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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.
I don't think it's illegal, they're free to make them, and I'm free to not buy them. Simple as that.
They can either make it hard to dupilicate (read rip) cd's OR take a cut on every blank (audio) cd made. .... Assuming this holds up (which it should)
... Have you ever bought a box of those?), DATs, and MDs compared to how much they think they loose by people not buying CDs since they pirate them.
:-)
What they will have to do is figure out if they make more from the pennies they get on those blank Audio CDs (Humm
In this case, the RIAA cant have their cake if you can't eat it
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
Isn't the CD-R "tax" only levied on "music" CD-Rs (The more expensive kind that you always pass up for the same brand but cheaper "normal" CD-Rs next to them)? At some point, home audio CD-recorders would only use the "music" CD-R variety, as the sale of those included a royalty payment. I didn't think there was a royalty included on normal CD-Rs.
They steal your music, your culture, your ideas, your stories, your language, mass produce it, shrink-wrap it and then sell it back to you.
This is exactly the problem... The RIAA/MPAA are the forces driving western culture into the ground, creating generations of bumbling, sex-mad idiots with carbon-copy personalities and giving capitalism a bad name.
Aside from any legal problems, I think it's damned unethical the way today's media giants operate.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
...which is why I'm as pissed off about it now as I am, whereas just a week ago I simply shrugged and thought: "well, that's for people who want to copy Britney records is all".
... right, didn't think so) disk in the mail. Guess what? I couldn't review it until I remembered there was a half broken diskman up in the attic somewhere because it was copy protected and couldn't be played on a cd-rom drive (I don't have - or didn't think I had - a regular cd player, it's either cd's in cd-rom drives or records for me, thank you). This is an album that will sell poorly by major label standards, even if it sells extremely well (two thousand copies at most). No one on Napster++ is going to be interested in mp3's I rip off it (not that I do, but ...). Finally, it's something that will appeal primarily to a somewhat technophile audience likely to play it on a cd-romplayer - why the fuck do they do this? Is this worth alienating the 1000 or so fans Oval has? Don't think so...
Today I got a review copy of an Oval (raise your hands if you've heard about them
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
I was in school at the time, and our University had maybe a couple CD burners for student use, and that was actually later than 1992. Broadband was available only at work and in the computer labs. Our dorms didn't start getting ethernet until a year later.
So in 1992, when the RIAA managed to get the law passed compensating them for piracy, there was a whole lot less digital piracy occurring simply because most people didn't have access to equipment to make digital copies. It seems we now have the choice between allowing copy protection or increasing the compensation to the RIAA if we assume that the 1992 law was just. :-(
Nevertheless, piracy will continue. If I buy CDs that force me to use a special player, you can bet that I'll decide to rip them to mp3s just so I can use XMMS. The RIAA could argue that piracy will continue, and they should be compensated accordingly, though now they can claim that hard drives, memory sticks, compact flash, and smart media storage also contribute to their allegedly lost sales and that these should also be taxed.
end of line
(Oddly, for such a tech-savvy guy, he's not set up for secure credit-card contributions over the internet; most campaign web sites are. I usually send amounts totalling $1-2K a year to various campaigns -- usually because their opponent annoys me -- and I almost always contribute by CC.)
So why don't the Linux vendors get a cut of the blank CD media tax? Only seem fair.
Hell, why worry about the occasional dist that you download?
How would you feel about sending some money towards N'Sync each and every day because you use CD-R for daily incremental backups?
Sure, you could use CD-RWs, but that requires you to track them, blank them, etc. With a CD-R you can just label them and toss them into the archive vault.
Of course that pimple-faced kid buying a 100-pack at Costco is probably not using them for backups. But so what? Do I have to spend a week in jail every week because some rapists went unpunished? Do I have to spend two weekends picking up trash, under court supervision, because some drunk drivers went uncaught? Then why do I have to pay this "pirating" tax on media destined to archive my source code and mail box?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
now that we have 2390482398 copies of the same general idea posted... i have a new one to add to the melee.
what is going to happen when the people who use operating systems produced by people outside this company... aren't able to access the music on a copy-protected cd?
"no, i'm sorry mom. you can't use your imac to listen to that cd because the record companies don't want you to."
You mean like the U.S. Government taxing your income, then taxing it again when you invest it and make money? And taxing it again if you use that money to pay an employee?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
And several million voters got used to Napster.
And several billion dollars says Napster shouldn't exist and "fair use" is theft.
And disillusioned customers stop buying music, so the record companies have the worst year in a long time... Also this attracts the attention of the Senate... Now who wins?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
(Disclaimer: I think the tax on recordable media is stupid and completely unjustifiable - it is not the job of the government to compensate people for flawed business models)
Assuming that you can somehow justify paying a tax on recordable media, IIRC the way it works right now is that the copyright owners get a proportion of the money based on the sales of the particular records.
Records which are copy-protected should simply be removed from the equation and everything should continue the way it is. Why is this so hard?
Mmmm.. Donuts
Meanwhile, since the major labels are ALL part of the major entertainment companies, they've figured out how to cross-promote like hell, which may be part of how they are succeeding better than usual at keeping their lame crap on top - people like what they already know and they make damn sure you know about it. And if you don't believe me, ask yourself how many events you've seen on ABC where Brittany, that boy band, and Aerosmith are all present, sometimes on the stage at the same time, and said "Fuck me mickey".
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
The recording industry gets a tax on blank digital media....In other words they get PAID for every blank piece of media.. NOW they want to make it so you CAN'T record on said media? Then why should they get PAID then? In fact why shouldn't they HAVE TO REFUND all that $$? Greedier bastards have never roamed the earth....
"Floop!" said the tar pit...
I buy my music from used music stores. I get the same wuality music, its cheaper, the money stay locally and it dosn't go to the riaa.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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 have two questions: First, does this mean by buying a CDR, I am legally allowed to copy any music whose copyrights are owned by the RIAA? and Second, if I do not record any music on any of those CDs, can I send the RIAA a bill for a refund of that money?
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
And disillusioned customers stop buying music, so the record companies have the worst year in a long time...
...
...
... I remember the Donnas back when they didn't suck ... do you?) needs some form of label support to pay the atrocious bills of a studio that knows what it's doing.
OK, I shouldn't really do this, but wtf
Over the past two years or so, over here in the Netherlands at least, more and more "music afficionado's", meaning: "kids who bother to shell out bucks for music other than major label schtick", have been drifting towards more-independent-than-thou electronica, foregoing their usual diet of avantpop and guitar noise etc.
Why? Lemme take a guess
Like it or not, every form of guitar music excepting the most specialist garage thrash that gets recorded on two track cassette recorders as a matter of principle (as you can see, my own credentials are perfectly in order as well
On the other hand, for modern day electronica, all you need is a fairly average desktop PC (running Windows or MacOS, I'm sorry to say*), a cd burner and a few thousand EUR or so to press vinyl copies. No record label *ever* gets involved.
The result is that all truly original music nowadays gets made on a desktop computer, not by some geeky fellows in a mouldy practice space. Why bother with the latter if you can have near perfect sound quality and a near perfect materialisation of your musical vision at a tenth of the cost?
Support these independent electronica artists by buying their albums, eschew major label shit, and sooner or later you'll have turned the entire musical landscape around just because there's no more need for out of the ordinary equipment to make out of the ordinary music.
*Maybe some open source sound app developers should take a few pointers from Win/Mac freeware/shareware developers on how to develop music software? Please? I'd love to switch over completely to Linux, but unfortunately, most audio apps suck
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
And several billion dollars says Napster shouldn't exist
Several more billion dollars says Napster should exist. However, the PC and broadband industries--both of which collapsed in the wake of the Napster decision--do not spend their billions buying Congressmen. (Well, the surviving portion of the broadband industry does, but only because it has been consolidated into the hands of content owners, who of course contributed their billions against Napster.)
The sad thing is that there was another industry which collapsed, though not quite as precipitously, at exactly the time of the Napster decision. I'm speaking, of course, about the recording industry. All throughout 2000, when Napster grew from almost-zero to 80 million users, IIRC, record sales increased to record levels (yay, a pun!). Sure the economy was good, but 2000 had IIRC the largest rate of increase in something like a decade. (And the economy was good for most of that decade.) Now 2001 is a terrible year for the record industry--which they blame on "piracy", of course, completely disregarding the fact that the decline started almost precisely when Napster got shut down.
Of course there are other interpretations for why record sales sucked this year, e.g. "the music available sucked." But this is precisely the point--the music you heard about sucked. Maybe the fact that it was suddenly much more difficult (not just Napster, but even more the demise of independent online radio, also due to RIAA lawsuits) to hear about new bands and sample their music had something to do with this??
The Napster case was just like the Sony Betamax case...the only difference was which side won. We know what the long-term consequences of losing the Betamax case were for the MPAA--roughly half of their income. The comparison with the RIAA's "victory" over Napster should prove enlightening...
BUT...Microsoft's own EULA -- which in their own words is a legal agreement -- states that if the original media is required to play the game (as is the case here), then it is permissible to make a backup copy of the game CDs. To quote:
So as you can see there is a major contradiction here. Microsoft explicitly and legally states that it is okay to make backup copies, but they implicitly state that it is not. Are they contradicting their own agreement here? Is this legal?
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Ironically (and in the serves them right category), I suggest that another significant part of this drop was very possibly attributable to their attack, crippling and ultimately shutting down of Napster this year.
:-).
Napster was providing the function that radio used to (before the proliferation and fragmentation of genres marginalized its effect) of introducing people to new music.
That is people maybe weren't as able this year as last year to find the good (non-boy band) stuff to buy
At least for myself, I know in 2000, Napster introduced me to a number of artists whose CD's I subsequently bought. There was also the ripple effect of my introducing my sister and friends (who were not downloading from Napster) to music they subsequently bought. I don't find the time to download whole albums and burn my own CD's
I'm also not one of the keen ones who moved on to other systems after Napster was crippled and I know I've bought less music this year.
...if I were the music industry I would point out that vastly more music sits on hard drives than CDs, and hard drives are exempt from royalties under the Digital Audio Recording Act.
However, it seems to me they could just broaden the scope of royalties to INCLUDE harddrives, and make it definitively legal to download and exchange music over the 'net.
It would be worth it for me to pay an extra $50 for my new HD if I knew I never had to hear about or deal with the RIAA again.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
He He, two moderator points left and I decide to give up that democratic right and post instead.
I'd put it down to the incomahole.
Lemme tell you what I mean.
Near on twenty years ago I started fiddling around with computers, and had much fun doing so. That was in the days when ones operating system was written in stone. In the days when the OS was burnt onto a rom and they had to get it right when they went for a burn 'coz it cost an awful amount of money when they got it wrong.
Then came along HD's and it was worked out,
one no longer had to give so much commitment to accuracy, one could issue the operating system in software, sort of flashupgrade on steroids, and charge in the process. Yeah big time, well clever keep em in the dark and suck em dry. Well the chickens are coming home to roost sorry.
Economics on its most real level, is about resource management and I think us homo saps are making a poor fist of it. Raping the present and mortgaging the future. Why? Maybe because of intellectual capitalism.
The understanding of how computers work should be shared, not hoarded. The proliferation of different computer languages demonstrates the antithesis to this idea. Almost as though kind of following the fat wallet and empty bollocks syndrome grows bigger antlers, irrelevant of the environment of ones children. They vainly try to delineate logoize encapsulate alienate obfuscate towards a fat wallet and empty bollocks as though that was the sum total of what life means. Capture the intellectual territory by beating the shit out people if they do not agree with your labels.
Well to end all this, I would like to say I think intellectual capitalism stinks and resource capitalism has a grain of sense.
Init nice to waste karma when you are that old and fucked up.
Peter
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Hate to be unpopular here, but:
Given the law's emphasis on protecting against serial copying, this hardly seems open and shut to me. The AHRA requires them to allow first-generation digital copies, but mandates preventing serial copying. Nobody foresaw when the law was written that the home computer would take control of serial copying out of the hands of the music and music-reproduction-hardware industries. Last time the hardward industries were all lined up on the pro-copying side. I don't really see who's gonna line up on that side now, because there's no clear scent of money.
Seems to me this is yet another law on the big piles of things to be rejiggered when the idea of copyright finally catches up to digital distribution.
- It's still possible to make *analog* copies of cd's, just not *digital* ones. Does the law state anything about allowing analog (imperfect) but not digital (perfect) copies?
.mp3 "copy" of a track is not perfect even at the highest rate: mp3 is a lossy algorithm.
Don't know about the law, but a
A couple years back, the state of arizona thought it would be sneaky and try to screw drug dealers out of more money. They created a cannabis tax - The idea being that if you were caught with a bunch of bud that you hadn't paid taxes on, they could use the "tax" to extort that money out of you.
Funny thing is, because they had the tax, they had to then create a cannabis license. So, people started applying for licenses to sell cannabis.
When all was said and done, and everything went through court, it was decided that these people who had applied for and received cannabis sale licenses and had paid the tax, could not then be prosecuted for selling cannabis.
So...If I pay a tax on the blank media I buy - a tax that was put in place to compensate the various content holders for "piracy" - does that not then give me the implicit right to use that media for "piracy"? I mean, hell, I *did* pay the tax after all...
I agree that the music stinks, but it DOES sell...
Since BSB, Nsync, Britney, etc are "made" bands instead of real musicians, there aren't issues like 'artistic differences' and the band members getting a cut of the music that they wrote (because they didn't write it.) They're just paid for being celeberties and singing/dancing/appearing in person at events. And in terms of enconomics, it brings in billions for the music labels and sellers of associated merchandise because the 12-year-olds eat it up.
Heck, these so-called 'musicians' are not even artists. They don't make their music. They don't design their costumes or choreography. They just perform routines made by nameless individuals in the Ministry of Art.*
Until the boyband/breastimplantgirl music sales model doesn't bring in the dough anymore, we can expect the industry to shove these groups down our throats even harder. We'll just have to hope that they shove too hard resulting in the groups being "old," "stale" or "uncool" in the eyes of the kids. This and nothing else will bring them down.
*the "Ministry of Art" is akin to the Ministry of Truth and the Ministry of Love.
AOL lists 109 open jobs in Dulles, Reston, Manassas, etc., VA
A google search for Herndon, VA reveals the following in the first couple pages. Surely some of these companies would like to see lots of people spending a lot of time on the Internet (or least finding significant value in it).
Foundry Networks
12801 Worldgate Drive, 6th Floor
Herndon, VA 20170
Directions to Inktomi in Herndon, VA
Monument One
1Plaza Ridge I, Suite 100 2975 Worldgate DPlaza Ridge I, Suite 100
Herndon, VA 20170
From Road Runner's jobs page
Accounting Department (Herndon, VA)
Administration Department (Herndon, VA)
Commercial Services Department (Herndon, VA)
Broadband Technology Department (Herndon, VA)
Operations Department (various locations)
However, he mentions the AHRA. The interesting part about the AHRA is that it places a tax on certain blank media, and mandated certain copy protection schemes in digital recording hardware. The record companies get the money from the tax. In exchange for this, consumers got some pretty broad music copying rights.
I think the theory he is thinking about is that consumers have bought copying rights via that tax, and so that the record companies can't take steps to stop that copying, since they have accepted the money from that tax.
Somewhat related, is the fact that a spokesperson for Philips, interviewed in a german trade publication says that copy protected CD's are not according to the specs laid down by Philips, and as such are not real CD's, they will be less functional and have a shorter lifespan. And Philips expect all future CD's to be specifically labled to this effect ("This disk is not a real CD, will not play in most equipment and will have a much shorter lifespand" *snicker*)
German Yahoo has the story:
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating