded for many centuries, but were eventually beaten down by the invention of the printing press. The nation-states of Europe tried to do it, when they colonized the rest of the world. Now the information industries of America are trying to do it.
Just like their predecessors, they *will* fail. You can't fight time.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
US, Everywhere - The RIAA has sued the Department of Defence for creating ARPANET, the mother of the Internet, on the basis that it facilitates "copying of mp3 files via HTTP, FTP, EMAIL" and a host of other evil tools that exist merely for the facilitation of piracy. Al Gore was also named in the suite.
Upon learning that the case was summarily dismissed, the RIAA sued the messenger who delivered the news.
This article is pure bunk. I've lost track of how many file sharing programs I've seen announced in recent months. The internet is a system designed to share information. The only way to prevent information (like mp3s) from being shared is to shut down the entire net.
It was pretty apparent to me that the big names in early file sharing (Napster, MP3.com etc) would go down. They had pretty, bright red targets painted on their foreheads.
However, now that it is started there will be no stopping it. You can filter for music and people will just encrypt it before sending. You can shut down central servers and people will go peer to peer. You can publish FUD about the death of music sharing and people will ridicule you.
Bah, just go to freenet.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
I'll refer to two pieces of science fiction, as harbingers of the future war of which we're seeing the first battles.
For the first, I forget the title. But it was about an unspecified era in which aliens try to 'help' us by giving us replicators. First there are attempts to control access to the replicators. But of course, someone manages to replicate the replicator, and it's all out of the bag. Along the way, someone speculates that the aliens were really out to ruin us by destroying our economy, which is based on scarcity. Finally, the 'hero' of the story realizes that by controlling the originals, he can still be rich. Economy of scarcity is maintained, only at the 'manuscript' level.
In Joe Haldeman's "The Forever Peace", the United States invents the NanoForge, essentially a nanotech-based replicator. Then they nuke the lab that the prototype was in, telling the world that the NanoForge exploded, so it's established as *physically dangerous* technology. (It's really not physically dangerous, just politically and economically.) Thereafter, some dozen NanoForges are government-run at high cost, with some public access, because they're just too dangerous any other way. Once again, economy of scarcity is maintained.
This is it. The Internet enables an economy of abundance based on exchange of information. Bits are bits, and from a technological perspective, they can be copied for near-zero cost. But information exchange is not a new business. Prior to Internet and electronic exchange, it was done on dead trees and discs. (First laquer, then vinyl, then CDs.)
The publishing industries arose in order to disseminate information. They made their livlihood doing so, and grew into empires. Ironically, they are now threatened by more efficient means of dissemination, and are fighting for their continued existence by *restricting* those newer means.
From another perspective, there are (at least) two aspects of publication, be it music, movies, or print, editorial and duplication. While the editorial aspect is still necessary and valuable, the duplication is becoming obsolete. Yet in common perception, the editorial value has faded and the duplication dominates. So someone downloads music, and wonders what value the record company contributes.
We were headed toward a world with wide, free spread of information. It had some problems, in that it didn't recognize the editorial value of the current publishing industries. Now, as a result of RIAA and MPAA actions, we are headed toward Joe Haldeman's world, where a potential economy of abundance is being thrown away, in favor of information and access control. I don't like this at all.
But *they* have more money, and more influence in the courts and congress than *we* do. We can fight the good fight it's a sad reflection on "Justice" in the USA that I expect us to get beaten down every step of the way. Rather cynical for a Friday, I know.
The philosophical war began in music and movies, and is moving to the print world. There are signs that it would like to move into software, though we have a good, strong beachhead here. I wonder where else it will try to go.
To be more positive, we first need to recognize the *editorial* value of the publishing industries. The bar for publishing on the web is low, and there are a lot of clunkers out there as a result. We need some way other than a few portals and hit-based Google searches to recognize good content. If we want to take the battle for music and movies to a different front, we need to grow the alternative - free (or at least non-RIAA/MPAA) content. We need to make it known where it is, and how to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Even after the first few battles, most of us don't recognize the breadth of the War. This is a wholesale societal change for the better that we're letting slip out of our grasp.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
OPERATEUR: ecran principal s'allument.
M. LE CAPTAIN: C'est vous!!!
MICHAEL: Comment allez-vous messieurs.
MICHAEL: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
M. LE CAPTAIN: Quoi vous dites!?
MICHAEL: Vous etes dans le chemin à la destruction.
MICHAEL: Vous avez pas du chance pour survivre faites votre temps.
MICHAEL: Ah-hau hau hau hau.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions