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Future of Music Summit
DotcomScoop writes: "We were provided with a copy of the letter sent by Congressman Rick Boucher to RIAA head Hilary Rosen and IFPI head Jay Berman questioning the legality of copy-protecting CDs. 'I am particularly concerned that some of these technologies may prevent or inhibit consumer home recording using recorders and media covered by the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA),' Boucher writes. We've summarized the letter in a story and CNET also has coverage. Monday is the kick-off of the two-day Future Of Music Policy Summit, which includes keynotes or panels from Boucher, Rosen, Napster CEO Konrad Hilbers, Nirvana's Krist Novoselic, Fugazi's Ian MacKaye and the National Writer Union's Jonathan Tasini, among others." We already posted a story about the Boucher letter, but it can't hurt to mention it again.
No matter what they do, it will be cracked -- therefore copy protection does not hurt software and music pirates. They will figure out a way to do it. No, the people it hurts is the legitimate users that just want a backup copy in case the cd gets broken, which is their legal right. The people who want to put the songs on their MP3 player so they can listen to it while jogging without experiencing CD skipping. Thats who is hurt by the copy protection. Honest people who have paid for the product are being robbed by the publishing companies. This is true for both software and music. It *will* be pirated. That cannot be stopped. Only law abiding citizens follow the law.
I would honestly bet, that the people in the cyrstal palace of RIAA forget that there is this "tax" on black media, or they knew about it, and now want to have a more effective way of increasing it without huge public backlash (we will return your right to have clean cds, but we can pull this stunt again if we want more money). Imagine if the RIAA wanted to increase the "tax" to 50c/media, without going through this effort first. People would revolt, now they are saying, well if I get access to all my CD's again, maybe its worth it
`find / -name "*your_base*" -exec chown us:us {} \;`
2. Based upon your knowledge and upon any consumer contact received by your member companies, have any discs entered the U.S. market that may not be copied on a device or on media for which a royalty has been paid under the AHRA?
This is really the point of his question. The AHRA allows the collection of a royalty on recording media, but this comes in exchange for the priviledge of the consumer to make these copies. By making copy protected originals, the priviledge is removed. Congressman Boucher's questions are pulling tight the noose the RIAA has made for itself out of all that rope.
Very funny indeed.
As you know from your personal involvement in its drafting, the AHRA clearly requires content owners to code their material appropriately to implement a basic compromise: in return for the receipt of royalties on compliant recorders and media, copyright owners may not preclude consumers from making a first-generation, digital-to-digital copy of an album on a compliant device using royalty-paid media. Under the AHRA, any deliberate change to a CD by a content owner that makes one generation of digital recording from the CD on covered devices no longer possible would appear to violate the content owner's obligations under the statute.
And how much of a royalty does the RIAA get on the sale of hard drives/MP3 encoders/iPods/Nomads? I'm sure Ms. Rosen will gleefully point out to our well-intentioned friend in Congress that she's more concerned about CD-to-MP3 copying than CD-to-CD, which might, unfortunately, render Rep. Boucher's argument moot.
Let's face it, copy-protecting audio CDs is an expensive waste of time and the studios must be realising it by now. They have the costs of licensing the copy protection scheme, the costs of the bad press it generates, the costs of dealing with returns from unhappy punters whose CD players don't work. And what do they get in return? A CD that can always be ripped simply by feeding the stereo line out of a CD player into the stereo line in of a soundcard and pressing "play" at one end and "record" at the other. Line noise? I'm Ogg/MP3ing anyway, you think I'm going to notice the little bit of line noise after compression has mangled it?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
One thing that slays me about all this is the attitude that if I record something to a CD it MUST be material that was created by someone else. The folks pushing this battle and demanding taxes on blank media assume that the common man is not capable of creating his own music, documents, movies, etc.
I got a taste of this during the discussion of Napster at http://www.tednugent.com where they were insisting that if I made my own MP3 file it was copyrighted and illegal for me to offer for free. Never mind if I wrote and performed my own music, recorded it myself, and chose to give it away to the world. The attitude seems to be that even if a moron like myself is capable of such a thing, I'm not as wise as the RIAA and should be protected from myself and not allowed to give it for free.
But of course.....the RIAA wants a chunk of "the action" and if I give it away there isn't any action.
I understand that some places (Canadia?) already have a tax on blank media under the assumption that you are going to use that media to copy copyrighted material. They don't seem to take into account that the same media can be used to save files of any type. Maybe you just wanted to save your family photos to CD, or your letters to your girlfriend. Oh well, you pay the tax anyway.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
The classical example of someone actually standing up to the record companies is Frank Zappa. He discovered that Warner Brothers was pulling one of the standard record company tricks to avoid paying royalties, which involves pressing more copies than they record in the books, typically twice as many. I believe this was with Freak Out, his first album, circa 1965. He sued Warner Brothers and won. Part of the settlement was for him to get his own sublabel Bizarre under Warner/Reprise. Even then, he didn't get completely out from under Warner Brothers' thumb until the mid-to-late 1970's, with the Lather fiasco. After that, he sold records under his own separate Barking Pumpkin label and CD's, at first, under Rykodisc.
I think there are two lessons from this: