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Greene's Grammy Speech Debunked
jonerik writes: "Today's New York Times has this article which debunks at least part of NARAS president Michael Greene's much-publicized speech at last week's Grammy Awards ceremony in which Greene claimed that he had hired three students to download a whopping 6,000 songs "from easily accessible Web sites" over two days. Leaving aside for a moment Greene's bizarre admission on national TV that he'd hired three students (at least one of whom, Numair Faraz, is a minor) to break the law (the No Electronic Theft Act), Faraz has been interviewed by the Times, saying that they spent more like three days on the project and that the other two students (both unnamed, though both are apparently attending U.C.L.A.) barely used P2P file-sharing programs at all. Instead, they used AOL's popular Instant Messenger to receive song files from friends."
This is why many artists are taking a stand:
:/
Recording Artists Coalition
(take a look, you'll be suprized who's there)
ps. I think I did hear one person boo... I'm sure he/she got to enjoy the remainder of the grammays outside.
This is actually quite easy to debunk:
6000 mp3's @ approx. 3.5 - 4 mb per song / 3 Students for two days (48 hrs)
(6000 * 3.5 * 1024)/(3 * 48 * 60^2) = kB/s
Sustained data rates between 41 and 47 kB per second would be required to support the claim.
Now, most of these "easily accessible Web sites" wouldn't sustain those rates to an individual user. And P2P definitely never gets close. The only real way to get that much data would be from other computers on the campus LAN not said web sites.
So, now we know he lied in his speech apart from his ridiculus extrapolation to millions of students (when was the last time you skipped a month's worth of classes just so you could download all that pirate music?)
My question is, why can't the broadcast media crunch these simple numbers and figure out that this guy is full of sh*t?
And I bet that he's not going to buy any music now.
At 4 minutes per song, that's...
(wait a sec...)
over 16 days of nonstop music.
At 75 minutes per CD, that's 320 CDs.
At 15 bucks per CD that's $4800 in revenue
(or $4500 in profit) that the record company
has had stolen from them!
My brother has worked at an independent CD maufacturing plant for 13 years (they used to do tapes). He repairs the duplication machines
They handle programs, music CDs, etc. They often make shipments directly to the consumer.
I recently asked him how much they charged to produce a CD today.
He said "18 cents."
I said "No, I mean with the case"
He said "18 cents."
I said "No, I mean with all the inserts and stuff."
He said "That's included in the 18 cents."
He wasn't kidding.
"Pirate", being not in any dictionary acception what someone who copies a song or a software is
This is simply untrue. For example, Webster's 7th New Collegiate Dictionary contains:
pi.ra.cy
('p{i-}-r*-s{e-})
...
2) n, the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or
conception esp. in infringement of a copyright
If you consult the OED, you'll see that the first recorded use of piracy in this sense is hundreds of years ago, only a few years after Britain enacted its first copyright laws. The idea that anyone today is trying to evoke brigandage on the high seas when they use piracy to refer to unauthorised reproduction of copyright material is not very credible.
-Tom Duff