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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."
They have to lie to make their points because the facts show that Napster, et all seem to have a positive effect for the most part on sales...
Easy to prove, he made an admission that was recorded and video taped.
Doesn't he want all music pirates convicted?
Fight Spammers!
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.
3 college students download songs off the internet... call CNN, make sure /. is notified!!
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Did anyone listen to the speech?
This problem won't be solved in short order. It's going to require education, leadership from Washington and true diligence to help our fans - that would be you - to embrace this life and death issue and support our artistic community by only downloading your music from legal Web sites
How can anyone compare death to music piracy with a straight face? Needless to say I turned the channel and stopped watching the shortly there after. The little respect that I had for the Grammies was lost that night. I think it pissed me off more that no one booed him off stage.
Maybe I have the wrong IM friends. Hey... I wonder if those UCLA students are still for hire!
-magic
I found that speech rather humourous.
First off he said that downloading music is a bad thing. Then in the next breath he incuraged everyone to download music from RIAA approved web sites.
Second. Who uses the www to download music anyway? It's all FTP or the various P2P services. The only exceptions that I've seen is music that has already be approved for download. MP3.com is an example of that.
Third. My guess is that MP3.com would have 6000 MP3s avaliable. All you would need is wget and a small shell script to download all the songs automatically. Keep in mind that there is legally nothing wrong with downloading music from there.
I find it pretty sad that they had to go to all of the trouble of writing that speech just to try and sway the public away from downloading online audio. Was downloading the 6000 songs trying to prove a point? It just sounds to me like they were breaking their own laws. If it is okay for them to do it why can't I? The RIAA knows their current role is coming to an end and they fear this. The truth is, is that they will not become obsolete, their role will only change.
You think that's bad? Just the other day, my wife downloaded 5 gigs of songs in under a half hour! Talk about thinking you know someone!
How surprising is it that Greene was easily debunked? When we all know that mp3 trading is the best thing to happen to the music industry, this snivelling little weasel has the nerve to get all prosecutorial in a five minute rant during the Grammy award show. He may call it theft, I'd call it sampling. There are many CD's in my collection that if it hadn't been for the fact that I found mp3's to listen to, they wouldn't be in my collection. It's because of those mp3's and the ability to sample the music first that caused me to head for the store and purchase the album. The RIAA should be glad that we're swapping songs.
Now, here's a question I'd like to ask: If I have purchased all of Sarah McLachlan's albums (for examples sake) and if she were to release a "Best of" compilation, and I already own the CD's on which the songs that are part of that compiliation originally appeared, then go to USENET and download that "Best of" CD in mp3's, am I a thief? I've already paid for the rights to listen to the songs on the original albums. Hell, for all they know, I got the track list and created it myself based on burns from my original CD's.
The RIAA can go fuck itself, in my estimation, hopefully using a large, blunt instrument, such as a baseball bat or rubber pitchfork. I've never seen an industry try so hard to alienate it's customers.
It's going to require education, leadership from Washington and true diligence to help our fans - that would be you - to embrace this life and death [my own empahsis here] issue and support our artistic community by only downloading your music from legal Web sites
Geez, can't the music folks go back to "raising awareness" about other life and death issues like HIV and Breast Cancer? Seriously, life and death? Has this guy been reading too much of The Onion? A statement like this completely undermines all of the actual life and death situations in the world, ones which Greene mentioned at the beginning of his speech.
The only thing seriously in jeopardy is Mr. Greene's ability to continue payments on his Porsche as he watches his 1950's-era business model crumble under the weight of 80's-era technology that's finally come of age.
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.
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!
Let's see, three students downloading 6,000 songs in two days...that's a thousand songs per student per day, or 365,000 songs per student per year...times millions of students (say fifty million, which was the last figure I recall hearing for the number of Napster users back before the RIAA killed it)...that's 18 and a quarter trillion songs per year!
CD prices are approaching $20 for a disc that typically contains ten songs or so. So the music industry must be missing out on $36.5 trillion dollars in sales every year. Since their actual revenues are closer to $10 billion—a mere one three-thousandth of their potential—it's no wonder they're so upset about file sharing.
He WANTS to spread the meme that downloading music off the internet is illegal. If a warrant goes out for his arrest because he hired some people to commit the "crime" of downloading MP3's, then his point will have been made. Transferring an MP3 file between computers is not a criminal act -- UNLESS the recipient is not licensed to have a copy of that content.
His implication that the results of hiring 3 people to do nothing but get MP3's all day long for $12/hr plus lodging can be extrapolated to represent the behavior of "millions of students and other computer users" is, of course, ridiculous.
Whats worse is, none of my freinds belive how easy it is! I have to download music all the time on to my hard drive just to demonstrate to them how far this has gone.
I even have to listen to the songs I've downloaded all the time just to be sure these are in fact illegal songs.
I think I should ask the music industry to help me out with a few bucks so I can continue educating the general public about this.
The Internet is generally stupid
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.
Why download files of suspicious origin and quality from someone who might go offline in the middle of your download, when you can get them from friends who know what they're doing? I used a P2P client whose name I can't even remember anymore once but it sucked for those very reasons. I have a friend who runs a fileserver with about 50,000 tracks on it. They're all well-labeled, have ID3 tags, are encoded at good bit rates with good encoders, and he's not going offline without warning people first. Only friends have accounts on the machine, and he accepts logins only through SSH and file transfers only through SCP. There's no comparison between the level of service he provides and what a P2P client provides.
P2P tools are just that. Tools. Like FTP, SCP, ICQ file transfer, AOL file transfer, &c. Their existence does not create piracy - it is just another way to do it. Resnet here experiences massively more traffic due to kazaa and audiogalaxy than FTP and SCP and I expect this is generally true. Combined with the fact that there's no money behind them, they are easy targets for the huge media companies. If AOL/TW and thee RIAA members were really serious, they'd sue AOL/TW and Microsoft too.
I'm torn between wanting them to cut it out because it's just silly and wanting them to win and teach people to be a little careful and use encryption. Spreading packets all over the internet with your IP and the names of the copyrighted works you're downloading is just stupid. People are paying attention. My ISP told me flat-out that they've sold their souls (isn't that a good Slashdot phrase?) to Sony (among others, though only Sony was mentioned by name) who analyzes every packet they handle searching for copyrighted works.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
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.
Chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka--
Hmm, maybe lower sampling rate next time...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is like a modern voodoo doll:
You should be left with hundreds or more copies of the MP3. With each copy, you have STOLEN from the artist. With each copy, your artist LOSES MORE AND MORE MONEY. By the time you get to the end, each keystroke should be DRAINING THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS of THOUSANDS of DOLLARS!!
If we all did this, we could instantly bankrupt any artist. For even more damage, move the MP3s to a CDR and repeat.
Think about how much the people who make the phisical CDs are losing. If all these misguided students were actually buying the CDs they steal, we would probably be mining the Moon, Mars and the Asteroids Belt for raw materials to make all these discs.
And don't even get me started about the potential losses of the transport industry.
Rosen and Valenti's corporate masters suggest that because it's a music show, next year's rant should be a musical number. They've even got the rights lined up for the appropriate song, with a few modifications.
A band launches into the Squirrel Nut Zippers song "Hell"; the two mouthpieces bound onto stage, dressed in tuxes, carrying canes. They sing:
(Cue swing/calypso music)
(The committee in charge of coming up with this was delighted by how little they had to change, but they couldn't quite figure out how to change "suit" to "lawsuit" and still have it sound right.)Using their methods for calculating estimated losses to piracy:
3 people grabbed 6000 songs in 3 days. So that's about 666 per person per day.
If we just for the sake of argument say that 10 million people are trading MP3s, that's
10,000,000 x 666 = 6,660,000,000
Songs illegally downloaded EVERY DAY!
So, assuming 18 dollars per song, since people are only downloading decent songs and the industry standard is one good song per album...losses to the industry are:
6,660,000,000
x
$18
------
$119,880,000,000
EVERY DAY!
$43,756,200,000,000 every year!
We can't let them get away with robbing THE ARTISTS of FORTY THREE TRILLION DOLLARS!
It's even more fun to do this to the movie industry.
Here's a list of instructions, much like the ones you just gave, although they are written in a context-free language so that they can be interpreted directly by a computer as well as a person, to unencrypt the contents of a DVD - ugh, my head.
THE POSTER'S BRAIN CONTAINS THOUGHTS WHICH QUALIFY AS CIRCUMVENTION DEVICES UNDER THE DMCA. THEREFORE, IT HAS BEEN ERASED. - YOUR FRIENDS, THE MPAA.
What was I talking about? Oh, 40 days and 40 nights was such a great movie!
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
"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
Okay, so he lied. He was bait and he got ate and it's his own damn fault. What does this mean in real terms?
Not a damn thing.
How many people watched that speech? Million--Tens of millions--Maybe hundreds of millions. How many people know about him being debunked as a fraud? Perhaps a million if you stretch the figures.
It's not a great leap to assume he willfully lied -- and why shouldn't he? It was a carefuly crafted gamble. So what if even half of the people who watched that speech believe he's a charalatan? He has still indoctrinated is message in the remainder of the people who don't know any better.
He either lied or didn't bother to follow the real figures, not because thought he could get away with it, but because he knows that it doesn't matter if he gets away with it or not. Public relations people everywhere know that a lie is only a lie if you know about it.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
barely used P2P file-sharing programs at all. Instead, they used AOL's popular Instant Messenger to receive song files from friends."
What exactly does this prove? The guy's point was how easy it is to hand music to other people over the internet, and how simple it is for people to acquire things that have never before been so readily available.
Whoever wrote this is nitpicking to avoid the matter at hand.