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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.
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
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
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
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.
"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
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...
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...
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.