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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."
Easy to prove, he made an admission that was recorded and video taped.
Doesn't he want all music pirates convicted?
Fight Spammers!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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)
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.
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.
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!
"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
Of course, it should also be noted that "prosecution for criminal offenses cannot be waived by the aggrieved party" - so the government could go after them if they wanted to. (See http://www.loc.gov/copyright/title17/92chap5.html
In fact (and here's the interesting part) - they DIDN'T EVEN DO ANYTHING ILLEGAL. *Downloading* is in itself not illegal - it's uploading that's illegal. Non-commercial downloading is specifically exempted. From NETA:
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Darryl Ballantyne
http://www.darrylballantyne.com