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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.
Except that they get a bit of money for every blank tape or CD as compensation for us being able to do those same copies they now want to inhibit.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Y'know, I'm at the point where I'd move to VA just to be able to someday vote for him ;-)
According to the US constitution, Congress may pass law to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
But it doesn't have to.
And several million voters got used to Napster.
I doubt that there will be any dramatic steps in either direction, but disallowing and preventing everything probably won't happen.
The issue is whether or not they should be receiving money for every piece of blank media sold if they're selling cd's that can't be copied.
Well, ok, it's either copy protection or the 1992 law they use to make a few bucks, obviously. I have this feeling that they will lose much more by trying to enforce copy protection (and by giving up that law, possibly) than just letting things go this way. Just think about it: you can circumvent copy protections -- that should be quite clear by now -- but you can't circumvent compulsory taxes so easily :-)
A few years back they added a "tax" to recordable media to "help compensate the recording industry" for pirating that happens on such media.
Now, if the RIAA were to "prevent" (haha) such pirating through copy protection, why should they get to double-dip by continuing to collect the revenues from that "tax"?
You can't have your Cake and Rip it too.
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
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).
That's the real problem, in my opinion. You are assumed guilty without even a chance of proving your innocence.
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
I think we all know the answer though. A massive bribe by the RIAA's lobbyists should answer any of the congressman's dilemas.
--
WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
This seems similar to the Bells and AT&T selling the consumer Caller ID, then CID blocker to the telemarketers, then selling caller id blocker blocker to the consumer, then ....
They must be, and this (which I, like many other /.-ers, apparently, hadn't thought of before even though it makes perfect sense) proves it.
Or does it? 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?
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
From the article:
The labels are worried that the rise of home CD-burners has eaten into album sales, particularly after the worst year in a decade for the music industry.
These sales figures couldn't possibly shaped by the fact that the RIAA is releasing the shittiest music in a decade, could it?
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
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?
The 'blank media' tax has been touted in every country it's been implimented in as a way to pay publishers and artists for the perceived costs of media copying, be it fair use or piracy.
In the U.S., the media companies get a large piece of that fee.
That they want the right to collect both this fee *and* impliment copy controls is what is being questioned here.
Personally, I think it should boil down to one or the other. Pay the tax or pay for copy protected CD's. Not that either is really effective, but...
Hopefully, Boucher will raise a large enough stink over this that it will actually cause some changes. Not likely, but there's always hope...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Intellectual property laws have done their job -- they've created a massive amount of stuff -- some good, some bad. But now the system is choking itself.
Copy protection schemes are the wrong target.
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!"
It depends on how they do it. If they do anything to your hardware to damage/disable it, then, it should be illegal. It should also be illegal to raise prices/lower quality for 'copy protection' reasons. I mean, making a CD that can't be copied without sacrificing sound quality/portability would be nice (for them) instead of making a CD that can destroy your equipment.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
As I pointed out in another discussion AHRA imposes penalties for manipulating the existing copy protection (SCMS) to prevent legitimate copying - so it makes sense that other technology would similarly be a violation of the AHRA.
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 that simple. According to the law, you have the right to make copies of the music you buy for personal use. In exchange for that right, the recording labels get a small amount of money from the sale of blank media. By attempting to make it impossible to copy CDs, the labels are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They want to collect money from the sale of blank media, while at the same time making it impossible to use that media for its intended purpose, thereby forcing the consumer to pay yet again for another copy of the same music.
In simpler terms, if I buy a CD, and want to burn a copy to keep in my car, that's my right, and the label gets compensated by collecting a small percentage from the sale of the blank CD. What they want to do, however, is collect that money, and by making it impossible for to make a copy, get me to buy another full-price copy for my car. That's doesn't seem fair. They either need to give up the money they collect from blank-media sales, or stop trying to prevent me from making copies.
But I suppose a few million in lobbying money will make it all come out in the labels' favor in the end. My few $$ as a consumer mean nothing in the face of the industry lobby. Won't it be great when we all have our Passports(tm) and can be charged every time we listen to a song?
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
Ah, we can explain that, Senator... I'll just write you an explanation... let me find a piece of paper... ah, here's one, in the ledger! A signature on the line there on the other side to prove our sincerity and... there you go! I think that should explain everything.
who this representative's backers are? I mean, most of the time you hear a politician say something like this to the media, it usually just means that he's fishing for some campaign money.
But maybe this isn't the case, maybe this guy is already backed by the CDR Companies / MP3 Device companies / Any company who doesn't profit from CD copy protection. Because almost certainly, that is why a question like this would be asked.
-- Dan
Because of the cayenne pepper that just got blow into my eyes. But I digress...
This is very good news. They certainly need to look into this practice, since rights we have been given by law are being taken away by corporations. Though I'd be grossly dissapointed if, as the comments at least make possible, this ends only the blank media royalty.
Though this isn't the only time fair use issues have been brought up. In the DeCSS case the judge was quite unapproving of the MPAA's thoughts on fair use... not that it ended up helping much.
The enemies of Democracy are
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!
is that the blank media tax (at least in Canada, and I think the States) goes exclusively to the music publishers. So everytime I download a new Slack version or whatever, I'm giving money to support N'Sync. That's the really criminal part. Why would you assume every blank CD is used to copy music that you didn't buy? If I'm making a backup copy of my legally purchased disc, why am I paying more money to give myself an extra?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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.
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.
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
Is CD copy protection legal?
Does that really change whether we will be saddled with it or not?
We all know the story:
ConHugeCo does something evil and of dubious legality. Someone calls them on it (like the high tech community's good friend Rick Boucher or the Justice Department, or Ralph Nader), the matter gets talking head time on the enws channels... gets debated for a while... maybe goes to court... drags on a few years... Congress passes a law that would have helped before the fact, but not after... even the media get bored with the story... and finally gets resolved with a slap on the wrist long to ConHugeCo after the issue has ceased to be relevant.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
along side this is a question i've had for a while: why, after paying this "tax" on blank media, have i not been considered to have paid for the copies i have made (or will make)? since it is assumed that i will use my blank media for music copies, why is it wrong for me to then use my blank media for copies of music?
geek friendly VPS's and free API enabled DNS : zerigo.com
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.
Actually as far as CDR's are concerned you are free to avoid paying the tax, just buy Data CDRs instead of Music CDRs.
Uhm, no, I think you're mixing up two different things.
There's audio-only cd-r's which only work in standalone audio cd burners. These are hideously expensive because the market for them is limited.
The ones you can use in computer cd burners (either the 74 minute/650 MB audio type or the 80 minute/700 MB type older stand alone cd players choke on) are cheaper because everyone wants them.
IIRC, for both you'll have to pay some sort of copyright tax.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
With the economy being the worst it's been in over a decade then the decline in album sales seems to be about right. I know a couple of things. 1) When I didn't have a job for eight months I didn't go out and blow money on luxury items like music. 2) At $20 + tax for most for most new releases I'm buying much less music than I did when CDs sold for about $15 a pop. The RIAA should take a good look at their pricing and product quality before blaming file sharing and CD buring for lower revenue.
Since you can rent studio time and since you can now market your music over the Internet, shouldn't most bands and artists be telling the RIAA to "blow!"?
Yeah, you would think. But the record companies seem to have convinced everyone that there is such a thing as a "star". Of course, everybody knows that stars were just an invention of the manufacturing divisions of the record industry giants. They complained to their bosses about always having to change the damn plates on the record press. They said "Hey, instead of promoting 50 artists who each sell 100,000 albums, could you please just have one artist who sells 50*100,000 albums? It would be *so* much more convenient and *profitable*.
So the record companies realized that they could make much more money by having 1 big star and mass producing copies than by having regional music with no economies of scale.
So every garage band and coffee house wannabe still labours under the illusion that one day they will be great. Maybe they will, but they won't be in control.
Not only are you paying a tax to the "music providers" for using a CD-R or CD-R/W or blank tape, they ARE NOT PAYING IT TO:
the musicians listed on MP3.com - where is their cut of the pie?
the indie recorder who got listed on Napster - where is their cut of the pie?
Face it - the money only goes to those musicians stupid enough to have signed a contract with a RIAA music provider. In which they lost their copyright ability to earn the most money from the sale of their music, and in return get less than a penny per song played from many dollars collected on the sale of the CD.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
So why don't the Linux vendors get a cut of the blank CD media tax? Only seem fair.
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."
when I compile your comment I get the following errors:: no such file
Line 3; undertermined character constant
Line 8; I_realize_Napster_is_not_equivalent_to_Fair_Use.h
can you help me?
Please help! I'm stuck inside my virtual reality headset!
(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
Does computer software have a similar 'right'? I seem to recall that software buyers have a right to make personal backup copies of install media just as media buyers do. If I am remembering correctly it would seem that the same arguments would apply to the attempts to copy protect software CDs as well.
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!
Incidentally I expect that the record companies make even more money from tax exemptions due to to what they claim are losses due to piracy in their account books but I don't have hard data on that.
-- SIGFPE
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.
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....
The Canadian law, IIRC, applied to both Data and Audio CD-Rs.
Worse, it was a pennies-per-minute charge, that varied according to media type (cheap for crappy analog tape, expensive for perfectly-reproducible CDDA).
I can see the RIAA if they get their hands on that notion. "Well, because music can be compressed to 128kbps and 10 hours placed on a CD, and the Audio-CD tax is $0.50 for a 74-minute CD, we believe we should now collect $4.50 for every data CD."
Mercifully, if Ms. Rosen tried it, I think even Congresscritters who don't get it would tell her to eat shit.
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 $49,000 (http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/detail.as
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Rep. Boucher has a brilliant idea here. Send him a note of support, especially if you live in the 9th district of Virginia: Rep. Rick Boucher jeff
It's not just boy bands. When Creed, Staind and Incubus were becoming huge I thought "Well at least it's better than Britney". Ever since Wish you were here and It's been a while got stuck in an endless loop on radio and MTV, I contend that that music is even worse. (needless to say it reminded me what was so bad about the Matchbox 20/Tonic/Third Eye Blind days)
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
While I was sitting here reading the comments, I realized that we have all seen this before.
The software industry went through this many years ago. They started with simple copy protection using 'bad sectors'. It was countered with various copying software. Then they added microscopic laser burned holes in the disks. That was counterered again by copying software like CopyIIPC (boy am I dating myself). Some tried various codes such as serial numbers and books with codes on certain pages. The algorithms were simple and the books got copied. Then most if not all but M$ gave up. I became too costly to keep trying.
Next was the movie companies with trying to copy protect video tapes. Very quickly there were companies making devices to circumvent that as well. Even magazines like Radio Electronics were publishing articles on how to build them. Then most gave up as well. Again too costly to keep trying.
The various movie stations like HBO, etc. tried too by scrambling their satallite transmissions. that too has been easily defeated and they are beginning to give up as well.
Cable companies tried it too when they were charging for each set connected. They were defeated as well. Then the government decided it should work like phone service and they could no longer charge for each set but only a house connection. (I'm glad someone sued them)
So I say let them keep trying to copy protect their CDs. It'll cost them more and more money and it will get feated time and time again. The focus should be on stooping them from getting this royalty on blank media. In 1992 there weren't too many people using CDs for anything but music. Today there are - computer software, Backups, videogames, etc.. They sould NOT be able to make money from something that has nothing to do with their business. That is the message we need to get to Rick Bouche.
Personally I use blanks to burn the latest distro ISO's. I use them to ... get this... actually back up legally bought software. I've only made about 10 actual audio CDs.
I back up everything onto CD. It's so nice. I've copied entire directory trees onto a CD. Just because.
I pay a 'what-if' tax on the media and such. No big deal. But the reason for the tax is kind of ridiculous. Not everyone is copying N*Sync or movies. Some of us are putting our own works on CD!
So as a home user we are paying tax on the RIGHT to use this technology?
It's a funny business. But how far up does the tax go? What if I run a mom-and-pop shop creating CD's for people who sing covers? Who is paying this tax? [please respond]
What if the 'new' Napster takes off? People are legally buying music to legally put it on CD. Either in a compressed format or a regualar CDDA form. So they pay taxes on illegal copying?
How about breaking the distribution monopoly the RIAA holds? Let's look into why we can't walk into a Media Play and create a CD in two minutes. I mean we've been wanting custom mixes for years.
Jeeeez
--
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
If some congress person raises the question, and suddenly he/she is silenced by a flood of lobbyist money (Boucher is not like that, is he?), then we are back to square one, and nothing is achieved, besides shining a bright light in this age of darkness for a little while.
Now, if this can build up a momentum of grass root movement, and put real pressure on the legislation people to change things, then that would be a kudo.
But that's a start.
The sad part is, he's the only one asking questions like this, and no one is listening except the choir.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
RockyJSquirel wrote:
Re:Why the hell was this at -1? (Score:1)
I.T.R.A.R.K. wrote:
Re:It's not just boy bands anymore (Score:-1)
by I.T.R.A.R.K. on Friday January 04, @07:32PM (#2788643)
(User #533627 Info | http://povo-hat.besmella-quake.com/test/)
Write fan mail to the band and tell them why you can't listen to their music anymore. It may not accomplish much beyond pissing off the band, but at least your voice will be heard. It's bands like that who care about every last fan, because they don't have many to begin with.
If your/our complaints reach the right people, we might have an uprising one of these days. You never know. But you'll never know unless you take the time to complain to someone. It's your right. Use it.
"Adequacy.org: Where congenital stupidity is not an option, but a requirement."
Rocky J. Squirrel
Listen to what he says people! Tell the bands why you won't buy thier music. Make them aware of what the RIAA is doing to thier sales!
(P.S. Mod up I.T.R.A.R.K., not me. I've got karma coming out of my ears)
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I've never burned audio to a CD, unless it was a file within the back-ups I've made. Never.
It really sucks when the RIAA assumes that every CD-R purchase is for copying music. I pay money for music, when I don't even work with music.
This year, I'm going to make it a point to write my US representatives about once a month, on this issue (and similar ones). I didn't mind (well, I do, but I've gained some apathy) when the RIAA made me pay money to them for backing up my data, in the interest of compensating others' "abuse of their artists". I do mind paying them money when they are actively preventing "abuse of their artists" (or at least attempting to).
I would urge all of you out there (that are US citizens, of course), to write to your representatives. Given enough letters saying (essentially) the same thing, the rep's (most likely) going to listen. Even with all the money raised and spent in election campaigns, they can't afford to ignore their constituents. To paraphrase Bill Cosby, "We brought you into that world, and we can take you out." Just let your reps know that you know this (well, gently let them know).
There is no 'e' in metaphor.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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...
I assume this double dip only applies to the "music" cdr's.
How can someone determine exactly what blank data cd's are being used for?
Ask 20 people the same question and you will get 20 completely different breakdowns.
Based on my burning habits, how much should be a per disk gift to the RIAA to cover their simulated paper loses?
If I had a decent vid capture card I would be saving tv shows to cdrom but not yet..
My last hundred burned cd's breakdown to this..
5 Playstation backups
yes I own the originals
5 Dreamcast stuff
not games but emu's, and extra stuff that others have made.
10 Audio cd's of music that I made.
I made - meaning original music. I sequence midi files and record and edit the final product in wav format.
5 computer game discs
yes I own the originals
15 Software discs
Software I have downloaded, like patches, IE updates, MS service packs, plugins, Netscape, driver updates, Star Office etc..
15 Linux distros and software
10 MP3 disks
mp3's that were converted from CD's I own or I created (see above). I use these in my home DVD player and my laptop when on the road.
15 data disks with pictures from my digital camera
5 data disks filled with prOn and car pictures from various usenet groups
5 data backups - various data files that need backed up
3 stuff I do not own..
d/l mp3's, game roms, cracked software etc..
7 coaster - ran into problems copying some of the above.. I could probably make this better but I try disc-disc on the fly first, if that doesnt work I see why (orignal scratched, copy protection that slows reading etc..) and try another method.
Is that 100?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I realize that the law in question is the AUDIO Home Recording Act, but how are other entertainment recordings (namely videos and DVDs) qualitatively different? Either the same (or similar) laws should apply to both, or be prepared to watch the RIAA sqeeze through those loopholes. DVD audio is already starting to catch on... and all it takes is one little video file on a music disc for them to call it a movie and sell it under those different standards. (I much prefer the converse, allowing us to copy DVDs for personal use)
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
It could be that the CD prices (blanks not the other kind) have fallen so much I don't bother with RW disks anymore for my perodic backups. Re formatting them takes too long. This has nothing to do with music of any kind and has everyting to do with keeping the family photo ablums up to date and the tax records, E-Mail and school homework projects archived. I quit using streaming tape. A 250 Meg backup on a tape takes a lot of time and isn't reliable. It's also a waste of time retensioning and reformatting them. I don't buy audio blank CD's because there is no reason to pay a tax to the music industry to back up my server.
The truth shall set you free!
Sony owns the license for the Memory Stick technology so anybody who isn't Sony that produces them has to pay Sony a cut for making them. Sony also owns Sony Music which is one of the big three of the RIAA.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
...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.
Perhaps we should "acquire" some 18-wheelers loaded up with blank audio CD-Rs, drive to Boston Harbor, and toss them in?
IANAL, but I feel pretty confident about this: You have the *right* to copy it, but you can't do it in any normal way because it would have to be a DMCA violation. Since DMCA is law, the law takes precedence over any agreement. Of course you could stamp (as in cd press) a perfect copy and it'd be legal (as you're not breaking any copyright method), so you can't claim the right has been entirely taken away from you. Thus your right exists, but as 99.9999% doesn't have a cd stamper around, you can't exercise it. It's like giving you TV broadcast rights in the US, but if and only if you send from the back of the moon.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I think this guy is one of the few we have in Congress that "get it" and IMHO one of the few in Congress not paid for by a major media conglomerate.
Although this is going to sound like a political commercial, I have followed this guys record, he has opposed virtually every fascist piece of legislation pushed by "big media".
I believe the linux and free software community should support him just like most of us support the EFF.
This sig is taken.
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.
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
It's great that you can complain about how mass media is destroying your culture... but what do you propose to do about it? Establish some government oversight preventing more than 20K copies of any CD from being distributed? Require the taxpayers to fund the publication of any artist who thinks they have something worth distributing?
Capitalism may be a poor method of resource distribution -- but there is none better.
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
...put that in your review. Or send it back saying that you won't bother to make a review of it if you can't play it in your (for you) normal player.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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...
Does that mean that the record companys can't do anything about someone making the copy for personal fair use of they break the DCMA?
No. The DMCA and AHRA are separate laws. The AHRA protects you from copyright violation suits, but not from liability from violation of the DMCA.
Come to think of it, when I had Napster at my beck and call I downloaded a lot of music (for a 56k guy, that is--if only I had my cable uplink back then!). But I also bothered to go out and buy CDs, something I seldom did before and haven't done since.
When I had Napster, I logged into its chatrooms, talked with people, and got pointers on what to listen to. Then I downloaded a few songs, listened--and if I liked I often went out and bought a CD. That's how I got intorduced to music like Cat Power and P.J. Harvey. But even when I could find > 160kbps MP3s of their songs, I still often wanted the better sound and the liner notes and images of the CDs.
A trip to Best Buy to pick up some blank CDs or a new PCI card or game often led to a new CD purchase, too. But not any more. I don't get introduced to new music I really like, since MTV is 99% kiddie-pop or shitty rapcrap, VH1 is 90% stuff I heard 10 years ago, and nowhere else is there in my area to get into music and explore.
I think that's what the RIAA bitches don't understand. The piracy angle is insignificant if the side-channels it creates get millions of people to be more enthusiastic about music and let them find the kind of music they really want. You see, it turns a largely indifferent market--and let's face it, unless you're a child or young adult into the MTV sort of demographic, the odds are you're pretty indifferent about music and only buy it on occasion--into the same sort of excited MTV-kiddiez who rush out to buy the latest NSYNC crapola, only about a far broader range of music. For every Britney Spears lover who downloads her whole new album at 128kbps instead of buying the CD, there are several people who sample a few dozen tracks and then get inspired to buy a CD or two when they never would have bought one before.
That's exactly the sort of person I met in the Napster chatrooms quite often. I mean, if they were still in print I'd buy every Cat Power album ever recorded, all thanks to someone at the Napster forums, and I know there are lots of others who'd say the same about an artist they never would have known but for online "piracy."
Incidentally, if anyone can point me to a copy of Cat Power's "Darling Said Sir" from one of her old out of print singles, I NEED THAT SONG. I can't find it, not even in online record stores, and only have a very bad and scratchy MP3 of it at 128kbps. I had to mention it beause I've been searching for sooooo long.
Anyway, I think the nail has been hit right on the head. All those increased record sales pre-Napster shutdown were due to ordinary people becoming excited music lovers and buying music they never would have known about before. The decline in music sales ever since has been due to the fact that no real replacement for Napster's community exists yet--no place with an easy interface that anyone and everyone can log into, with integrated chat functions and real ease of finding almost anything at almost any bitrate. I've tried stuff like Limewire, WinMX, Kazaa/Morpheus--each has fatal flaws. Some lack Napster's nice integrated chat communities. Some only find crappy 128k music and won't let you limit your seaches to better quality stuff. Some is too hard for an average guy to use. Some are just too obscure with too few users. Some never provide stable connections when you try to make a transfer.
In short, nothing is what Napster was. If the recording industry were to be beaten within an inch of its life with a clue-stick, it would realize that what it needs to do is just remake Napster exactly like it was, with open MP3 and OGG file formats freely allowed, with a reasonable subscription fee to be doled out to artists and labels according to number of downloads for each song. If it were a reasonable flat monthly fee and the file formats were open and unencumbered, most old Napster users and a bunch more would jump on it--as I said, the other file trading networks just aren't as good, with all the features and ease and connectivity Napster had. And most people would continue to buy CDs, and just as before a lot of non-CD-buyers would become CD buyers thanks to the music they're introduced to. Let's face it: a real album still usually offers something an MP3 doesn't. Tangibility. Pictures. Notes and information about the band and the album production. Show-off-ability--easier to point a friend to an album on the shelf and tell him how great it is, than to point him to your hard drives.
Not that I like the RIAA, but they could have easily consolidated their power over the industry into the next millennium by embracing Napster and working with it toward a fee-based licensing regime. Instead, by fighting the new media, and trying to impose control under their own unnatural terms, they're pissing away their power and influence. Stupid, stupid RIAA.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
MOD THIS UP!
/.ers personal convictions.
In a nutshell: follow the money!
I like Boucher and he's done some other stuff that I'm too lazy to go look up, but he's pretty much serving the special interests of the internet... it just happens to align with most of
Humorless sig goes here.
Something just hit me. This is so obvious to me now based on what you just said and based on my previous comment.
You know how in 1984 by George Orwell, he talks about the "Versificator" (it's in Part II, chapter IV)?
I'll quote it for you:
"The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention on an instrument known as a versificator." - George Orwell, 1984, Part II, Chapter IV
And so here we are today with clone-bands singing cloned songs that all sounds the same. Have you noticed that "oops i did it again" and "baby one more time" have the same music and different words? Doesn't it seem like those BSB and NSync songs all sound the same and are cranked out from the same machine-liked process? There are other songs within (and between!) the boyband groups with the same music and different lyrics. Try finding them. You'll be surprised.
I'm not sure which idea scares me most:
1. In this picture, WE (or at least most of the wealthy countries' youth of today) are the proles.
2. Most people don't even have a clue how accurately our situation portrays a portion of Orwell's book that was written decades ago.
So if music is destined not to be readable by a PC, isn't that going to totally kill sales of portable players like the Rio?
These players, afaik, only have computer interfaces, so it's not like you can put music on them from any other source.
Perhaps companies producing these products should wake up and smell the stinky stuff before it gets totally rancid.
US Rep. Rick Boucher: "How can the RIAA collect royalties on various blank media at the same time that the RIAA members are implementing copy protection mechanisms..?"
RIAA's Hillary Rosen: "Simple. We pay you - or your comrades - to hush up."
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The fact that the record companies do this, or that our culture is stupid enough to buy into it (again, and again, and again)?
Don't believe me? Read these articles.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/ index.html / love_in_sacto/index.html
http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2001/09/06
If anything should be made illegal, it's the thievery of the record industry.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
You can perfectly well make a copy of it with a normal burner. If it is the old SafeDisc (version 1) you just need a burner that supports RAW+96 reading and writing and software like CloneCD that can take advantage of that fact. For the new SafeDisc (version 2) you also need a burner that does correct EFM encoding. Those are still somewhat scarce, but available.
Even under the DCMA, these aren't illegal. CloneCD and these burners don't circumvent copy protection, they jsut copy the whole disc, copy protection and all. IF you copy a SafeDisc'd CD with a burner that can handle it, then try and copy the copy with a burner that can't it won't work. However the DCMA now makes illegal programs that just remove the SafeDisc checks, like SafeDisc unwrappers.
On a related point, your link has got me thinking about philanthropy on Slashdot. I'm still baffled why this site does not run drives to raise money for various causes - like a "Cause of the Month" type of thing. Kuro5hin has been doing this lately. There are always cause de jours that need money (Sklyarov) and the EFF could be the default. Hell, create a Slashdot poll to determine who gets the money for the next month. Taco could set up a Paypal account and donate the proceeds to each cause at the end of the month. Put the link on the homepage and BAM! donate with a single click, as you read.
Various posters talk about contributing to groups like the EFF - perhaps we can make this a community priority (as well as making it as easy as possible for people to do so).
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
I suppose it might randomly overload your speakers, but if your equipment is decent it'll have some kind of anti-self-destruction limitations built in. The copy protection dreck just gives you lots of bad bits which a computer player will reject and an audio player will error-correct (unless, of course, somebody writes different error-correction software for the computer-based players.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
...because I seem to have no trouble burning CD-A tracks onto CD-Rs (not audio!) amd playing them in my CD player.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Note: the payments aren't per taxpayer, of course, they're per piece of recording medium, which is much less obnoxious, since it's not taxing people who aren't recording anything. So if it bothers you that the tax covers media that you record non-audio material on, go get yourself a copy of Morpheus and download some Metallica tunes.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
And that's what it is. A MESS. A mess created by a government illegally getting itself involved where it shouldn't have.
There should be no regulation by the government in any of this. Copyright constitutionally extends 7+7 years, that's it. All other laws extending it were unconstitutional per the 9th or 10th amendments.
An artist's ability to protect his artform for up to 14 years is fine. If someone finds a way to break their "protection scheme" they should not be punished -- the free market lets them try again with another scheme to prevent "breaking the code."
This is all a mess creating strictly by our government's being bribed by big music and film industry to "protect them" so they don't have to spend the R&D to protect themselves.
It would have been easy, in fact, SIMPLE for the music industry to make their own propriertary listening devices -- give them away even. Then surcharge the music format, an uncopyable format at that. Easy enough. Instead, us taxpayers have to pay for all this government spending and waste trying to protect copyright that was supposed to be protected by the authors.
If someone copies a CD, they should be held liable, not the manufacturer of the hardware, software, or media used to copy that material. End of story.
Get government out of copyright management issues -- vote libertarian.
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
So when the act came out, did you believe it was the record industry's Final Answer, or did you believe it was the stinkin' camel's nose getting into the tent, or just another milepost along the way?
It's one of those "eternal vigilance" things. If you care about it, keep watching them, keep lobbying your Congresscritters, support groups like the EFF and ACLU and NRA and keep watching them too.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Very interesting question really. Amazing that someone in office actually got it right. Kudos to him!
So if I am paying for copies that I might make, that in a sense makes the copies ok so long as they are for personal reasons and I am not directly profiting from them, right? Wrong in their eyes. Being able to create and potentially distribute content without their involvement is the issue.
If these people were out to actually make some easy money, they would lobby to increase the tax, and they would have also taken the Napster offer. I say they are making enough right now, enough to make these options unattractive given the carrot of pay-per-play.
They are taking the longer view. If they stick to their guns and actually legislate our machines into content receivers then they stand to make a hell of a lot more. It would not surprise me to see them actually make some consessions on the small tax they are collecting now in order to make bigger legislative gains toward their longer term future.
It is no secret that they want the entire pipe between their content and our brains. It is this level of control that drives their current actions, not money. It is getting really easy to produce content on par with theirs and they know it. In music this has pretty much happened already. Movies will follow.
Remember that the movie studios were worried about the VCR because they could not control how many people were watching. My god, a whole room full of people might actually watch that movie!
They need to own content distribution totally, or they face competition and eventual insignificance from whatever creative disruptive technology and content will come from an open content delivery platform.
Until now economics of scale and technology made it easy for them because few could afford to really generate compelling content. As this changes, they will react because they must to exist over the longer term.
This whole battle is not totally over personal copies. It is about the potential for leaks in the channel to be expoited by others in a competitive and potentially disruptive way that changes the game. Since they basically have all current content locked up, the only way they can really lose longer term is to miss out on new content thus diminishing the value of their channel in favor of another.
So I say they will yield somewhat here on the tax issue in a gamble to capture the larger prize.
I will be watching this one with interest.
Blogging because I can...
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.
Since the poor bastard is dead, I don't care that you're violating the Sneetches copyright. All hail civil disobedience in the name of truth, justice, and the American way. 8)
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Symphony orchestras are perhaps the musical entities most deserving of your money.
Granted, they get massive endowments as it stands, and have always been reliable charities- but in this case, it's the performance that's being paid for.
So paying for classical music is just as important as the others.
This having been said, the CDs are indeed often dirt cheap, and good buys by anyone's standard.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
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.
Uh..my point was Sony still gets the guy's money no matter what he is doing. Not that you use Sony's technology to break stuff they ultimately own the rights to. In fact using a Sony Memory Stick to listen to MP3s made from Sony Music produced CDs would be pretty stupid if you're aiming to fuck over Sony. Not only is Sony making a buck off the media itself (the memory stick) they're making a buck off the reader/writer as well as at some point the CD some guy ripped to MP3. The guy just gave Sony a bunch of money for listening to MP3s on a memory stick based MP3 player. Congrats!
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Napster was providing the function that radio used to
CKLW was am AM, clear freq (800 KHz, and the first AM Stereo) top 40 station that would play some demo stuff from local and some non-local bands, people like Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, I even heard the Cars a few times.
On a good night I've heard that station in north Alabama, and I've know people who told me that they picked it up in Alaska as well.
With a little home-brewed equipment it could be heard world-wide, the station was in Windsor Ontario, Canada.
In the Army, people would look at me strange when they were asking about an artists break-out recording, and I you tell them about good their previous works were.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
However, if somebody is able to dig up solid figures for sales, metrics for the purchasing ability of consumers, number of downloads done, and possibly other relevant metrics, preferably with a time resolution of a month, it should be a very easy analysis to do. But right now I haven't got the time to dig up the data.
Rather than analysis of variance, somebody should do real time series analysis on it, but that's not a field I've been studying, but perhaps there are some real statisticians here.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I know exactly what you mean there, I just wont blind-buy records and I'll be blowed if I'm gonna stand at the listening post in a record shop all day long.
/SE area and can also be listened to over the web. Internationally there is a German TV channel on several sats covering wider europe called VIVA. - I first saw the video for Prodigy's "Smack my Bitch up" here.
:).
:)
Being a DJ at the weekends, I tend to get any tune I may be interested in on MP3 (from some somewhere like here) and then go out and buy it on 12" vinyl (try copyprotecting one of these!).
There are other good places to find out about good new tunes but you have to fight your way past all the kiddie-pop/rock/whinging/defeatist/suicidalist rubbish. KISS TV in the UK is excellent cos the guys that call in and select the tunes mostly live around London and already know there stuff & there is Radio KISS which transmits on 100Mhz in the London
As for the states - I dont know but there are ways and means
Oh, one other thing; most of the pre-release and early copies of tunes on MP3 come from 12" vinyl promos - which dont even provide revenue for the RIAA! And if anyone think that vinyl is dying: its sales are up by 21% in the last year in the UK
Long live 12" - The British - a nation of dance DJs
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
hawk
I'm not looking to rip off the record labels. Just to have things priced fairly and balanced. They need to make money, but they also need to respect the consumers rights. If the record company decides they want to use copy protection, then they shouldn't get to collect royalties. Once that happens, they'll realize how big of an impact fair use plays in increasing sales of music. Then again they probably already know that fact, but don't care.
It's probably Macrovision protected. Macrovision screws with the sync signals in the analog video stream. TVs generally ignore this, but VCRs don't, and attempting to record a Macrovision-protected signal on a VCR will result in garbled video (I don't think it does anything to the audio).
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
In order to understand this clause you have to understand the situation in 1992. DAT recorders had been put on the market in Japan, but the RIAA had issued a standing threat to sue anyone who tried to sell a DAT recorder in the U.S. As a result, DAT was being frozen out of the U.S. market.
..." The RIAA was threatening to sue based on exactly those grounds, and this clause eliminated that possibility, and opened the door to DAT recorder imports.
The AHRA was the result of a congressional attempt to get DAT recorders into the U.S. market. This clause was never intended to protect consumers from the recording industry. It was intended to protect hardware manufacturers from copyright holders. That explains the odd phrasing "based on the noncommercial use by a consumer
I think that the AHRA certainly does, or at least should protect individuals against the RIAA, but the AHRA was originally drafted to resolve a fight between the RIAA and the DAT manufacturers.
I think that Napster made a key mistake by relying on this clause. The reason that users have the right to download music isn't because the law forbids lawsuits. It's because users commonly make mix CDRs from their downloaded music, and those same Napster users are paying statutory royalties on the blank CDRs, and have the right to fill those CDRs by any means, including digital downloads.
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
PL/1 wasn't that bad. In many ways it was better than C (if you had the RAM to handle it ... the z80 version was a real looser!). It's unfair to compare it to Ada, as that was years later. JOSS? I admit I've never known anyone who ever used it, and I've never had access to it. But this doesn't automatically make it a better language. But it was designed as a successor to Fortran and Cobol, and as that it was a success. (Possibly F90 is better, but Fortran IV wasn't. I ended up trying to use Dystal to manage lists of strings is how bad that was.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
2000 $5,285,246.32
Wow. 5 million dollars. Ain't that a drop in the bucket. What's that? Half a million CDs at $10 per? (Guessing at the wholesale cost the record stores pay.) And how many CDs were sold last year?
I'm no fan of the RIAA, but these amounts are truely piddly.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
You don't. I assume you used at least one piece of proprietary music in the wedding program. I feel justified in making this assumption because most weddings I've attended have used at least one piece of proprietary music.
Bzzt. Wrong. My wedding program didn't include any music composed after Bach's death (1750). Despite the long arm reach of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extention Act, I'm pretty sure I'm in the clear here.
You must go to a lot of cheesy weddings.
My word processor was written by Stanford Professor Donald Knuth. Who wrote yours?
Wow, I'm impressed that the subtlety of what I said managed to slip right past you! Especially since it wasn't so subtle!
I'm well aware that copyrights last longer than life. I know Mrs. Seuss is making a pretty penny off her husband's works. Frankly, I don't think anyone should be able to collect copyright tithes from someone else's works.
This is why I said what I said.
Cheers,
-l
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