Slashdot Mirror
Is CD Copy Protection Illegal?
ribbiting writes "US Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. is asking RIAA execs to explain how they can collect royalties on various blank media at the same time that the RIAA members are implementing copy protection mechanisms, with particular reference to the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992."
Glad someone is asking the question.
FINALLY! Some congress-critters are beginning to think that the RIAA might not be the next best thing since apple-pie. I wonder if this is in any way the result of the wonderful efforts of this community and others like it. It is a nice thing to see when you see the Great Machine begin to slowly turn the right way...
But don't stop now. Not only should you continue to keep those letters and emails flowing, but you should also send new letters and email praising the efforts of those congress-folk who make a good descision, after all, they like to get a pat on the head as much as the next person...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Did you bother to read the article at all?
They're getting PAID by us consumers NOT to make copy-protected CDs under an existing law.
The question is whether it's fair to REQUIRE consumers to pay a "tax" to the record companies for the privilege of being able to copy CDs for personal use and then for the record companies to copy-protect CDs anyway. It's a great deal for the record companies at the consumers' expense: free money and they don't have to do anything in return.
If they're going to sell copy-protected CDs, they should no longer get their "protection money" for blank CD sales.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
It's not a tax, it's a "levy." :) But the RIAA doesn't really have anything to do with that in Canada. The money goes to Canadian artists, based on record sales, which is the part that bugs me. They could give all this cash (22c/disc, currently) to promote up-and-coming bands, but it's all going to Celine Dion and Bryan Adams. GenericGarageBand doesn't see a dime. Not to mention every time you download and burn *BSD (Linux/Solaris/whatever), you're giving money to the music industry.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
You aren't free to not pay the taxes on blank media that they want (except by not buying blank media, but a lot of us have legitimate need for CDRs, etc).
Actually as far as CDR's are concerned you are free to avoid paying the tax, just buy Data CDRs instead of Music CDRs. There is virtually no difference between the media, except that Audio CD to CDR burners such as you might have in a audio component system, won't work with the Data CD. CDR burners for PCs don't care.
Of course making a copy of an audio CD onto a Data CDR would be a violation of the same act, but until the RIAA and the recording industry in general start complying, I can't see that they should have any expectation that consumers will.
Why is it that this hasn't come up before, and does anyone know how this act affects MP3's? Should they be considered legal as long as you burn them to media on which you have paid the royalty tax?
Work for Change & GET PAID!
SCMS & the blank disc royalty was the bargain struck between congress and the industry to allow private home copying. If they fail to uphold their side of the deal it's only fair that they should be held accountable.
Sorry, but this isn't true unless you're buying the special Audio CD-Rs not generic blank media. Many(most?) home audio recording equipment will only support the Audio CD-Rs. There is no tax for the computer CD-Rs...
The main thrusts of the law are:
-No copyright infringment suit can be brought against someone making home digital recordings.
-Retailers have the right to sell copying equipment and media, so long as they contain serial copy protection.
-The RIAA collects a royalty of 2% on copying equipment and 3% on media.
That the RIAA might be violating this law by making copy-proof cds is not immediately apparent from a quick reading. In fact, the definitions of what is and is not a "digital musical recording" do not seem to hinge in any way on the "copyability" of the recording, and the only qualification for entitlement to payments is that an entity is making and distributing recordings so defined.
The point that copy-proof cds violate the spirit of this law is a good one. I think that any argument that the letter of the law is violated is weak, however. Anyone who can determine otherwise would make me happy, though, since IANAL.
As a final point, the fact that a congressman is looking into this might make violation of the letter of the law irrelevant since congress, of course, has the power to create new law.
Do move to VA, it is a very nice state :)
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
Doesn't look like there is actually anything in the Audio Home Recording Act that says that the RIAA members can't do what they are doing. (Moral considerations aside.) Apparently, the drafters of the Act back in 1992 didn't think that there would ever be enough copy protection to worry about. Of course, that's why the Act was passed-- the recording industry was all whipped up about the revenue it was going to loose as a result of people making digital copies.
:
Here's the text of the Audio Home Recording Act.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/ch10.html
(Arranged in easy to navigate sections from Cornell Law School)
http://www.hrrc.org/html/ahra.html
(Full text on one page from Audio Home Recording Rights Coalition)
Subchapter C is the part that is particularly interesting in that it sets out the details on royalty payments. You will have to cross reference to the definitions section is Subchapter A, however, in order to fully understand who is entitled to collect payments. Love the method of splitting up the royalty payments!
Finally someone is paying attention to this issue. I've posted this information in a couple of slashdot threads, and here it is again. It's one of the most incredible recording industry lies/ripoffs. Maybe now it will get some attention.
...
...
The upshot of it is that every time you purchase a digital audio recorder, or blank digital audio recording media, such as audio CDRs, you pay a small statutory royalty into a fund. This fund is collected by the Federal Government, and turned over directly to the music industry. The name of the fund is the DART fund. DART stands for "Digital Audio Recording Technology". The best source of information on the DART fund is right here
These documents are very interesting. They show how the money was paid out. The law was written to allow all of the major copyright interests to gather together and collect all the money in one lump sum. According to the first report on the page, we find that 99.997% (LITERALLY!) of all of the statutory royalties collected on blank digital audio media (mostly CDRs), and digital audio recording devices went to the following organizations:
Broadcast Music, Inc. (``BMI'');
the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (``ASCAP'');
SESAC, Inc. (``SESAC'');
the Harry Fox Agency (``HFA'');
the Songwriters Guild of America (``SGA'');
and Copyright Management, Inc. (``CMI'')
Copyright Management, Inc. is a blanket organization that represents all of the major record labels.
In other words, all of the people who are raising hell that they aren't being paid when people burn music onto CDRs are being
you got it
paid every time a blank CDR is purchased!
However, nowhere in any of these web pages will you find the actual dollar figures. The reports go to laughable extremes to avoid disclosing exactly how much money we are talking about. For instance, according to the report, for the 1995 funds collected, 99.998034% was paid to the music industry, 0.001966% was paid to one individual claimant, and 0.000614% was paid to Ms. Alicia Evelyn.
I obtained the actual royalty yearly figures by contacting Ms. Evelyn, one of the individual claimants. Ms. Evelyn is a songwriter who, unable to obtain any royalty payments from ASCAP for her work, petitioned the copyright office directly for payment. She read me these numbers over the phone which she received in the course of her research. If you do the math, you'll find that she received a few pennies for her efforts. Literally.
Here are the total amounts collected year by year since 1992. These statutory royalties were all paid out to the recording industry:
1992 $118,227.42
1993 $520,162.84
1994 $521,999.64
1995 $473,592.20
1996 $397,152.52
1997 $969,178.06
1998 $1,978,457.93
1999 $3,551,030.86
2000 $5,285,246.32
So, while on the one hand, the music industry is claiming that they are not being paid when individuals make audio CDRs of their music, yet on the other hand, they are quietly collecting millions of dollars in statutory royalties from consumers when they purchase blank digital audio media.
The key here is that these are statutory royalties. They are NOT a tax. They are described as royalties in the law, and they function exactly as royalties.
A royalty is what you pay in exchange for the right to make a copy. This is the ordinary meaning of the term "royalty", as it is used throughout copyright law, and there is absolutely no evidence that it means anything else in the context of the AHRA.
I submit that by accepting these statutory royalty payments from the general public, the recording industry, and every major record label claimed this money, has incurred an obligation to permit the public to exercise the rights that they have paid for, to the tune of millions of dollars per year.
This is NOT an issue of fair use. This is an issue of consumers receiving the rights that they have paid for.
Kudos for Rep. Boucher. We need more representatives of his caliber with his level of committment to the rights of the people.
Wow, not only did he think arresting Dmitri Sklyarov was a bad idea:
)
m )
p ?CID=N00002171&cycle=2000)
This unfortunate legal action highlights the overly broad terms of the criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). It clearly demonstrates the intrusion of these provisions on the ability of American citizens to exercise their legally protected fair use rights,
(http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/sklyarov.htm
but he also gets that the entertainment industry wants money off the public everytime you listen to music or watch a movie.
As NTIA recognized in its letter, one of the foremost concerns reflected in the Congressional report upon passage of the DMCA was that changes in the law could chill the exercise of consumers' traditional "fair use" rights, and move us all toward a "pay-per-use" society.
Unfortunately, the announced exceptions to the rule are so narrow as to be practically meaningless. Fair use is not protected.
...Congress in its next session should act to prevent the creation of a "pay per use" society, in which what is available today on the library shelf for free is available in the future only upon payment of a fee for each use.
(http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/payperuse.ht
Wow! That'll teach the entertainment industry to only give him $18,500 when the telephone industry gave him $49,000 (http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/detail.as
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
I agree completly.
I can't remember the number of times I've sat here and listened to all the armchair QBs on slashdot say "If I had the chance I'd make a diffrence.". Well, guess what! This is your chance. Get up, find a stamp and do your part. It's easy, even a post card will work. Even if doubt your letter will effect anything, don't worry it's cheap, easy and it will definitly benifit a postal system that could use some help anyway.
Communication is about content not presentation.
You're wrong. The "audio-only" CDRs are more expensive only because they are subject to the RIAA's royalty. "Normal" cdrs, the kind that work only in computer cd recorders, are not subject to this tax. It makes no sense, because people with stand-alone cd recorders are probably more likely to be using them for legitimate purposes (home and small studios), but that's how it is. The "audio-only" cdrs differ from the data/audio/whatever ones only in that they have a certain bit set in the atip (which is what makes standalone cd recorders accept them).
Yes, in Canada all CD media is surtaxed, but the same is not true in the US.
One played it, the other one didn't. Bad enough for me. Ordinary cd's play in *both* drives (interestingly enough, the newer drive, a burner I sometimes use to play damaged cd's, failed to see there was an audio cd present at all, while the older drive played the disk just fine except for a few extra glitches which weren't supposed to be there.)
This happened in Windows ME (work, sorry) *and* Linux.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
In Canada, the "blank media" levy is bigger and applied to more media, including data CD-R discs, so it's even more upsetting. Activists there have already noted that it's incompatible with the arguments for anti-fair-dealing measures. The record companies have to give up one or the other (at least!). The earliest mention of this issue that I've seen is in the September 14, 2001 submission of Eric R. Smith, PhD to the Canadian government's copyright reform comment process, and flagged in a reply comment of Matthew Skala.
But of course, it wasn't news for Slashdot until a U.S. Congressman thought to mention it.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
The article says 'sightings are rare' - don't think so, see here.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Boucher's Email
WASHINGTON, D.C. OFFICE
2187 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
202-225-3861
DISTRICT OFFICES
188 East Main Street
Abingdon, Virginia 24210
540-628-1145
112 North Washington Avenue
Pulaski, Virginia 24301
540-980-4310
1 Cloverleaf Square, Suite C-1
Big Stone Gap, Virginia 24219
540-523-5450
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
What the label is providing is knowledge about how to sell music, and how to make music that sells, which is only partially related to how to make music that sounds good. But what they're really providing in return for your soul, first-born child, and ownership of your music is that they're running the business and hiring you to play music for them, like a bar owner hiring you to play for the evening, unlike the computer venture capitalist deal where the VC lends you money, owns much of the stock, but you run the business as well as making the product. Why can't you just buy studio time yourself? Theoretically you can, and if you can market your music successfully, cool. Studios are a lot less expensive than they used to be, but advertising is more expensive, but delivering product is less expensive. It's getting to be time to kick the chair out from under the traditional industry structure.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Which is sad, really, because there's an unwritten agreement that DAT and MiniDisc recorders will treat analog inputs as if they contained copyrighted materials which the user has no rights in.
In his What's Wrong With Copy Protection, John Gilmore says
So much for fair use.
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
Rep. Boucher who was rerferred to by John Perry Barlow as "The only person in Congress who gets it." (at the O'Reilly Conference)has some ideas on Fair Use that are well worth reading. As a VA resident who has met and discussed DMCA and fair use with Congressman Boucher, he needs your support in helping to correct many of the problems with the DMCA as it exists, by letting YOUR Congressperson know that you, as a constituent, want them to support the changes. They need your vote, without being elected, they don't get the lobby dollars that the copyright industry scatters around DC like confetti on New Years Eve. Point out to them they work for you not Disney, not Vivendi, etc., etc, not Hilary Rosen or Jack Valenti. They will get the point.
For music, there are 2 kinds of copyrights:
PA - Performing Arts
SR - Sound Recording
Since most classical music was written before ~1922, there is no PA copyright for it in general; hoever, a specific arrangement or orchestration can be copyrighted. Most sheet music of classical music is coprighted for this reason, unless it's aiming to be as close to the original score as possible (then it would be public domain).
Every recording of classical music (or any music) is SR copyrighted. Since not many recordings exist from before ~1922, you can safely assume the recording is copyrighted.
Boucher has nothing to do with UCITA's acceptance in Virginia.
Congressman Boucher is a Member of the United States Congress -- the federal legislative body.
UCITA was adopted in the state of Virginia by the Virginia General Assembly, Virginia's legislative body.
As a U.S. Representative, Boucher never voted for or against UCITA.