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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."
That is alot of pipe for 2 days worth of downloads. 6000 x ~3.5megs per song = ~21000megs of download. I don't think that this was accomplished on a 56k modem.
I believe it is in bad taist to plug your agenda at an event like this.
I think I will go home tonight and "Hire" 3 friends of mine to download a hack of starcraft and play all night.
If I were only smart enough to accomplish the things I dream about.. Or maybe too dumb to care.
Music industry heads have long relied on the fact that money can buy credibility, especially from the two classes of people they're most concerened with... government regulators and performing artists. Before the music-sharing era, these were the only ones they *had* to be credible for.
What RIAA heads like this guy and Hillary Rosen are demonstrating, however, is their complete and total lack of intelligence, wisdom, and understanding of the technology they're dealing with. MPAA's going through the same thing. DeCSS was supposed to be uncrackable, and I beleive in my heart that Jack Valenti and his buddies bought that hook line and sinker. When Jon J. cracked it, it was not just a kick in the movie industry's legal nuts, but a phenominal blow to their credibility. Record industry is going through the same thing right now with CD copy protection. Nothing they can do will prvent the ripping and encoding of CD's, even if MP3 traders have to revert to using non-digital capture methods. (Headphone to Audio-in port, anyone?) Despite this *obvious* problem with audio copy-protection, the music studios are trudging forward with poorly thought out, poorly tested, unworkable, and uneeded copy protection controls. This makes them look like idiots to the public.
Articles like this are both promoting and refelcting the popular opinion that not only is the RIAA a bunch of idiotic cartoon bad guys, but that they *deserve* to be taken advantage of.
The RIAA's worst enemy is not P2P, MP3, or even the people who trade audio files. The RIAA's worst enemy is itself.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Since they were hired by the Recording industry who holds all the copyrights in question, wouldn't they be stealing from themselves (on an organizational level)?
Despite what the RIAA would have you believe, the RIAA-affiliated companies do NOT hold the copyright to every MP3 that found its way onto the internet. I've got MP3's of music I wrote, recorded and encoded myself on my site, for example.
For those that are held by the RIAA -- common sense says that you can't steal something from yourself, but when has copyright law ever used common sense? Viz the lawsuits where a musician is sued by the copyright holder of some of their previous works, because the musician wrote a new song that sounds TOO MUCH LIKE THEMSELVES.
By his own admission he has violated Federal Copyright laws, has Contributed to the delinquency of a minor and should be prosecuted and fined for doing so. He had no legal right to do what he did (e.g. no court order) and then went on TV and admitted that he had done it.
I would urge everyone and their friends to gather this evidence together (video tapes, web page printouts, etc...) and send it via USPS snail mail with a certified return receipt to the DOJ asking them when they will be prosecuting him.
The more of us that do it, the more likely it is that he will face fines and penalties for his actions. I'm already looking for a copy of the actual speech (not just a web transcript, but the actual video of him doing it) and will be sending this to the DOJ.
If they accept that Napster improves sales, why the hell would they fight against it? It seems much more likely to me that they don't accept the facts themselves.
And... all of this AIM versus p2p stuff is a red herring. We shouldn't be arguing over how many files you can download in a certain period of time, or what mechanisms you use to do it. Our concept of intellectual property is broken, and they are pushing through laws that hurt the public good more and more deeply, while we quibble over what program was used to download files!
What we need to focus on is that they are doing things that reduce software reliability (SSSCA will do that), hurt people (snuffing our ability to copy will do that), and retard progress to protect an industry that is composed of trivial entertainment. Don't be distracted from the issues.
Don't forget about all the bandwith it would use...
18.25 trillion songs, at an avg of 4 megs/song works out to a little under 2,314,815 megs/second (assuming I didn't screw up the math)
woah...where do I sign up for *that* connection?
Juiced? Or Not?