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Digital Music's 2001 Winners and Losers
An Anonymous Coward writes: "MP3 Newswire is running two articles that contain their top 8 MP3 winners for 2001 as well as those who top the loser category. So who is this year's #1 winner? The legal industry for all the billable hours they got to roll up thanks to RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. It's a pretty interesting read and the two articles solicit reader opinions on other potential contenders. I can think of Dmitri Sklyarov right off the bat, but I admit I'm not sure if he won for getting the charges dropped or lost for getting arrested in the first place. Rolling Stone has also run their own digital music winners and losers list for 2001."
Personally I consider MP3 itself to be a loser. It is owned and controlled by a cartel (Fraunhaugher and Thomson Multimedia) and people have to pay out their asses to use it. That is what prompted me to take a moral stance and rerip my entire ~160 cd collection into Ogg Vorbis (350k!). And yes, I know about the threats made against the Ogg project by Thomson......
Seriously folks.... why are so many people still using MP3? It can't hold a candle to Ogg Vorbis or even Windows Media. It isn't open, it doesn't sound nearly as good as it has been hyped to, it produces files that are much bigger than an equivalent Ogg or WMA and well..... it's just lame now.
Here's an example of what I mean if you don't believe me:
I have a 350k Ogg of Prisoner of Society by The Living End that takes up 9.07mb on my hdd and the same song as a 320k MP3 takes up 10.5mb!
Now we have some new technologies:
If I want to hear great new music, what should I do. Right now, even with the second list, I am stuck with the set up of the first list. If I am an artist (I am not...) And I want to get paid for my work, I also am stuck with the first list.
As I see it the week link in the chain is promotion. Slashdot is a wonderful community. We have a list of quickies for the day. How about a weekly feature which posts Free(libre) music. Set it up like the Interviews where each person posts a link to an MP3/Ogg/tar.gz/bz2 file and then the top five/ten rated posts get listed and sent out to the sites that promote music.
Yes It will democratize music, with all that it implies. I don't think there is any way to get around it. Niche music like free jazz will probably not be very popular...but we may be surprized with some of the crossovers.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
Let's do a smug little comparison here:
bin Laden: Thinks he knows better than the rest of the civilized world.
Rosen: Thinks she knows better than the rest of the civilized world.
bin Laden: Refuses to acknowledge legitimacy of modern social mores.
Rosen: Refuses to acknowledge legitimacy of modern technology.
bin Laden: Believes his moral values are more important than your freedoms.
Rosen: Believes corporate profits are more important than your freedoms.
bin Laden: Poses an enormous threat to the freedoms and values we have built for ourselves.
Rosen: Poses an enormous threat to the freedoms and values we have built for ourselves.
bin Laden: Responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center and four commercial aircraft.
Rosen: Responsible for the destruction of the most comprehensive music archive ever assembled by man.
bin Laden: Responsible for ~4000 deaths.
Rosen: Responsible for 0 deaths.
bin Laden: Unmitigated asshole
Rosen: Unmitigated asshole.
Okay, so Rosen wins on the bodycount. That doesn't she and her cronies shouldn't be watched very closely.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I understand - and in fact I agree. The legal weight of a license is more important than the intent, because any number of circumstances can change the intent of a copyright holder. (Most commonly, the copyright changes hands for one reason or another, and the new owner feels differently than the old.)
That's why I based my post on quotes from the license texts, rather than on quotes from commentators. I still don't see how a lawyer could conclude that the output of gcc is covered by the GPL - unless either
a) he has a very shallow understanding of technical issues and is confused by the difference between a program and its output, or
b) he didn't read the auxilliary license texts such as that found in libgcc1.c to cover the corner case of the runtime library ... or
c) "derivative work" really does have such a loose definition under copyright law as to include the assembly language output of gcc, which is not copied verbatim out of any gcc source, even instruction-by-instruction, but calculated on the fly ... or
d) he is being overly cautious to cover his backside
I'm guessing (d). Well, whatever, go ahead and don't use gcc in-house if you truly think your counsel knows the issues. It's what you pay him for, after all. I think he's overly paranoid, but I don't have a problem with paranoia - it's quite useful sometimes.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
Not at all.
The RIAA et al may be busy litigating, but with the rise of peer to peer networks, everyone with an Internet connection has instant access to almost any sort of music or other data he or she desires.
That is a big win for consumers. And by their nature, peer to peer networks are difficult to target legally.
They may not last forever, but for now, consumers have some incredibly powerful tools at their disposal.
-John
Politics makes strange bedfellows, and your lover one day may be your killer the next. So its time we acknowledge our corporate and even political allies -- if only temporarily, and on this specific issue -- in the fight against the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA for our rights regarding fair use (and beyond) of intellectual property. This is simply about interests. Right and wrong are for the most part relative -- for some things, such as murder and rape, there is a clear right and wrong. For others, such as intellectual property, all is relative and a matter of your viewpoint. It is in our interests that we be able to trade any files we want freely.
So, here's a listof our two allies and the reasons they're our allies. They consist of the audio-hardware industry (i.e., MP3-player makers), the computer hardware industry (i.e., computer OEMs such as Gateway, Dell, IBM, etc etc), and the Hard-drive industry (which is in kept very profitable largely due to people who want to store 80GB of mp3s or wmas).
1. SonicBlue (RioVolt), Archos (Jukebox HD), Intel (Concert Audio), Apple (iPod), TDK (Mojo), and other makers of MP3-players. They are basically immune from any of the RIAA/MPAA's ridiculous attempts to pin responsibility on the makers of a product for the users actions with that product (as, I believe, if the constitution is upheld, so will software developers eventually be). It is not in their interest at all that music be solidly protected and not traded online -- in fact, this is against their interests. The MP3-player business depends on the trading of music files over the internet. Without the swapping of millions of mp3, wma, and ogg files over Morpheus and LimeWire, the companies that make MP3-players are out of business (if that's their only product) or out of one profitable market (if that's one of their products). These companies most likely will fight and fight hard on our side and against the MPAA/RIAA. Right now, most of them are keeping hands off, because business is fine for them, and we are fighting their indirect legal battle for them. But should the restriction of trading threaten their business, they'll step in.
2. Gateway, Dell, IBM, Compaq, Apple, HP, and other OEMs. Part of what supplies their business is the online world of trading. People buy computers expecting to be able to use them to trade sound and video files, and to store enormous amounts of these files on them. Without that ability, their sales will drop, as their products will be less useful. If protections are build directly into the hardware, sales will really take a hit, as people will be more likely to stick with their current systems.
3. Makers of hard drives. The fact that MP3s and WMAs are small for the amount of information they contain hasn't stopped people from obtaining huge amounts of them in GB.
These are three relatively obvious allies that I thought of off the top of my head. There may be many more. Indeed, our allies in one cause -- i.e., MP3-makers in the cause against the RIAA -- may be our foes in another (i.e., the right to modify their firmware software and distribute the modifications). However, that is not relevant. You use and rally people and organizations where they help you; where they don't, you fight against them. It is up to us to figure out who should be our allies for for obvious profit-margin reasons and alert them to the reality of how their interest lies in supporting us.
In response to this, please feel free to comment on any of the 3 allies I mentioned and add some of your own.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen