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RIAA To Target CD-R
mike skoglund writes: "According to this 8/20 RIAA press release, the RIAA is concerned about CD burners. Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the RIAA, said: "Many in the music community are concerned about the continued use of CD-Rs . . . and we believe this issue deserves further analysis. A preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded. All of this activity continues to show the passion of the consumer for music and the need for both legal protection and legitimate alternatives.'" I enjoy Rosen's claim that "consumer loyalty to the physical product still dominates and we are committed to providing the quality product listeners desire." I wonder if they'll eventually push through a Canadian-style tax on anything that can carry data.
IIRC, the canadian tax is on 'Audio Media' only. I can go into a store, and pick up 'Data' CD-R's without adding the additional fees, but if the CD-R's say 'sudio' on them anywhere, them I'd have to pay the fees.
Really rather stupid.
Is anybody out there now not completely convinced that Hillary Rosen is the antichrist?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Time for me to put my mp3's on punch cards... :)
This is rediculous, but I'm sure they'll eventually get what they want. Are we going to continue to allow these corporations absolute power over non-infringing activities simply because someone, somewhere might break the law?
...and I thought you were innocent until proven guilty...silly me.
----- Leghorn "Not responsible for program content"
They'll be taxing air, which we use to make noises that form phonetics, then words, then sentances, resulting in communication... I'm surprised we've gone this far with free air...
~ now you know
"...this activity continues to show the passion of the consumer for music and the need for both legal protection and legitimate alternatives."
Legitimate alternatives? Like, what - cassettes?
Only outlaws will have burners.
I wonder if they'll eventually push through a Canadian-style tax on anything that can carry data.
... it'll actually save me a ton of money, because I'll have bought my last CD.
If I have to do the time, you can bet your ass I'm going to do the crime. If I have to pay for the assumption that I'm a pirate, then a pirate is what I'll become.
Why do artists continue to sign contracts with these people? Can someone tell me that?
Name me one person you know who is at least moderately computer savvy, has a cd burner and uses a computer as a hobbyist device who has not done something illegal with their cd burner within a week of owning it.
Right. That's partly the reason why we Canadians pay a CD levy tax.
That might be a good idea. Under the right circumstances. If we pay the tax on the CDRs or DVDrs, but are then allowed to copy them amongst ourselves, for instance. That's sort of how ASCAP works (well, for sufficiently large values of "sort of").
Best Slashdot Co
Or however you spell that. Huked on foniks wurked 4 me.
~ now you know
If the volume of full length CD's dropped by 5.3% but the dollar cost of those CD's only dropped by 2.7%, perhaps the reason for the decrease was higher prices for the CD's that were shipped. The extra few percent that was charged was enough to make some CD purchasers not bother. I'm sure mp3's and a recession may have had some effect, also.
Yea, I've downloaded music and burned it to CD in the past month... but not music that's under RIAA control.
Or did she just forget that little bit about there being actual LEGAL uses for this technology? Just because someone downloads music and burns it to CD does not mean that a copyright infringement has just taken place. And it does not mean the RIAA has just been monetarily damaged.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
So -- did the flack who wrote this really expect anyone to conclude from this anything other than, "Yup, we're in a recession..."
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Hmmm...if the DMCA makes it illegal to make anything that can be _used_ for illegal copying, why aren't they arresting people at, say, HP or Phillips?
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
I wouldn't consider it such a quality product if those "Tech Savvy" users were burning it when they downloaded it.
;)
You don't burn something you like.
-- Dan
Mulling a CD-R tax? Nothing new, really.
Other than that, it's just a fnord, like all press releases. Yawn.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The RIAA is looking into a new emerging media known as "hard drives" that are capable of storying massive amounts of copyrighted data.
Last post!
Independant artists who use CD-R to efficiently distribute their music without the help of those majors will have reason to be pissed off if they act on this, but nobody will listen to them, this is only to give more money to Lars and Dr Dre.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
so why doesn't she tell her member companies to STFU and simply advertise them?
sulli
RTFJ.
Good one, someone mod up, please!
~ now you know
LPs increased in unit sales by 7.4 percent in the first half of 2001, representing a $12.9 million dollar value. This number is up 3.3 percent from mid-year 2000.
This means that I can continue ripping LPs with out any heat from the RIAA. They'll never catch me.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
(Of course, we all know what exactly the difference between a Music CDR and Data CDR is).
Are you now, or have you ever before been a downloader?
Better go out and stock up on spindles of 100 (or more if you can find 'em) 80 minute CD-Rs. Might want to pick up a pack of 25 or more 80 minute CD-RWs as well. Might even be able to sell them at a profit (but still below whatever 'tax' Congress levies on them) if the RIAA gets their way.
I'd also better get a new CD-R drive (my current one is flaking out) before the RIAA forces all manufacturers to include copy-protection mechanisms in the devices.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Sure, why not pay a leavy on all data storage devices. Given a hard drive I can carry my stolen MP3 and warez anywhere I want--all i need is an IDE cable to plug into...
Or maybe I could copy it all by faxing it to myself. How about a leavy on fax paper?
::sheesh::
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
I find that I have about 20-30 CDR's and of those only 2 of them are mp3's. And guess what? those mp3's are from CD's I had ripped and were just for backup. Are they going to charge me extra for buying CDR's even when none of them are being used for illegal mp3's?
/b
[Please type your sig here.]
It happened in denmark. Doubled the price of a cd-r.
Then they started talking about taxing memory cards & harddisks.. they are insane.
So every time i burn my favorite linux dist. I pay some nasty musician. Nasty cuz the amount they get is based on their normal sales. So for me the music i really cant stand ( danish pop), gets my money. All by burning a linux dist.
still reading?
I heard yesterday that since Napster was taken down, CD sales are down 4 1/2 %
...from music I've downloaded, I have one thing to say.
:D
Arrrrr, me mateys!
http://pebkac.net
Because of their widespread availability CD's are one of best mediums for archiving personal (non-commercial) data. It would be unfortunate if the RIAA messed with that.
Recently I have been having extreme difficulties accesing the slashdot network. This kind of poor service and lack of commitment to the userbase is unacceptable and unprofessional. If the administrators of Slashdot continue to neglect their service I will be forced to take action with the appropriate autorities. Rob Malda and his associates are smearing VA Linux's good record by their neglect of Slashdot and their refusal to commit to maintaining its services.
Basically I am warning you right now. If you don't make an effort to keep Slashdot running smoothly I will be forced to take legal action against you.
Fine, let them try to take away everyone's CD burner... it's almost time to move to the DVD-R format anyway. =)
I think I'm going to patent air, then lease it out and charge a tax on it cuz these morons are using up some good oxygen when they sit around thinking up these STUPID ideas to try and enforce copyrights.
At the risk of being Redundant:
The great thing about this argument is that you can replace "CD-R" with "electricity" or "computers" or "The Internet" and it still holds just as well.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
One hopes that "the need for both legal protection and legitimate alternatives" will take into account the fact that some users, myself included, don't use CD-Rs to burn "pirated" music or data. There is a never-ending stream of live music that can be downloaded for free, because the performers allow their performances to be taped and traded. Check out etree.org for an example.
Some of us make (gasp!) backups of our data as well.
It's the economy, stupid!
From the RIAA press release:
Full-length CD units dropped 5.3 percent at mid-year 2001, representing a $5.5 billion dollar value within the market, a 2.7 percent decrease in dollar value from mid-year 2000.
With the coming of the bear markets, and now corporate layoffs (unemployment has risen from 4.2% to 4.5%), ssignaling a slowing economy, people have cut back on "luxury" items like CD's.
The RIAA loves convenient scapegoats like Napster and now CD-R's to place the blame for declining slaes, when they do not take into account other factors, such as the economy, the quality of the musical product or factors that cannot be measured, such as personal taste.
blank CDs
I got High...
I was gonna pay my fine to the RIAA...but I got high...
I was gonna download divx movies...but I got high...
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
Let us all hope, pray, and perhaps protest. We, US citizens, can idley watch as we are subjugated any further. The idea that the RIAA might selectively target CD burners because they allow "their" music to be copied is ridiculous. This is just one more example of corporations slipping their tentacles around the now semi-defunct US government. This has gone on long, and far enough. I will not have my rights to enjoy music, or any other art, nor my right to own a CD burner for legitamate purposes revoked. Nor will i watch and allow a tax that has no real benefit but to narrow the control of music to the RIAA further be passed. Not only the idea of having to pay handsomely for music repulsive. But with the RIAA and the government in cahouts (sp) together how far away are we from watching our 1st Amendmant rights be widdled into nothingness and censorship rules. Remember what Locke said: Petition, Protest, Revolution. Perhaps we are on the verge of Revolution....
When taxes such as the American one on blank audio cassettes or CD-Rs in Canada are levied, do the recording industies AlSO have to pay the tax on the raw media (which, if they do I'm sure they pass the cost on to the consumer...)
If they don't tax themselves, by what means are they excempted? Can anyone apply for and receive an exemption as a "music publisher"?
Just curious.
is a bunch of clueless idiots. They could be well on their way to multiplying their revenue and profits manyfold if they would only embrace the opportunities technology has created for them. The vast majority of the population would cheerfully fork over $.25 a song for stuff they wanted to download, because:
a: most people don't really feel good about stealing stuff, and
b: most people wish for better quality recordings than you usually get via Napster or Gnutella (or whatever).
It would cost the music industry less to deliver the music this way and, I firmly believe, people would buy lots more dollars worth of music. It's pretty easy to pass up a new CD for $15 that may only have four songs you like on it, but if you can cherry pick your favorites 4-for-a-dollar, how can you say no?
At least that's what I think.
I hardly listen to non-burned cds. and I'd say 99% of all my burned cds are 100% legal. all the music I download is 100% legal.
check out etree.org, and join the thousounds legally trading music.
RIAA has announced that remembering Top 40 music (neuro audio encoding) has been expressly forbidden under the DMCA.
Wistling or singing such songs will result in a fine or possible jail time.
Interesting story
It makes me wonder how much longer technology like this will be legal. Of course, it's not as if we haven't wondered before (The link I have was to banjo, sorry folks).
1) People who dont own a computer.
2)People who don't know what an mp3 is.
3)People who don't own a burner.
4)People who do not use the internet.
You are left with a *very* small percentage of people burning cd's compared to the countless droves of consumers who purchase cd's without knowing that it's all free
if they say 'sudio', does this mean they are subject to the "Genesis Tax" (AKA, the "Phil Collins Tax")?
Yet they want to tax every cd-r I buy?
They are so self-centered they think everything is about music. I wish they stop making any music so that their "rights" could not be violated.
Outlaw music!
RIAA, tax rambus memory... it's so much better for multimedia handling than anything else on the planet, so it's the base of MP3 compression, file sharing, ram on home computers that plays those illegal song, run the software that burns CDs, it's the NextBigThing(tm) and they claim market domination in months from now, so you should look seriously on this threath, and stop it before it gets out of hands!
:) I promise! :)
Plus, you'll get our support
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I have yet to burn an illegal CD. I've space shifted (pulled together some 80's compilations) and have taken stuff from work to home (big source packages) and burned some Linux distributions. I've also backed up media so that the originals can be stored in some offsite place, but I still have the disks to do installs at work.
Now, you can argue whether or not I am 'moderately technically savvy' or not. But, I use Free software, work pays for the non-Free stuff, and if I want a CD/DVD, I either buy it, or wait.
FWIW, I don't mind paying a tax. But if I pay the tax, that means I can do all of the things I've not done yet (ie: download and burn any song I want from any RIAA artist).
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The money collected from it is supposed to be distributed to content producers to offset the business lost to copying, but the bar to entry as a producer is very high. As a small producer, not only do I have to pay the damned tax on the blank media I buy (and then pass that cost along to my customers), but I can't get my share of the gravy, either.
If the US creates such a tax and sets the bar high enough, then only the "big guys" will be able to pass over it and everyone else has to pass along an extra cost to the consumer, to the great benefit of the big guys. Talk about predatory practices!
-Eldurbarn
Too late Hilary.
Consumers have a taste for this and they like it. There's no way they're going to let you take it away from them now.
Basically the RIAA doesn't get it. They're running scared since there role as distributors is under threat.
Once artists realise that labels are just glorified Ad men, the power will start to shift to Web-based opinion makers. Or maybe not the Web, but whatever consensual networked reality (be it networked PDAs or whatever) that all the 21'st century kids are going to be plugged into.
It's simple. We don't want to be exploited any more. We're not buying your ripoff collections that surround a song we like with absolute drek.
We're buying only the songs we want, when we want and how we want. We will NEVER pay for the same song twice ever again, so you can stick those "Greatest Hits" and "Best of" collections where the sun doesn't shine.
Once we've bought a song, we'll play it wherever, whenever and however we like. We'll mix it, we'll scratch it, we'll sample it, we'll screw with it in any way shape or form we desire. We'll burn it onto cd, flash it into our MP3 player or mobile phone.
We'll share the music we like with our friends like our parents used to do with tapes. When we like an artist, we'll support them. We'll buy their music because we want them to make more.
And you sweetie?
We'll you're just surplus to requirements.
In the digital world you have no purpose. You're a relic from a bygone age. A robber-baron who's built her castle by ripping off the labours of a million artists.
Frankly scrag, you can fuck right off. You're simply not welcome here.
What percent of CD-R are burnt with data or other non-music content;
What percent of CD-R are burnt with music content owned by the burnt disk owner? AKA "Fair Use" transcribing media.
I have a feeling the RIAA is just trying to kill fair use. Why am I not surprised? Anything for a $.
What I want to know is, since I believe most of the "data" being burned on CD-Rs is actually a subset of my data, how do I get my cut of any new tax?
Milo
...when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Hey, what's the problem?
.mp3's on our web-pages for anonymous downloads. We also offer to sell CDs of these .mp3s -- at $15 a shot.
.mp3s (and discard most of 'em). And we all make sure we get our pound of flesh from the RIAA's tax. Easy as pie.
We all record large amounts of REALLY BAD music, and post the
We then download each other's
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
I wonder how many music professionals got into the whole "Napster craze"? And how big is Rosen's MP3 collection?
Bow before my sig, for it is good.
I live in Canada and have been paying this tax for over a year now. Since I pay this tax, I feel completely justified in downloading and burning any music that I come across. If I pay a tax, I expect to benefit from it somehow.
The change to slash 2.2 didn't fix Timmys' problem with open italic tags. His tags and Tacos spelling. What would slashdot be without 'em?
Best Slashdot Co
Most of the music CDs I burn (over 90%) are not owned by the RIAA and some are not even bound by copyright laws which prohibit copying.
What are they gonna do? Come to my house and take away my CD burner and my vast collection of Russian rock?
------
Sig
We use CD-Rs for short-term backups. Let's see...one per weekday on 3 machines=15 per week,
60 per month, over 700 per year! If they put, say, a $.20 surcharge on CD-Rs, we'd be giving the RIAA about $140 a year. That's not that much, granted, but $140 * (large number of people) turns into pretty good income.
Just look at the numbers... as online music trading increased in popularity, CD sales only increased a measly 115%! Clearly, with trends like this, the end will come soon. Don't the naive music industry startups realize that to stay in business you have to have more money coming in than they spend? "Making it up on volume" is just a quick road to the poorhouse.
Well, actually, it's some stupid minister who decided a tax on CD-Rs was needed. It was absolutely moronic: as was pointed out, now, buying CD-Rs (no matter what for -- some companies that backup data on CDs yelled a LOT) brings money mostly to music corps that don't exactly need it, and doesn't really help small labels that DO need a hand.
Bottom line: people bought massive amounts of CD-Rs just before the law became effective, so the prices went down, which vaguely made up for the tax.
But still. Did you notice that trend where big corps live by taking small amounts of money from you regularly, no matter if you buy something new from them or not? Am I the only one who thinks it is a dangerous road for an economy to tread?
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
I also use my burner to create CDs, for family & friends, that contain the digital photos I've taken over the course of the past year. I set up the photos to be shown using a web browser. This way viewing the photos is platform independent.
preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded
I got a thought on this, how many people in the survey actually told the truth. If you do an illegal action, do you tell the truth about it Hell no. So personally I got the funniest feeling that these numbers are not that accurate. And another point that puts this into a shady spot is that it's an online survey. So basically if you see it, you can vote. To me this leaves for a rather selective group of people to be getting statistics from. So personally, I say it's just the RIAA twisting things to suite there needs again.
My 2 cents plus 2 more
...perpetrated by the CD-R manufacturers, hoping for a run on current blanks as Slashdotters world-wide "stock up" on the as-yet untaxed media.
Admit it, you were thinking of buying an extra spindle or three, weren't you?
The MPAA proposing a tax on VHS cassettes?
Publishers demanding taxes on copier paper from Office Depot?
The BSA wanting to tax hard drives?
The Canadian tax is actually a good thing. It recognizes that people use CD-R's to copy CD's, and makes that legal. You pay the tax, suddenly you're allowed to make copies
Of course, I'm sure that's not what the RIAA wants. But it might be a good alternative to advocate. It's also used in many European countries.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Unless you're being paid a butt-ton of money for your time, don't answer the surveys. If you are being paid for your time, then provide untruthful answers.
Now I am not naive, and I use them to burn audio CDs too. But I am not a big downloader of MP3s, I have a large CD collection, as does my fiancee. It is legal (and rightfully so) for me to burn a copy of a CD I bought for use in my car.
*If* someone were using CDRs to burn illegal copies of CDs and selling them, the only thing taxing CDRs would do is shrink their profit a little. Unless the goal is to make CDRs unaffordable for the average person, which would be really really bad.
Michael
M$ = Monopoly? Check out "Micropoly" at Pounding Sand Tshirts.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Jimi Hendrix is now a "quality product." So is Mozart, Zeppelin, NiN, Bill Hicks, Tool and every other artist happen you like. They're not musicians, they're not artists, they're "products." They make consumables.
These people drive me absolutely batshit. It's the skewed perspective that gets me. Fuck the art, they say, we just want to make money. Well, guess what: it ain't all about the money. When you focus on the money you lose site of important things like spiritual enlightenment and spiritual growth. Call me a vapid liberal, but I think those things are pretty important in life. If I have to choose between making a buck and becoming a wiser person, I'll choose wisdom every time, thanks.
I was wondering how they would explain the drop in revenue after they killed napster.
CD-R,...YEAH....Yeah... That's it. The new boogy man. (excuse the pun.)8^)
DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
Y'know, my initial reaction on reading this was to wonder which music community Hilary's talking about. Considering that Napster was easily the largest single media outlet ever for the few months that it existed, with a simultaneous active user base that even dwarfed the height of broadcast TV, it's pretty clear that the music community[1] and in fact the nation as a whole is in favor of mp3 trading. You can make mp3 trading illegal now, but it's obvious to anyone who isn't blind [2] that when the current crop of college kids are finally running things, mp3s are going to be free for the taking. Whether you like it or not (and I'm not sure that I do), it's only a matter of time.
[1] Yes, I know she meant the "music creation" community, or even more precisely the "music distribution, marketing, and bureaucracy community", but you get my point.
[2] Thanks to retiring Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) for this wonderful saying. Try to imagine me saying it in a soft North Carolina drawl. AFAIK this is his only positive contribution to human civilization, but I guess you have to start somewhere :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I haven't bought a CD in four years! take that!
Of course that might have something to do with me being old, and consequently, boring. Or it might have something to do with all their "product" being pap (N'Sync, Brittney Spear, etc, etc, ad nauseum).
If I am going to pay a 'tax' to the RIAA, because it is assumed that I am copying music music, (and this is in fact the justification for the 'tax') then is copying (pirating) music something I can still be sued for? I'm paying for the privlage to act in this fashion, so how could I then be sued for it?
Granted if the RIAA suddenly has this new revenue stream, then a reasonable observer might comment that they'll stop threatening to destroy people who copy music, but given their past history, who really thinks they'll actually refrain from attempting to sue people for this?
The RIAA would do well to consider the potential impact of attempting to tack a surcharge onto recordable media, because the mechanism they use to justify the surcharge will simply be used to define what rights they are granting the customer who pays the surcharge. Essentially a good defense atourney could argue that payment of the surcharge is de-facto entry into a contract with the RIAA, in which the customer is paying for the privlage of recording music.
-- CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
"Many in the music community are concerned about the continued use of CD-Rs (compact disc recordables) and we believe this issue deserves further analysis."
Translates into:
"We are looking for a way to convince the US (and other governments) to make the manufacturers of CD-burners pony up a percentage per each unit sold and give us lotsa $."
This is also a pretty crummy way for the RIAA to line it's pockets from people (and Indy labels) who write and record their own music in home studios.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
I burn CD's for backup. I've yet to burn one for music. Yet I get taxed by the recording industry because of what I might do.
Like the old joke, where a man goes out fishing, then comes back. His wife takes his boat out, for a quiet read. The fish police come up and accuse her of fishing without a license. "I'm not fishing, I'm reading!" she says. The cop says yes but I can see you've got all the equiment in your boat. She turns around and accuses the cop of rape. After all he has all the equipment!
I don't think any rational person can argue that they deserve to be robbed and don't deserve to protect themselves, but damn. Their methods just seem so sleazy.
Lets look into the future. We have an image of the year 2003:
If you are contemplating releasing a product, you must first check with the patent offices (very minor, they let everything through), then to the RIAA and government to determine if it affects the music industry in any possible way. If it does, then you can't release it and all doc on it is incinerated. The RIAA also goes into research facility to determine if any scientist is using "Sound waves on the "air" medium (they patented that on Dec.14, 2002)", and any violators are sued, raped, then incinerated.
Anyone have a link to the "The Onion" article about Kid Rock starving to death because of MP3's? That'd really fit in....
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I have no real interest in copying CDs; it's far and away the most practical way to back up my data.
Last time I checked, sites like Liquid Audio came with software that would let you take your downloaded music (in "proprietary, protected" format), and burn it to a CD-R ONCE.
If they tax the CD-R's, people would be paying TWICE for music.
If they DO tax CD's, does that mean I can copy anything and give it to anyone? After all, I paid for the music when I bought the CD....
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
I download free and legal music off the net by bands that don't think their CDs should cost $17 a piece. In fact most of them reallize that I can burn a CD for about $.30. Now you, some stupid record exec, trying to sell me crappy over-hyped music, have the balls to tell me I'm doing something illegal because your profit margins are down? Fuck you! Tell me you think I'm a thief to my face, motherfucker. I'd beat you within an inch of your life. Your high tower is falling and its my fault, so don't drag me down with you and your poor management. Real economics relies on supply and demand, and guess what? With this internet you have infinite supply, and your demand is dropping because you refuse to admit it. Sorry your monopoly on audio content had to be smashed by a free alternative, the internet and people who care.
During the whole Napster debate (back before Napster had filters), many journalists pointed out that judges often sided with improvements in technology in cases of copyrights and unauthroized reproduction.
When the audio tape recorders were introduced, the RIAA cried foul as it gave people the ability to make their own copies of music. Ruling was based on fair use.
VHS Recorders same deal. Hollywood and television threw a hissy fit and said it gave people the ability to copy shows and movies without authorization. Judgement was based on the fair use laws from the audio tape incident.
There were a few other examples (like the Xerox copy machine), but these were the most relevant.
CD burners have been available for the home market for quite some time now, all the previous cases came out just as the technology was brand new before a significant number of people had access to them. I think the same fair use law will come into play because it takes a significant amount of physical time and effort to duplicate a CD (whether data or music) or assemble a custom CD.
In addition, some members of RIAA are also in the business of building and selling CD-RWs. Sony is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are others. I just know my burner is made by Sony.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
One at work, that I have sole control over (along with a 100 Mbps net connect), my personal burner at home, and my parents one.
This article is just plain stupid. Double the price of a cd-r just for people using them to burn mp3's and whatnot? might as well double the price of condoms because of people using them to smuggle cocane.
what a crock.
If voting could really change things, it would be illegal.
Heck, I've downloaded tracks from great bands that many of my friends haven't heard about off of mp3.com. I rarely actually break any copyrigth laws in doing so, but often burn these mp3 tracks to CD.
The mp3's AREN'T CD quality, so anybody saying that these copies are first generation certainly doesn't understand the term "lossy compression."
Through this practice, I have learned about a good number of bands, and gotten tracks from bands that play in smaller venues, whose CD's are hard to find. Although I rarely purchase music (you would be rare to buy a CD too if you were in college and didn't want to break mommy and daddy's bank), most of these bands are usually at the top of my christmas list, and many of my more affluent friends often pick up a copy of a cd by a band I introed them to in this fashion.
Perhaps its that the recording industry can't tell us what to listen to if we can choose it for ourselves. I had to listen to Emenem all the way to New York last summer until I decided to get a CD adapter for my car. SOMEBODY had to pay those stations to get that damned real slim shady song played so many times that it was stuck in my head (especially since I mainly listen to punk music).
It would be wise for the music industry to realize that the only way to make a first generation copy of the CD is to share the ISO of it, which is essentially the same as making copies of tapes.
Perhaps they should attach copyright offenders rather than innovators. The last thing that I want my computer to become is just another distribution medium for media fat cats. For goodness sake, perhaps if there were no Internet, people would still realize that computers are computers, and not televisons or radios. I'm absolutely sick of people trying to cut into my computing so they can get their cut.
What the hell will the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center do when they have to double the number of harddrives in their raid systems in order to make up for the slowdown from mandatory copyright protection schemes? After they've illegalized CD and DVD burning, is everyone going to get a removable hard drive and then they'll illegalize writeable media altogether? Where will this foolishness stop?
So sales went down 4.4%. Could it possibly be because the economy is weaker today than it was a year ago?
Additionally, I have no idea to whom the RIAA is going to make their case, but fascists really need to look at their argument. We live in a country (at least most of us) where people need to be convicted of their actions individually. Claiming that computer users commit piracy and therefore should be punished is no different than the atrocities of racial profiling.
When the morons at Gateway are advertising the fact that you CAN illegally copy music with any new PC that you purchase.
The RIAA lobbied for a blank tape tax on all DAT formats. Instead, they managed to talk congress in to SEDAT copy protection that killed the RDAT audio format.
I'm not optimistic that they won't have similar luck at this with CD-R's.
Face it...we're guilty and have paid our fine. Now, copy all the music you want.
on CD-Rs/CD-RWs, diskettes, harddrives, paper, cloth, vellum, sheepskins, ....Hell, anything that you can write on or to! I don't want to have to pay a tax on the sheepskin seat covers I want for my car just because some fool can scribble a copyrighted (or maybe that should be copywronged as I don't think the RIAA is in the right on this) song on them.
Why should we have to pay a tax on media for something we may or may not do with it? That's like saying that guys who date have to pay a childcare tax because they may or may not get someone pregnant.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Timothy you bloddy idiot, what do you call the tax we in the states have now on video tapes, dat tapes, blank CD's etc? IIRC this "tax" goes to the various recording industry folks to be dispersed to the artists who are supposedly being pirated already.
I burned my mouth on hot coffee. I'm going to sue McDonald's!
A gang banger shot me after I stole his crack. I'm going to sue the cigarette manufacturers!
Bah.
-All your base are belong to the man.
Just don't expect me to have to pay you for downloading music and burning them onto CD then.
Anyone know how much to hire a decent mercenary to 'take care' of the problem ;)
Seriously though, this sh*t is getting out of hand. The RIAA wont stop until they start pissing off the average Joe & Jane Crackhead and by that time it'll be too late.
http://www.angryburrito.com/ The best, completely unfinished software review site ever.
uhh, shouldn't you be practicing what you preach?
or is this the only way you can drive traffic to your site???
I think they're a little late. They might as well put pressure on those audio cassette manufacturers and those piano roll makers and don't forget those pesky blank wax drum merchants, ooh I know, lets charge anyone with ears a user fee if they happen to listen to ANYTHING!!!
If anyone was actually losing money, I'd care.
--BUT THEY'RE NOT--
*throws hands up in the air, stomps out of universe*
crazy dynamite monkey
What if CD's came with 12 or 15 GOOD tracks, instead of the usual 1-3 good songs? I dont know how many times I've bought a CD and only like 1 or 2 songs, what a waist of disk space. Very rare is it for a entire CD to be good. Slightly offended
The tax we have here (aside from various compound sales taxes) is only on the CDR media specifically for audio. (read: the kind that works with those near-useless standalone CD copying whizmos).
I often make digital recordings of my friends' horrible bands, and my own decidedly mediocre tunage. These are burnt onto vanilla CDR's. People like to pass these recordings around. People need copies. I don't have the time to make all of these copies.
If someone who owned a stand-alone CD copying device wanted to make a copy of his own CD (of his own band!), he would be paying a tax designed to protect musicians from illegal copying. The technical term for this sort of obtuseness is, I believe, "Bullshit."
There is no tax on the vanilla CDRs because those have business uses. Don't stand in the way of progress.
Many in the music community are concerned about the continued use of CD-Rs
:)
Hmmm...they sure make it sound like the artists are concerned. But the music community also includes the coporate interests as well. I'd being willing to bet a few karma points that their definition of "many" is actually the people in their offices and the recording companies' offices as well.
Remember kids, only believe half of what you read, and always look for the between the lines stuff.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
First of all, know that this comes from someone who has never downloaded an MP3. I also must add that I believe that making copies and giving them away is wrong, but that is a long story that can't fit here. Either way, when I buy music, it is MINE to do with as a please. If I want to make a million copies than that is my right. I obviously can't pass them around or sell them, but I am talking about for me. So, how am I protected ms Rosen?
As they fail to mention, for every music quality blank cdr that is purchased, they recieve compensation. That is why "music" CDR's cost alot more than ones specified for data; this fee is also placed on blank cassette tapes.
And they still complain??!!
...by this logic, ALL digital storage devices should have a tax levied for "Possible Copyright Infringement". This is absolutely ridiculous. It's like taxing automobiles for "Possible Traffic Hazards".
I can buy a Firewire hard drive and lug all the mp3s I and anyone else I know owns around with me. I can back that hard drive up to tape, CD, optical disk, what have you. Should all these things be taxes because *I'm* an asshole?
Sorry just a little pissed. This has to stop somewhere.
El riesgo vive siempre!
.... with cassette tapes during the late '70s and early '80s and with video tapes, too. In the end a small tax was levied, they collected their money and people still recorded music and video.
Let's face it, people are going to do a small amount of copying for their own personal use. You do it, I do it - I'll bet even the children of the RIAA demons do it. The RIAA is sweating the small stuff.
The greatest threat of piracy comes from people that will copy in huge volumns for sale on the black market. A lot of this will happen overseas, where RIAA has the least influence.
If they want to sweat the small stuff, I say fine. It hasn't gotten them anywhere in the past - and it won't get them anywhere in the future.
Phillips, Sony and others have invested far too much money in CD-R technology and make far too much off of it to roll over dead for the RIAA.
I've said it once and I'll say it again. The business model where by music makes large amounts of money is dying. In it's place, artists (those backed by record companies) will make money from personal appearances and product endorsements, just like professional sports figures do. Sports figures may make a few million a year, but they pull in much more from product endorsements. That's where the money is and that's where the industry will finally go. The true value in a recording contract for an artist will lie not in the sale of music, but in the sale of his/her image.
We at the RIAA have done studies stating that 90% of the human population at one point or another in their lives has heard music that they have not properly paid us for. Therefore, we are having our whipping dogs in Congress pass a law whereby we will tax every birth in the US $20,000, that will cover our lost revenue for the lifetime of the customer.
Anybody caught commiting birth piracy will be terminated by our lawyers.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Still, buy a few good lawyers, a couple of politicians and call it viral, I'm sure they forces of RIAA goodness will come through in the end.
If we are required to buy everything that the RIAA, MPAA, and every other misc. content producer makes, then they don't have to worry about piracy. They can just crank out Scream 114, and not have to worry if some 1337 k1dd13 is ripping it, cause they already made the money from the sale. They also don't have to worry about whether it is crap or not, so hey... twice the reason to party.
This may sound completely Orwellian, but is it any more rediculous than the current DMCA or WIPO?
Bow before my sig, for it is good.
CDR's are already taxed.
I have a problem with a levy tax because it presumes that I am currently or will break the law. Since I do not purchase much music, why the hell I should reimburse the RIAA for money they wouldn't have gotten from me anyway? They aren't entitled to a dime from me. If their business model relies on laws that are impossible to enforce, that's just too bad for them. They aren't entitled to make money and I am not, and should not be, obligated to pay them for goods or services I do not use.
Now they smell the legal bait...they're gonna go for it all! Sheesh!!
Galego
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
After all, their sales are going to drop.
It'll happen, eventually.
What's this Submit thingy do?
If I were American I would definitely take the Canadian blank media levy as a bad sign. Here in Canada we do not yet have DMCA style copyright laws, yet we were able to get a CD-R tax. The tax is, basically, fifteen cents per disk (roughly an american dime).
If such a law were passed in the US I would expect it to be several times larger, probably a dollar or more per disk. This is certainly something to worry about.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
If I am going to pay a 'tax' to the RIAA, because it is assumed that I am copying music music, (and this is in fact the justification for the 'tax') then is copying (pirating) music something I can still be sued for? I'm paying for the privlage to act in this fashion, so how could I then be sued for it?
Not quite. Paying for health insurance doesn't give you the right to commit insurance fraud to get your piece of the pie back. The tax on cd-rs would not be for the priviledge of copying music, it is to cover the cost of revenue supposedly lost due to people copying music. Fair? No. Legal? Could be.
1. Might as well tax mouses and keyboards because they allow users to input their desire to burn CD's, whether the burning is illegal or not.
2. Tax the monitors because they allow you to actually use the computer which allows you to burn a CD and see what it is doing, whether or not you actually know how to do it.
3. Add a tax to mail packages that "could" possibily hold blank CD's (say you purchased them from Amazon or a friend).
4. Tax radios and TV's since they allow you to hear and like the songs you might possibily burn to CD.
5. Tax magazines such as Rolling Stone that have reviews of music, sometimes helping you decide if you should buy the music or download it, which eventually could end up being burned to CD.
6. Tax paper, since it could be made into jewel case inserts for these burned CD's...
Anything else I missed?
I don't see how paying a royalty tax per CD blank could be justified since many CDRs are used for completely legitimate purposes. I personally, would complain bitterly about having to pay a tax on 1000 CDRs when I hold the copyright to the content.
P.S. It's not a 1000 copies of the same content, it's 1000 unique pieces of content. I'm not that stupid.
Well, if they tax CD-Rs, then via an extension of the DMCA anyone who pays their taxes is guilty of possession or supporting hacking tools, and until proven innocent, electricity can be shut off to their home until they prove their CD-R is only for data backups by burning a backup cd and mailing it to the RIAA, IRS, and MPAA.
When will the madness stop?
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
There's still a RIAA?
$5 bet that the MPAA goes right after the new HP DVD burner, and the statment that they are doing so gets posted here!!!
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
I wonder if they'll eventually push through a Canadian-style tax on anything that can carry data.
Ever heard of the DAT Tax? In 1992, the US Congress passed a law taxing media for use in digital recorders.
The Audio Home Recording act of 1992 mandated that consumers pay a royalty on each tape sold for DAT drives.
This contributed to the death of a market for the promising technology. And assumed that everyone who owns such technology would use it for theft. I have not made any illegal copies of music or software using the CD recorder that I own. This sort of levy assumes that I will, and I don't care for that.
I remember waiting for DAT technology to catch on for music - and waiting, and waiting, and waiting.....
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Full-length CD units dropped 5.3 percent at mid-year 2001, representing a $5.5 billion dollar value
LPs increased in unit sales by 7.4 percent in the first half of 2001, representing a $12.9 million dollar value
If current trends continue, June 2050 will mark when vinyl will once again be the preferred format.
You know, if computers didn't come with sound cards, I wouldn't be half as tempted to download music and burn it. Maybe we should outlaw sound cards. And who without a computer would download music? let's get rid of those. What about the internet? well, we will take care of that in good time.
There is an old precedent that if a product has both legal uses and illegal uses, it should still be allowed becase the legal uses must be preserved. You can use CD-Rs and CD-RWs for more than pirating music and games, etc.
They need to move to Turkey or Afganistan if they want to control the people like that. Oh wait, those countries wouldn't have them either. They exist because America is Free. And they want to make it less free, but not for them, just for everyone else.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
the CDR manufacturers will tax CDRW's because of the loss in profits due to the widespread use of reusable recording media.
The listening public has finally gotten the chance to try before they buy and they can now buy what they know they want. I wouldn't be surprised if the drop in sales of cds was due to all the people who figured out that they don't really want that Butthole Surfers cd afterall.
And doesn't that make the world a better place?
If I were the RIAA, I would be more worried about John Vanderslice and other rogue band leaders who give cd sales the finger.
Why not tax or outlaw VHS tapes, audio cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes, 8-tracks, records, mini-disks, hard drives, and any other possible storage media that exists (including pencil and paper) while they are at it?
BTW What happens if I hum or sing a tune that some RIAA artist made? Am I in violation? Will I have to be brain-washed and tossed in jail?
Heres a dumb idea, Record _decent_ music at very high quality say 88KHz 24bit 4-Channel surround sound. Put it, (with no lossy compression, stupid copy protection or annoying no-fast forward devices etc.) onto a big disk (those 50gb multilayer things that are in experimental stage). Do something similar with Movies and music videos etc. Sell at a reasonable price (the standard formula is ([Production Cost] / [Expected No. Of Sales]) + Reasonable profit. Don't piss off your valuable customers by imposing taxes/monopolies/artificial pricing.
I'd rather by a decent high-quality sound than wait for an mp3 to download...
At the moment i buy my linux distro so i don't have to download several cds. If my connection gets faster, i might download instead. If connections get faster, the recording industry should pack more higher quality data onto their media to persuade me to keep on buying...
-tfga
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Check my math, but this means that at ~$12.69* per "unit" they sold more units (and made more money) than they have by charging ~$13.96** per unit.
Imagine that. Charge more per unit, and you sell fewer units.
* $6,200,000,000/488,700,000 units ~ $12.6867/unit
** $5,900,000,000/442,700,000 units ~ $13.9578/unit
When you need music for something, it's easy to find some techno tracks from a band nobody ever heard of, and pay them $100 or so for the right to use it in your own stuff. ("And where would you like the cases of beer delivered?")
Okay, so because *gasp* people are burning MP3's onto CD-R's, it means that they should outlaw them?
Heck! While there at it, lets outlaw hard drives... After all, 99% of people download MP3's onto hard drives at some point! And hey! Lets kill Zip and Jaz disks too (well, iomega is already doing a good job of that themselves)... And RAM. Gotta get rid of ram because what if an MP3 gets cached in RAM?! Floppies... Gotta destroy them too. Granted, it would take a few floppies per song, but you could do it!
Sorry for the rant, but this just infuriates me.
If the RIAA didnt charge $20.00 for a CD that costs $0.05 to make, then maybe they wouldnt be having this problem.
I think I did something illegal with my CD-R within a week of purchasing it. No, wait, I was thinking of my horse. My mistake.
It's arbitrary to tax data backup media. Why don't they just make a pact with the US Treasury? Every year the music publishers could produce data showing how much the citizenry is listening to their music and send a bill to the US Government.
Hell, why not just nationalize the whole music publishing industry. The US Congress could budget some money for the artists. The Congress would distribute the funds based on their musical tastes. Now that would spark people's interest in politics!
Marko
Good thing they cant do anything about Audio->Audio transfers. Really tho, its kind of like they want to make life miserable for everybody, but they dont realize that their hands are so big that users just slip thru their fingers. It would be like Bill Gates saying that nobody pirates Windows (he stresses the problem in China, it was only an example)
none
is Microsoft Windows. Windows is an enabling technology which allows ordinary people to become music pirates. MS has deep pockets to sue too. I think it's about time the RIAA targets MS for complicity in facilitating ordinary people with the means to commit music piracy.
This would end up being good for everyone (except the RIAA, but who really cares). Distribution channels would pop up all over the place, giving more choice to artists and consumers. We'd have the ability to not feel like criminals when we burn a CD.
The only thing I'd rather see, is congress revoke all of the RIAA's copyrights because they've been using them to stifle innovation and competition.
***DISCLAIMER***first off DON'T take this as flamebait because it's not, it's a collection of observations that fit the subject matter. so no flames please.
now that's done with on with my post.
living in canada i have the joy of being a third party witness to the shinnanegans of the riaa and the mpaa without it affecting me THAT much, it still does tho. some of these court cases the riaa is doing would not happen up here, they would be tossed out.
i know americans make fun of canada but we have court systems and governments that work for the people and not the corpate intrests. i do believe the american constitution reads "for the people, by the people" something i think a lot of americans don't realize is the government should help THEM and not a corperation that gives them a nice infusion of cash.
yes there are sometimes that politicians in canada are swayed by the corprate world but that's few and far between and usually they are found out and get REALLY bad press and something does happen to them when they are found out.
a canadian judge would look into the matter and see if a group like the riaa is really after groups for their own good, such as reputation or copyright/trademark infringement, or if they are after them just for the money. if it's just for the money the canadian courts have a good habit of either tossing the case out, rewarding in the favor of the plantiff but for some trivial amount but making them pay court fees or finding for the defendant and making the plantiff pay for the court fees, yes in canada you have to pay court fees so it can get fairly costly.
now with this story if a canadian company or mexican one for that matter made either cdr's or burners they could go after the riaa under the terms of nafta. it's a nasty piece of legislature but it does have some good usages and screwing the riaa over is a good one. i do believe it would be loss of business or not allowing them to carry on normal business, i don't know nafta off by heart so i can't quote it exactly but it's in there.
now as much as the wto sucks this is something that companies can at least try and put a stop to is the bully mentality of the riaa and the mpaa. both nafta and the wto stuff are VERY powerful pieces of legislature and some companies should learn to use them to their advantage.
I haven't seen something this silly since my dog got stuck in the cat door.
"Many in the music community are concerned..."
Well, it's a bit late for that. CD-Rs are so incredibly cheap, pervasive, and useful that there's no way people will surrender them. Since you can burn WAY more than just copyrighted material, they don't even have a legal leg to stand on if they want to impose a "tax".Not only are the horses gone, but the barn door has been ripped off of its' hinges and burned. They should have been worried about this five years ago.
This
The RIAA's statistics are questionable. "Preliminary" survey? By what company?
Who did they survey? "tech savvy online music enthusiasts" is a pretty limited statement - they're not talking about the average kid with a CD-R on his new Compaq. Are they talking about music enthusiasts who happen to be online? Doubtful. They'd get better results by surveying enthusiasts of music that is online.
Sure, one out of two customers (more like one out of every 50 true customers - they left out the word "surveyed" customers in hopes that the media would quote just that part, leaving out the details of who was surveyed) may have downloaded music within the past month, but the RIAA pulls a bait-and-switch here: "and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded". What - 70% of the music they downloaded in the past month? Doubtful.
I'll wait until an independent company runs a clean poll before I give the RIAA any credit. This is, after all, the same company that tricked the AP into reporting that "CD sales" were down by 5% (neglecting to mention that they were CD single sales).
On the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, there is a HUGE billboard showing a Mac and the slogan: "RIP. MIX. BURN!" So why doesn't the RIAA tackle the computers themselves too?
Sure, I download digital music. It keeps me from buying a CD that's as useful as a coaster.
If I like the sample that I've downloaded, I go to the store and buy the CD. At this point in time, downloaded music just doesn't have the quality that digital CD music does.
The place where my burner comes in handy, is ripping the music so that I can burn CDs that have multiple artists on on one CD so that I don't have to switch CDs every 2 or 3 songs while driving.
One of their best articles
http://www.theonion.com/onion3618/kid_rock_starves .html
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Remember the Apple commerical promoting their new CD burner with all the artists (George Clinton, Smash Mouth, Liz Phair,) - and about 30 others on a stage, and they guy was saying he wanted to burn each of their tracks to a CD for a mix...
And George said "It's your music - burn it" - you mean they lied????? I can't create a mix tape of my own stuff that I bought cause it's stealing???? (they afraid I'm sucking profits from NOW compilations? They pissed cause I burned my own copy of the Beatles "1" from the entire catalog I already own?)
Of course, I'm not endorsing the stealing of MP3's, but fer crying out loud...can't a guy make a mix CD of his stuff without the RIAA trying to bitch about that too...? They did this with Consumer Audio CD's (basically stand alone CD burners) and got the media price kicked way up to 4-5 bucks a disk because of taxes and fees...only reason they haven't gotten this far is because users aren't computer savvy enough to put mp3 to computer disk, but they're getting there.
Time to stockpile, kiddies...snag a few hundred and hit the black market when they're illegal.
RB
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
Kids in school will be forced to watch the "Napster Madness" educational film.
Something similar was already argued, insofar as whether or not the Betamax VCR was a tool for copyright infringement and should be removed from consumer use. http://www.virtualrecordings.com/betamax.htm The ruling of the case was that, more or less, Sony was in the realms of 'Fair Use' and, since it can be used for things besides copyright infringement, cannot be blocked. MPAA lost that one. Time for RIAA to lose this new one. Bring it to the courts. I want to see another decision like this just to shut them up.
Screwing CDRs is not the answer. Neither is banning p2p software. The RIAA has a completely reasonable reason to be pissed. People are stealing their product. However, all of these content control protections only hurt the customer.
Rather than punishing methods of pirating that have other uses, the pirates need to be fined. Jail time probably isn't appropriate, but if they could make a hefty, enforceable fine for the illegal possession of songs / music, that would stop piracy immediatly.
Image if uploading illegal content to someone was illegal. The RIAA would just need to track down individual users, and send them a bill. Naturally some manner of regulation would be necessary to make sure they don't have an guilty before innocent situation. However, they do the have the right to be pissed about this. People are stealing stuff from them.
This solution doens't penalize those of us who use burners, mp3 players, decss, napster, etc. but does burn those who are actually doing something illegal. Yes, I know a lot of people are going to play the information wants to be free as in beer argument, but the fact remains that stealing music and burning it is illegal, and noone is going to stop doing it unless they can get caught.
Captain_Frisk
These laws and corporations are getting more and more screwed up. However, I would say that if they start charging "copying tax" for CD-R media then it would legitamize the act of downloading any song you want at will and burning them to a CD-R because you already paid for the act of doing burning the music when you bought the CD-R.
That would be a very small, even complimentary, exploitation next to what their parents do. You don't think those folks take their work home with them and listen to all that awful junk they push all day, do you?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Well, let's put a stop to that. People are passionate about music!
More of this legal maneuvering will only take away the passion that people have for *buying* music, not for the music itself (hopefully). And you know what, that is probably not that bad of a thing if these are the types of people we buy the music from. I prefer to have a nice new manufactured CD of music I like rather than a burned copy, but these people make a nice case for civil disobedience with regard to music purchase.
Oh well. I'm moving to Canada, where they have no laws. :)
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
I understand that if a credit agency reports falsely about you, and if you have the moxy to swing it, you can recover big damages for defamation, slander, whatever it is. It isn't easy, but it's been done.
I hope maybe they cause an ISP to deactivate such a person unjustly. Maybe a few multi-million dollar lawsuits will slow them down. Slander? Defamation of character? Violation of the right of free speech?
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If you this error seems to be incorrect, please provide the following in your report to Source Forge:
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The exact same tactics, arguments and methods will result in a successful application of a 2-5% tax on both burners and media for CDs within 5 years. There won't be a damn thing to be done about it cause y'all keep voting for corporate fed political pigs year after year.
That should read "What - 70% burned that music they downloaded in the past month? Doubtful."
And F*ck Hillary Rosen.
;o)
I listen to most of my music on LP -- yes, records.
Some schlock, years ago, payed the RIAA for that record. But not I. I pick mine up on pennies on the dollar. RIAA doesn't get one bit.
The last brand-new CD I bought was six months ago.
The CD's I do buy (Mostly of the pop/rock/whatever else variety) are also purchased at used record stores.
This, friends, is one way to f*ck RIAA and Hillary Rosen.
Hell, I had Telarc's *new* 1812 Overture TWO WEEKS before the stores had it. Never know what will turn up at used record shops
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Really, how much longer will this go on? I can't wait till the MPAA armed with the DMCA goes after HP for the DVD-R. I'm just begging for the day that I see a T-100 (sent from the future) walking around town and asking for a "Hilary Rosen..."
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
If we continue the Hillary's thinking then they should also tax black pens used to write on the CDR and the printers that can be used to print covers.
IANAE (I am not an economist), but it seems to me that 4.4% could be normal market fluctuation. Even if it isn't, there are still a wide range of possible reasons. I think it would be ironic if we found out less people are buying CDs because, now that Napster is a thing of the past, people are having trouble finding new music. Another possibility could just be a backlash against the RIAA wherein people have intentionally stopped purchasing CDs as a form of protest.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I've owned a CD-RW for two years now. I haven't even space-shifted any CDs I own. I've used it to make archives of data that will not change, and some complations of original music I've composed.
It irritates me that the RIAA is playing both sides of the fence in this case - raising prices on CDs to cover the costs of piracy, and taxing the purchase of CD-R blanks to cover the cost of piracy.
The more you stick up for Rob Malda and his associates the more they will continue to bully their userbase and force them into accepting an unnaceptable level of service. I feel ashamed to be a stockholder in VA Linux as a result of the disgraceful way this site is handled. A site with as much traffic as Slashdot should not be allowed to fall into a state of disrepair.
The RIAA in further attempts to stifle copyright infringment has issued a lawsuit against Gof for the creation of the human mind and it's capacity to remember music that it has heard without due compensation to the copyright holder. God could not be reached for comment.
True
The result of which has been a complete homoginization of all things creative and interesting about music.
Not true. Comercial music is homoginized and dull. People still make, and always will make interesting music. The RIAA may not chose to publish it, prefering the boring and "proven" results of market tests in large metropolitian areas. Ask yourelf, was any of the "great" comerical music of the past really great or just familiar, hyped and associated with great moments in your life? Now go to MP3.com, a local music club or the garage. It's pathetically easy to record music these days. Creating has always been difficult, but people will always do it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
this kind of sums it up for me.
1. no.
/., the most vile den of depravety on the internet, so, no, you're normal here.
2. you're on
3. have any links?
Essentially a good defense atourney could argue that payment of the surcharge is de-facto entry into a contract with the RIAA, in which the customer is paying for the privlage of recording music.
Excellent point. They'd have to hit EVERY type of recordable media. Including (gasp!) cassettes. I'm dating myself a bit, but remember when you used to listen to the radio and record songs as they played in order to make your custom tape? Song got old/stale, you rerecorded. Easy as pie.
I doubt RIAA would take on the FCC in the US, as well as similiar governing bodies in other countries, and demand that they not play the songs. "Stop playing our artists! People could record the songs!" That leaves the manufacturers, and I sincerely doubt they'd successfully take on the likes of BASF and other major mfgr's either.
they are doctoring their statistics!
their population of sampline is "tech savy users" what about all users of cd's. how big is this tech savy population to the whole. stats are crap when used wrong.
Yup. This just confirms my suspicions. When Napster was in full force, music sales were up. Now, Napster has been shut down and there is no easy way for people to exchange or try out new music. Correspondingly, record sales are down. I the words of that big bully kid on The Simpsons... Haaa Haaa!
Don't you think that's funny?
--Robert
However, this is like putting a tax on bongs to help fight the war on drugs. Digital information is easy to copy these days, and they won't be able to put their fingers in all the holes in the dyke. The sooner they switch to a workable online sales model and embrace the online market, the better off they will be financially. I'm actually looking forward to it, although I can't really imagine they will come up with something that is reasonable financially for the average user. If a $1.50 CD didn't cost me $17.95, I don't think I would be that interested in alternatives.
check my tunes out at http://www.mp3.com/digitalcardboard
free online diet tracking.
Background Music: 10.96 per square foot
Marching Bands: $8.40 each band, minimum fee of $31.13 per day
Receptions (ie: weddings): Without Dancing: $28.75. With Dancing: $57.55.
Like, what fucking right do they have to charge me $30 more if I allow people to dance to music at my wedding? How can this extra fee be justified in relation to reimbursing artists who made the music? Are we supposed to pay different amounts depending on how much the people enjoy the music? This is an ethically repugnant scam of the highest degree and the vast majority of people just tow the line and pay it.
Here is a prime piece of Alabama black snake thats not to damn Boo-Koo.
All of this activity continues to show the passion of the consumer for music and the need for both legal protection and legitimate alternatives.
There are plenty of legitimate alternatives to RIAA-owned music. I agree, though, that consumers need legal protection...
I've never connected to Napster and I've never downloaded music from the internet. I tend to buy cd's used. If I have to pay some sort of extortion fee to the music industry, I will be pissed!
So, where are back to witches-hunting?
Let's get back to ye-old-5"1/4 floppy disks. Or even better, 8" floppy disks. It's impossible to put a mp3 into it!
By the way, why don't they sue mp3 players manufacters? Are they too big to a fight?
"Hey, you, RIAA! Why don't you mess with somebody the same size as you? :o/
Or event better: "Are you afraid of what?"
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
The business model where by music makes large amounts of money is dying.
Probably a more accurate statement is: "The business model whereby pre-recorded music makes large amounts of money is dying." In fact, this is the way things usually were; the purpose of recordings and performances were to sell sheet music; later, the recordings were used to push the performances. The music business has already reverted back to this model; that's why the RIAA is feeling threatened all of a sudden. They're defending a dying business, just like buggy whips.
If the Canadian Government imposes a tax for "losses incurred by piracy" for everyone to pay for a medium, then doesn't that just give acceptance that now it will be used for that purpose?
What's the use of charging people for an action, whether or not they do this, to compensate copyright holders for this action, and then state you still can't be doing this action?
I say, if the Government makes everyone pay, whether in jail, fines or taxes, for something certain people do, then it should be accepted that it's paid for and now allowed.
This is why I've never agreed with this tax. It's beneficial to copyright holders and still screws over the consumer.
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
At $17, I don't buy a CD for much less than a special occasion, like birthdays or Christmas. At least part of this is an impure sense of personal protest. If it weren't impure, I'd buy NO CDs at all.
If CDs were half the price, I'd feel less sense of protest, and buy more than twice as many. At one third the price, I'd probably take off on a binge of replacing my old vinyl, which I still hope to transcribe to CDR one of these days.
The whole thing with Napster and CDRs is MASSIVE violation of copyright law. But any time you get to MASSIVE violation of the law, perhaps more structural inspection is necessary, other than pers^H^H^H^Hprosecuting the violator. I can think of two examples of such massive violation, prohibition and the current War on Drugs.
Prohibition was one of the (scratch "one of") stupidest things ever put in to the US Constitution. The Constitution details rights, interactions, and operations, and Prohibition is the only time it tried to "act like a law instead of a framework." Rightfully repealed.
As for the War on Drugs, I have nothing to do with them, but feel they should be put on a peer basis with tobacco and alcohol. IMHO, the side-effects of the War on Drugs, in terms of 'crimes of financing' and organized crime control, exceed the evils of the drugs themselves.
For another example, the oft-repeated piracy of VHS tapes. Rampant at $80/tape, virtually not a worry at $10-$20/tape.
In short, we're being GOUGED. That's the underlying structural issue behind the current "crime wave". Except that their gouging is apparently legal, in spite of what I used to think were restrictions against collusion and price-fixing.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Add me to the list. The reason I use my CD-burner is because, as an artist, it gives me a cheap way to make limited numbers of CD's of my own music. I've also used it to make audio CD's of MP3's that I legally downloaded off of MP3.com for my own personal use, and to burn Red Hat ISO's. I use it for backing up the large amounts of digital data I generate as a musician, so that I don't find myself needing a new 40GB hard drive every month.
I use mine for legitimate work, thank you very much.
It will all be co-opted, but I have my 8xCDR and there isn't shit they can do about that. If you really want to piss off the RIAA leave your burner and mp3's alone for the evening and go see independent music played live. What a crazy idea.
8 years ago i was recording with one of my buds .Hell plug a rom module in his comp, swipe his card in a slot
what would turn out to be a major hit in bars.
We were discussing digital recording and were a bit on the techno trip..
I was telling him this.
In a few years we wont need a producer and a label.We will have a computer,a connection and sell our music direct to a consumer
and get the recording.No record company.
No need to make THEM do money with what we
wotked for with OUR money on OUR time.
Maybe it's come to age now.
No labels,no contracts,Just you and me baby.
hmmmm sounds better and better : )
Ric
Given that most of the companies that have a vested interest in CD-R's (drive and CD makers) are US companies, I don't think we will see a Canadian/euro tax on CD-R's anytime soon.
But we can all expect a large florida-shark-type convergence of lobbyists on Washington....
"Chill, Orrin!"---Trent Lott
Fucking idiot. Ever see a girl...naked?
Okay, so people can record music with a CD-R. I wonder how they feel about audio tape recorders attached to "line out" ports and VCRs attached to s-video ports?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Isn't that what the RIAA is doing?
RIAA can't win, its as simple as that
its information and electrical signals. they can never stop the people working against the machine
We spend our lives learning, if you like learning life is hard. it can never be only the ups the downs will always co
"A preliminary survey of tech savvy online music enthusiasts recently conducted for the RIAA showed that nearly one out of two consumers surveyed downloaded in the past month and nearly 70 percent burned the music they downloaded"
I burn the mp3s that I download. I get them at www.npgmusicclub.com. These mp3s are sold by Prince and the NPG, and users are given the right to burn them to CD so that we can listen to them without using an mp3 player.
Of course, I can certainly see why this would have Ms. Rosen concerned. That fat bitch knows that the big record companies are going to watch their profits melt away as other companies like Tekadence and mp3.com help artists sell their music directly to fans at reasonable prices.
I think I need to write some letters to politicians now...
The RIAA has no product to sell. They do not record music. They do not sign "soon to be big recording artists", They bank off of Major record labels. They have been selling them a "bill of goods" for years now. Promising to protect them. Protect them from what?! Haven't we had this battle already with dual cassette decks?! They have actually been the downfall of the music industry. All the research over the past couple of years shows an increase in cd sales. I place that on music sharing. Example: My Old Man hadn't been in a record store in 20 yrs until he heard THE INKSPOTS, THE PLATTERS, BILL HALEY, etc.. as mp3's. Now he has a shelf full of purchased CD's Not blank media, rather actual artist recordings.
It is about time Geffen, Artista, Sony and Virgin look at their revenues and kick the RIAA to the curb. MP3, a compression format, has not damaged anything except the RIAA's image. They throw the name "MP3" around as if it is a bootleg outfit. It is merely a compression format like many other compressions. I would be willing to bet if the record lables stopped paying the RIAA to wage war, their profits would grow even further.
As of now I have decided my recording of my 5 yr daughter singing "Itsy Bitsy Spider", which I have saved on a cd as an mp3 along with many other childhood songs, is valuable enough to sell. Each one of you can download it at the reasonable fee of $5.00. Any bastard that is a member of the RIAA can have it for double that
amount.
F&!k you RIAA!! Me and my technology will outlast your old ways of thinking.
You bring up a good point in that many people are not honest, but it is not my responsibility to subsidize companies who cannot deal with the problem. I already pay for a police department. If the RIAA catches someone violating the law, they are more than capable of turning them over to the appropriate authorities. If I pay a tax to the RIAA, I am paying for the same problem twice. I believe I have no legal or moral obligation to do so. The RIAA members are perfectly within their rights to defend their business but it is not my responsibility to subsidize that. They are perfectly capable of doing so themselves.
The practice is illegal, and they still manage to tax it.
I think the war on drugs needs to take lessons from RIAA.
badness 10000
It's fortunate that entertainment executives are such peacocks. Their counterparts in other industries seem more often to have the sense to perform their political maneuvers behind closed doors. Music and film industry execs have such raging egos they want everybody to see them win, no matter how ugly it makes them look. In the long run I think that's a good thing.
This is ridiculous.
I'm quite sick of the whole MP3 fiasco. As far as I can tell, the prices of all technology has decreased dramatically in the last ten years with the exception of CD prices, which have shot up to outrageous amounts.
For instance, an acquaintance of mine suggested I give a new artist a listen because I enjoy similar artists. So I went and downloaded the mp3s, and very much enjoyed them. Yesterday I went to my local CD store with the intention of buying the CD, only to find out that it was listed at $29.99 CDN. That's robbery. Ten years ago I could buy CDs at $16.99 CDN, and the most expensive CDs I saw were $19.99 CDN. Now the majority of CDs that I'm interested in cost $24.99 CDN, and quite frankly, I'm not honest enough to be willing to pay that much... I'd rather stick with the mp3s.
If you guys would click around on the RIAA site, you will see that when they mentioned CD-R as a growing problem, they are talking about bootleg CD-R vendors. The main problem they are talking about is people who setup a "CD-R Plant" and start burning copies of CDs to sell on the street as legit copies. They only mentioned people who download songs in an attempt to get people talking about it. Bingo! It worked!
I think that it's interesting that in the techno music world, piracy seems to be viewed totally differently. You've got DJ's (not all of course) who would love if their shit got mass produced and distributed: it gets their name out, gets people to go pay to see them and pick up more of their material. That's advertising that's *expensive* to pay for. And while they may lose some profit over the piracy of their work, in the end most are making more than that back over a larger and more religious fan base. And for the guys producing records: they are usually anonymous as it is. The only time they really get mentioned is if their stuff winds up on a compilation. So having their tracks ripped and pirated again gets their name out and increases sales. In short: piracy can be good, in the sense that it can get the artist more visibility and build a larger fan base. Ya, it can be bad too, this thing can be argued either way until we're all dead. YMMV.
http://dark-techno.org
No, but to further your example, paying for health insurance means that when the doctor send me a bill for a visit, I let the insurance I've been paying premuims on for so long, cover the cost. Similarly, when I copy music, I should be able to count on the premium I've been aying for the media, to cover the revenue loss, therefor the RIAA would have no claim against me because they have already been reinbursed through the 'tax'.
Not to beat your exampleto death, but the point of paying insurance premiums is so that you don't have to pay the huge medical bills you incur should you have a major injury. Under this theory, and consistant with your example, copying music is like filing an insurance claim. Based on the premuims you've previously paid, you are in essance collecting goods (in this case) rather than the services - such as medical care - that you would collect under a medical insurance plan. It's like having an insurance company pay for a product like a bandage or a cast.
This is the theory under which the fees would be collected, so you're not committing any sort of fraud. It is the expectation that some will chose to collect, but the majority don't - resulting in profit for the insurance company - which makes this system work, but you're right, the circumstances under which those customers who choose to collect (ie, copy music) do so, are completely arbitrary, which is what would make this sort of 'tax' or payment of a premium, an unworkable system, and why it's such a profoundly bad idea.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I believe that ascap and bmi get a mechanical royalty on dat tapes to make up for revenues lost by people taping cd's on dat for home use. This was started shortly after dat tape hit the scene.
I can't think of a single person I know that uses dat in their home component system - pretty much is used musicians and engineers for storage of masters.
Silly.
I don't think the RIAA is going through this trouble to insure the distribution of properties that they currently own. What I see right now throughout the "content producing industry" is intense interest in controlling the distribution mechanisms of all content - film, video, audio, print. Why? Because if they control the distribution then they control the production!
Remember back in the day when content and distribution were basically independent? Studios made movies, movie theaters distributed them. Recording companies made albums, record stores distributed them. You're an independent film producer? Independent artists didn't have the same access to distribution at large producers, but they had access. Well, that's all out the window.
AOL/Time-Warner and other giants are content and distribution, right to the wire that comes into your house. They're the cable company, the ISP, the censor, the news, they buy the policiticans... you get the picture.
Notice how many small ISP's are beign bought up by large ISP's and offering more homogonized and restrictive services? How long until the die-hard independents start facing industry-sponsored legal hardships for offering dangerous technology like shell accounts? How long until it is legally impossible to buy bandwidth from anybody but a media giant or they're interests?
To me, this is all part of the pattern. The big guys are content to fight it out with eachother, they just don't want to share it with anybody else.
If the money accumulated from the tax was applied to entitlement programs( Social Security / Welfare / Medicare ), education, or programs that were none profit.
Wouldn't that just piss off the RIAA.
Let's face it, people are going to do a small amount of copying for their own personal use. You do it, I do it - I'll bet even the children of the RIAA demons do it.
What seems to get lost in the discussion is that copying for personal use IS LEGAL. Copyright is designed to prevent people from publishing content in competition with the copyright holder. It has nothing at all to do with personal use.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Does anyone know of a single source of this information? The boycott-riaa.com site lists who to boycott, but I couldn't find a list of alternatives.
An ideal list would searchable and sorted by genre.
We already pay a "royalty" on blank CD-R's that are designated for music!
Title 17, Chapter 10, Supchapter C of US code. (from
Cornell website
What does she want, blood?
> If I am going to pay a 'tax' to the RIAA, because it is assumed that I am copying music music, (and this is in fact the justification for the 'tax') then is copying (pirating) music something I can still be sued for?
Reminds me of a decade or so ago when certain jurisdictions in the USA decided to put a tax on marijuana so that they could hit their victims up for tax evasion along with the the usual time in the pokey.
It seemed to me at the time that establishing a tax on something was a de facto way of legalizing it, though I hardly expected the f0cked 0p US legal system to reach that obvious conclusion.
Haven't heard anything about this in years, so I don't know how it turned out.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I think I remember the RIAA saying CDs cost so much because they have to account for piracy.
So, I guess if we tax CD-Rs, the extra three or four dollars added to the cost of a CD to make up for piracy will no longer be needed, right?
So everyone who doesn't pirate music will stand to gain from a CD-R tax since your store-bought CDs will fall to a reasonable price - like $12.
Muhahahahahaha!
People who say "money does not buy happiness" are just people without money trying to make themselves feel better.
Go along to the agenct that collects this money, and insist that no copyrighted material under their jurisdiction has been copied. Request reimbursement of the tax paid (at THEIR expense).
If they refuse, sue them - then add more for:
1) Trouble & inconvenience
2) Mental trauma (they called you a thief)
3) Slander/Libel (see 2)
4) any thing else you can think of
I want names. This statistic crap without sources is not worth the phosphor its glowing on.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I wonder if they'll eventually push through a Canadian-style tax on anything that can carry data.
...canadian laws on music books and media ..is like liveing in china they have baned books movies Zines etc etc No way in hell do i wish for canadian style laws in the usa
...They where forced to move to the usa due to the canadian gov due to public safety deamed there video Wrong and not right they even went after the guys ISP.. that video was released on the internet only
I sure hope not
I think it was perfect shot video that made a fake video clip of a women geting shot in canada
if you look on the internet there is a list of baned items in canada I think the list is about 1200+ diff magzines and books
Bleh keep canadian laws in canada or china
m0zone
This message, without a doubt, entirely sums up my thoughts on the subject. Well written.
The RIAA must understand it resides in a nation born, in part, as a result of anger to a monopoly, and under the control of a non-capitalistic system. The RIAA's tactics not only reek of monopolistic practices, but totalitarian practices which would be welcome adoptions in a truly marxist society. While I may sound like a troll, I truly do not care. I find the RIAA and any person associated with the organization as anti-democratic, anti-capitalistic and anti-liberty.
Freedom and a free market must prevail.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"
These MP3's are legally obtained. I want to burn them onto a CD-R to listen to while driving in my car. Is that going to be the bain of Hilary Rosen?
The thing I really like about They Might Be Giants is that they're using the internet to gather and retain fans, and sell their music. Basically, they offer something that you can't get in stores, and it makes a dedicated fan actually buy music.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
The Music and Movie industries tell their customers, "You Are All Criminals"(tm), and the average customer agrees with them????
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
decided that diarhea was a fitting color scheme for this discussion?
The RAII is so full of crap... If everytime people were using technology to infringe on corprate profits, than we would be living in the stone-age. long life the DIY'ers Cheers Sam.
I bet a guy like you is all ready with the stock answer: The Exception Proves The Rule. This might even be true, but it doesn't mean shit. The recording industry doesn't really care about piracy. They use exceptionally poor assumptions about buying habbits to make all manner of outragious claims that go unchallenged in more typical media outlets. They care only about the bottom line; as well they should being a buisness and all. But like all the monopolies that came before them, they care nothing for their customers, little if at all for their employees. They want to see shareholders profits grow, so they can one day leave via golden boot or paracute. They don't care how. If they must lie, they will lie. If they must beg the government to prop up their hidiously profitable monopoly with a special tax, they will. They'll buy congressmen, they'll lie, they'll tell Tipper they'll make warning lables on music bigger. It has nothing to do with piracy. That's an excuse. When everyone owns and buys your product how do you grow your market? Make it so they must purchase multiples of your product? Whine to the government, that the few people who steal your product are artificially shrinking your market? (As anyone who listens to any mp3 even once would surely have bought the album that spawned it.) The RIAA argues that these few, are really a great many, and their acts are so pervasive only a special tax on EVERYONE can rectify the situation. None of this makes them different from any other large company, but most importantly, this fact doesn't make them right.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Full-length CD units dropped 5.3 percent at mid-year 2001, representing a $5.5 billion dollar value within the market, a 2.7 percent decrease in dollar value from mid-year 2000.
Hmmm... we're in the middle of a recession and CD sales dropped. Who'd a thought it!
by the jews.
I Pledge Alliegence to the flag of the United Corporations of American.
And for which it stands, one Industry under Censorship, Indiscrimantorilly trampling on the people.
Petition, Protest, Revolt!
Also speaking as a Canadian you are wrong. You're saying that it's legal to borrow a CD, make a copy and give the original CD back, but it's illegal to make a copy and give it to someone else (???).
This is exactly what the law says. The levy gives you the right to copy for your personal use, so long as you personally make the copy. The levy would not be legal under Canadian law as worded otherwise. (I am a Canadian, btw).
From the CDR-FAQ: The rules for music are more lenient. Because of the media tax imposed by the Canadian government (see section (7-13)), you are allowed to copy any music for your own personal use. This means that you can go over to a friend's house and copy any number of discs you like, so long as they are for your own use. You are not allowed to make copies of music and then give them to others.
More information can be found at: http://neil.eton.ca/copylevy.shtml
The Copyright Board of Canada's web site: http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/ the decision on private copying is listed there. They moved the location of the act, but it's there.
Please take a more active role in what our government is doing, it helps stop them from doing stupid things. I wouldn't want to end up with a situation like the USA has now; Go visit your MP and MLA provincially and let them know what you think about these things.
..don't panic
"We are looking forward to Mary J. Blige, Andrea Bocelli, Brandy, Goo Goo Dolls, Macy Gray, Enrique Iglesias, Jewel, Natalie Merchant, and Alanis Morrissette releasing works in the coming months," Rosen concluded.
HAHAHAHAHAHA
Don't worry. They are doomed. They are just in the panic and denial stage right now. They knew they were in trouble in 1995 when the Beatles re-release beat the pants off ALL their new releases.
Everyone please just patiently keep recording in your basements. Relax. Actually, no, get really angry so that your recordings are better.
Eventually even the CD burners that the RIAA members use to make THEIR CDs will wear out, and all of the companies in the industry will go out of business, thereby destroying the RIAA. :)
But of course, the article should have read "We are concerned about CD-R's in the hands of people other than the approved RIAA members."
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
That's like taxing lightbulbs in order to compensate lantern and candle manufactures who failed to modify their business models when the electric light was invented. Absolutly ridiculous!
It seems to me that the only way the RIAA could continue to object to new technologies (such as CD-Rs) is if they somehow expect that conditions are different now, and that they'll win, this time. Without legal training, I can't come up with any differences between the legality of audiotapes and CD-Rs, other than the fact that CDs are higher quality than audiotape.
Delving a little bit deeper, I wonder if this argument can't be traced to proud individuals who look at past copyright laws and say, "If I was in charge back then, we wouldn't have lost!" Or, conversely, "If I was in charge now, I wouldn't be losing!" ... It appears to me that people grandstand about these issues far more often than regular ones. The RIAA does it; the MPAA does it; posters on Slashdot do it; even the US Government displays this type of reaction when comparing the current Drug War fiasco to the Prohibition Era.
Perhaps the real problem is that people simply want to re-fight the same arguments over and over again because they weren't satisfied with the results the last time?
The article dances completely around the question of how much money is being lost by CD-R and illegal downloads. The article is ripe with insinuation, leading readers to believe the losses are in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. But no data are provided that are actually pertinent to the specific question of losses due to theft (not to mention lost profits versus decreases in gross revenue). The drop in sales could just as easily be a reflection of the poor state of the economy. Music CDs are after all a luxury, not a necessity.
This is far too late and nobody will read it but: what I *love* is the "continued use" phrase. This sounds like a health warning: "Continued use of heroin presents a serious health risk" What did they expect would happen after they killed Napster (right or wrong, you decide) that people would stop using CD burners?
> The US Constitution prohibits the government from "taking without compensation" in any form.
Can you explain furthere where it says that. I'd like to look into this further.
Thx !
Then anyone with a turntable at 33 1/3 RPM could be in violation of the DMCA for having a circumvention device... Quick, buy the record players!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Dont get me wrong I am a conservative and I hate having any of my freedomes abriged especily by taxses but this would be wonderful. See I'd abuse the hell out of it and run ads on the web encoraging others to as well. Its simple if this happens you just make agreemnets with your friends to buy all the cds your group wants depending on what week of the year it is. Then you and you other 51 buddies all make compies each of you pushes the button on the cdrecord software yourself to make it nice and leagal. Also Librays often have small collections of cds you could checkout and dupe thoes too. Pretty soon the levy would have to get so high to make cd sales profitable the cds would be to expensive for most anyone to justify the purchase of and all the major reccord lables will foldup and the RIIA will be force to dispand. Then will have one. Hey all you Artists I hate to put you out of work this way but all I got to say is FUCK YOU cuz after all if it was not for contracting with reccord lables wich inturn contribute to the RIAA well the RIAA would not exist. You brought this on yourselves!
Fork em with a large metal probe, then fork em again. No one's touching my CD-R. End of discussion.
They're the ones who help use poor americans with
free DSS. I'll help pay the CDR tax with US dollars, they're worth more anyway.
When the time comes to oppose legislation on this issue, my representatives will be aware in no uncertain terms that, if they vote to impose a tax, I will never vote for them again.
All in all, perhaps the time has come for us to go on the offensive? Perhaps legislation mandating minimum royalty payments for artists would be enough of a slap in the face for the RIAA's members to bring something other than greed to their attention.
And a union of concerned artists and computer enthusiasts might be enough to take them down.
I've burned a couple dozen CDs in the last few months, and guess how many of those had music on them? Two. And guess what? That was music I already owned, had already paid for, and was simply putting my favorites together on disc, instead of spread out over a handful of CDs.
The rest of my burning has been backups or operating system ISOs I downloaded. There's no way in hell it'd be reasonable for me to be charged a tax on my CDs for something I'm not even really using them for. FEH!
I think that if they are going to tax CD-R's, they should include Micro$oft, Adobe, and others in the negotiations. After all, I bet a lot of the illegal copying has to do with data discs, not just music discs.
By my calculations, getting the music industry and the software industry to agree on anything will take years, and until then, we are all safe. Case in point: look how long it took to establish the DVD standard with the MPAA, RIAA, and software houses all involved.
"We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking." -Mark Twain
If I relied on the quality of these artists to sell for my salary I would be worried about sales dropping too!!
CD-R's are a godsend. Who doesn't use them or know someone who does? If they are worried about CD-R's then that will take some focus away from their other unmoral actions like robbing artists, lying to the public, maybe faking letters of support, you know, the typical evil company with lots of power stuff.
And as another /.'er commented, sales drop during an economic depression???? That's unheard of... those evil hackers are behind it!
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Imagine this thou, mp3 by fax, and use scanner to read.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
I forget the name of the ACT, but devices that can record music are taxed in the US and that money goes into a fund that individuals or groups (the recording industry) can dip into. I believe the fund is administered by the Library of Congress.
I don't believe the law covers media though, but it could be expanded to cover multiple use technologies like computers. This would raise the price by a few bucks on all computers.
Yes, it does presume guilt and is very un American.
"...we are committed to providing the quality product listeners desire..." Hmm, how does this relate to the copy protection schemes recently introduced which use damaged audio data blocks to prevent me from making backups of my own CDs? Not much of a quality product I would think...
While this would make sense, I'm afraid that the RIAA has far too much money to be bound by reason or, well, pretty much anything. Good thing for them that the vast majority of people happily bend over and take it rather than have to actually think about or pay attention to their rights.
I do not know why you people think that you have a legal right to privacy when you use an private ISP.
If you read ANY TOS, it specifically states that you cannot use their service for any illegal acts (such as stealing someones IP, which, believe it or not, is still illegal). The TOS also states that they can use any and all methods to monitor and enforce these rules, up to and including revoking your account and handing over evidence to the proper athorities.
This is obvious, straight-forward, and well spelled out in the contract/service agreement that you have with your ISP.
My question is, what makes you think that that you EVER HAD this privacy? Anything other than wishful thinking? Just because enforcement of these laws are lax, doesn't mean that they will never be used.
Having your ISP read your stream is unethical, and possibly immoral. Too bad, though, because we are not a world of morals or eithics. We are a world of laws.
Donut
How do you know this? Have any information or links I (we) can look into?
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
She just needs a good, hard, deep dicking.
She needs to be laid down on her enormous belly on the kitchen table and fucked right up the poop-chute till she screams. Then she needs to be picked up by the hair on the back of her neck, turned over, and titty-fucked. Then, finally, when she can't take any more, she needs to have 8 inches of hot, hot cock rammed right into her sloppy little cunt.
Then maybe she'll stop being such a cast-iron bitch.
Only morons will post to slashdot.
If the RIAA eventually succeeds in making CD-Rs too expensive to use for the average joe.. like they did with DAT.. then the musicians who want to burn CDs full of their own stuff are going to be screwed... they'll have to sign up with a recording company and get raped. Going after Napster I could understand, but going after CD-Rs in general? There is something very wrong with that idea in my opinion. Perhaps the country should focus their anti-trust eyes on the RIAA...
I could care less about Microsoft at this point.
Don't be an idiot. Railing against Canadian Content ignores the fact that without it, VERY LITTLE Canadian music would get played on the radio. As giant media conglomerates buy up radio stations, local programming goes down the tubes, and eventually Canadian culture on the air would disappear beneath a deluge of American crap. (This is not to say that some Canadian music isn't crap, but the point is that there's a lot of GOOD Canadian music that wouldn't get played *at all* to make room for more Britney and Mariah).
The problem, if there is one, is the perception that "mediocre music" gets forced onto the air, excluding better American music. That's a load of sh*t. Popular Canadian tunes get a chance against the marketing muscle of their American counterparts. To try and get Can Con sunk would pretty much guarantee that you'd never hear another Canadian artist on the radio outside the college stations and the CBC (both excellent to listen to, BTW).
Last time I checked, Rita McNeil and Buffy St-Marie weren't too popular on Gnutella.
Um, they don't get a lot of airplay on the radio either. That marketing privelege is mostly reserved for younger, hipper acts like Moist, Natalie Imbruglia, or Gord Downie.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Oops, I meant Nelly Furtado... Natalie Imbruglia is Australian, heh.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Okay, I'm stuck in the 80's. But the music just doesn't interest me lately. Even the one 'alternative' station seems to only play about 20 songs over and over, so I don't even know if there's anything new that I'd care to buy. And I'm certainly not going to drop $17 on a CD that I don't know anything about.
Double the price and they're cheap as dirt. If that will get everyone to stop calling me a crook
for making my own personal "Best of Procul Harum" CD from stuff downloaded off the Gnut Net, I'm for it.
Cheers,
JHVH1
`The shapes of things are dumb.'
-L. Wittgenstein
To register a complaint, feel free to use this handy contact info:
Ms. Hilary Rosen
2318 Ashboro Dr.
Chevy Chase, MD 20815
H:301-589-8585
W:202-775-0101
F:202-775-7253
E:hrosen@riaa.com
Fine, but the problem here is collusion among the labels and the distribution channels, not society's preference. How many of these public stations play popular music? It is not as though society is actively ignoring public alternatives.
Sure, artists want to be heard. They want to be heard because they want to make as much money as possible. Nothing noble in their intentions. So technology is limiting their ability to milk their talents in perpetuity. Big deal.
The fact is, artists and their labels are trying to extract more for their product than it is worth to the average consumer, and now the market is responding exactly as it should.
Of course, they'll force it through, just like they got good ol' Al Gore to force through a tax on tape recorders during the 80's.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
I've bought a few CDs from MP3.com. They're burnt on demand. Artists that place work on MP3.com are not going to see any real income without this "publish on demand" technology. I doubt THEY'RE worried by CD-r discs.
It's only the mainstream music labels (and the artists that have swallowed their line) that are worried about CD-r discs. The real artists are actually big fans.
So let me get this straight - they're raising an alarm because they did a "preliminary survey" of "online music enthusiasts" and then use the numbers gained from that targeted sample to claim that their copyrighted material needs more protection? Their press release only says that 50% of those surveyed "downloaded in the past month," but they don't say in the press release whether the music downloaded violated any copyright - I'd be interested in knowing whether they're including in their numbers people who download music legally available online, such as the music available on mp3.com.
All we can really draw from their survey is that 35% (70% of 50%) of online music enthusiasts burn music to CD. It doesn't sound that alarming to me, especially since we don't have a means of determining what percentage of the music-loving population are "online music enthusiasts", nor do we know what percentage of those burning music are burning copyrighted music they don't already own to CD-R.
At least we know one thing - the RIAA is good at saying nothing and making it sound like something.
Naked.
Some how I don't think so, First off not even 99% of all people have even seen a computer!
I wonder how much of that has to do with...
1. The Economy.
2. Bands that target kids too young to have jobs.
How many 8 year old Britney Spears fans can afford $17.99 for a CD? If I was 10 and had a small allowance I'd be downloading and burning too.
'Same speed C but faster'
The situation you describe is legally different from a tax (or levey) on media. That is because in the situation you describe, the tax is collected pursuant to an individual, signed tax form. This raises concerns re: the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.
If I remember the case-law correctly (and I may be mistaken; THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE), what happened is this. I believe the courts have uniformly held that taxation of income from illegal activities (i.e., drug sales, gambling, etc.) is legal as long as the taxing authorities provide some legal mechanism to pay the tax without incriminating yourself. One example would be acknowledging the amount of such income income, paying the appropriate tax, but not being forced to disclose the source. Another example would be paying the tax in some anonymous, but subsequently proveable traceable way -- i.e., send in tax payment with a code number etc., such that if you were audited later for the income from you drug sales, you could say, "ah, but I sent in the letter identified as "a12foduis85037439", in the amount of $1,243,245 for the income tax on my cocaine sales!" Finally, I believe I have heard of provisions to pay such taxes through an attorney, who would simply say the tax was being paid on behalf of an anonymous client.
Are these alternatives realistic? No, of course not. But I believe (again, THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE, I may be wrong) one or more of these mechanisms has been held to make legal collection of income tax on illegally obtained income in light of the 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
The Canadian tax on CDs is no different than any other tax.. regardless that SOME people might only use CD-R to burn backups or such, you still pay the tax because you live in the country. Tell me the last time the government went around and asked every single person if they used the roads, the phone lines, might ever need employment insurance, ect. Of course that will never happen. So don't complain that you don't use CD-Rs for the purpose they are being taxed on, because that argument is no more valid than someone saying they never drive and so don't want to pay the portion of their tax that goes to road repair.
However, you would have a valid argument if you were to say that NO ONE uses the roads, then of course, NO ONE should pay that tax. So, if NO ONE copied retail music onto their CDs, then NO ONE should pay that tax. However, we all know that the majority of people DO burn such things, so what do we do, make it illegal and throw everyone in jail? Or just pay the damn few cents a CD?
Would the RIAA like knowledgeable computer users to go back to using expensive and bulky tape drives? Better brush up on the man page for tar, ladies and gentlemen.
******
"What makes you think I care about your opinions?"
Am I the only one who has noticed that CD sales ROSE by 22% after Napster came on line and that have already dropped by 4% (and are continuing to drop) without Napster?
Part of the RIAA's case is that they have been harmed. How? Where?
HDGary secures my bank
I use my burner to trade live concerts that I have downloaded in SHN format. Many bands allow this; including, but not limited to, the Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, etc. If the RIAA is able to convince the CD-R manufacturers to automagically embed copy protection into anything I burn I will not be able to share this music with others. Let's hope it doesn't come to that. Additionally, an increase in price from taxes for media will limit the amount of music that I give away.
I also don't understand how they can attribute the decrease in product sales to mp3 trading alone. The economy has turned slightly at the same time the decrease in sales. It is my belief that people are not purchasing music not only because they can find tunes online for free, but also because CD's are so fucking expensive. Courtney Love wrote an article for Salon about a year ago that can be found here. The artists are being shafted by the music industry, not by the consumers alone. I think that the artists are targeting consumers (copyright violators, rather) instead of the record companies because the consumers are an easier target to recover their lost income from.
Something MUST change within the recording industry. The artists aren't being compensated for their labor, while recording companies turn big profits and continue to blame US for their losses.
While I know what is happening; I am still unsure of what it is that we can do to fight the MPAA. Does anyone have any ideas regarding this? Should a boycott of the major recording and publishing companies be organized? Is this already being done? Are there other websites that exclusively provide information on this (knowledge is power, and we need to inform the masses)?
--a musician (by love, not trade)...
Bonus points for home, DL, credit rating.
Take this bitch down old school.
...none of you are old enough to remeber that
statement from the past I am sure.
ok you all bitch about this but how many
of you still continue to buy CDs and DVDs
on major labels?
I find it a personal offense that this BITCH instantly assumes that I use my CD-R to burn music that I have downloaded from the internet! In fact, I do NOT use my CD-R to burn MP3s! I use it to back up my war3z from my HD to make SPACE for those damn MP3s that are being ripped at 320! Damn those fucking pirates!!
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Dear RIAA:
I believe that the laws in the USA are based on the assumption that you are innocent of a crime until proven guilty. Please stop trying to reverse this fact just because your business plan didn't account for technological progress. It would really make all Americans (and likely the rest of the world too) happier, and you might not gain RIAA-boycotting enemies at the alarming rate that you are now.
yep.
all the publishing companies in the world should now be able to tax copy/fax machines. after all somesome somewhere at some time has probably made copies of copyrighted matierial.
In the news today, the Copyists and Writers Industry Association (CWIA) decried the recent rise in literacy, along with the easy availability of paper and pencils to "unauthorized individuals".
They reported individuals were copying down speeches and other public utterances, totally without permission, having paid no per-word licensing fee of any kind.
Additionally, they reported that some "word pirates" may be sharing this recorded information with their friends.
The CWIA calls for an immediate ban on widespread literacy training, as well as for the immediate burning of all unauthorized paper.
from The Music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
If the RIAA thinks cd-r's are bad for their business, just wait till dvd-r's come out. HP is already coming out with a $599 model in September.
Sorry RIAA, but there's no way in hell you're gonna take away my cd-r burner.
eTrade SUCKS
I first started listening to music more than casually in the mid-late 80's, and just about everyone I knew dubbed tapes for each other. Lots of portable stereos (every one now) came with dual decks - many times the amount of people with CD burners today. The music industry survived.
The real reason for a dip in music sales isn't even economic downturn, but the simple fact that there's been an absolute dearth of quality mainstream music this year. For me, the real joy of napster wasn't even getting a free lunch, but rather the joy of discovering new music effortlessly and without risk. I'm sick of hearing it said myself, but I really did buy quite a number of CDs because of napster discoveries. The industry's real fear is the democratization of music. Internet distribution and easy CD creation are threaten the racketeering business they've been running for decades. It's in their best interest to limit the freedom to burn discs early; before the concept can become entrenched.
In a near future when broadband is more common, who's going to venture into meatspace to pay $18 for a CD when you could download directly from the artist at a fraction of the cost?
Speaking from personal experience, i can tell you this is absolutely true. Are you into electronic music? I'm sure you know at least one of the following names:
Now think of it, these DJs, whom are very popular and get paid a shitload of money, go out there every night and drop 15-60(!) tracks durring a party (a "rave" to you outsiders ;-) ). The only credit goes to them. People say "Oh man, [DJ such and such] was awsome! I loved that part where it got all fast and loud" etc. But in reality all the DJ did was mix the tracks together, most of the credit should go to the producers of the tracks. How many artists on this list have you heard of before?
Probably few to none, eh? Yes I know, those are all mostly happy hardcore producers, but it just goes to show that even I don't know alot of producers! If i where a techno producer (hey wait, i am...) then i'd be psyched if my shit got popular and was pirated everywhere becasue there is alot of crap out there and if my stuff is good enough to the point where people feel the need to say "Hey, listen to THIS!" then I'd know i was good, plus the free publicity, etc.
From a financial standpoint it would suck, but then again we dont make millions.
Some "artists" just can't bear to think of the gutter they'd be in if their 7-digit salary where only 6 digits...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
-Legion
> I wonder if they'll eventually push through a Canadian-style tax on anything that can carry data.
Yikes! a Paper tax?!?
At first, the tax prices in canada were exorbitantly exaggerated when discussed... $1/cd...
I'm only paying 30cents/cd TOTAL for blanks... Wonder what happened to the other 70cents?
Has the recording industry been loseing money, I doubt it. The only reason they are so mental about the whole thing is control. They lost control about two years ago and this scares them. If they are going to complain, make a police report.
In other news, the RIAA announced its deep dismay at the massive decrease in 8-track sales. "We feel that Napster and the other file-sharing networks have seriously impacted 8-track sales, causing a decrease of almost 100%," a RIAA spokesperson said.
-----
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who was not there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away!
I have a problem with a levy tax because it presumes that I am currently or will break the law. Since I do not purchase much music, why the hell I should reimburse the RIAA for money they wouldn't have gotten from me anyway?
Actually, it doesn't presume you're guilty. It presumes that a percentage of the population is going to break the law, and forces you to share in the RIAA's losses. Though this distinction may be slight, here's why the problem is significant.
If a store loses money due to theft of merchandise, it passes it onto its own customers through rising prices. If someone steals from a credit card company, they charge higher interest.
If companies lose lots of money because of product or security mismanagement, they won't be in business for long, because nobody will pay their high prices when their competitors charge less.
The RIAA's strategy is to place this burden on someone else's customers, namely those who might engage in "theft" of their products.
This is socialism, plain and simple. People pay for someone else's enjoyment of a product or service. If someone "steals" from the RIAA, they're stealing from everyone.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
According to the press release to justify that CD's are better than MP3s:
DVD video growing in popularity further confirmation that the disc is the preferred format over all others is found in DVD video shipments.
What kind of positioning by the RIAA is this? DVDs are a very popular delivery method for video. Translating this into popularity of audio on compact discs seems ludicrous to me. By the same token, here's my flawed reasoning for the comeback of snail mail over email...
Recent increase in Stephen King book readership further confirmation that paper is the preferred correspondence format over all others is found in book sales statistics.
CDs are becoming less popular because there's a more convenient distribution channel called the Internet. When the Internet becomes convenient enough to muscle videos around, DVD sales should drop accordingly.
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
We, the Revolutionary Insurgency for All Americans (RIAA) call on you, comrades, to turn your backs on the evils of private property.
It is clear lesson from history that the State, that is to say, the RIAA, knows best in allocating resources. All intellectual property should be held in common, in trust for you, the people, held by the RIAA and licensed out according to our five year profit plan.
We know best who can benefit from which entertainment. Abandon your bourgeois withholding of intellectual property for your private benefit. The masses will rejoice when all property is held in common, for allocation by the State, that is, the RIAA.
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your CDs. Oh and your DVDs, we'll be wanting those too.
Hmm.. let's see... Recording Industry Asociation of America... The industry who's primary business is to manufacture and sell records the people in the 50's used not to produce for themselves...
CDR and CDR Writters, the tools to make such records now goes to the masses, so, bypassing such Industry becomes reality (clearly a threat).
Yup, makes sense, they are simply defending their interests using the lobby ($$$) system to manipulate laws so the little peop... er.. pirates could not make such horrendous thing as bypassing them; i mean, who is the law system for? Individuals or Corporations? Of Course! Individuals are stupid (and poor) hence only the righteous organizations with the cash... er.. knoledge to know whats better for you can dictate your conduct (heh, and they dare point to "non democratic" regimes...)
Hmm any suprise here?
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
"Independent publishers and record labels sue the entire computer industry"
:-)
In an unprecedented turn of events, a large group of record labels and publishers decided to sue the computer industry for producing technology which enables digital information to be duplicated, some of which they claim, may be unauthorized copyrighted works. "We believe that digital technology is unfairly disrupting our market," commented the owner of a large publishing house who wished to remain anonymous, "once you digitize information, it is volatile and can be recreated, transferred, stored or destroyed at little or no cost." The group aims to sue the industry for over $658 trillion dollars in compensation for all the free, unprinted information consumers have gained access to over the last 30 years using digital technologies such as diskettes, CD-ROM and the Internet. "Computer technology is a monster," proclaimed the director of a well known publisher's association, "we are aiming to educate the public through this lawsuit what a scourge digital information is on our free market economy." "In fact, using computers is like downloading communism into your home," he later quoted at a press conference, "what we really want is full control of the technology so that royalties can be fairly extracted." Among others who are expected to join the lawsuit are a group of smelly hippies who came out of the woodwork carrying cardboard signs to join the protest against computer technology. "Dude.. technology is like fighting mother nature," said one of their leaders, "all we want is peace and harmony with the earth." The group said it wishes to sue for psychological distress caused by playing digitized music while using illicit drugs. "Digital is so unnatural, man," one protester told reporters, "my trips get like totally funky unless I have the smooth, warm tones of vacuum tubes and records to set my vibe." Analysts say that if this suit fails, the respective groups may turn to patents to stave off further use of digital technologies. "We're working to dig up an old patent covering 'the use of binary mathematics in conjunction with an electrical device,'" quoted a prominent intellectual property lawyer, "it's sorta what they call a 'submarine patent,' but we believe it is perfectly valid and somehow just got misfiled."
(yes, this post is entirely fake and satirical.
Read This.
To be fair about it the tax should go to anyone who has produced any sort of content that is (1) copyright and (2) can be burned to a CDR. Which means (1) software, (2) e-books, (3) anything published to the Web (which being freely available in that medium does _not_ imply that it is freely publishable in other media).
Of these, the most valuable is software. So let's get the tax set up so that about 60% of it goes to the GNU project, since it produces the software most commonly burned to CDR, which is of far more real value to society than the silly music put out by Butch Goddess Hillary's buddies.
Heck, I've got sequential backups here going back years, all full of GNU software. Music? Sorry, the only CDR music I have is either (1) out of copyright (old blues) or (2) stuff recorded by friends who are independent musicians. So here's the deal to offer: If the tax goes through, it goes to GNU!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
The legislation is very clear, if I borrow a CD from you and make a copy of it on my "tax paid" CDR I am breaking no law.
Perhaps in this instance, but not in every. Please see the Iowa drug stamp tax for a good counterexample.
"You will call off this hounding consumers over mp3s and CD-Rs. You will go on live TV and say that there is no problem whatsoever, and that all your analyses turned up negative.
"You need us. We buy your CD's, we go to your concerts, we put food on your table and tip your chauffeurs. So DON'T FUCK WITH US!!"
Maybe I'm watching too much Fight Club lately.
The sad thing is that this actually happened. When DAT was to become popular, it was killed by taxation.
Hugo
and then it occurred to me that this probably means that anyone who wants to back up their files to CDr, or their e-mail, or whatever, it's gonna cost them 4 times as much, too...
Are there any examples of musicians "owned" by the RIAA that actually believe in the crap these people keep spewing?
Ritual burning of music? Agreed, there's a lot of crap music out there, but simply deleting the MP3s is a lot easier than setting them on fire...
If anyone remembers their history - you already know that the REASON we pay ~ $15 for a MUSIC CD today when it only costs $.20 - is because there is an ADDED TAX - a digital music tax - which is shared by all artists - it is there because the gov't already lined the laws with silver for RIAA - specifically because they knew digital music was easier to copy and would take awy sales - so they just FRONT LOADED it to make sure they got theirs.
I think they did this on CD-R media too when it first came out - or wanted to - tax the heck out of it.
herez what s*cks......
The Riaa assumes you will steal, so they tax you. After they get this money, they still complain that their music is being pirated. Interesting that they dont deduct the money they get from taxes when they tell the media how much money they are losing. HMMMMM??? Interesting
I have long found it useful, with corporate utterances, to replace the words "customers" and "consumers" with "fucking morons". If you read it that way I think the content sounds much more honest.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
And you now see things like they really are. Kinda like the Matrix.
Stop the brainwash
That means the storage space required to hold a movie will cost about 20 cents...
Won't be long after that before you will be able to buy a disk holding "The Best 100 Movies"
and DVD as a format will be dead.
how is paying a tax on cds because a few people pirate any different than insurance rates going up because people claime fraud?
it's not.
and personally, i care more about my insurance going up.
so quit whining, it'd be a paultry few cents.
The RIAA would do well to consider the impact these idiotic crusades will have upon them in the future. The more they push consumers and the more they squeeze them, the more the consumers will start to fight back. I think it's time for us to demand that our lawmakers rethink the laws that grant these multibillion dollar corporations exclusive rights to intellectual property. The way they are using copyrights and even patents is no longer in the spirit of the small artist or Thomas Edison's of the world. Instead today they churn out garbage like Britney Spears, boy bands, and huge biotech conglomerates that literally rape the very people the drugs are intended to help. Intellectual property laws are broken and need to be abolished or revised to take into account that these huge corporations DON'T deserve to be protected as much as the little guy starting out in his basement. I give a hearty "Fuck you!" to these corporations and hope there is a special place in hell for the Jack Valentis and Hilary Rosens of the world. May you be analy raped by Lucifer himself on a nightly basis after you die you fucking scumbags.
because there's a sodding big blanking plate welded in the way of the spare drive cages.
What idiot designed that?
Hey, I'm a software guy.
How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None - it's a hardware problem.
Don't use any products sold by these companies. Everybody wants to complain about this and that but do people actually practice what they preach? Every day I am infuriated by the atrocities committed by large corporations all in the name of GREED. At first my anger is focused towards those entities committing these crimes, but after some thought, it becomes obvious that these same corporations would be almost powerless if the PEOPLE did not buy their products. As I have been taught (paraphrased), the road to liberty is paved in blood, not necessarily the blood that spills from us, but the blood of tireless labour and vigilance against tyranny.
Unfortunately, I fear that we will never win this battle. Each and every one of us continues to commit treason against freedom at some point by giving in to those we seek to fight against. How many of you have bought a CD released by a major label, or have purchased or used some software product created by backers of the DMCA? When was the last time you ate a MacDonalds hamburger or chicken from KFC. So long as we continue to do compromise like this, we justify the methods by which these corporations function. By working for these companies, or companies that use their products, or vote for politicians that support unconstitutional legislation, they will not change their ways.
No revolution has been one by complaining about the king. You will only loose your head doing so. Actions, on the other hand (warning: CLICHE) speak louder then words.
*****
The information contained in this posted message is intended only for use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, or the employee oragent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If youhave received this communication in error, please immediately notify me at the email address above, and destroy the original message. Thank you.
... must be VERY popular in Canada
And look, they're so sad they have to ensure they publicise their coming works in alphabetical order. Politics and Money do not a musical classic make!
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
But what if you were copying software? Or top-secret weapons plans? Or any one of countless more possible illegal uses? Should you really have to pay RIAA for illegally using your CD-RW in a way that has no effect whatsoever on their profits?
OK, so I'm being a bit silly, but the point still stands. Maybe M$ should look at getting a cut of the tax to cover all those illegal copies of Windows or whatever.
So far everything I've read here has been about personal usage.
What about if you're a company and use CD-R's to backup and store data? Archiving off mailboxes of staff etc...
Now I may just be a thick Brit, but don't you guys have laws protecting the ability of a company to do thier business without hinderance?
A group like the RIAA would not be able to charge you extra for using goods they don't produce to perform your business how you wish.
Now, if this is right, what about freelancers? People who work from home? How could you tell the difference between buying for "personal use" and "business use"? Would you have to pay the tax anyway and claim it back somehow, including your company number or something?
I don't think this idea is at all workable, and would open up a huge can of worms if it went ahead.
I see Land Sharks rubbing thier hands in glee.
Chris.
I found out about Grandaddy...they rock. Also try Ladytron, and The New Pornographers. Listening to New Indie on Spinner pays off ;) Tons of good stuff playing there. All hope is not lost, it's just not being marketed and hyped.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
In Denmark (my home country) the copyright laws were changed in june to allow digital copies at home, as long as it was for your own use, and you only copied from an original (hence mp3-downloads were illegal). In order to compensate the artists and copyrightholders, a company called Copy-Dan were allowed to put a 'tax' on empty digital medias such as cd-r's. A the tax on an 80 minutte cd-r is aprox dkr 5.32, and without the tax it costs aprox dkr 2,66.
... and some nice people started a protest at StopCopyDan.dk ... 26.000 signatures thus far in little less than a month. If a new party wants to run for congress, it has to gather 22.500 (afair) signatures ... so far they've talked with the Minister of Culture (the copyright laws are her domain) and they have a meeting with the "Culture Commission" (pardon the lousy translation) in a few days.
Okay, most of the cd-r's are probably used illegally, so it wasn't that big of a deal for me. Besides, I hardly use any cd-r's myself.
Then they extended the 'tax' to memory cards and sticks
Hopefully they'll get them to change the stupid laws.
Most European countries already do this. I know for a fact that France, Sweden, UK and the Netherlands have special tax on the CDR's that goes to the Record companies.
Personally I prefer putting the mp3's on my MiniDisc. Since I don't use CDRs to put music on them, it annoys me that I'm paying the record industry money by buying CDR's. But then again, MD's don't have this tax... so I guess it evens out.
Well of course you need to tax my CD-R's I spend all day just burning CD's full of music and that's all I ever use it for, except for the fact I'm deaf but never mind I'm burning music in case my hearing ever recovers.
i gave away all my cds (with the except of 9 from my two favorite bands--two of which are autographed) with those exceptions, my entire music collection is mp3s and burned cd-rs. i will never purchase another cd or pay for any other type of musical format as long as riaa tries to control what i can and can't do with the music i would normally buy. so kiss my ass, you profiteering cunt.
The money the distributors are paying comes entirely from consumers. If they aren't directly targeting CDR buyers with price hikes, then the tax burden is spread among all their customers.
If they charge based on how much you enjoyed the music, would they pay me to listen to country music?
But there would be a major problem if I have to pay a $.20 surcharge on my $.15 CDRs. Is that fair to the consumer, or the CDR manufacturer? I can only see that the RIAA benefits from this. Besides... Even if they make money off of your CDR purchases, they still are going to fight against piracy of their music. The RIAA will win in either case, then.
Actually it was a trap of sorts, I know because they tried that scam here in MA. The scam was, it is illegal to sell drugs without a tax ID, you can't get a tax ID without bringing the product(drugs) to the tax ID place(city hall or something). That you don't have the tax ID yet, you are then possesing an illegal substance and therefore go to jail. It's a which came first, the chicken or the egg type of arguement. If you don't have the drugs, you don't get the ID, if you have the drugs to get the ID, but don't actually have the ID, then you go to jail. I don't know how many people actually fell for it, I don't think many have.
RIAA may be able to pull off controls, taxes, etc on new hardware and software. However, I have sitting on my desktop machine all the hardware and software to copy copyrighted CDs, burn Mp3s, burn Mp3s to CD audio, etx... RIAA might make future technology more expensive or difficult to use, but the base of installed technology and software is simply so large there will be no way to stop it. Even those nifty methods of introducing noise, simple way to get around that- run a line from the sound output to the mike port on your sound card(you need a full duplex card for this, or a second computer) play one CD out, and record a .wav from the mic, then encode it as Mp3.
RIAA can't stop the spread of digital music. No matter what they do they will fail, whether you support them or not you must realize this. What they can do, if they just had the balls to take a chance, is look for ways to use the digital music revolution to their advantage. IF they don't, in time the spread of digital music will undercut their business model and they will fall from their position, business limping along at best.
What the hell is wrong with everybody? So let me see if I understand the Canadian media tax: consumers pay a small extra fee, which is collected by vendors, and eventually handed over to the government, which offsets theoretical lost sales of said media due to piracy. These monies are supposed to end up eventually back in the hands of media vendors.
Hello? Is it my imagination, or are the people who crafted this legislation several D batteries short of a flashlight?
Theoretical sales of CDs are just that: theoretical. The cheapskates who pirate music are not more likely to buy loads more CDs should the technology to copy suddenly evaporate.
Maybe grocers should lobby for a tax on candy bars, due to the egregious lost revenues from occassional theft.
Oh wait; that's considered the cost of doing business, isn't it? Hmmm...
That what I did not remember about it was the size. It was great for the proggramming mag. and a easy waay for a publisher to provide source code. (without a disk)
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
The RIAA's #1 concern is not about the supposed piracy of music. They are really worried about the loss of control over distribution and over the artists.
Napster and MP3.com are threats because they allow artists to gain exposure and distribute music through non-RIAA controlled channels. Unsigned artists don't have to lose huge chunks of money and music ownership to massive recording companies. What would happen if the big multi-platinum artists discovered they could distribute their music directly to the listeners and not have to "honor and obey" the big music labels?
The RIAA groups have decided that they will develop their own, proprietary music delivery systems via the Internet where consumers "lease" the music and can only use it as the label allows. The systems are deliberately designed to be excessively restrictive so that they will fail. The labels can write off the losses and then claim (to artists and consumers) that they tried Internet delivery, but it failed so consumers either must not be that interested or they're theives.
They are trying to paint all users of non-RIAA compliant distribution as thieves. Most consumers are at heart honest, and would be willing to pay reasonable fees to download music that can be played flexibly on a choice of platforms.
Taxing CDR and CDRW blanks is just gravy.
Who the hell does the RIAA think they are, and why do they own everything? Why can't a group of people come up with their own four letter acronym, that owns the freedom to download and burn music onto CD's... I'll leave that one for discussion. For the moment, forget that the RIAA has enough $$ to make me cry.
What really galls me is that the RIAA assumes that the only use for CD-R blanks in the world is to pirate their damn music. They already have some sort of surcharge on the home-audio blanks, the ones most frequently used by artists who are recording their own music and don't have the money to spend on media.
If I have to start paying a surcharge on my CDRs that ends up going to the RIAA, that will be my signal that I'm obviously not getting my money's worth, and I ought to start duping CDs left and right so that I'm not lining the RIAA's pockets without taking something out first.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."