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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.
Y'know, I'm at the point where I'd move to VA just to be able to someday vote for him ;-)
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 :-)
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"
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
It's not a tax, it's a "levy." :) But the RIAA doesn't really have anything to do with that in Canada. The money goes to Canadian artists, based on record sales, which is the part that bugs me. They could give all this cash (22c/disc, currently) to promote up-and-coming bands, but it's all going to Celine Dion and Bryan Adams. GenericGarageBand doesn't see a dime. Not to mention every time you download and burn *BSD (Linux/Solaris/whatever), you're giving money to the music industry.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
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
...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/
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
And several billion dollars says Napster shouldn't exist and "fair use" is theft.
Who wins?
#include "I_realize_Napster_is_not_equivalent_to_Fair_Use.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
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.
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
Doesn't look like there is actually anything in the Audio Home Recording Act that says that the RIAA members can't do what they are doing. (Moral considerations aside.) Apparently, the drafters of the Act back in 1992 didn't think that there would ever be enough copy protection to worry about. Of course, that's why the Act was passed-- the recording industry was all whipped up about the revenue it was going to loose as a result of people making digital copies.
:
Here's the text of the Audio Home Recording Act.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/ch10.html
(Arranged in easy to navigate sections from Cornell Law School)
http://www.hrrc.org/html/ahra.html
(Full text on one page from Audio Home Recording Rights Coalition)
Subchapter C is the part that is particularly interesting in that it sets out the details on royalty payments. You will have to cross reference to the definitions section is Subchapter A, however, in order to fully understand who is entitled to collect payments. Love the method of splitting up the royalty payments!
Finally someone is paying attention to this issue. I've posted this information in a couple of slashdot threads, and here it is again. It's one of the most incredible recording industry lies/ripoffs. Maybe now it will get some attention.
...
...
The upshot of it is that every time you purchase a digital audio recorder, or blank digital audio recording media, such as audio CDRs, you pay a small statutory royalty into a fund. This fund is collected by the Federal Government, and turned over directly to the music industry. The name of the fund is the DART fund. DART stands for "Digital Audio Recording Technology". The best source of information on the DART fund is right here
These documents are very interesting. They show how the money was paid out. The law was written to allow all of the major copyright interests to gather together and collect all the money in one lump sum. According to the first report on the page, we find that 99.997% (LITERALLY!) of all of the statutory royalties collected on blank digital audio media (mostly CDRs), and digital audio recording devices went to the following organizations:
Broadcast Music, Inc. (``BMI'');
the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (``ASCAP'');
SESAC, Inc. (``SESAC'');
the Harry Fox Agency (``HFA'');
the Songwriters Guild of America (``SGA'');
and Copyright Management, Inc. (``CMI'')
Copyright Management, Inc. is a blanket organization that represents all of the major record labels.
In other words, all of the people who are raising hell that they aren't being paid when people burn music onto CDRs are being
you got it
paid every time a blank CDR is purchased!
However, nowhere in any of these web pages will you find the actual dollar figures. The reports go to laughable extremes to avoid disclosing exactly how much money we are talking about. For instance, according to the report, for the 1995 funds collected, 99.998034% was paid to the music industry, 0.001966% was paid to one individual claimant, and 0.000614% was paid to Ms. Alicia Evelyn.
I obtained the actual royalty yearly figures by contacting Ms. Evelyn, one of the individual claimants. Ms. Evelyn is a songwriter who, unable to obtain any royalty payments from ASCAP for her work, petitioned the copyright office directly for payment. She read me these numbers over the phone which she received in the course of her research. If you do the math, you'll find that she received a few pennies for her efforts. Literally.
Here are the total amounts collected year by year since 1992. These statutory royalties were all paid out to the recording industry:
1992 $118,227.42
1993 $520,162.84
1994 $521,999.64
1995 $473,592.20
1996 $397,152.52
1997 $969,178.06
1998 $1,978,457.93
1999 $3,551,030.86
2000 $5,285,246.32
So, while on the one hand, the music industry is claiming that they are not being paid when individuals make audio CDRs of their music, yet on the other hand, they are quietly collecting millions of dollars in statutory royalties from consumers when they purchase blank digital audio media.
The key here is that these are statutory royalties. They are NOT a tax. They are described as royalties in the law, and they function exactly as royalties.
A royalty is what you pay in exchange for the right to make a copy. This is the ordinary meaning of the term "royalty", as it is used throughout copyright law, and there is absolutely no evidence that it means anything else in the context of the AHRA.
I submit that by accepting these statutory royalty payments from the general public, the recording industry, and every major record label claimed this money, has incurred an obligation to permit the public to exercise the rights that they have paid for, to the tune of millions of dollars per year.
This is NOT an issue of fair use. This is an issue of consumers receiving the rights that they have paid for.
Kudos for Rep. Boucher. We need more representatives of his caliber with his level of committment to the rights of the people.
"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
Wow, not only did he think arresting Dmitri Sklyarov was a bad idea:
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This unfortunate legal action highlights the overly broad terms of the criminal provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"). It clearly demonstrates the intrusion of these provisions on the ability of American citizens to exercise their legally protected fair use rights,
(http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/sklyarov.htm
but he also gets that the entertainment industry wants money off the public everytime you listen to music or watch a movie.
As NTIA recognized in its letter, one of the foremost concerns reflected in the Congressional report upon passage of the DMCA was that changes in the law could chill the exercise of consumers' traditional "fair use" rights, and move us all toward a "pay-per-use" society.
Unfortunately, the announced exceptions to the rule are so narrow as to be practically meaningless. Fair use is not protected.
...Congress in its next session should act to prevent the creation of a "pay per use" society, in which what is available today on the library shelf for free is available in the future only upon payment of a fee for each use.
(http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/payperuse.ht
Wow! That'll teach the entertainment industry to only give him $18,500 when the telephone industry gave him $49,000 (http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/detail.as
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
I agree completly.
I can't remember the number of times I've sat here and listened to all the armchair QBs on slashdot say "If I had the chance I'd make a diffrence.". Well, guess what! This is your chance. Get up, find a stamp and do your part. It's easy, even a post card will work. Even if doubt your letter will effect anything, don't worry it's cheap, easy and it will definitly benifit a postal system that could use some help anyway.
Communication is about content not presentation.
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?
TARKIN: The National Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that Hillary Rosen has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
TAGGE: That's impossible! How will the RIAA maintain control without the bureaucracy?
TARKIN: The Major Labels now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the consumers in line. Fear of the DMCA and the New Police State.
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...
Perhaps we should "acquire" some 18-wheelers loaded up with blank audio CD-Rs, drive to Boston Harbor, and toss them in?
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...
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
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
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.