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File-sharing, Digital Rights Management, Etc.
Politech has a couple of good articles on political developments in the post-Napster world. (That's almost a Katz phrase there, isn't it?) The folks behind Kazaa, when they're not busy spying on their userbase, took the time to write to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after a bashing they took a few weeks ago. Kazaa's new owners suggest a general royalty fee, perhaps similar to the recent webcasting fees, be put in place to compensate intellectual property holders for file-sharing. Meanwhile, the European Commission takes a look at digital rights management. Looks like Europe will get its own version of the SSSCA.
That 1992 statute mandates a small royalty on digital audio recorders and recording media, with the proceeds of that levy redistributed to content creators
What is the equivalent in the internet world? Is the new tax on computers? Modems? File sharing software?
The latter obviously won't work for decentralised P2P systems like kazaa, so I bet they'll put the 'P2P tax' directly on the original CD itself.
Soak
Wash
Repeat
I'm getting fed up of this bullshit. We all know that in 20 years the technology for online music exhange will still be here and it'll be legal. The music industry is doing the exact same thing the petroleum cies did, boycott the product until they own it. Then market it and prepare the market (ie. electrical cars), and finally say you played along the whole time, while unveiling your product.
The birth of a new monopoly, the same as before, just different packaging.
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
There are so many people out there sharing music and other files, that it would be difficult to actually stop them. The RIAA thought that people would give up on downloading mp3s after the death of Napster, but instead the music exchange continued (and may have even grown). Schemes like gnutella have been largely invulnerable to attack from the {RI,MP}AA, although they could still be improved to further protect their users.
My point is this: no matter what they do, people will find a way around it. There may be some martyrs at every turn, such as Emannuel Goldstein and Derek Fawcus with DeCSS, but now CSS is all but broken, and virtually anyone can find DeCSS if they look. A DRM OS, while evil, can still be broken, and tracking down the subversives who use Linux/BSD and other "unAmerican" OSes would prove difficult. And if the governement started coming after the people, they just might have a revolution on their hands.
This isn't something to get overly depressed about. We should be fighting it, but even if they win the battle of legislation, we are still able to continue the war.
Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen
I've often thought that one should use whatever means are commensurate with the threat at hand to defend one's constitutional rights, including killing those who would take them away, collateral damage be damned, if it comes to that. Otherwise, such rights are meaningless.
The only issue then, after (for example) killing the dozen cops trying to arrest you for daring to run Linux, is whether you have a constitutional right to do so.
If so, you go scott free.
If not, you fry.
I'd think that, with the stakes so high, we would not see very much murder in the name of defending bogus rights that do not exist.
You could've hired me.
The Audio Home Recording Act is flawed in one respect that I hope would be corrected if it applied to downloading music on the net. While the Act provides for royalty payments to compensate the music industry, it does not provide anybody with a license to copy copyrighted musical works. What this means is that when you buy an audio tape, you are paying royalties because you are an assumed music thief but you are not buying the right to copy music for that price. The Act does not make it legal to copy copyrighted music onto an audio tape.
In other words, if the Act were updated and applied to music downloads on the Internet, Napster would still be at Metallica's mercy. The royalties would have to be high enough that Metallica would prefer to receive the royalty checks than to have people buy their CDs in a store. That's pretty much impossible because the music industry makes a fortune on CDs, and I'm sure not going to pay CD prices to download from Gnutella.
The only real solution is to modify the Act to give net users, in return for indirect royalty payments, a license to copy music digitally and use it for noncommercial, nonpublic use.
I think you're absolutely right. There's a bigger problem here - I want to use the word "globalization", but that words been so overused of late I'm not even sure it really has a meaning any more. Call it the smothering of nationalism. When nations are sovereign, it's much harder for the evil robber barrons to impose such draconian legislation. People can always route around the damage.
When I was a kid, I used to think "Wouldn't it be great to have one world government?! No wars. Peace and prosperity for everyone." Now the notion scares me to death. Soon there will be no place to turn. Mega-corporations will rule the world.
Eisner testifies at the SSSCA hearings. Why? How many ordinary citizens, who will shortly be declared criminals, had an opportunity to speak to these assholes? None. Zippo. So much for social progress. The corporate CEO has become the fuedal lord of the new milleneum.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
Here in toronto the keynote speaker for CMW (a mildly pretentious and industry-oriented music festival) was moby, a guy who has been successful not so much in making good music but rather for selling snippets from every track of his last album for commercials.
He had, I thought, an interesting and pragmatic take of the future. Especially given that his audience was mostly people in the music industry. He thinks that the ways in which music is made, marketed, distributed, and sold must change radically over the next ten years. He said that bands oriented towards live performances would be successful, citing the Bare Naked Ladies and Nirvana as examples.
The quote that i remember was, "You can't download a concert. You can't download a t-shirt." That is to say, you can't replicate the experience of live music. His follow up comment was, "you can listen to a recording of live music, but compared to being there it's like watching porno in a hotel room instead of actually having sex with someone".
In a way it's like a shift back to Mozart's day -- you had to go around performing and composing prolifically to make a living.
He also noted how the a large chunk of the generation of his 14 year old cousin had "grown up without ever having bought an album. they download everything." So he was trying to make people in the industry aware that a cultural shift is already taking place with respect to consumer's attitudes towards 'ownership' of music.
He also dismissed conventionally 'manufactured pop' and boy bands, and cited himself ironically as an example of an act becoming successful outside of the mainstream labels.
CDs cost less than cassettes, but are priced higher, "because of apparent value".
The actual cost of pressed CD's is very low. Consider the number of computer magazines which come with at least one disk or even the way AOL send out postal spam with their disks.
CD's are priced based on what the market will bear. Similarly for DVD's, except that they came up with the idea of regions, so as to charge what the market will bear in each of those reagions...
Besides, as much as some in here bitch about the SSSCA and the DMCA, the true strength of their conviction is really shown when they line up to the MPAA trough every couple of weeks. Or buy hardware from Sony, Nintendo, Toshiba, IBM, or any of the other companies who have made it clear which side of the digital rights and DMCA fence they are on. Tell people that all you have to do is stop spending money on certain things, or hell, even just cut back their movie spending, and they'll respond like you just asked them to amputate a limb.
Look, we can't even convince the people who are supposedly clued about the whole problem (Slashdot) -- what possible chance is there to make the problem and solution clear to people to struggle to understand the evening news? +1 Insightful to you.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Imagine if this law was passed in the U.S. and in Europe, but not, say, in Canada. Many programmers would protest, ineffectively, and decide to live with it no matter how distasteful; but a not insignificant minority might say "Canada's looking pretty good right about now".
If even this minority decided to move to Canada the country would suddenly inherit a wealth of technical expertise - unfettered technical expertise - which would result in a boom in its technological industries. Along with a resultant expansion in the economy and the creation of thousands of new jobs.
All you need is one savvy, future-oriented nation to say "no thanks" to these kinds of laws while it sits back and reaps the rewards of dissent in other nations. Not to mention the sales (roundabout or direct) of non-crippled devices to countries which have outlawed their own industries from producing these goodies.
(I'm using Canada as the example because, so far, they don't appear to be caught up in the same sort of digital hysteria that seems to be sweeping the U.S. and Europe. I could be wrong - any resident Canadians, feel free to correct me.)
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?