Slashdot Mirror
The Culture of CD Burning
An anonymous reader points to this "good article from the Boston Globe about the culture of CD burning, and how hard it will be for the RIAA to stop it. Some interesting quotes: 'There's a "sex appeal" to burning CDs, says [Sheryl] Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents.' An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people." Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
What the hell was this article about ?
Anyway, anyone knows where can I get the AOTC vcd-s ?
thx
Lets say you buy a 50 pack of CD's....
I might burn 5 music CD's from that.
First posts and AC's can go to hell! And so can you!
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
So is hilary saying that we are allowed to burn CD's of crappy artists?
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
Meanwhile, artists of all stripes, from Byrd to Sheryl Crow, are challenging the status quo.
Sexy and a rebel.
Nice.
-... ---
this is a lame statment.
;) 1 music cd costs from $9.99 to $20. So of course recordable cds will out sell music cds, even if people were not using them to "pirate" music.
I can buy 50 recordable cds for $19.99(b4 a 10 rebate
Recordable cds dont even come in 1 packs do they?
It's not the pirating...it's the music!
We don't have the bands of the 90's anymore....
We've got a couple big sellers, one hit wonders, trendy bands....nothing 'classic' lately
Go ahead, flamebait, redundant, offtopic
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?'
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
Unless they pay for it. Thats the logic behind this. It's not like everyone who burns a CD is trying to make a profit, the majority of people are in fact just burning CD's for pleasure.
I wouldn't get worried about like 5 downloads. Who'd want that?
If I wrote an A paper and then some one copied it and also go an A, what difference does it make to me? Although there are many valid arguements to copying music, this isn't one of them. I would have written that paper any way! It isn't costing me money that some one has copied it.
It's been said a million times before, but I'll say it again. In my day we had analogue tapes and we used to record songs to let our friends hear them, in the form of a "compilation tape". That way people got to hear new stuff that didn't get on the radio. People then bought the album if they liked it etc.
These RIAA people are so full of hot air and FUD. Why even bother listening to their drivel? We all no it's impossible for them to stop home recording. Just ignore them and they'll spend a load of money on stupid "prevention measures" that don't work. They're the only ones losing out.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
It's like geeks and sex . . .
They might buy a pack of 12 condoms, but they might only get the chance to use 1!
The idea that others can/do copy bothers me. I use to get copied in class, and on one occasion a kid took my paper and wrote his name on it. I found him, busted him and the teacher gave a wrist slap. lame.
i have turned in media (cd/floppy/email) type of homework. the plus is speed but on the otherhand, you must have a computer literate teacher.
good teachers are able to regonize students material and know when work has been copied.
but, then again, in coding, code is code.
I think the author is out of touch with today's kids.
I'm trying to remember the last time I burned a CD for music, I think I only did it when a friend came over and asked if I could copy CD xyz for them. For the most part, I've just about allways ripped to MP3. Pop a disk in, click start, wait about 5 minutes and presto, with ID3 tags provided by CDDB i've just added their music to my collection.
Most of the kids I know with some computer skills (ages 12 and up) do the ripping thing more often than the burning thing. From a price standpoint you never have to use media other than a little hard disk space. With CD's you have to pay out 50cents for a blank every time you want to make one. Don't forget canada either, i'm sure with the new tariff's imposed on recordable media, MP3 ripping will get even more popular over there than ever before.
Exactly what "personal investment" does the RIAA bring to the party? Given how much their members have stolen and continue to steal from artists, the only ringing true I hear is my hypocrisy alarm.
Given the theoretical situation where I would not get into academic trouble for giving out my paper, I'd have no problem with sharing it so that other's could get A's. Especially when I would be able to use someone else's paper and get an A myself. That's open source. To me it sounds great, share my work and end up doing less work overall with greater benefit (all A's). Perhaps the musicians, who must appreciate other's music as well, need to see that if they share theirs [music], they get much more in return [the rest of the world's music].
Not once did the article raise the possibility that maybe, just maybe, poor product might have something to do with lower CD sales.
Hysterical! If this person was even remotely in touch with technology, they'd know that nobody spends anything remotely close to $1000 on a hard drive.
.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Hey, kid, what if you found out that your school has made millions of dollars selling your A paper in stores all over the country, and you got nothing except a contractual obligation to write more papers?
It will continue with more and more people burning DVD's as well as CD's, as the technology progresses and hardware becomes cheaper. I don't see how the RIAA can stop people from burning CD's for their own personal use.
As for burning CD's and selling them, I think that is clearly illegal, but the same problem is how to curb that, while still allowing people to burn CD's for themselves (only).
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
At one time artists were funded by voluntary money from rich patrons. The public enjoyed the art for free. Why hasn't a similar modern system been developed? Perhaps artists should publish their work (whatever the medium) free and redistributable, with embedded linkage/instructions for donating money to the artist. If simple payment infrastructures on the net made this completely painless for the end user, they would probably contribute a dollar or two to the artists they like... and those with more money might donate more. Artists with enough worth and/or popularity would probably make their fair share, and trash would simply die away penniless.
Problems:
1) A lot of popular and/or good artists are entrenched in the current scheme, leaving only the small-fries to try this method, and a majority of them will fail to make money this way, seemingly proving that it just doesn't work.
2) Even if it worked very well, the high end artists would probably bank less than they do now, so they don't have much incentive.... but then again maybe I underestimate the cut of the production/distrubtion monopolies. Perhaps by going direct from studio to consumer and reaping all the money themselves, the actual net intake of the artist would remain the same.
11*43+456^2
They can't possibly be paying her enough money to come up with this stuff, day after day..
"CD Burning will make you fail school and get pregnant. Be smart - don't start."
But record-label representatives say that home taping was never as prevalent as CD burning
Um... Sure. Try to find somebody who never taped something off of the radio or other medium. Most CD players came with a tape deck so you could tape off the CD to a tape to give it away or play it in your car or something.
It seems that Ms. Rosen doesn't know the difference between plagiarism and piracy.
Do your homework, Hillary. Then get back to us. Buh bye now.
vi ~/.emacs
It would bother me. It would bother me if the school superintendant peddled the paper for $17.99, using $.50 worth of material, and I as the author received maybe a dollar for each copy.
The CD copying analogy really breaks down because anyone trying to push an Eagles song as their own would be laughed off.
The party's over
I bet CD's used for data distribution and storage push these numbers way up. Lies, damned lies.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
If they would like to individually prosecute each individual who illegally copies music or software, that's fine with me. They just had better not mess with my freedom to use the technology for legal perposes! Bah.
And letting others have distribution rights to your own work. The creator has no say anymore!
And as for Hilary Rosen's analogy:
Let's say that "getting an A" is like getting paid for your work. This is analogous to others selling the work as their own and getting paid. Music sharing is more like your friend copying your paper and giving it to others in your class and saying "Look what good work my friend's capable of. Go read it." What Rosen describes are two different phenomena.
And I'd be very proud of my work, indeed.
If I weren't nailed to the penis, I'd be pushing up the daisies!
I'm waiting ladies! Big spindle o' 100 CDs just waiting to be burned.
I just heard the sad news on talk radio. Pornographic star Linda Boreman was found dead in her Denver home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss her, even if you didn't a
see her pornographic films, there's no denying her contributions to popular culture. Truly an American Icon.
Yeah, sure, it's a social event. Just like listening to 45's.
With one small difference -- the 45's were bought legally.
Now when you're making your mix CD, do you own that music you're burning onto there? Or was it a bunch of mp3's that you've downloaded from the Internet?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
I would hope that it's becoming more clear to people that this is fully illegal. "Fair Use" is a pretty broad concept, but it doesn't allow for blatently stealing music for your own use. It's shameful that parents don't better inform their children about theft.
I'm amazed that this kind of uninformed naivety about the music industry still exists. If people keep stealing their music, artists won't have any means or motivation to make more music.
And that would be a sad thing indeed.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
Why no, It wouldn't bother me so long as they pay me royalties. Why... that's the American way, right? You stupid bitch.
RIAA needs to encourage people like my friend to keep on making mix CD's for their friends, it actually creates demand for, and adds value to their product.
My other sig is extremely clever...
Or tried to.
I remember on VH1's behind the music on Jim Croce his widow had to take the record company to court to get fair compensation. They were making millions off his alblum sales but had shafted him on the contract. If I remember right she eventually won.
This brings me back to the buying CD Quality music by the track... But their greedy, etc etc...Heck I just throw away the cases and liner notes anyway so it's waste of money for me to have that junk anyway.
This analogy makes no sense. Maybe if people were selling burned CD's, then it would ring true, but how am I "getting an A" by listening to a CD with burned music? A better analogy might be: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and read it and enjoy it too? Would that bug you?" That's the right analogy, and my answer is: No, it would not bug me. My master's thesis is online for all to enjoy.
You get that many bad burns? Ye-Gods, if I only got one good burn out of every ten CDs I'd return my drive.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
Ptui! Read the article at Salon and you'll see that Byrd isn't claiming lots of people are swapping and burning his songs. He's irked at Sony because he hasn't seen a penny of artist royalties on either of his two albums which are still in the catalogue (though he started getting composer royalties after he was contacted to let another artist record one of his songs). He'd rather have the music available freely if the artist is never going to see any payment.
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
Ok.. Not to support this one way or another, but logic is EXTREMELY flawed. NO ONE is trying to take burned cd's that are current hits (A papers) and trying to get a record deal (an A for themselves). That's just ridicules.
The logic should be: If you wrote an A paper and everyone passed it around and enjoyed it, would that bother you. But there's no bite to that, because I don't think that would care anyone. In fact, most people would probably be so proud that their paper was enjoyed, that they'd encourage sharing it.
Oh... and everyone look closely! This may be the only time you'll ever see "sex appeal" and "Sheryl Crow" in the same sentence!
Of course the big point that's missed in all of this is that the RIAA continues to mislead people and lie outright about the legality of copying. Non-commercial duplication of CDs is specifically allowed under current copyright law, and the CDs used in stand-alone CD copiers even include a royalty payment in their cost that goes to the RIAA. But Hillary Rosen continues to make it sound as though copying for your friends is illegal. But the mentions of the fact that it actually is legal gets only a short mention down at the bottom of the article.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Since you obviously aren't participating in the blackout...
My other sig is extremely clever...
That quote about someone peddling your 'A' paper around town to get an 'A' is misleading. A better analogy would be that you wrote an 'A' paper, and now it is being circulated among a community which likes to read good papers. They aren't passing it off as their own (as she implied), they are appreciating the work for what it is.
Yeah, a good 60% of a spindle of CD-R's goes to Linux ISOs, 20% to linux kernel updates and other large software, 10% to mp3 CDs, 5% to actual audio CDs, and 5% to buffer underruns.
>>"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' Quite frankly Hilary, no. Art for arts sake, and all.
Ummm, I think he meant he'd only use 5 of them for music.
listening to a burned cd is like reading someones paper, not submitting it as your own.
:p
people aren't claiming they created the music, making money from it, reaping acclaim, or rewards, there just enjoying it.
if someone else read my thesis i'd be kinda happy, means I didn't waste my time (i wasted theirs
"Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
He must not be familiar with those "services" that allow people (for a nominal fee of course) to go and dl other people's papers and turn them in.
Copying tracks off a CD and burning a compilation is not analagous to copying a friend's term paper and turning it in with your name on it. You're not representing that you created the music, hence you're not plagiarizing the music. It's a stupid analogy.
It's not about right or wrong anymore. It's about money. There's no need to even discuss this or comment on any comments the industry makes considering right and wrong, because it's not important. It should be, but it's not.
The media industry (audio and video) is determined to do whatever will give them the most profit, or more likely, reduce lost profits. I say that, because they could probably increase profits if they went along with the flow of this file sharing revolution rather than fighting it as strong as they are.
Right and wrong stopped mattering the moment the media industry took control of it. Now they make the laws (with the help of self-admitted naive lawmakers) that determine right and wrong.
On a positive note, Wilco's new album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot hit stores today. I'd recommend picking it up. Reprise gave one listen to it and kicked the band off their label. Nonesuch Records picked the band up. Interesting enough, AOL Time Warner owns both Reprise and Nonesuch...isn't this industry great? Anyways, this horrible horrible album that Reprise threw away to Nonesuch is quoted by Rolling Stone as "The first great album of the year." They also gave it 4 stars. Show the record industry that the people decide what's good music, not them. Don't buy J.Lo. Support Wilco!
-Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A?
-No sir, I wrote a paper and got Slashdotted.
I think the poster was implying that only five CDs would be burned as music, the others would go to other data.
I drink too much and my liver FUCKING HURTS!
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
... if I take someone's A paper and put my name on it quite obviously that is plagirism. If I take my firends Sheryl Crow CD and burn it and listen to it on my computer, I haven't put my name on it or taken credit for the Sheryl Crow's music. You still know it is Sheryl Crow. Jesus, much of the intent of copyright is to prevent one's work from being appropriated by others, not to prevent stealing. I don't think anyone in their right mind would try to pass off a Britney Spears CD as their own work (and why would they want to). Insofar as trying to make the point that burning a copy of a copyrighted, widely distributed compact disc by a internationally known recording artist is the same thing as putting your name on some run of the mill term paper by an unknown high school student is a lot like comparing apples and oranges (or some cliche like that).
WTF? It's not the same thing
What? No one ever uses CDs for anything other then stealing music.
You people are Killing Kid Rock!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Now compound this by, for example, that this person copies 20 CD's from his friends, all for his own enjoyment, he has made a profit between $300.00 and $400.00.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Yet even [Elvis] Costello acknowledges that, at least in terms of the big record companies, ''They've loaded the game so the house has been winning for a long time. Now it's time maybe for the house not to win for a while. Maybe they have to take some losses.''
Actually it looks like they are taking some losses now - there's a very interesting (but long and a bit heavy on the piracy angle) article from the Observer newspaper in the UK, that used a net monitoring company to track how many downloads of music and movies are being done through KaZaA and similar. The article has a table of the top 10 downloads: number one was Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory with more than 5 million in a month - that's how many copies the album sold retail last year in total. You may not like the music industry, or agree with their tactics, but they gotta be hurting. Get ready for copy-protected music CDs, coming soon to every store near you.
From the article:
Top 10 downloaded movies
1 Black Hawk Down 169,000
2 The Fast and the Furious 168,000
3 The Lord of the Rings 165,000
4 Ocean's Eleven 154,000
5 Harry Potter 147,000
6 Monsters Inc 146,000
7 Collateral Damage 134,000
8 American Pie 2 126,000
9 A Beautiful Mind 125,000
10 Ali 100,000
Top 10 pirated albums downloaded last month
1 Linkin Park -Hybrid Theory 5,300,000
2 POD - Satellite 2,800,000
3 Creed - Weathered 2,600,000
4 Sum 41 - All Killer No Filler 2,500,000
5 Britney Spears - Britney 2,000,000
6 Nelly - Country Grammar 2,000,000
7 Nelly, et al - Training Day Soundtrack 1,800,000
8 Creed - Human Clay 1,600,000
9 Usher - 8701 1,500,000
10 Incubus - Make Yourself 1,500,000
Burning CDs is really no different that making mixed tapes (culturally, at least for me). Only the technology has changed. I'm not going to get into the legality of the issue, but its not like this type of activity is now somehow new. I make tapes (and burn CDs) for other people for much the same way I lend out books I like: because I want to share with them something I like, give them something that makes them happy (or impress them enough to let me get into their pants).
What's the upshot of all of this (other than trying to get laid)? I've discovered a whole lot of new music from tapes others have given me. Sure, a huge chuck of it gets listened to once or twice, but a lot of the time I end up discovering something special. And I figure the same thing happens to people to whom I give tapes to.
Now, the record companies can do their best to squash this, and in a very abstract way I can see their point of view (lets ignore the fact that they screw over artists and want to destroy fair use in the country), but in the end they're just going to hurt themselves. Casual sharing of music (as opposed to outright, high volume piracy) I think is a bigger marketing tool than radio and MTV combined. How did Metallica (or the vast majority of bands who aren't marketed to the hilt the second they're signed) get so big in the 80s/90s? They had little to no radio airplay, no presence on MTV, and as far as I can remember no huge push from their record company? I'd wager mostly from social sharing, whether it be listening to it in your bud's car, or a tape your friend threw at you that he made. I know I've bought just as much (if not more) music due to stuff I've heard on small webcasts, friends apartments and mixed tapes as I've ever heard from commercial radio and marketing.
The Salon article is quite interesting...
- Joseph Byrd records two albums in the late 60s
- They're released on vinyl
- They're re-released on CD
- It's 35 years later, and he has yet to receive any royalties on it!
JWZ had this interesting little bit(Part of the trouble stems from a missing contract.)
Sony, having bought out Columbia Records ignores his requests for sales figures of his material -- no denials, no "we're looking into it," silence!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Whenever I hear the music industry gripe about falling profits, etc. I just think about how cd's cost twice as much as cassettes of the exact same music while the production costs of both are neglible. Has there ever been an explanation for this price gouging?
Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
That should read: Would if bother you if someone copied your paper instead of paying me for the paper I coerced you into giving me?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
''This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out,'' adds Galuten. ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.'' What kind of hard drive are they talking about?
Taking someone's work and calling it your own is "plagiarism." Benefitting commercially from a copyrighted work is called "copyright infringement." They are two entirely different things.
How much does she make again? There seems to be a basic disconnect with the simplest elements of intellectual property laws here, and this isn't the first example.
sigh... 90% of debates seem to be teaching the ABCs of logic, argument and the definitions of words.
The Artist's royalties should go to the artists, or to an artists trust fund, separate from the record companies.
Then at least we can deal with the issues of copying with the problems of crooks getting in the way.
they muddy the water too much.
I think we could all agree on some sort of fair exchange for the artists, if nothing else.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
"And Elvis Costello doesn't mince words when he says, ''If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and takes the chair away, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing."
uhm.. So you can't sell CDs after a copy is made? If you lose anything it is a potential sale and nothing else... That may suck, but it is not the same as having something stolen.
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
I don't think it would since I'm a Satan worshiping Communist...wait a minute this is the Apple story....
Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
Poor guy. But there are two ways to prevent that kind of thing from happening to you:
1)Always enter into a favorable up-front royalty aggreement with any record company in contracts. Always. Even if you think the contracted work will come to nothing.
2)Join ASCAP It is a lot easier for a record company to brush off the royalty statement requests of a burnt out hippie than a powerful organziation representing him. Generally speaking.
I wonder if anyone has ever seen someone making copies of a newspapers, and giving them away to its friends. The answer is NO. If you want today newspaper, you buy it, because is cheap, and people don't care to copy them to save some cents. And my question is, why are music CD's so expensive? Are musicians more qualified/important than journalists? The answer again is NO.
My question then is who is stealing here?
Cheers.
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
'What have you done this week?' She might say she bought a sweater because she liked it. So I'd tell her 'Oh, you bought a sweater? Would it bother you if you had to pay for that sweater again if you wanted to tie it around your waist when it got too warm to wear it? Would it bother you if you couldn't tie that sweater around your waist too? Would that bug you?'
I'd be pretty darn brought if I found out that people were copying my A paper so they could get A's..
I would guess poor Hillary had problems with her SATs.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people.
This would be more like me taking a song by a professional artist, pretending I wrote it, and attempting to distribute it under my name. I wouldn't mind it if someone took my paper and turned it in for an A as long as they gave me credit for it. Then again, I'd like to see the institution that gives that person an A.
''These type of people perceive the risk of getting caught as being nonexistent. It's like a hacker mentality. If there's a way you can hack it, then you should just be entitled to it. It goes with the hacker ethic.''
This makes me so mad. I am not even much of a hacker, but I'd like to be, in the real sense of the word.
I take stuff apart.
I make my computer do what I want it to, even if it wasn't originally intended to do those things.
The hacker ethic is several orders of magnitude more beneficial to society than the RIAA.
Hackers got us on the moon.
Hackers made The Matrix.
Hackers made slashdot.
I, for one, hope the hacker ethic is here to stay, no matter what this prick has to say about it.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
''These type of people perceive the risk of getting caught as being nonexistent. It's like a hacker mentality. If there's a way you can hack it, then you should just be entitled to it. It goes with the hacker ethic.''
the "hacker ethic".
hehe... it's been a while since i heard that one.
ah well...
lysergically yours
...you should use those that are funny too.
:-)
Seriously, comparing it to... stealing xeroxed practice exams would be a better analogy.
Not a very good one, though. Ahem.
Someone please Re: and help me out here!
No sig to see here. Move along.
"The way to address the record industry's concerns about loss of revenue is by finding other means of compensation, Fisher says, such as a tax increase on blank CDs. The major record labels may eventually push for that tax, or a tax on CD burners." I've bought a lot of blank cd's. I'm about to buy a cd burner. I have never burned music on to any of them. I use them for linux distributions and to transport other large binary files. All free software, I don't pirate. I sure hope they don't tax these devices I use for legal purposes just because some people don't use them legally.
comparing writing an A paper and having it peddled all over town is quite different from the logic behind CD-burning. In the first case people are taking credit for the work they stole, in the later the person is just making a copy for personal use. I really couldn't care less who makes a photocopy of my "A Papers" as long as they dont claim it is there own work
I've started using CD-Rs and CD-RWs as back up media, they're relatively inexpensive and robust. Since I don't use the majority of the media to burn copywritten material, would it be fair to charge me an additional tax?
Also, what if I am burning copywritten material? As the Boston Globe article points out, I am allowed to make as many personal use copies as I want. As long as I don't distribute or sell the copies it is permissable. Is it legal, or fair, for the record industry to both recieve a kickback from tax revenue AND employ anti-copying methods? I think not.
-Runz
From the linked Salon piece: Byrd's failure to earn artist's royalties stems in part from his inability to find a copy of his contract. "I've looked everywhere," he says
The moral is obvious: Save the paperwork. Make copies. Get a safety deposit box and/or fireproof safe, etc. You never know when may need it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
"An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
I'd be disturbed if any middle man toke my paper (say the university) and return anything but 100% of the procedes back to me. As far as I know a artist about to record their first album pays for the session just like students pay tutition. And I know of no court rulings that allow universities to claim students work as their own.
I think what a lot of us are missing is that an 'A' paper is not analogous to a burned cd. The A paper would be pawned off as being someone elses, them recieving all of the credit. WHEREAS, i doubt that there are any of us burning CD's of frank zappa, and then showing it to our friends as if WE made it!
an inane argument -- how do such unintelligent people become the voice?
Hilary rosen speaks about her love of money and desire to roll around naked in a big pile of money ... (as said in a previous /. article).
I don't believe that anybody thinks that the record industry has the best interests of the artists at heart - if they did they'd incorporate as non-profit corporations and divide the profits among the artists.
The industry is there to make money - why can't they just be honest about it instead of claiming to be the best friend of the recording artist?
If CD Burning could make ME get pregnant... now, that would be impressive.
So, it seems to me that the music industry is already getting compensated for the sales of CD-R's. And since that's the case, they have nothing to complain about.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
how much of that $19.98 per CD do the artists get?
it's my understanding that it's much less than 25 cents
monkeys.
CDs and sexy? you gotta be kidding me. they are fscking steril no emotion involved, nada.
vinyl however is sexy. when you put nice vinyl on your turntable that is a totally different experience than putting a cd in your cd-player.
especially because vinyl quality may become less over the years or if you don't threat them right.
vinyl lives. cd's are dead.
keep it simple.
''Burning a CD is a good thing,'' he says, ''because you get to see if you like the band, and then you can go to their shows, where you help them by buying tickets and merchandise.
But if you never buy they're CD's in the first place, what makes you think they're going to bother touring? You *are* ripping the artist and their label, etc.
I'll have something intelligent to add one of these days...
he bills himself out at $60-$80 an hour. Then he is just breaking even.
I toldy ou NT!
I, for one, certainly hope that *if* the tide does turn, and copyright law is interpreted to give the market exactly what it seems to want:
1. Downloadable music/video/software/games
2. The freedom to burn CDs
3. The freedom to share (to a certain extent)
4. The freedom to switch formats and time/location shift
5. More reasonable prices ($.25 a song or so)
and so forth, that the people who enjoy this music/software/games/video etc. respond IN KIND and don't take that opportunity to deprive musicians/developers of the means to make a living by refusing to pay under any circumstances.
I think the loosening of the current restrictions is probably very likely. I also think people are basically honest and are willing to pay a fair price for a good product. I also think if people were able to do business on-line reliably enough to support themselves, we could very easily see an unemployment rate of 1%-2%, and an economic advance that would make the dot-com era look like the mid 70s, but without the bubble.
I certainly hope the net doesn't just become a warez wasteland, or we will have insulted the potential of the Internet and in the process wasted a spectacular opportunity to improve a lot of things.
From the article:
Last year, recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time.
I've seen this statistic before, and it's misleading as hell. The conclusion made in the article cited and previous articles I've found in the LA Times & NY Times, is that CD copying is exploding, with the recording industry losing out on what could have been a boost in sales. This, however, is a lie, and a wonderful example of using statistics to mislead people.
It's a lie because all the statistic shows is the number of individual blank CD-Rs sold. There is NO USE INFORMATION associated with this number. As is well-known on /., people burn CDs to back-up their work, store pictures and video, copy CDs they already own to reduce wear on their purchased CDs, burn ISOs of downloaded programs, etc, etc, etc. The use is limited only by the imagination of the person with the burner. Yet, RIAA would have us all believe that 90% or more are used to copy CDs. I don't buy it, and they don't have the information to prove it.
Lastly, there's this nugget:
Even Harvard Law School students are getting into the act. When Hilary Rosen, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, lectured at Harvard last week, she asked how many of the law students had illegally downloaded music. About one-third of them put their hands up. But when she asked how many had burned CDs for friends, the vast majority raised their hands.
''And some of these people are thinking of going into the entertainment industry,'' Rosen said afterward, shaking her head in disbelief. ''This is what we're up against.''
What Rosen is "up against" is called FAIR USE. The sort of CD copying for a friend is exactly what is protected, even under the current DMCA-clouded copyright landscape, under the home audio & recording act. You ARE permitted to copy & share your music, burn CDs for friends, etc. The law that allows you to make tape copies makes no differentiation between analog & digital media. So Rosen's head-shaking is so much dross & corporate lobbying. I agree on targeting people who sell copies, that's dirty. But sharing with friends & family? Gimme a break - that's free advertising.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
It's idiotic statements like this that get everyone on the "copy protection" bandwagon. Without actually saying it they are giving the idea that every blank recordable CD sold are used to copy a copyrighted musical CD. When that is just not true. People who don't know any better, however, will think that last year, more illegal copies of CDs were made than legit CDs sold.
Thank you Hilary for once again proving that having money and having intelligence are often found in a perfect indirect relationship to each other.
http://www.cdrinfo.com/burnerscorner/winxp_1.shtml
m l
http://windows.oreilly.com/news/pchardnut_0900.ht
http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
http://saturn.med.nyu.edu/help/burner/hfs.html
http://www.mp3machine.com/mac/CD_RIPPERS/
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/CD-Writing-HOWTO.html
http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/
Thanks for letting me know where I can find how to copy more CDs ... :)
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?
You know, maybe this makes me a bad person but as a student, that wouldn't bother me in the least bit. I'd be happy for the guy. Guess that just means I don't think "right."
Keep Austin Weird!
There is another mirror here.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Moo
P.S. You've got a friend in the business.
{sniker}
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Boycott the Jon Katz boycott boycott!
So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people.
Um, so Hilary, exactly what kind of personal investment was it that you were making in these CDs?
If you were talking about personal investment in music, I would have guessed it to be the artist.
AFAICT, the recording companies are middlemen, profiting handsomely for their efforts, which are pretty strongly targeted towards making money, one of the more impersonal activities I can imagine.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The teacher is paying you, with good grades as a method of compensation.
(people sometimes forget that you can trade without money being involved)
So a continuation of the analogy would be: Would you mind if the teacher (buyer of content) allowed all the other students to read your paper (the content) for free (without permission/new compensation)
Making this a moral issue (you shouldn't do it because it's just wrong) adds all kinds of emotional baggage and obscures the root cause of the debate.
;^)
"The amount you have to pay for CDs is horrendous".
The obvious solution is for the record companies to stop raping the consumer at the checkout counter and charge something more reasonable for a CD. The market has determined that the price is too high-- thus the "scourge" of ripping and burning copies. Find a price that still covers the cost of manufacture, distribution and artist compensation, but is more palatable to the consumer. You reduce the prevalence of illegal copying by reducing the demand for it.
(20+0)/2=10
I don't want to pay $20 for a CD, and I don't want to steal it, but I wouldn't mind paying $10 for the real thing. But if I'm forced into a choice between $20 and $0, what do think I'm going to choose?
No, it wouldn't bug me. It would if the person who copied it and got an 'A' was competing with me for the same job and got it, particularly if the paper was in the relevent field. It would also bug me if they published it, but the threat of humiliation of being exposed for this prevents most people.
Hilary gets it wrong of course, because we already pay fat royalty fees for the privilege of listening to the music whenever and where ever we want, however, my truck doesn't have a CD player and copying my own CD's onto cassette (while time consuming and impractical to automate) lets me enjoy the music, whenever, where ever I want. If I couldn't I would most definitely buy less music, however, it attempting to be a consumer I'm a criminal by the RIAA's reckoning. Why not bring back 78's?
Now if I were in a band and we cut a CD and suddenly copies where popping up all over the place, we only have ourselves to blame. Clearly one of us, or collectively trusted someone, who spread the music. The distributor would be the villain, but how can you apply this to CD/Record shop sales people, if they sell a CD someone copies? Clearly everyone who makes CD ripping/burning software, rips/burns or otherwise transfers to another piece of media, borrows or lends music should be locked up. I suggest (for those who remember the house on the beach in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish) we lock up the RIAA for their own protection.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- Hunter S Thompson
I like this quote, but I think that Thompson was a little too positive. Maybe he was having an excessively good day.
I've purchased two boxes of 20 CD-Rs. I still have 22 left after three years. As for music CDs, I've made three.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
That's because hard drive business has a better relationship with its customers. I don't recall Western Digital or Maxtor suing a customer because he tinkered with his drive. You could say that IBM screwed its customers with the DeskStar saga, but you can't blame Big Blue for N'Sync, 98 Degrees, etc. People are willing to spend a pretty penny for storage; they aren't willing to drop $18 for two singles and filler.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
You can rationalize copying CD's any way you like, but that really doesn't change the fact that to do so is to steal. Most folks wouldn't think of walking into a record store, picking up a bunch of CD's, and walking out without paying for them. The physical media itself isn't worth much - probably just a few pennies given the huge quantities they're pressed in. What you're paying for is the music.
Now, you can argue that CD's cost too much, and if that's how you feel then you're perfectly right to not buy them. But that doesn't make stealing them suddenly okay.
/. obviously has a strong connection to the open source movement. IMO, open source is one of the best things to happen to the software industry in a long time. To me, one of the most beautiful things about open source is that developers choose to give their work away. That's great, but the existance of open source software doesn't justify pirating commercial software. And it's the same with music (or video, or whatever)... there are musicians out there that choose to give their music away, but that fact doesn't mean that all music is suddenly free for the taking.
Lastly, it's important to point out that if you use your CD burner to steal music, you only strengthen the RIAA's claim that all CD burners and blank media should be outlawed. That impacts me and my ability to use my own CD burner legitimately, which pisses me off.
While "Burgundy Advocate" is making horrible assumptions (I personally haven't burned a CD containing music I don't legally have the right to copy), you are certainly NOT allowed to give away someone elses copyrighted work.
You can copy for personal use, you can not copy to distribute.
I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with the law, I'm stating what the copyright laws, and the home recording acts uphold.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Whats the difference between a digital radio station peddeling your single, and a guy ripping a single from a CD?
The article make it seem that that every blank CD is going to be used for pirating music. What kind of BS is this?
Lets say you buy a 50 pack of CD's....I might burn 5 music CD's from that.
Get yo hands offa mah CDs!
" That's the weird thing about 'N Sync and its rivals: It's impossible to appreciate their staying power, or fully fathom their genius, right down to the seemingly witless banter, unless they make you want to vomit."
--The Washington Post, 4/23/02
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Do you think she's actually published her own music? (really asking...)
She's the biggest LEECH of them all.
Individually she's worse tha all of us, I know she must make over $100,000.00 a year off these artists (in salary), I know I don't dupe that many bucks worth of music a year.
I wish these upset artists would defend themselves. The recording industry is just pissed cus we don't need their monopoly of presses and distribution networks anymore. Their day as a scumbag middle man leech agency has come and gone.
for the first time, more blank CDs (1.1 billion) were sold last year than prerecorded CDs (968 million).
/. readers are familiar with the great article that showed how silly this belief was, and this Boston Globe article has a very interesting statistic that relates:
How can you draw any conclusions from comparing a product that costs $0.50 per unit to a product that costs $18 per unit? The above sentence shows that people are spending $550 million on blanck CDs and $17.4 BILLION on prerecorded CDs. This is a factor of 32 in favour of prerecorded CDs!
Why do I see everyone saying that piracy is the reason for the drop in record sales? I'm sure most
It's also notable where the people who still buy music are buying it. Chains like Tower and Virgin are down 8 to 9 percent, according to SoundScan, while mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target (that is, stores that sell many other products besides CDs) are up 6 percent.
Imagine, CD sales UP in stores that sell them cheaply!
Albhy Galuten, vice president of new media for Universal Records: "I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music."
Where does this guy buy hard drives? Seems to me that a 40G HD is $150 Canadian. That's enough to store about 10000 songs, or about 1000 albums. That would cost $18000 dollars to buy those albums new, though, so even if you were paying $1000 for your hard drive, I could still see why you were doing it.
I haven't gotten to the Salon article yet... maybe it will cheer me up.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
I'd be thinking this was a good thing, if I owned a music store.
I mean, with the debate going around these days over quality of music vs. price, exposure vs. having a hard-core dedicated audience, and so on, wouldn't it be nice if the RIAA would just own up and say "Fuck the little guy doing the weird musical stuff, we're really worried most about people ripping off BrittaN'Sync'Boys latest cookie-cutter multi-platinum release," focus on pushing those records in Wal-Mart where all the other brainless cloned products are pushed, and leave the real music in the MUSIC SHOPS??? It totally adds up! Wal-Mart is where you go to get all the cross-merchandized sneakers, t-shirts, trapper keepers and pencil boxes anyway!
pant... pant... pant
When I go into a record shop, I'm going there precisely because I want to get my hands on stuff I can't find at a big chain store becuase there's not enough of a following to devote valuable shelf space to in a big market. I expect the tinier shops to be more eclectic, and build a loyalty through providing music that's off the wall.
Besides, that's where the Next Big Movement in the musical culture is going to come from anyway. It's the experimentalists that forge the new ground. It's Rosen and all the Zombinomicists that assimilate it into a pop sensation afterward. She *needs* those weird little shops.
Fuck you, Rosen. Fuck you right in the ear. We know what you're after, and I for one ain't buying it.
GMFTatsujin
Last year, recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time.
Maybe that's because for the price of a CD I can get 50 "recordable discs". Even if I spent the same amount of money on each I'd still have 50x more blank ones.
[i]'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' [/i] Isn't that exactly what the RIAA is doing? Aren't they taking the work of the artists and using it to get their own "A"s, in the form of lots and lots of dollars? Maybe RIAA should write their own papers (or create their own music), and stop using the work of others! Frankly, I've never heard Ms. Rosen sing, I've never seen her dance, and I've never seen a "RIAA's Greatest Hits" CD... so I'm a little confused when she's complaining about us using someone else's work...
And Elvis Costello doesn't mince words when he says, "If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and takes the chair away, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing.
"Why should it be any different with music?" he asks.
Obviously, if you steal a chair, that's theft. What if you could make a perfect copy of that chair for free(almost) and anyone who needed a chair, but couldn't afford one, or would not have a chair if they had to pay for it? You didn't take the original chair. It's still there, in the carpenters workshop. He lost nothing. You wouldn't have bought a chair anyway.
Not that it's "legal" to copy and redistribute music, but his logic is fundamentally flawed, like most of the people quoted in the article.
I'm supposed to burn 240GB of mp3's to cd ???
Why is it that a computer game that is a year old drops to 25% of its original price, but a music CD that's a year old goes up in price?
I bought the game Pharoah the other day for $10. When it came out, it was around $40-$50. I also bought the Alanis Morissette CD at the same time for $13. In six months, I'll be lucky to get it for $17.
I think before the music industry calls us all crooks, they should take a hard look at themselves.
Personally, I'm no fan of the artists either. In my book, anyone who lives in a mansion in Beverly Hills, drives a nice Mercedes, and only works a few hours a day on average, shouldn't be bitching to me that I'm not paying them their $20 to listen to them sing for their supper!
Someone bringing in the wood and making an exact duplicate of his chair and taking the duplicate away. Costello still retains the original chair.
He cant sing, he cant get analogies right. No wonder hes not making any money.
Exactly...what about all the companies that use CD-Rs as the lifeblood of their company? Game companies and software development houses burning the new builds. People backing up their HDs as they prepare to format, and other legitimate data storage. Decorative purposes, the list goes on. (I seriously had a friend who used them as highly reflective curtains.)
Next they're going to start bitching about how many gigs of hard drive space are being sold. Hillary's starting to become the new blink tag of the internet. People are just getting far too tired of her played out, immature antics. BTW, the biggest music "thieves"...people who work in the music industry. Mostly the interns they hire from local colleges.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
So it would bother you that somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
What if they got partial credit for the paper? And partial credit for everyone else's paper, whether or not they were involved in the paper or not?
Check the Home Recording Act, Record Companies get a cut of every blank CD sale, irregardless of what it's used for.
Data indeed.. lots and lots of MP3s. ;)
"And the same study found that 23 percent of consumers bought less music last year because they downloaded or copied most of it for free."
So the other 77 percent is either buying more or the same amount of music. This statistic is meaningless.
She rolled her kia on C-470. A much better story:
E 53 %257E566109,00.html
:(
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257
Truly an American icon, she will be missed
It would not destroy anything. The manufacturers would not be able to stay in business, just like any other obsolete company in a market economy - good riddance. The net gain to society would obviously be enormous. See it as Free Hardware (as in Free Hardware Foundation), people would be getting stuff for free and there would always be some people prepared to make new inventions for the others. Companies wanting to get profit out of that industry would have to rely on giving support and "business solutions". Sound familiar?
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
The thing she missed out, was that the owner (or the label on their behalf) already sells their 'A' Paper to people everywhere. Also, i'm confused as to how the example of an essay from which you are given a grade and someone copying it to get the same grade bares any likeness to copying some music to listen too. Its not as if they are copying the music and then saying "_I_ actually wrote and performed this" (Unlike some bands)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Copying is not theft. Get your terms correct.
Hilary Rosen is a fat, ugly, lesbian. Don't laugh, it's true.
Musicians should get paid - before they start playing. Not everytime someone new hears it.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So shouldn't it only bother the artists if we try to pass off their music as our own? If I did well on a paper I would love for people to read it.
Hilary Rosen's analogy about taking someone's paper and making an A from it is just plain wrong. That would be benefiting from the work. While it is certainly wrong to copy someone's work then use it for your own personal gain (i.e., getting an A on a paper or selling CD's without the legal right to do so), it is more accurate to compare the vast majority of cd copying with taking someone else's paper and simply reading it. And there's nothing illegal or unethical about reading someone else's work.
OTOH, the Recording Industry would have everyone pay for the right to simply listen to a song. That's the ultimate in unethical.
This is bogus. Free downloads do not translate 1:1 to lost sales. The media companies want us to believe that's the case - "look at all that money that's being stolen!" Demand is driven by price. Free services don't translate into real sales (otherwise all the dot-bombs would still be in business).
There's a lot of music I might listen to for free that I'm not going to pay $16.99 for a CD. Right now, the only options provided to the consumer are to pay the $16.99 or to steal a free copy. The interesting question is: if there were viable options to buy music, somewhere in between overpriced CDs and stealing-for-free, what the demand might be. But the media companies aren't interesting in exploring this option -- they're trying to force everyone to the no-options, high-price model.
I have been through about 120cd's and I think I burnt 1 cd from CD's I already owned. Not downloaded mp3's although I typically download MP3's I already own rather than spend the time copying them from cd
The wonders of her analogy are great. She knows an artist who feels atleast one of his A's are peddled around town..... for free, but hey if you buy that paper off of him, it's A okay :-)
Her analogy is flawed horribly because If you did pay for his paper, you are a cheater. She's not good at settin' up morality questions is she
The Famous YEEEHAWW!
I can't quite figure out why there aren't more MP3s floating around on OpenNap with advertising blurbs in them. Well, all right, actually I can: nobody with money wants to pay for that kind of promotion.
But think about it: for purposes of advertising, the fact that these things spread like wildfire suddenly becomes an advantage rather than a drawback. Sure, some people would edit the files and cut out the ads, but I bet not everybody would. And "Don't remove ads" is an easier sell than "Don't use this incredibly tempting, limitless sea of files," especially if you keep them brief.
The only example of this approach I've personally run into is at a site called AudioBookForFree, but all of their ads are for themselves -- no real clients yet, obviously. Still, it's an interesting idea.
Given the quality of popular music, a more accurate analogy would be:
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got a D-...'
The term paper analogy is flawed. I don't know of anyone that downloads music, burns it to CD and then claims they wrote and performed the music.
A better analogy would be the open source movement. People create the intellectual property and then release it to the public under certain license agreements. I can download the GNU compiler collection for free, but I don't claim it as mine.
The issue here is money, nothing more. The RIAA wants to be paid for every distributed copy of music; fair use be damned. The RIAA uses the intellectual property argument when it suits them. They never bring up the thousands of programmers that give away their work for free, without restriction, every day.
-ted
I wonder if anyone has ever seen someone making copies of a newspapers, and giving them away to its friends. The answer is NO. If you want today newspaper, you buy it, because is cheap, and people don't care to copy them to save some cents. And my question is, why are music CD's so expensive? Are musicians more qualified/important than journalists? The answer again is NO.
say yes! yes! yes!
Photos.
"This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out," adds Galuten. "I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music."
this just shows how out of touch these people are.
1. I didn't pay $1,000 for a hard drive, I paid $200.
2. I did it because the Hard Drive is a good deal. Selling us shitty music at $19.99 is not.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
Quote you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?
Let's try:
You wrote a kernel, and it was good. Would it bother you if somebody could just take that kernel and make somnething good too?
Answer: no, because I published it using the GPL, and used copyright law to ensure that others could do good things with copies of it, and still more could do good things with copies of that!
Wrong ethic here lady.
- Paul
Hilary Rosen's analogy is faulty. If I write a paper and get an A, the credit is all mine.
However, if an artist records an album and sells it, the majority of the credit (i.e., money) goes to a horde of lawyers and paper shufflers who lack the creative ability to survive on their own.
So as far as Ms. Rosen's argument goes -- Does it bother you that someone else is getting your A? Well, with the RIAA it's already happening.
I'm definitely in favor of paying the artist. But every time you buy a $16 CD that cost pennies to make, you're supporting every fat, worthless idiot trying to get the secretary drunk down at TGIF's.
Stealing music can be a principled thing. When the artist is selling directly to the consumer, THEN it should stop.
Aren't both Hillary's in favor of media censorship?
Sure, some piracy is there because of the price (Only the industry's illegal price fixing to blame for that) but a hell of a lot more of it is simply due to the fact that the consumer can't get what he wants any other way. And the industry is clearly not willing to provide it.
You know what the industry wants, what it really wants? It wants to control your entire listening and viewing experience and it wants each person to pay every time he listens to a song or watches a movie. And they want the $30 up front charge which they insist is just for the media and not for the right to view or listen.
They wonder why their sales figures are dropping. Maybe it's because more people like me are becoming unwilling to pay those greedy pig fuckers a single god damned cent. I can't even remember the last time I bought a new CD for my collection (I don't download MP3s off the net either.) I can remember the last time I went to see a movie; Brotherhood of the Wolf (Sucked, but at least it sucked in French) and Mullholland Drive (Kicked ass) before that. Didn't see Harry Potter. Didn't see LOTR. Probably won't see Attack of the Clones. The industry can blow me!
I'm not inclined to be the least bit sympathetic until those whiney fucks get with the technological program and start offering consumers some choice, and I don't mean "Should I buy the latest Britney Spears album or the latest Backstreet Boys album?" They're here to serve us. Not the other way around.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Is it possible that they just need to find a different way to make money than selling CD's? Perhaps that has become obsolete and the artist can make their living through touring instead of selling CD's. And how much per disc does the artist actually get anyway.
You can't tax CDR's and digital copyrights just piss people off. They can't win so they might as well get over it.
Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
Actually I'd only care because they would end up apparently more qualified in some field than they really are. I'm about to publish a paper on cancer gene-therapy. Will it bother me that other scientists will be able to read my paper for free and do great experiments to progress medicine and human knowledge like I did, without paying me? No.
And no one tries to pass the music off as their own either. Its intellectual dishonesty that makes her example work emotionally, and fail as an analogy.
Ok, so artists & companies suspect they're losing money due to CD pirates. Leaving aside the question of whether you can prove that or not, why don't they look for new ways to make money not subject to pirating?
A suggestion: more touring, more live music. Sure, you can pirate a concert performance, but nothing compares with actually being there, and most people know that. I'll wager that folks who won't pay $18 for a CD would gladly pay that to see the same artist live.
-- "" - Harpo Marx
Hilary knows it's bogus logic to think that artists have a lot of money because she's part of the organization who makes sure that the artists don't have a lot of money. "You think that the artists are rich so copying CDs doesn't hurt? Well, you're wrong. We screw them so bad that they don't have two dimes to rub together. So think about that the next time you pirate music!"
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Is it me or is the RIAA comeing up with any excuse but the obvious one, ALL THE CRAPPY ALBUMS coming out!
I have a CD-R, I burn disks. THe disks I burn are the same mix tapes I made when I was in high school. All my favorite songs form 300+ cd collection I have. The benifit I have now is that I can make better choices on the cds I buy becuase I can listen to songs other than the force fed radio hit and decide if the whole album is worth buying. Not very many reciently.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society. Think about how many people would be driving Porche Boxters or (insert your favorite car here) versus how many would actually sell. Your friend bought a brand new HDTV? Now you've got one too! How would any manufaturer or store stay in business? Does this seem bad to anyone other than me?
Interestingly enough, there was a science-fiction short story published in Analog more decades ago than I care to admit exactly along those lines. I don't remember the title, but in the story, some alien race dumped a matter duplicater and the plans for it on the human race, with the apparent intent of causing human society to self-destruct. Instead, the humans worked out the obvious solution: since anything could now be duplicated, the only thing that has value is unique originals, and the way to make a living is to design and create unique originals of things.
I think of this story a lot whenever the debates over digital copying and copyright infringement comes up. The Internet + computers are that matter duplicator, as far as anything digital (music, software, books, data) is concerned. The only question is, how do you get people to pay you the necessarily hefty fee for the unique original when they can wait for someone else to buy the original and get a copy for free? It used to be that the guys in charge of the "matter duplicators" (printing presses, film duplicators, record presses) charged a fee for each duplicate to cover the cost of buying the "unique original" (the manuscript, artist's studio tape, composer's score, etc.), but when everyone owns a "matter duplicator" (computer), who buys the original?
---dragoness
Sorry for the second post but I found this gem in the article:
''Obviously, something is being done with those blank CDs,'' says Mike Dreese, owner of the Boston-based Newbury Comics record chain and prophetic coauthor two years ago of a widely distributed essay, ''Disc burning equals death.''
Yes you moron, I actually do put DATA on some of my blank CDs....not just music.
-ted
I'm supposed to burn 240GB of mp3's to cd ???
Stop lying, you know 212 gigs of that is pr0n.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
No, because the educational system is a sham in this country.
Then, I return the question to Hilary "Swank" Rosen: What have you done lately, other than sit on your ass and collect money? What can you produce that no other human being can? What makes you special enough to keep you from, say, gas-pump-attendance work?
Nothing.
See, there's the difference. Whores are concerned about the money (a la your Lars Ulriches), whereas artists are concerned about the music (a la your Mobys and your Sheryl Crows).
It's easy to figure out. Follow the money. When Hilary Rosen puts an album of music out, I will wholeheartedly listen to whatever the hell Hilary "Swank" Rosen has to say about it. I don't listen to whores whimpering about lost profits.
-----------------------
You are what you think.
'There's a "sex appeal" to burning CDs, says [Sheryl] Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents.'
I'm sorry, but my friends and I don't have orgies everytime I toss a CD in the burner..
"My days are less enjoyable because of people." ~ Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Well, i for one won't be copying any cd's for a while - my burner has packed up and i'm getting a new one. But, when i get my new drive, i'm going to copy as much as i like. Go screw yourself rosen & co. i've never bought a music cd in my life and i'm not about to start now. :)
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Hah... yeah, you can keep telling yourself that. AC got it fair and square.. we all know ACs are the only TRUE trollers.
slashdot!=valid HTML
Will you stop using that fucking phrase!?!
'We have got to do something to protect intellectual property. It's just not right to steal,'' says Albhy Galuten, vice president of new media for Universal Records
Not paying royalties is stealing, burning a cd is only copying. To steal you have to take from someone. Dont think the industry steals from artists?...
Yet even Costello acknowledges that, at least in terms of the big record companies, ''They've loaded the game so the house has been winning for a long time. Now it's time maybe for the house not to win for a while. Maybe they have to take some losses.''
---
From the boston.com article:
''This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out,'' adds Galuten. ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
For $1,000, assuming IDE drives, I could get 600+GB of storage space. Of course, if I were copying music to my hard drive, I'd use a compression format, and the quality would not be equivalent to the CD from which it was pulled originally. Essentially, even at an excessively high bitrate, I could still record more music onto that much storage space than I could actually listen to within a reasonable time. People aren't spending $1000 on hard drive space, they go buy a large (60-120GB) hard drive for 10-25% of that if they want music on their hard drive, or they go spend $20-30 for 100 blank 80 minute CDs and have 70GB of storage that way. Plus, in either case, they can use that space for something other than music.
At the same time, $20-30 buys you one or two CDs (two if you're lucky) at the record store (or Wal-Mart, whichever), and the $100 you spent on a 60GB hard drive buys you 5-8 CDs. Top that off with the fact that CD prices have risen despite production costs decreasing and sales increasing (talking since they were first released) beyond the rise of inflation.
Also, they like pointing out that more blank CDs were sold than pre-recorded CDs, but let's look at what people really use blank CDs for. Some people have to create backups of data, some people are distributing their own music, some people distribute their own software, and then the rest are pirating software and music with those blank CDs. Not to mention that some number of those blanks are turned into coasters not only by the copy protection schemes that both software companies and the music industry are introducing, but by random occurance of errors or other problems as well. Why do they think so many CD writers have buffer underrun protection now? Because people get sick of creating frisbees, even at 30 cents a piece.
What really pisses me off is that fact that today's CD's break so much more easily than cassettes did. If I shell out $20 for a piece of plastic that cost $.02 for Sony to press, when it gets damaged beyond playability, why can't I get a replacement CD for FREE?? I have tools in my cabinet with better warranties that cost less, and they sure the hell don't break when they get a scratch.
As computers and electronics fall in price it becomes relatively easy for artists (I'm talking about real artist not studio produced acts) make their own music. Through the internet the artist can get exposed. The artist can even distribute his own music over the net. A group of artists could, together, purchase higher bandwidth if needed.
Suddenly the manufacture (which BTW costs less and a dollar a disc) and distribution companies are no longer needed...
UNIX/Linux Consulting
...after having read the article and most of the threads, that the fundamental issue is not whether or not the media is being stolen, but actually how it's distributed. What is the underlying root issue is the need for the RIAA (and for other industry organizations as well) to find ways to embrace this cultural phenomenon by promoting digital delivery in ways that will satisfy both the needs of the artists and those of the listening public. PressPlay and the like are valiant starting efforts, but they will never be effective until the need for physical media (i.e, the CD) is at least downplayed, if not removed entirely...
Music Industry to Stop Selling Music!!
The RIAA has today announced that it is to stop selling music CDs. Instead, they will concentrate on selling blank CDs. Already a number of artists including Madonna, NSync and Britney have said that they will be producing 'own brand blanks' - blank CDs with pictures from their albums printed on the front. An industry expert said that blank CDs will be the RIAA's saviour. The MPAA said they are considering selling blank DVDs instead of films.
The jokes probably been done, but i couldn't be bothered to search
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It isn't a culture-statement that I burn CD's, either with music or data, it is simply one of the ways I use technology. CD burning allows me to backup my files, distribute photographs to my mother, give a copy of my file of .WAV's to a buddy in my office -- it used to be a floppy (or several of them) or a Zip disc. Within the next few years, it will be DVD's with gigs of data or music (she'll love that) on them. It is just that technology has become so prevalent in our lives and the CD-burners are standard equipment in PC's today. The RIAA should make better analogies than the school report and the 'A' grade -- maybe if I were to sell the paper for $$$ and then found out later that somebody had made a copy and was not sending me my cut of it.... and I wouldn't care.
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
[Galuten:] ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
.NET before I get low disk space warnings.</sarcasm>
Funny, the last 40gb drive I bought (2 weeks ago) came in at $80 and can hold about 1000 modern albums (since a lot of them are coming in at only 40 minutes -- for which they're charging $20). And I can buy a spindle of 100 80+ minute CDs for $20 (after rebate), thus allowing me to store 1000 albums locally and have 200 copied albums (2 40-minute CDs per 80-minute blank, remember) for $100 -- less the $24,000 cost of 1200 such albums.
<sarcasm>Or my drive can hold one install of Windows XP and Visual Studio
But it brings me to a point: Microsoft knows how to prevent piracy -- all you have to do is make your products too big to copy! Who cares if your customers can't really tell the difference? You can still charge them more for the 'favor' and claim that there really is one...
The simple fact of the matter is that the RIAA wants to toss up a straw man (thievin' technologists!) to cover up the fact that they're price gouging their customers ($18+/disc? It was $15 just the other year...) in the middle of a recession in which their industry has done precious little that's new, innovative or different [and most of what is unexpected -- BeautifulGarbage -- is unexpected in a scary and disappointing-experiment kind of way]. In short, they need to repaint themselves as a pro-consumer organization that is trying to find and fund the next musical revolution and that's why we should be paying them to exist.
As it is, they're turning a lame excuse into a PR crisis that they're too involved with to be able to effectively solve.
Recommended listening: $13 for Shimmer [http://www.natashasghost.com/merch.htm]; $12 for Doppelganger [http://www.curve.co.uk/]...
If I made millions of dollars for selling my A paper publically, it wouldn't really matter if some people copied it, since I'm already a millionaire, and I don't believe in crying that I'm not a billionaire.
''And some of these people are thinking of going into the entertainment industry,'' Rosen said afterward, shaking her head in disbelief. ''This is what we're up against.''
God forbid the entertainment industry might get an infusion of people who actually care about fair use.
That kind of question always turns up -- "Would you mind if someone take your paper and get an A, too?" -- and probably the desired answer is something like "No". But it doesn't not stop there.
Because, even if someone just copies a work of mine, that someone always end up learning something (in fact, if s/he copies by hand s/he will learn a lot -- "he who writes, reads three times", Roman saying). And I lose nothing because what I learned cannot be taken from me. As a matter of fact, this would even be good to me, both by making me widely known as author by word of mouth and by giving me a (deserved) status of contributor to general enlightenment.
Well, I don't do this. And the reason is that I want to keep things straight (i.e., I don't want to participate in a lie, when others claim authorship of my work) and I think that quality controls are needed: bad grades are good to people who are not learning as a feedback.
I even said this at high-school. Upon saying that cheating is anti-ethical, I was greeted with loud mocking. One of the few times I got amazed at the mocking, but satisfied I was being honest.
Now, why I write this? Because, after all I said, maybe you understand why I laugh at corporations when they try do promote honesty and charge high prices at the same time. Hypocrites.
i've done an inventory here: number of original CD's: 97 number of 'burned' cd's (with original): 23 number of 'burned' cd's (no original): 4 number of non music burned cd's: 26 the thing that bugs me is that there is always an assumption that the cd-r will be used for illegal music. that just isn't true. i live in Canada and have been given the 'privilege' of paying a levy to the artist's organization/union for every CD-r that i buy. of the lot that i have, i think only 4 would qualify as fee-worthy. and even so, not illegal, because i have paid the fee (my intepretation of the law. shared by many) i made duplicates of my favourite music because i spent a lot of time on the road, and i kept the original CD's at home. when handleing and sunshine wreck a cd, it only costs me a buck to burn another. fair use. i shouldn't have to pay a levy to the artists for my copy of linux. i shouldn't be accused of being a thief by some jack-ass-in-a-tie just because i bought a stack of blank cd-r.
Music is dead, something else is going to take it's place. The riaa is kicking a screaming on the way down.
..we'll make more, but 'they' won't make $more$.
Did anyone actually think that music as a form of art and entertainment would last forever? Does anything outlast time? There is plenty of great music to listen to from the last 80+ years, why make more?
Times change.
I been using layer 3 since the good old days and I have MAYBE burned a dozen audio CDs. These people suck. Was it like this when the recordable tape came out???
Hillary's comment about getting an A on a paper is pretty self-condemning, considering that her whole career is based on taking 99.9% of each "A" and giving the writer one tenth of one percent. Self-assured moralizers always fall on her faces trying to turn "It's legal and we can" into "It's Right."
I have about a hundred recordable CDs due to arrive at my front door tomorrow. I did not buy them for the purpose of copying music CDs, nor did I buy them for the purpose of burning to CD downloaded music I don't own. It's not very efficient, but I use them to back up applications I've bought electronically (which I do more and more often). I use them to make images of Linux distros. I use them to back up my porn (which may be objectionable, but that's a seperate issue). I use them for.... I don't know what. I probably won't use all those CDs before I upgrade to a DVD writer. I think it's absurd that I have to pay a compensatory tax on something as multiple use as recordable CDs. I also rip all the CDs I buy (and, hmm, let's see, I've probably bought already 20 music CDs this year) and convert them to MP3s, particularly so I can transfer them to my car Empeg player. I am absolutely furious that the recording industry is agitating to prevent me from what I'm legally (and justifiably) entitled to do with the music I buy.
I'm highly skeptical of the RIAA's claims because they're so dissimilar to my experience. But I'm 37 years old. I have no idea what teenagers are doing these days. Furthermore, I do know people who have accumulated large (illegal) MP3 collections and are burning those to disk. So I have reason to believe there's a problem. I just don't think it's as enormous as the recording industry is claiming that it is.
What's desperately needed is a good, authoritative study of the actual use of purchased CDs, downloaded CDs, and recordable CDs. Everything I've seen so far has been funded by someone with something they're trying to prove. I'd like to see a comprehensive academic study.
Question:
If I own an 8-Track of Elvis's greatest hits. I then find the songs on LimeWire in mp3 format. Which I download and burn onto a CD. Is this illegal?
Any ideas?
In his typical incisive style, he cuts to the heart of the matter. After pointing out that future earnings in the far future have, in present terms, no economic value, he goes on to note:
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I can't mod, so I'll just respond with kudos!
BlackGriffen
Clearly, none of you have ever been on tour.
Guess what? I have. For the most part, it's unglamourous, boring, exhausting and above all, not very profitable. Most of the low-to-mid-level bands being screwed by both the record labels and MP3 kiddies give up day jobs to tour, and they're lucky as fsck if they break even, after paying typical expenses such as gas, food, lodging, van/bus costs, sound engineer, equipment rental, you name it.
If you're a moderately-successful regional touring band, yes, you can make some money -- but for how long? And what do you do when you're not touring?
''Obviously, something is being done with those blank CDs,'' says Mike Dreese, owner of the Boston-based Newbury Comics record chain and prophetic coauthor two years ago of a widely distributed essay, ''Disc burning equals death.
Lets see. 100+ CDs I've burned in the last year to distribute reports and large files that were too big for email. 3 CDs I've burned in the last year to make mix-tapes for my freinds.
Sorry to burst that bubble, but from where I sit, a lot of the CD burning that goes on is for legitimate, business applications.
But if you listened to them, the CD burners we have at the office are tools of evil. And.. I'm supposed to pay additional taxes to cover the losses to the recording industry?
"Hey boss... the price of CD-Rs just went up." 'Why?' "Well, aparently our business has to pay Madonna and N'Sync because of some high school kids".
Lunacy. Pure Lunacy.
The Internet is generally stupid
Well, I for one have stocked up on cheap blanks. I just bought 10 100pak spindels of 700mb cds (and with my reseller discount they were next to nothing)... and thats on top of the aprox 500 blanks I already have. I am stocked for a good long while ;).
;). Nah, really, I don't have a *single* piece of pirated software on my computer(s) because 100% of my software is open source. I also don't have any MP3's that I don't own the cd of....
I also have several burners (8x, 12x, 12x, 16x, 24x) (and all plextor). All I have to say is they CANT keep me from burning my Warez
I wish these stupid FUCKS would get it into their head that the rest of the world is not out to get them. Yes, some people do use cds for piracy, but there are more people who use them for legit purposes than illegal ones.
How did Metallica (or the vast majority of bands who aren't marketed to the hilt the second they're signed) get so big in the 80s/90s? They had little to no radio airplay, no presence on MTV, and as far as I can remember no huge push from their record company?
In my long-ago youth, the guy holding down the counter at the local independent record store noticed that I came in regularly to browse the heavy metal section and check-out the Iron Maiden and Judas Priest T-shirts, and suggested that I might like this cool new heavy metal band Metallica. I was a bit skeptical, but he put on "Master of Puppets" from the then just-released album of the same name, and I was hooked. Damn, but that was some good, loud head-banging music!
What's the point? I had to listen to the music before I was convinced to buy it. Hell, the guy at the store was probably violating some "public performance" rule or something by playing it in the store!
In fact, I got into heavy metal in the first place when I was stationed overseas in personnnel support and spent the slow hours listening to my supervisor's tape collection. He had Black Sabbath, which I thought was neat, and prompted me to go out and actually buy some Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne. Later, I discovered Judas Priest from copies of a co-workers metal collection, and bought a lot of my own in tapes, and later CDs... none of which would ever have happened if I hadn't listened to someone's bootleg, copied tapes.
---dragoness
and now Linda, when will people learn to use their seatbelts!
....
oh well
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
> Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society.
Destroy, indeed. It would fundamentally change our society, but that's a far cry from wholesale destruction. Firstly, why should I cry about stores going out of business because we no longer need them? Because of all of the poor workers who don't have jobs any more? If they're the ones you're worried about, let me ask you, why would any of these poor people need their jobs any more? They'd use the machine to get what they need and want, just like I would. We'd all have to find jobs that don't involve manufacturing or transport (of goods), or we'd need to restructure society to compensate for not needing to make anything (although unless you had a REALLY BIG MACHINE you'd still need labor to build things like houses and cruise ships and spacecraft and such), but I can't see that as a bad thing on the balance. I mean, Porsche wouldn't make any money selling Boxsters any more, but people would still need the roads maintained, and there would always be a need for teenagers pumping gas. To extend to the digital music world, no artist would be able to sell CDs, but there would still be a huge demand for concerts (which is where the real money is in the music industry, anyway).
> Why doesn't the same logic apply to digital music? Sure CD's are way over priced, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go steal! Sorry to rant but I'm tired of people trying to justify what they know is not right!
The same logic does apply to digital music, but that's tangential to my problems with these people. The uses to which I wish to put my content are completely legitimate, but still I run afoul of their howling complaints that I'm stealing food from the mouths of these artists' children. For example, I want to watch DVDs on my high-powered Linux box. I bought the DVDs from my local Best Buy, and I don't copy them, but I'm not allowed to create, buy or use a DVD player for Linux because of the DMCA. For another example, I own a very high quality CD jukebox, which is attached to my multi-thousand dollar sound system. Because they say CDs need to be protected, they produce CDs which will not play on my CD player (note, not a computer, but a friggin' CD PLAYER!) and don't bother to warn me that they won't play, and won't let me return them if I should buy one and find that it's a coaster. For a third example, I can't play said same CD in my computer, but they provide digital tracks for computer use. Only, if you'll remember, my machine runs Linux, so I still can't listen to the tracks, because they require Windows Media Player. Again, finding my way around this so I can listen to a CD that I bought legitimately has been outlawed by the DMCA, so I'm stuck.
I'd be very interested to hear how any of this qualifies as justification for doing something wrong. It seems a lot more that a bunch of record companies and movie studios got together and decided that they could make a lot more money by enforcing a badly outdated business model on me, without any real concern as to whether they're screwing me in the process.
Virg
Another bad analogy:
[i]And Elvis Costello doesn't mince words when he says, ''If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and takes the chair away, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing."[/i]
What Elvis is saying equates to someone coming in to the studio and stealing the sheet music or the master copy of a song he just wrote. That would certainly be wrong - no question.
A more accurate analogy would be if the carpenter built a chair as a model of a mass-produced, but very expensive chair, the sale of which generates a small roaylty to the carpenter. Someone then copies the chair and gives it away for free.
The solution is less expensive music. Especially digital music. Why is the markup on the chair so high? Sell the chair for an affordable price, and people won't make their own.
In the article Elvis Costello says: If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and takes the chair away, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing. Why should it be any different with music?
Well, the difference is that there's only one chair. If it's stolen it's gone, and the carpenter can't sell it anymore. But of course data can't be stole in that manner. Not to mention the breaking and entering part which also doesn't exist with CD burning.
His analogy would only be accurate if someone broke into the studio and stole a unique master tape.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
My response: Nope. That doesn't bother me one bit. Hell, I even make it more accessible. http://oostedorp.org/homework/ Want my homework? It's free. Take it!
Point 1: Article Description
... [consumers] often distribute copies to friends."
.. note the word solution
"Last year, recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time. With so many people copying music, is the record industry toast?"
This implies that there is a direct relationship between Recordable CD sales and People copying music.
Let's look at what this statement implies
1. That every recordable CD bought last year was used for copying music.
2. IF #1 is the case that each copy has the ability to hurt the record industry thus people are not making fair-use copies.
3. Nobody made copies of software, backups of documents, archives of images, backup of websites - software - images - hard drives or anything else with the bought CDs but rather were copying music.
Point 2: 2nd paragraph
"The issue is CD burning - the act of duping a CD for free on your computer. It's become the central worry of a music industry that slumped last year and continues to dive alarmingly, as more and more consumers feel entitled to burn CDs and often distribute copies to friends."
This implies that
1. the industry slump is directly related to "consumers [who] feel entitled to burn CDs"
2. that "
Point 3: Hilary Rosen given 2 paragraphs here to talk about this 'shameful' act and more near the end of the article
"Even Harvard Law School students are getting into the act. When Hilary Rosen, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, lectured at Harvard last week, she asked how many of the law students had illegally downloaded music. About one-third of them put their hands up. But when she asked how many had burned CDs for friends, the vast majority raised their hands"
Note that first. the above paragraphs were discussing consumers.. now we are discussing 'illegally' downloaded music. This article portrays both consumers and those that illegally download music as being one and the same
Point 4: The term "Burning" only referring to music
"But record-label representatives say that home taping was never as prevalent as CD burning"
and
"There's a ''sex appeal'' to burning CDs, says Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents."
Burning encompasses more than just music yet the focus here is showing burning = music = theft
Point 5: RIAA commissioned statistics used without any counter studies introduced
"Ownership of CD burners...has nearly tripled since 1999. Last year, according to a study by Peter Hart Research Associates (commissioned by the RIAA).....And the same study found that 23 percent of consumers bought less music last year because they downloaded or copied most of it for free. "
Point 6: Once again CD sales directly related to burning
"''Obviously, something is being done with those blank CDs,'' says Mike Dreese, owner of the Boston-based Newbury Comics record chain and prophetic coauthor two years ago of a widely distributed essay, ''Disc burning equals death.''"
Point 7: Newbury Comics record chain owner giving statistics and predictions showing a direct relationship to CD burners and lower Prerecorded sales
"Dreese notes that CD sales were down 4 percent last year from the year before. They are down 9 percent so far in 2002 and he predicts a 13 percent overall decline this year, based on how many consumers will buy new CD burners."
Point 8: Copy protection referred to positively with no counter points or issues that it involves being discussed
"''None of the [copy-prevention technologies] totally work yet, but the best minds in the business are spending copious amounts of time to find a solution,'' says Ron Fair, president of A&M Records. "
Point 9: near midway to the end of the article. we see the other side.. which STILL portrays burning as bad
note the following quotes
"It's a complex issue that is far from cut-and-dried in the eyes of many observers, including some artists. ''I see it from two different sides,'' says Boyd Tinsley of the Dave Matthews Band. ''It sucks because musicians will make a lot less money'' from CD burning, he says. ''But, on the other hand, it's a cool thing because kids gets exposed to so much music through the Internet - and that's a good thing.''" - Why don't they use other artists who don't have a problem with it?
"''Burning a CD is a good thing,'' he says, ''because you get to see if you like the band, and then you can go to their shows, where you help them by buying tickets and merchandise. I'm not trying to rip off the band. And a lot of times, kids will buy the CDs after they've burned a CD, just to support the band.''" - Actually, those who do have this perspective of finding out if you "like" the band only do it with mp3's. Not burned CDs. You don't burn an entire CD to find if you like the band. This is a flagrant misuse of some peoples way of making music buying decisions.
Point 10: During the counter point part of the article. We see Rosen debunking those beliefs ( which are not legit anyway )
"The RIAA's Rosen, however, sees some of this as bogus logic. ''It's in vogue to diss record companies. That gives fans the license to say, `Well, we're only hurting record companies. We're not hurting the artists,''' she says. ''People sometimes think `If an artist is well known enough and I've heard of them, they have a lot of money and I don't care. And if an artist is unknown, they ought to be grateful to me for spreading their name around.' So they create this sort of rationalization.''"
---
I'd go on an on but there's no need.
Record companies take 98% of the money out of the revenue stream either upfront or after sale. Changing the distribution mechanism would not affect musicians. Why is that? Look at price elasticity. If record companies wanted they could sell CD's for 0.25 more and pay 25 cents more royalities to artists and that would contribute more dollars to artists than trashing Napster. What if they sold CD's for 40 dollars? Would they only take 20 and give 20 to the artist? No of course not. So whether CD's cost ZERO, 20 dollars or 40 dollars - the artist is utterly unaffected.
Conversely if record companies wanted to compete with Napster by retailing CDs for 5 bucks - think of it new releases for 5 bucks - they would continue to take 98% of the money out of the stream and artists would still not get anything.
Think of it - new retail CD's for 5 bucks. The only use for burners would be to make your own party mix - unit CD sales would go back up. Of course the artists are still starving but that's a MATTER BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND THE RECORD COMPANY NOT THE ARTIST AND THE CONSUMER. I don't stipulate how UAW workers get paid to make Fords so WTF should I worry about the artists contractural relationship with the record companies??
Your analogy is flawed. You're so stupid! You arne't even thinking beyond your preconceived notion, and you're simply grasping at whatever ill-conceived example you can to try to justify yourself. You fail miserably. Shut up and die.
so there, nyah!
Uh did anyone think to take a look at the current economy. Oh poor RIAA, economy sucks, no real pull towards their one hit wonders. Let's tax the people burning data to make sure we hit our profit margins. Harpies...
Coming soon... Tax on box cutters to pay the airlines for their slumping profits.
Ah well, a little late on this one, so I doubt anybody will see it this far down, but I just gotta say.
Why do so many businesses think that because they made money in the past, they have some kind of god-given and federal government enforced right to keep making money in the future, despite the fact their business model has been antiquated by changes in society and technology?
It may be that in another decade, when even your grandma's on the net with a T3, and you don't even need to bother with 'burning' something to a CD, you just download it into you all-in-one go-anywhere media player, that it will be impossible to profit from selling packaged media, because copying is so easy and ubiquitous that laws against it are completely unenforceable. I don't know that's the case, but maybe. The record companies will STILL insist that, 'we made money in the past, we get to make money now. Tax anything that can be used to copy or distribute music and give some to us so we can keep being rich.'
Used to be blacksmithing was a pretty good business. Everybody had horses, horses need shoes, bring us your horse and we'll shoe it. But then, ono! Those new-fangled automobiles! Blacksmiths can't make money shoeing horses anymore! Quick, let's use the police power of the federal government to tax all automobile tires, and distribute that money to blacksmiths, to make up for their lost profits!
SECRET MESSAGE TO RECORDING INDUSTRY: FIND A NEW BUSINESS MODEL
I dunno, try recording as a way of promoting merchandise and concert seats. You know, try selling tangible and scarce resources, just like the rest of the economy! Develop a music-matching service...I love music, but man I have no time to go listening to all kinds of stuff to find out what new artists (or old artists I've never heard of) I might like. I'd gladly pay for a service where I tell you what other bands/songs I like, and you stream me music that you think I'd like, based on my preferences. There are all kinds of ideas...check Kevin Kelly's new book, he's got some great ideas there. But for the love of god, quit whining to me about how much money you're losing because you're a dinosaur.
/rant>
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I was an active music consumer when CDs first came out in the USA. At the time, they were priced several dollars more than LPs (actually, the price, in some cases, was nearly double). The price increase, we were told by the labels, was due to low sales volume compared to LPs and lack of CD production facilities in the USA (the first CD production facility in the USA came online around 85 or 86, I believe) and that CDs would get cheaper once these factors abated.
Like idiots, we believed the labels and waited for the prices to come down. They didn't. They didn't come down when CDs overtook LP sales. They didn't come down when CDs overtook cassette sales. In fact, they kept going up. The labels liked the fat profits they were making with no effort when CD production costs plummetted and their prices remained the same.
Here we are 18 years later and the record labels are getting exactly what they deserve. They got fat and stupid off of their CD profits and were too slow to respond effectively once digital music became a force to be reckoned with. Did they make individual songs available for purchase and download so people wouldn't have to fork over $20 for a CD that contained one or two songs they liked? No. Did they make cheaper MP3 versions of albums available for people who didn't care about the quality, expense, and packaging of a full-priced CD? No.
The labels didn't respond to the market and so the market is running all over them. It's sad that the artists are the ones being screwed, though. The labels sowed the seeds of discontent and now the reaper has come to call.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Last I checked, it was legal to make copies for yourself, but not to distribute them to others.
''This is a sociological problem and we have got to work it out,'' adds Galuten. ''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
Wow. I can't believe someone who is supposed to be an 'authority' on this subject could be so misinformed on the cost of hard drives. Outside of SAN and huge storage farms (which I doubt are widely used as MP3 libraries) I haven't paid $1,000 for a hard drive since I bought a 1GB back around '93 or so. Is ANYONE really paying $1,000 for bigger hard drives to avoid buying music? I highly doubt it. In fact, I challenge Mr. Galuten to present even one anecdotal example of this.
If I'm a carpenter and someone comes and takes my chair, I don't have the chair anymore. That's the key difference. If someone copies my chair's design they can make the same chair. As far as I'm concerned, that's not stealing. I still have my chair.
Sony just released the new Celine Dion CD in Europe as an encrypted CD...
damn.
I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you? More like writing an A paper, and then having other people take that paper and read it.
No comment.
Except the house never loses. The record companies will keep (signed) artists from making money, period.
Hilary Rosen reminds me of a dog that pisses on the food that's left over after it's done eating.
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'"
Well, disregarding the fact that taking the paper and getting an A devalues As and punishes the person who is doing the cheating (neither of which is pertinent to this discussion), my answer is "No, that wouldn't bother me at all. I would be glad to have helped someone."
If I get an apple and Johnny gets an apple too, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. For me to get an apple then burn the tree so Johnny can't get one is not helpful, it's not wise, and it's not right. It's also not terribly important right now while the apples are pop-music, but when we're talking about medical software that could save someone's life, or, in the not so distant future, code for a nanofactory that makes food or housing, it becomes very important.
The day is not so far away when these laws, which we make to satisfy piss-ant small-minded corporate drones who imagine that they have a right to profit by punishing others, will affect how many children in the world die of hunger and exposure, or how many people live in squalor and die of malaria.
That we should treat their arguments as anything other than the temper tantrums one would expect of a two year old is inexpressibly infuriating. Have we really learned nothing from millenia of two-bit dictators suppressing the masses for no reason other than it makes them feel important?
Ok first off, blank cds are by no means all used for music....has anyone noticed how floppys have all but drifted from computer store shelves? more importantly floppys are usually signifigantly more expensive than CDs. This sounds like the RIAA setting the scene to introduce something similar to the Blank Tape tax they tried to do in the 80's. More importantly I think that this is just the record companies trying to extend their usefulness. consider this. an artist only makes a few dollars on each CD. So if I download music or get it from a friend, what exactly did the record company do? nothing. So if I send a check for 5 dollars to each artist for every album, then not only am I not doing anything wrong, I am helping the artists make more $$$. so foreget the record companies, they are worthless!
In A.D. 2002, War was beginning.
Kernel Hacker: What happen?
User: Somebody set us up the CBDTPA
Programmer: We get signal
Kernel Hacker: What!
Programmer: Main Screen turn on
Kernel Hacker: It's You!
R.O.S.E.N.: How are you gentlemen?
R.O.S.E.N.: All your computer are belong to us.
R.O.S.E.N.: You are on the way to pay per compute
Kernel Hacker: What you say?!?!
R.O.S.E.N.: You have no chance to hack make your time
R.O.S.E.N.: HA HA HA HA....
Kernel Hacker: Take off every CD
Kernel Hacker: You know what you doing
Kernel Hacker: Move MP3
Kernel Hacker: For great justice
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
If a band I like comes within 300 miles of my sphere of influence, I go to see them. Because how do I know when I am going to get a chance to do that again. Unfortunately, the last band I liked that I saw live was pavement, back in '94 i think...
It's all about the price we're expected to pay. If I can spend 50 cents and get the same recording as I would if I spent $18, why the hell WOULDN'T I? Setting morality issues aside temporarily; I don't care who you are, you can't tell me that you wouldn't go for the cheaper item if you knew they were practically identical. Seems to me that pretty much anybodies morals can be bent for a price. The difference in price between 50 cents and 18 bux (36 times(!) as much), means that most people are willing to tell that angel dude on their shoulder to shut up.
:)
Now if, say, the new Britney Spears album came out and it was 5 dollars. Now it's only 10 times as much, the morals start to kick in a little bit harder now. More people might be willing to shell out for the music rather than copy it. A) They could have the warm fuzzy feeling knowing they helped their favorite artists' cocaine habbit. B) They don't have to feel like a guilty thieving pirate.
Another thing, probably quite a few kiddies have a fiver burning a hole in their pocket at least once during the week. They'd likely buy an album even if they only liked one song, rather than hesitate and download the one song they liked and save their $18...
Does this make any sense? RIAA, your product is overpriced for the current market conditions. Lower your prices to something resonable and you'll likely realize quite a bit more sales and profit.
Would something like this work? The musician when he wants to record an album goes to a recording company and signs a contract, the difference being that he is allowed to dictate the number of years the recording company owns his/her music (negotiations would ensue). At the end of this time, the music ownership reverts back to the musician. They can renew the contract, or take their money and music and run.
And Elvis Costello doesn't mince words when he says, ''If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and takes the chair away, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing.
''Why should it be any different with music?'' he asks. ''If music is all free, then why not go and make up your own songs? Music isn't just in the air. Somebody has to determine the order in which these tones and rhythms are played and arranged and recorded.The woolly idea that music should be for free is ridiculous.''
you can't make perfect digital copies of a chair
one day you WILL be able to, and this shit will start all over
yes it is a grey area Elvis, thats why its such a big controversy right now..perhaps you should go back to writing lame songs and let the system shake itself out
The analogy would have made more sense if the copiers of the cds were trying to claim that they wrote/performed the music. If some one was copying my paper to use as an examplar of a good paper I would be flattered and pleased that my work was being distributed to as many people as possible as should any artist especially a musician.
You dare to hit ME! JOHNNY PASCAULLY!!
i have unwittingly been participating in the (H)GSB(really busy....i know its bad when i can't read /.) and wanted to post something. this story...is horrible. malda is right. comments aren't worth much, and its been showing. come on, guys...you can't leave /. ALONE for a week, let alone refrain from posting. however, we need some stories. something better than "burning cds is a part of modern sexual culture." i don't care how this gets modded up or down, just wanted to say something.
I have no desire to reach nirvana.
If someone takes my A-paper and represents it as their own work, then that's /fraud/ and it does bother me. (Note that I'm refering to fraud in the abstract/conceptual sense of what fraud really IS, not the concrete sense of what /legally/ constitutes fraud). However if someone takes my A-paper, says "someone else wrote this", and they get their A, then more power to them, because quite simply, that paper is not my property.
/DIFFERENT/.
Similar reasoning can be applied to CD burning. If I burn a CD for a friend, and scrawl the title on it with a Sharpie and slip it in a paper sleeve, that's one thing. It's another thing if I make a master, and start running them off at a pressing facility, with perfect copies of the CD art and liner notes as well, and pass these off (for sale, in the market) as legit. Now, I'm not going to say here that one is moral and one isn't (although you can guess what I think), I'm just saying that on a certain moral level, these acts are
Last month I attendended the Silicon Valley Summit III in Manhattan hosted by Tom Brokaw on MSNBC. Present at the summit was at least one CEO whose company is a member of the RIAA.
The Music Revolution: A story about the ways in which the Internet has irrevocably changed the way many young people listen to music was one of the hot topics discussed, dealing with music piracy. A member of the audience asked the Sony Corporation of America Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer about how Sony was going address the problem of a new album coming out with only a couple of decent cuts while all the rest were fillers. Obviously Howard didn't have an adequate answer. This is what's at the core of this issue I believe. Unless the record companies find a (profitable) way to change with the "Music revolution" and allow people to pay on a per-song-basis, the industry is pretty much screwed.
1. "Last year, according to a study by Peter Hart Research Associates (commissioned by the RIAA), two in five music consumers owned a CD burner, as compared with 14 percent in 1999."
One reason for this is that many computers now come with a CD burner standard - "Many new computers now come equipped with burners". I'm sure there are very many computers out there with burners that are never used. Yeah, my computer has a floppy drive. I've used it once. Just because there is a burner in the computer does not mean it is used.
2. "Sales of blank CDs - used for recording purposes - have skyrocketed to the point that, for the first time, more blank CDs (1.1 billion) were sold last year than prerecorded CDs (968 million)."
Okay, I have so far used about 10% of the 100 CD-R "tower" I purchased four months ago. Buying large numbers of them is cheaper, and more convenient - fewer trips to the store. With the prerecoreded CDs, you know they will be used. But with a blank CD, it may go unused for quite some time. And even if all the blank CDs were used, this is still a poor comparison. Not all CD-Rs are used for the illegal burning of copyrighted music. A person may be burning their own music (as in music they personally produced), they may be backing up files, or burning the files to bring elsewhere. Maybe they're making a video CD. Or maybe they're doing something else that's illegal with the CD. Blank CDs are not just for music.
3. "Dreese notes that CD sales were down 4 percent last year from the year before. They are down 9 percent so far in 2002 and he predicts a 13 percent overall decline this year, based on how many consumers will buy new CD burners. "
CD sales are down?! Can you believe it?! I can. Listen to the most heavily promoted artists out there. Many of them are just the same old mass-produced crap they've been pushing for years. Britney, Nsync, etc. Many of the good bands are not promoted at all. Surely people would buy the CDs if they knew about them, but they don't.
4. "There's a ''sex appeal'' to burning CDs, says Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents."
Yeah, when I walk down the street with my CD-Rs the women are all over me. Pleeeaaaaaseeee. This is not a social event. Nobody is having cd burning parties. LISTENING to the burnt CDs is a better comparison here. But wasn't listening to CDs something that happened before cd burners?
5. "''None of the [copy-prevention technologies] totally work yet, but the best minds in the business are spending copious amounts of time to find a solution,'' says Ron Fair, president of A&M Records."
There will NEVER be a copy-proof solution. Hook the headphone-out on your cd player into your computer's sound card. If it gets really bad, hold a microphone up to the speakers. Somebody will always find a way around. All copy protection systems do is prevent people from dragging and dropping songs to their desktop. It only takes one person to "break" a copy protection method and get the songs across the Internet. Copy protection is a waste of the industry's time and money.
6. "In the meantime, the industry is mounting a massive public-education campaign"
Oh yeah, that'll work. [insert rolling eyes graphic here]
7. "'The amount you have to pay for CDs is horrendous,'' says Gregory."
Take a hint from Gregory, RIAA. CDs are too expensive. Either drop the price, or get artists to fill the disc with quality songs, not 2 singles and 10 filler crap.
8. "but Rosen does not rule out seeking legal redress against individuals who ignore copyright protection. It's a last resort, but she says ''individuals are liable.''"
Going to be kind of hard to prosecute 10 million people across the country, isn't it?
-----------------
As for the the artists going away because they don't get my CD-buying money support, I don't care. Someone else will pop up and replace them.
You're only protected if you use a digitial audio recording device as defined by the act, which does not include CD-ROM burners. And it's a good thing CD-ROM burners aren't considered digitial audio recording devices because that very same act that you're touting would make CD-ROM burners illegal since they don't conform to the Serial Copy Management System.
''I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
Who in the world spends $1,000 for a hard drive to store music on??? They are so out of touch with consumers.
I copied someone's paper once and got an F on it. Then I beat him up in the alley behind the school.
In the early days, it would mean .3 billion coasters........
The many-sided digital divide
When Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Act on March 21, he declared that his aim was to spur the growth of high-definition television and broadband Internet use, the fastest route for downloading music for free.
His reasoning was that content providers so far have been unwilling to make available enough high-quality digital programming for those channels because such programming can be pirated too easily.
His method for achieving this digital safe zone would be to give the consumer electronics industry and others one year to agree on a protection standard, which would then, by law, have ot be put into "any hardware or software" capable of presenting copyrightable material in digital form, including CDEs.
The bill drew a range of negative comments that fell into four general categories:
Opposed to government mandates
"We appreciate that [they] sent a wake-up. [But] we have been, and continue to be, eager to work out a voluntary solution, for that is in the best interests of everyone involved." --Hilary Rosen, Recording Industry Association of America
"Government mandates on technology products, as proposed in the Hollings bill, will decrease consumer choice, degrade product performance, stifle innovation, and reduce global competitiveness for US information-technology products." --Ken Kay, Computer Systems Policy Project
Too favorable to content providers
"Senator Hollings' bill is simply wrongheaded... It seems that the bill would be more accurately titled the 'Content Owners Market Promotion Act.'" --Jonathan Zluck, President, Association for Competitive Technology, an education and advocacy group representing mostly small and mid-size companies
"It would basically give Hollywood veto power over the design of new technologies." --Robin Gross, Lawyer, Electronic Frontier Foundation
It won't work
"Unfortunately, no one solution will solve all piracy threats in all circumstances." --Robert Holleyman, CEO, Business Software Alliance
"As we know, copy protection isn't breakable by the average citizen, but it is very breakable by software experts." --DigitalConsumer.org Web site
Anti-consumer
The bill "appears to recognize only a right to make a single 'personal' copy, and then only of certain defined television programs (not music). Such a restriction would make it impossible for Americans to record a program on a device such as a personal video recordder, and then play it somewhere else in the house." -- Gary Shapiro, Chairman, Home Recording Rights Coalition, founded in 1981 to advocate for consumers' rights to use home electronics products for private, noncommercial purposes.
SOURCES: cnet.com; washingtonpost.com; wired.com; www.politechbot.com; Globe archives
[end of transcript]
Fight for your right to read books!
The same goes for almost every industry. The consumer is king. If the consumer ain't buying your product, it's probably cause they don't want it. i.e. Most top 40 music today.
I can't think of any other product in history that has failed solely because people stole it. Think newspaper machines. Someone can *steal* as many newspapers as he wants and the industry isn't going out of business....
And Elvis Costello doesn't mince words when he says, ''If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and takes the chair away, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing.
So when Norm Abram make a copy of your wooden furniture on PBS it's stealing?
An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if your professor only gave you a 2, even though you made a 100? Would it upset you that the other 98 points went to his daughter? Would you like it if that professor could just take that paper and give it to anyone else who wanted to get an A too? What if he could do that, but you couldn't. What if you could no longer write papers for your other professors. In fact, what if you could no longer even sign your name in the presence of other professors? Would that bug you?' If not, then you understand exactly how the artists feel when working for us. So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
It's not meant to persuade logical people who think about it carefully, it's a soundbite for people who don't want to think about it.
Anyway, this isn't a legal argument, it's an appeal to emotion: "This thing which involves copying information produced by the artist upsets the artist. Would you like it if someone did a thing which involved copy produced by you which upsets you?" There is a consistent theme: that copying information without the producer's consent is wrong.
They (the distributors) know perfectly well that they can't make copying impossible, so they are doing everything possible to make it inconvenient and make people not want to do it.
People know they should pay the artist, that it's the right thing to do. The distributors' strategy then is to make them equate "paying the artist" with "buying the CD." It's their only choice, really; if they even admitted there are other ways of paying the artist that don't require the distributors at all, such as a busking model, they'd be cutting their own throats.
If your argument against them consists of pointing out the logical flaws in their argument, you'll just end up looking like a nitpicker to anyone who doesn't already agree with you completely. If you really want to help promote the move away from obsolete, expensive distribution systems, it would be better to point out other ways to support the artists.
Or maybe he's going to make 10 copies each of his 5 CDs.
Shouldn't we be encouraging burning CDs then? ;)
I think the music market is lamenting the fact that they no longer lead us around by the nose and determine our fashions. People are starting to listen to what they want to hear. The music industry is suffering more from a discriminating public than piracy.
I suspect there has been a big rise in things like classical music or folk music sales.
Really, how many all boy bands can the machine manufacture before it gets tiring?
I find it disgusting that public funds are being handed over to an industry just because it exists. Why not tax cars to subsidize the horse carriage business? How about a tax on computer monitors to support the chalkboard industries? Farm subsidies are there to keep them from collapsing and the food supply is a hell of a lot more important than the music biz.
If we can separate the church from the state then we should be doing the same to the government and industries.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Am I mistaken or did I just see someone try to appeal to my sense of morality to make me feel pity for the RIAA? It would take a great deal to balance my sense of moral outrage against these greedy heartless media corporations. When I can freely download, copy, and distribute works of music and any other form of expression that are "out of print" and otherwise unavailable, then maybe, maybe I'll start to consider the benefits of limiting the ability to make copies of artwork for a limited time for the good of the art and and artist.
Two days ago in a major bookstore chain I ran across a paperback novel that is one of four in a series. I own the first and it was excellent, but is now out of print. The bookstore wanted $18 for it and did not have any of the others in the series. What was the retail price printed on the book? "Not for sale in the USA!"
Current copyright law, like much of the law written in the last 50 years, has nothing to do with morals, ethics, or promoting the common good. It is all about maximizing the profits and power of the large corporate entities, whose behavior would be considered downright evil if it were embodied in a person.
I'll pity the RIAA as soon as it begins to behave as if it any sort of social decency and acts in a way that will benefit music, art, and mankind rather than try to collect as many green pieces of paper as possible.
F*sck the RIAA!
Someone copying a paper and submitting it as their own would be plagerizm.
Copying MP3s is very different. NO ONE says that a certain MP3 is them... (do they?)
A computer user purchases a stack of blank CD's. She then uses them to periodically back up files on her PC. She use's about several CD's (with compression) each time she does a complete back-up and one CD for incremental back-ups. None of the files contain music. A portion of the cost of each CD she purchases is given to the record labels. I call that stealing.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
She's assuming that music listeners want to be moral when they're being entertained. They don't. Much music is meant to help people unwind, or even bring out their darker feelings that they accumulate in life, where it's taboo to discuss. The same goes for movies, video games, Slashdot, and other entertainment. Entertainment often glamourizes theft, sex and murder, so it should be no surprise that so many music fans enjoy the much milder crime of CD ripping and burning. Yet if she tells her artists to make morally correct music, she'll lose her customers.
Hilary:
I live in Los Angeles, having been transplanted from Boston. Radio here purely SUCKS...there's the usual Britney Spears stuff on five stations, a couple of old rock stations and most of the rest is spanish. To keep my sanity, I frequent the websites of stations I used to listen to in Boston (to be specific: wbos.com and wxrv.com). I look over their playlists, download many of the songs and listen. If I hear an artist I like, I buy their CD. I've probably bought a dozen or more CD's so far this year due to the ability to preview the songs off the 'net. These tunes are ones I'd NEVER HEAR on the radio here in LA!Hilary, I buy CD's BECAUSE I can hear them on the net! Are you listening Hilary? Let me repeat in case you missed: I buy music because I have the ability to download songs and listen to them from off the 'net. If I didn't have that ability I would have bought quite a few LESS CD's then I have! Why? because I wouldn't have KNOWN about the artists! I CAN'T LISTEN to them on LA radio because they don't PLAY them on LA radio!
Now, I know that you claim that sales are down because of downloading. I have another reason why sales might be down: Your product sucks! I'm in the 25-54 prime money earning/spending demographic you ache to serve. Why then aren't you serving ME? I HATE whiney girls like Mary J. Blige. I HATE guy groups like n'sync! Yet, this and classic rock are all I hear on the radio in the second biggest city in the country!
If I were you, I'd be kneeling down and THANKING GOD that people like me have the ability to preview music from an alternative source like the Internet. Instead, you bitch and whine about it while trying to sue every site out of existance. It doesn't make sense, Hilary. I'll admit that some that download music from the Internet don't buy the CD. Let me say to you that a good percentage of these people might not have bought the CD anyway. So, what do you lose by exposing the music to them? You lose nothing....In fact, you might well GAIN by this. How? Some of them might play the songs to their friends and THEY might buy the CD!
Hilary, I'm in the radio business. There's a saying in this business that goes: The only bad press is no press at all. It seems to me, Hilary that this applies to the music business as well. In other words, the more a song gets out there (ie: is heard, by whatever means), the better off the music business is. I only wish you and your industry would get a clue, Hilary. I've worked in business for over 30 years Hilary. When I was 15, I worked in an ice cream parlor. On the back of the bathroom door there was a poster of a lion with a caption that read: "In our business, the customer is king". It's too bad that the music business considers it's customers to be criminals, Hilary.
Let's look at this metaphor more closely:
Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
On the music side, this is equivalent to taking another artists' music and passing it off as your own. However, this is not what's happening. The "problem" is that people are copying artists' music for free so they can play it at their convenience. The "A paper" equivalent to this would be:
Would it bother you if somebody could just photocopy your paper and read it whenever they want without having to pay you for making the copy?
I don't think many people would have a problem with this. In fact, most people would probably be honoured that their work is so respected. I am not saying that these artists do not deserve to be paid for their work, but this metaphor is poor.
"It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe."
Last year, recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time. ... The conclusion made in the article cited and previous articles I've found in the LA Times & NY Times, is that CD copying is exploding, with the recording industry losing out on what could have been a boost in sales.
As someone pointed out in a post where _I_ ranted about this long ago.. When I can buy a spindle of 100 music CDs for about 25USD...
I would only have a problem if people were passing off the paper as their own without crediting me. When you burn a music cd I assume you aren't claiming that is you singing "Sympathy For The Devil".
I would've asked Ms Rosen, "Have you ever photocopied a page from a book and handed it to someone else? Magazine? Newspaper article? Aren't those copyrighted making you a hypocrite and a criminal?"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I've burnt 6 out of the last 200 that I've owned.. and that was free music that I wanted to hear in my car.
Pathetic...
yeah, all music is RIAA property... these people are pathetic swindlers who see their soulless house of cards falling down around them...
and somehow my legislators are supposed to ensure them a living?
In fact, she's taken a context (copying an A paper to get a good grade) where there is no moral way to copy!
Do you think that was unintentional?
It's actually quite a good match to their general strategy: expressing the importance of obedience to the restrictions of authority in terms of the feelings of the originator.
Does someone else copying your paper without your consent (in and of itself) hurt you? No, but it's against the rules and it might offend you if you heard about it. It's against the rules even if it doesn't offend you, in fact even if you give permission and want it to be done (assuming regular school rules).
Does making a copy of a CD (in and of itself) hurt the artists? No, but it's against the rules and it might offend them if they heard about it. It's against the rules even if it doesn't offend them, in fact even if they give permission and want it to be done (assuming regular recording contracts).
Know why you only hear crap in LA? Because a good chunk of every cd you buy goes to what is basically payolla to get records played on radio stations (http://www.salon.com/ent/clear_channel/).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
And I don't mean to discriminate against fat people at all... but as a trend, fat white women tend to be very angry and very vocal... those are their ways of covering for their insecurities about their weight. Napster is Hilary's insecurity pill.
;)
Go to a good protest some time, there's a lot of fat white women, particularly in southern states. Think religion, book burning, music copyrights, whatever.
Now fat black women, those are some of the greatest women on Earth. Just fun-loving, cool, though still don't piss 'em off.
I've bought LP's, then CD's then remastered CD's
No way am I going to have them tell me what I can
do with the music I've bought.
MP3's, give me a break! The sound quality sucks.
I'll buy a CD if the music is good, not the crap they push on us.
I have enough music in my collection to last the rest of my life. If I don't buy another CD ever,
they will be sorry.
I hope it does not come to that!
If I wrote a paper and got an A... Ok, I kinda get that analogy (though it's pretty bad).
The thing is, if I wrote a paper and got a D, I wouldn't give a shit if someone made photocopies of it and passed it out to all of their friends. In fact, I'd be delighted if that person passed off my shitty work as their own.
And this is what we're working with where most of the music industry is concerned.. D-quality work for which nobody should give a shit one way or the other. Drop me a note when somebody starts producing a product with some value.
There are plenty of good bands that don't have contracts with RIAA member record labels. The problem is that lots of people like the shitty crap that RIAA labels put out. It's fairly easy: if a band is a stinking sellout, you don't need to buy their albums. When will you all get the point that it's not just the record labels' greed, but the greed of bands that whore themselves to the majors, that create the problem.
For example, you can go to unixpunx.org and download plenty of music by bands that don't object to you sharing it. A real band wants you to hear their music. A relatively lazy band like Metallica may make you think otherwise, but they're old and they've lost their touch anyway, the stupid jerks.
Major labels are bastards -- "Put 'em up against the wall and shoot 'em." It's really that simple. Anyone who signs to them is just asking to be taken for a ride anyway.
In fact, I've written several, but most of my high school English teachers were just amazed that I could figure out that their != there.
My college ones realized that no one but English majors care, so they just shoved good literature down my throat.
At any rate, if I do write an A paper, someone very well might read it. And they very well might use it for their own paper.
And you know what? Last time I checked, that's okay, provided they've listed me in their sources. (Frankly, I don't care if they steal my papers or not. Ooooh, papers.)
This is the core of Rosen's idiotic statement. Not, "How would you like it if someone took your paper and got an A too!".. It can't be that. When was the last time you burnt a copy of a Selloutallica disc and told everyone, "I made this! Yeah! I spent hours writing these lyrics and hammering out the chords!"
Well, you might have, but you were probably laughed at.
..In fact, this argument makes very little sense at all. Writing a paper that's publically viewable, and burning discs are two very different things. For the most part, students writing papers don't receive any money for them, and tend to be honored that someone else would actually use them.
Perhaps a more likely argument would be, "If you wrote a book and..".. You'd be sued into oblivion for taking, say, J.R.R. Tolkien's words as your own.
Now here's the biggie. Say you buy a book. Do you not have the right to lend that book to friends? Do you not have the right to quote passages from that book, and do things like alluding to the possiblity that Rosen is the incarnation of Melkor who is Morgoth, Black Foe of the Free World?
I say, yes. I am, in fact, against wholesale piracy. But it'll be a cold day in hell before I stop sending an odd mp3 or two to friends, saying, "Listen to this!" in hopes of getting them to support my favorite bands.
(Favorite bands which aren't sleeping with Rosen, by the way, and don't see anything wrong with the aforementioned activity.)
Would Shannon Elizabeth fit in this machine you are proposing?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
And they're getting sneakier all of the time. I'm almost certain that...
N'Sync + Crappy guitar riffs = Linkin Park/Incubus/System of a Down/etc.
...has got to be a marketing plan scrawled on some record exec's whiteboard.
I always thought that most artists produced their work as an addition to this vast pool of collective creative work and knowledge. Apparently the concept of capitalism (which is a very good concept, don't get me wrong) has so taken over many of these artists that they believe "theft" of their "property" is a crime justified by punishment -- without even considering that the reason for this theft might have been popularity. This almost seems contrary to the argument that file sharing services have actually increased sales -- not decreased them!
Perhaps I am too biased toward this concept of communal good and the betterment of our race in general, but I would be inclined to believe that most artists would rather rest at night knowing that SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE is actually listening to their music! As far as I'm concerned, I think that personal greed has so gripped the music industry (I suppose it could be argued that this is the reason for RIAA's existence) that no longer are the artists producing art -- they're producing a product that is manufactured to be sold, not heard (this came to mind after the "A" paper analogy, so apologies if it seems somewhat offtopic).
He who has no
Something I've always wondered about in this debate: why doesn't the RIAA go after public libraries?
The idea of "lending" a book -- or a CD or a DVD -- seems to me to be the issue here. Last time I checked, my local library had thousands and thousands of books and CDs -- and lots of people coming in and out, renting for free, reading for free, borrowing, xeroxing, and all manner of free things.
Is the library the next intellectual property target?
(I don't know. I ask because I've always wondered about this.)
"...and sales are slumping, and no-one can say why. Could it be they ut out one too many lousy records?"
M.T.V.--Get Off the Air, from the album Frankenchrist.
Lets set aside the ridiculously hih prices charged for CDs. How many of us can sa that the world needs another boy/girl band?
I give people my papers to cheat on ALL the time. As long as they get it from me, I couldn't care less.
90% of the education I have to take is a complete waste and/or sham anyways. We spend more time doing accounting than programming in my computer courses, and what programming we do do is in RPG, COBOL, or VB. So why not cheat?
At least I get papers from the people I help cheat when I need them. Makes the marks easy to get, and I refuse to work doing COBOL or RPG anyways (I'd rather be a sanitation engineer) so its no loss.
If it weren't for anti-creative people like Hilary Rosen we wouldn't be in such a mess in our education system anyways.
"Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
Wouldn't it be more like my teacher xeroxing it for a colleague to read?
Last spring I did a 10-page paper on the Digital Millenium Copyright Act focusing on DeCSS for Business Admin 201 and got an A for it. Would Ms. Rosen mind if I gave that paper to other people?
"You're never ready, just less unprepared."
Next they're going to start bitching about how many gigs of hard drive space are being sold.
Note from the article: "I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music"
They already are starting to bitch about gigs of HD space. Also note how absolutely wrong this guy has on his dollar figure for music. $1000 in cheap disk space would amount to somewhere just shy of 1 Terrabyte (920GB figuring $87 for an 80Gig drive) which would store some 16,000 CDs worth of MP3s (figuring 128Kbit/s, 60mins/CD) or somewhere around 1500 uncompressed CDs.
If I saw Hilary on the street, you know what I'd do? I get right up in her face. RIGHT UP IN HER FACE, POINT MY FINGER AT HER and say "not cool Hilary Rosen, not cool."
I used to burn a lot of data cd's but no audio because I honestly believe that the artist should get some royalties for their talents. Now in Canada we have to pay a tax on every blank cd that we purchase. In theory the revenue from the media tax is distributed back to music artists. So now that I know the artists are getting paid, and I am paying for it, I feel justified in burning the occasional music cd. My current ratio of Data Cds to Audio is in the neighbourhood of 40:1
Let me apologize in advance for saying what plenty of other people are and already have, but if enough people say it, maybe they'll pay attention.
...I repeat nothing beats good word-of-mouth. You can't buy that kind of publicity. But absent that vector, the industry has little choice.
...shouldn't surprise me. Just follow the money trail, it leads right to our government. You can't legislate this sort of obfuscation without a legislator. And that's where the battle has to be fought.
Sixteen dollars and ninety-nine cents for 8 tracks of music is preposterous.
What the industry is seeing is the result of kids learning that burning a CD that is every bit as good in the way of quality as the original is dirt cheap. So the obvious question then becomes, where's all this money going to?
The record industry is an incestuous network of kissing cousins whose existance is superfluous and merely to propogate it's own necessity. A record requires two things -- a band with talent and the money to record it. That's it. End of story. What the record industry has become accustomed to is clusterbombing the market with promotion. In other words, quality has become not second-hand, not third-hand, but an entirely forgotten quantity. How many seconds of blank-stare do you suppose you'd get from a record label exec when you asked how large a factor the artistic quality and originality of the artist played into their marketing scheme? I'll give you a hint; it involves two numbers.
So what's happening? Kids are getting a copy of Jack Off Jill or A New Found Glory and saying, "hey, this is pretty good" and lo!, all that Brittney/nSync marketing is for nothing. Blown. Wasted. Something that execs DO know is that nothing
In summary, the industry shifted from embracing talent to embracing marketability and now the market is learning that markteting is a dubious bedfellow, their foundation is sand. They can't abandon their model and they can't survive where they stand.
In other words, hey're panicking. And I have zero sympathy.
Let them make a CD $6 and nobody will bother with piracy because it simply won't pay. Nobody ever seems to take the industry to task on the roots of their own demise -- the monopoly-like abuse of their medium.
This buffoon from Newbury talks about the "hacker ethic" like he gets it. If he understood the concept of making something and then not hording it (Linux, anyone?) for his own gain (copyright, when applied to the recording industry, is nothing more than artificial information scarcity), would he even be speaking against this? Goddamn right it's the hacker ethic. Let me apologize in advance for believing that sharing is an ethically superior modus operandi.
What they say: "This is unfair! This is unethical!"
What they mean: "You're learning that we're screwing you and you're no longer standing for it, so we're scared we just lost our meal ticket."
Anyway, if you've read this far, thanks. It bugs me that they can shift the focus of the issue as well as they can. They've managed to mask their own blatant greed and vilify a college kid who burns a CD for a friend at the same time. Where is the outrage over their own artist-screwing practices? But the answer doesn't
But that's another rant. =)
My
Limekiller
I don't know anyone with that many MP3s.
IMHO the ONLY legal purpose of burning your own CD's is to make collections of songs that YOU want on a single disk, to make MP3 collections (can stuff a LOT more music on a CD in MP3 format), or perhaps to back up your CD's if you are paranoid that they will go bad (I havn't had a single CD go bad in over 20 years, though I have gotten some that never played right in the first place).
Most CD-R's sold are the data kind. You CAN use them on a computer to burn audio cd's and they do play in most audio only CD decks (Hey RIAA that's one way to make some trouble, insure that audio cd players will ONLY play CD-Rs' and RW's that are of the 'music' kind that carry an extra tax to buy). But most of these data CD-R's are being used for computer data backup's, making copies of computer CD roms (Pirate copies of Windows and MS Office?) such as Linux iso's, and digital pictures off loaded from your digi-cam. Also small software companies that can't afford to press 1000 silver copies of their software for sale burn them on CD-R's instead.
Real BULLSHIT statistic RIAA!
"I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music.''
Who has enough music to fill a $1000 hard drive!!
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Commissioner Lal
''It's in vogue to diss record companies. That gives fans the license to say, `Well, we're only hurting record companies. We're not hurting the artists,''' she says. ''People sometimes think `If an artist is well known enough and I've heard of them, they have a lot of money and I don't care. And if an artist is unknown, they ought to be grateful to me for spreading their name around.' So they create this sort of rationalization.''
Um, ok. Good. Perfectly true and valid thoughts. What exactly is your point? Here, let me show you what you just said to me:
It's in vogue to diss Aristotlean physics. That gives fans the license to say, "Well, we're only saying all that shit about the celestial spheres and the sun going round the Earth is garbage. We're not hurting the real scientists," she says. People sometimes think "If you let go of a rock and it falls down towards the Earth, then there must be gravity. On the other hand, if it doesn't fall, then it probably means you are in an orbital free-fall." So they create this sort of rationalization.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium, or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings
"One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place."
- Mick Travis, "If..."
"Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?"
I guess that comment might have made sense if people were taking a U2 CD, burning it, and selling all the copies to people...but oh WAIT HEY! I don't see ANYBODY doing that!!!
Hold on, it seems to me that record labels are the one who are selling the work of others without paying them (as evidenced by what happened to Byrd in the Salon article).
So, who is the "cheater" here?
I think the real question in the music sharing debate is would the RIAA care if they made $17.99 everytime somebody downloaded "Who Let The Dogs Out"?
I think.
And Elvis Costello doesn't mince words when he says, ''If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and takes the chair away, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing.
''Why should it be any different with music?'' he asks. ''If music is all free, then why not go and make up your own songs? Music isn't just in the air. Somebody has to determine the order in which these tones and rhythms are played and arranged and recorded.The woolly idea that music should be for free is ridiculous.''
vs.
And Elvis Costello doesn't mince words when he says, ''If you're a carpenter and you make a chair, and then somebody comes around your workshop and looks at the chair and makes an identical chair, you call the police. There isn't any gray area. It's just stealing.
''Why should it be any different with music?'' he asks. ''If music is all free, then why not go and make up your own songs? Music isn't just in the air, floating around all over the place in the form of magic "electromagnetic waves" or anything like that. Somebody has to determine the order in which these tones and rhythms are played and arranged and recorded, and that person should get paid forever for making that up. The woolly idea that music should be for free is ridiculous.''
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
I didnt even know what your music sounded like until I downloaded a bootleg concert last week (ie one you didn't release to the public). You know what? you aren' bad and I would have bought some of your albums... till you called me a thief...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Those people that constantly whinge and carry on about how somebody "stole" their idea or code, and then at the same time claim to believe the "information wants to be free" meme are arguably worse than Sen. Hollings (D-Disney).
/. readers who fall under this category; hopefully nowhere near a majority.
Information still wants to be free, its just that deep down inside, they still wish it weren't true, despite their posturing.
I apologize for misunderstanding your post. There are indeed many
Frederick Pohl wrote a whole series of satirical stories based on this McGuffin. The essence of it was that only the rich could afford not to own huge mansions, fur coats, enormous banquets at every meal... and the only people making enough money to become rich were people who provided personal service and artists, since they were the only ones producing something the machines couldn't.
At the heart of it, people are stealing music. Most of the mp3s I have that are commercial music, I do not own the actual copy. Often I will buy a CD after downloading one or two of its songs online, but not always. Personally, free music on P2P networks has meant: 1) I actually listen to commercial music and I am exposed to a lot more than I normally would be 2) I actually buy some music (which I never did before) 3) I also have illegally downloaded and saved music I don't own Obviously, security measures are going to fail, because every hacker sees them as a challenge and they are a violation of fair use laws. However, there should be some sort of compensation for recording companies and artists who have legitimately released good music for profit. They're like any other business or service, you can shop around, but ultimately, to play it fair, you have to pay. I think there should be some sort of small tax on every blank CDR sold (maybe on burners, too). Maybe a $1 on a pack of 50 or something. Call it the Commercial Privilege Tax or something and use it to help compensate the artists, software companies and others who have legitimate losses from piracy and "sharing among friends." How to distribute it? Do what we always do. Pick random proportions, give deep and meaningful rationalizations for every tenth-percent, and then let people sue each other over the pickings. At least it will stop the RIAA and artists from alienating and attacking their fans and allow people to share cool music and software without having to pony up $20 or $50 for a CD with one good song or a video game of poor quality.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I had never downloaded music in my life before six weeks ago. After all, I have plenty of disposable income. If I want a CD I buy it. No big deal.
Then my mom asked me to mix a few CDs for my sister's wedding reception. It was a pretty small wedding, just family and friends, and they just wanted to throw some CDs on for dance music. They came up with a song list and emailed it over.
The intersection of the songlist and my personal library was quite small. I did have a few of the songs already. I went out and probably spent $80 on CDs so I could rip the "special" songs myself and be assured of a good rip. But that only covered maybe one CD worth of the music.
The rest I reluctantly downloaded. I mean, I'm all for fair use and everything, and you can pry my iPod from my cold dead heads, but I think that downloading music to avoid paying for it is Wrong. Call me old-fashioned. But in this case I didn't feel I had a choice. I needed about 65 songs-- maybe 4 CDs worth of music. I would have been more than happy to pay $80 to get copies of those songs. But I didn't have that option. To get all those specific songs, I probably would have had to buy at least 30 CDs. Using our $20 a CD figure, that's $600. There was just no way.
That's when I realized what morons the record companies really are. They are too busy fighting their consumers to sell them what they want. Give me a way to download good quality copies of individual songs for a reasonable price and I am all over it. It would be so easy! I want to be ethical, make it easy for me for heaven's sake!
When I write papers for school I cite works from other authors. Can you imagine if that was considered IP theft?
The article states that more CD-Rs are being sold than pre-recorded CDs. This statistic is a little silly if you ask me.
I work for an engineering firm of 120 people, and we go through nearly 1000 CD-Rs a month, and none of them are used for music,
they are all for delivering reports, and data to our clients.
I know of many other firms that are using CD-Rs as their primary
delivery mechanism for documents and other digital data as well as for backups.
What its time for is someone to use the EFF's open music license.
Back when I used to run an indy label I assumed that each release was like the equivalant to throwing a couple thousand doallars down a sewer. The profit wasn't the point.
If was thinking about starting a label now I would release the thing under (o) and walk away.
Total costs = a couple of hundred bucks (with the potential to be widely distributed)
or
$3500 = records sitting in your parents closet (ten years later)
hmm... a near 700 comments.
WHO could be posting these comments if everyone is picketing?
what a joke.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I know from experience that they are used a lot in the "recording industry" itself too. Do you seriously think people use all this digital recording equipment to make tapes? There are digital recording devices with built in cd burners on the market.
Yeah, and where's the proof that all these recordable disks were being used to copy music and not being used for software backups and other legitimate reasons?
I wonder what Hilary got for her SAT verbal score.
Salon: Courtney Love Does The Math
And the essay that inspired the speech:
Negativland Official Site: The Problem With Music by Steve Albini
The only people whose ox is getting gored from "the culture of CD burning" are the Five Families of the Record Business and the RIAA. The artists already get it up the butt, with no vaseline and definitely no reach-around.
If Sheryl Crow and Elvis Costello want to see more return from their music, then they should go indie and set up a site where people can download their music legally for a fair price. Unfortunately it's not so easy to get out of a record contract...it really is like indentured servitude at the moment.
So yeah, let Hilary Rosen, Vivendi, Sony, AOL-TW/WEA, Bertlesmann and EMI weep in their beer all they want. I have no sympathy for those bastards.
I will continue to buy my music used because I don't want them to make money off my musical tastes. If I want to rip my own mix CDs from CDs I bought, then that's my own damn business. I don't do P2P...I am naturally paranoid about my network and am not into opening up holes in it lightly.
Until artists get the fair shake they deserve, I do not see my actions as hurting them. They are suffering enough as it is at the hands of the same people who cry buckets of crocodile tears about "the poor artists" in the media.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
It's also a bad analogy because 99% of us don't enjoy writing papers. We just write whatever we think the instructor wants to hear to get it out of the way. It's just stupid to compare writing a paper to writing music, 2 different worlds. And what's this about $1000 for a hard drive? Uh, last time I checked you can get plenty of gigs for $50. But you know that's what happens when you have people who don't know jack about computers or writing music making statements like these. I personally think this article was lame.
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
Hello!! The first thing I would do if I wrote a good paper would be to post it online for everyone to download and read. Much of the scientific community already does this. Ever visit citeseer? This is the future.
Honestly. How many people downloading MP3s try to pass them off as songs they recorded themselves? Did you say none? As in zero? Zip? Nada? Idiots.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Errr...no N'Sync is a crappy boyband singing throw-away songs which make absolutly no sense or emotional connection. Linkin Park/Incubus (never really heard SoaD), are playing experimental music while wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Not a big LP fan (I do like Incubus 'tho), but I hate this analogy.
Rosen's quote speaks to how far this attitude has seeped into academia as well.
Take, for instance, my thesis seminar. When one of my classmates offered to put all of our year's work onto the web for the mutual enjoyment of all who cared, our thesis adviser shot down the idea in one instant because, as she said, "other people could read them, print them out, and turn them in as their own work."
Yes, it would bother me if someone falsely appropriated my work as their own, but that's academic dishonesty, just like selling stolen music is copyright infringement.
Not even academia gets the difference, and one of them went as far as suggesting the work shouldn't be shared.
Don't forget mapped network drives...
heh, coming from a Help Desk I see this every day. How are we supposed to help them when they cannot communicate their problem effectively. *sigh* Now I know how a doctor must feel. Good thing we techies don't have to worry about malpractice insurance!
Ye gods! I'm REALLY depressed now.
Robert Fripp is a personal hero of mine...he's been making incredible music since 1968...I was born November 1963 so that's most of my life. To hear about the financial pain he's going through is almost too much to take.
The Japanese Government directly supports the necessities of life for people considered "National Treasures." Perhaps the UK should consider people like Fripp (Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel and Bill Nelson also come to mind) "National Treasures" and make sure they can continue creating without the nagging worries that can stifle creativity.
In the US, it's even worse. I can think of dozens of incredible musicians forced to do day jobs and whatnot because their music doesn't fit the flavor of the month. I happen to be married to one of them.
This really fsckn sucks.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
, RIAA would have us all believe that 90% or more are used to copy CDs.
Between my wife and I, we've burned at least 400 CD-Rs in the past couple years. I don't think more than 10 were audio CDs. (As an aside, I think we've bought about 20 music CDs in the past 2 years.) And I know at work we go through a 100-pack about every two weeks and none of those hold audio. Hillarious use of stats there Hilary.
If the RIAA had been associated with published works that would receive an A grade, I don't think their sales would be slumping. And they wouldn't need a scapegoat, either. The analogy should have been
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an D? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an D too? Would that bug you?'
And of course, the answer would be no, I wouldn't care if someone shared my pathetic performance. Maybe if it became average, I'd get a C instead! Which somewhat accurately describes how the RIAA has survived all along!
-Paul Komarek
This isn't about progress in technology anymore -- it's about retribution.
It may be true that Sheryl Crowe and Elvis Costello site this all as theft, but what about the untold number of talented, starry-eyed artists that where ripped off by the colluding, shiny-toothed, BMW-driving, corporate record exec?
It's payback time. Good luck trying to stop it.
I know it's been said here already, but there is absolutely no way that all 1.1 billion of the CDs went to burning music illegally.
Many CDs contain data, legally copied music, or are coasters/Christmas decorations caused by buffer underrun.
Definetely true about buying music after downloading several songs by a good artist. Many people buy music by bands they like after downloading some of the songs, and still more go to the concerts. Outrageous that bands get only $2-$3 on a $20 CD.
Nice article from Salon.com, wasn't aware that so many musicians were recieving almost nothing at all from the major labels. What a joke..."protecting the artists" by hoarding all the money to themselves. A fine example of corporate greed.
Two things, first, isn't taking someone's A and saying "Wow, this is really cool! Read it!" more like what we do with open source? It's just if someone claims to have written it, THEN it's wrong.
Second, the RIAA keeps whining about cd-r's ruining their business. But, since they get a royalty off every cdr sold, doesn't that suggest that not only are they profiting off purchases of cdr's ( regardless of whether or not people are "stealing" with them or not) but they have accepted payment for the right to burn cd's? Does this mean that they have given up their right to bitch and whine and go after people? "Hey, don't bother me, I paid the cdr tax."
I use to be worried that I was apathetic, but I just don't care anymore.
I'm sorry, but that analogy is completely incorrect due to a lot of factors. A more accurate analogy might be that I write what *I* and my ignorant lazy greedy highschool teacher SAYS is an "A" paper because I suck up to her and the schoolboard dictates that each teacher must give out a certain number of A's each year, and then I get UPSET when my college professor informs me that they've changed the curriculum, he does not take bribes, and my fellow classmates papers have as much chance of getting A's as mine does. Well SUCK IT UP AND DEAL. If you write good music, people will still buy it.
I like the paper analogy, but I'm not passing off Sheryl Crow as me singing.
haha, how much music does he think anyone has? $1000? How many people have a tera of music...
I don't like that lady.
Hillary, if you are reading this, I want you to know how much I despise your lying and manipulating ways. You take an otherwise good idea, (not stealing) and manipulate it to make a case for a bunch of money hungry CEOs running outmoded businesses who need to change the law in unamerican ways to preserve the monopoly on recording that the music industry has enjoyed for almost 100 years.
Fuck you and the RIAA. you are just mad that anyone with talent can buy an imac for 1000.00 and a good microphone for 100-500 and record, edit, produce, market, and distribute their music without ever passing throught the monopoly you dishonestly refer to as "legal copyrighted music".
Face it, the time will come when ARTIST own the copyrights and companies like the ones you represent DON'T.
I'll be laughing, laughing, laughing at the remains of the RIAA when that day comes. And no law making it illegal to not use you is going to change that. Like the old lady with the breast implants and the face lift, you can fend off old age for a little bit, but it will catch up to you.
Soon you and the band of scum you represent will be as obsolete as the scriveners.
I hope you die a lonely death facing a wall in a prison somewhere.
At least geeks now *have* coasters. In olden times, they were lucky to have even table cloths... :)
And my answer to Hillary would of cours have been: "No, it doesn't bother me one bit, i know what i've learned compiling that paper, but i would be bothered if someone took it away from me and sold it all over the campus, making a lot of money off my work and giving me only a ridiculous percentage of that.". Maybe it's so hard coming up with valid examples and analogies for the music industry, because they've never really honoured the artists themselves.
Meanwhile the music-industry is killing the one application where someone tried to make a legitimate business out of distributing music over the internet: web-radio. They simply want to keep all kontrol to themselves, they don't want artists becoming known via new media and realizing that maybe they don't need the feisty record-labels, or that they at least have some power to negotiate, because there are alternatives. So it's all about control, only those law students (and others) wanted some little control of their own over what they can do the music they bought.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
Hmm, judging from the frequency of slashdot articles regarding cheating at our colleges & universities, I would say that Hilary picked a bad example...
I admit to having used "this sort of rationalization". So I'm wondering why she doesn't proceed by explaining to me what's wrong with it. I know of course why it's wrong in the sense of the law, but it seems to me like she's appealing to my sense of morality?
My morality tells that if I have to pay 20 dollars for something, it has to be worth 20 dollars to me.
Example:
A couple of years back I bought the Americana album by Offspring because I thought I might like it. I'd seen the hit video (pretty fly) on MTV and thought it was cool. I have listened to that album less than 10 times since I bought it, and it has not been worth the price I payed. Today I'd just download the mp3. But as matters are I feel like I've been cheated.
Example 2: I collect Nick Cave albums. I would never dream of just downloading the tracks or get them burned on a CD at a friends. To me these albums are special--collectors items so to speak (even if they're not rare). They are easily worth the price I paid for them.
Hmm. I hope this made sense. I'm not used to writing in english and so it may not be as clear as I would like it to be. And anyway this is the first time I've ever posted.
-- Adam.
Exactly! I would keep the BEST student papers from previous years and put them in the college library so current students could learn and explicitly EXPAND on the previous excellent work. First week of classes students thought I was crazy giving term papers in a physics class. "Original" 2-page calculations + rap! End-term evaluations and student performance told a very different story. Making previous work freely available gives new learners a step up ON THEIR OWN ORIGINAL CONCEPTS AND INSIGHTS.
I am posting anon because I know a few teachers and students at my school read this web site with as much frequency as I do. I've been approached about some of my comments here before (purely computer-related ones) but for my security, I must remain anonymous.
I write "A" papers for just about every one of my classes. Tests and projects, not that great, but papers, I consistantly score 95+%. It doesn't bother me the slightest to let a friend use my (paper/program/whatever I wrote) as long as I know they're trying to the best of their abilities.
My best friend does his papers on his own for the most part-but a part of his final exam was an essay, and he had the weekend to do it. Being as he isn't quite as devoted (smart...just doesn't apply himself at all) to school work, I helped him out with the final exam essay. In the end, it was the difference between a C and a B on the exam.
Parents and school officials and teachers are always saying "It's stealing" or "It's wrong", but everyone Gen-X and below has a new outlook on it. Information should be shared. My friends help me out with stuff school and not-why shouldn't I do the same?
It's the same thing with music, specifically MP3s. Referencing to the example of my friend above, he writes most of his own papers, but a few important ones he gets some help from me with. Just as, most people will do their own (buy) music for the most part, downloading only once in a while (copy) We're the same way. I have hundreds of MP3s from bands on my hard drive, but it's at most 4-5 songs from those bands. The ones I like, I own CDs of. Tool, Puddle of Mudd, Green Day, The Offspring, Papa Roach, etc.
It's a generational issue. If the RIAA realized that regardless of what the LAW says stealing is, it is actively defined by the culture, and the prevailing culture has decided that copying music isn't stealing. Instead of fighting this trend, the RIAA needs to jump on it, and find a new content-distribution scheme. I would happily pay a nominal fee ($8 at most) to download digital albums as MP3s, and pay a small tax on CDR media to put those MP3s onto. Most of my downloaded music never makes it onto a CD, it stays on my computer.
It's like the flashback to 1996 in South Park... Where they find the guy that has been frozen since 1996, wearing Eddie Bauer and listening to Ace of Base. Just a thought...
Taking someone's work and calling it your own is "plagiarism." Benefitting commercially from a copyrighted work is called "copyright infringement." They are two entirely different things.
How much does she make again? There seems to be a basic disconnect with the simplest elements of intellectual property laws here, and this isn't the first example.
sigh... 90% of debates seem to be teaching the ABCs of logic, argument and the definitions of words.
Taking someone's work and calling it your own is "plagiarism". Benefitting commercially from a copyrighted work is called "copyright infringement." They are two entirely different things.
How much does she make again? There seems to be a basic disconnect with the simplest elements of intellectual property laws here, and this isn't the first example.
sigh... 90% of debates seem to be teaching the ABCs of logic, argument and the definitions of words.
The music industry might REALLY REALLY win on people copying CDs. You have people listening to a lot more music than they would if they ahd to pay for it. Subsequently. you have a generation of people who enjoy music and have a fairly wide range of interest. When these people grow up and will have money, they will buy more. I know when I was in HS I got a whole bunch of tapes made for me by friends. All of the albums that were on those tapes that were worthy, I got on CD once I got some money in my pocket. Wait until the college kids move out of dorms and get real jobs.
"Even Harvard Law School students are getting into the act."
If kids at Harvard are getting sucked in, then this that definately classifies it as a crisis.
The students are actually paying for somone to
grade them and "give" them an "A"...
...I wonder how many critical thinkers there were
in the audience?
This doesn't say that you can redistribute copies, it only says that you can make them, or more to the point, that the fact that someone makes copies for noncommercial use is not in itself the basis for legal action. This is implied by fair use. The section you quote does not say that one can't initiate legal action on the basis of redistribution of copyrighted material.
CD duplication is the only way to stem the tide of corporate mega-market drivel. Every radio station, every music television channel and most every music store is carrying the same bloated, smelly mass of pop music dung. It all sounds the same, with bands cropping up to be the next Pearl Jam or Nirvana. It has gotten to the point where even the old rip-off bands like Bush are being ripped off. Don't even get me started on Hip-Hop. How is it that we can defeat this unstoppable money machine? You find a good band, some guys with talent and a new sound, and you turn your friends on to them. Give them a disc to listen to, and if you both like it, go and see them in concert. The artists make money for an honest nights work, and you were there supporting them because you were introduced by a CD pirate. Since the advent of CDRs, my range of music has grown far beyond the dreck on FM radio. I can only hope that other minds are being opened with every spindle of CDs sold.
Outrageous that bands get only $2-$3 on a $20 CD
$2-$3 per CD is generous. A very good series of articles on Cosmik Debris written by music lawyer Dina LaPolt gives an inside view to what the artists have to deal with. The artist has to pay packaging fees, the producer's royalties, "CD reduction" fees (CDs are considered new technology!)... all told the artist comes away with around $1.37 per CD. Then they get to start paying back the record company for advances, promotion costs, marketing, etc.
Add to that the highly unfair grip the record companies have over release schedules, and we start to see who the real pirates are.
I'm gonna do what I want and I'm gonna get paid -- Tom Waits
http://www.law.com/images/128_pics/gross_robin.jpg
So, i realize that this: "you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?" is probably the most replied-to snippet in the whole article, and rightly so: the slashdot trolls should take a lesson in writing such one-sided misleading tripe that nobody with a functioning neuron left in their head can read your words without wanting to correct you.
What i haven't really seen pointed out is that music is, in theory, art. As in, "if you painted a pretty picture, and people liked it, would it bother you if someone took a photo of your painting so they could show your pretty picture to other peolpe and they could enjoy it too?"
Granted, since i'm an engineer, my opinions about art don't count for shit in this society, but i was at least under the impression that artists are supposed to be in it for the art. (If your're going to be in it for the money, be an engineer. Just don't expect peolpe to take your art seriously...)
I think people should at least attempt to remove their heads from their asses long enough to realize that humans have had music for at least an order of magnitude longer than we've had a recording industry, if not two orders.
So... I have 50 Karma when I post this, it gets modded up to 5, and then down to 4. I would call that a broken system that gives capped-out users a disincentive to post.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
"They may say they wanna smack me in the mouth. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wanna smack me in the mouth? Would it bother you if somebody else could just smack me in the mouth too?' They're speechless after that...it takes the wind right outta their sails!"
DD
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Yeah,
49.
sux
No text.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
I think what the article is reffering to is more than just a cd burning culture. It is the overall file sharing culture. This generation has expanded sharing way beyond making copies of cassette tapes or VHS. Although initially limited to techies it is expanding and it is definately a cultural movement. I don't think the open source community would be enjoying the success it has without the overall vibe of this cultural movement to back it up.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
actually 80% goes to AOL promotional CDs. Sorry, but your statistics are flawed.
geek page at KY speaks
So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
Not in the slightest. Frankly my dear I don't give a damn.
Long before there were any recording mediums like records and tapes, music performances were paid for (or not) "one off". You bought the experience of the performance. Then along came technology and gave the musicians the loophole of their wildest wet dream, to be able to make basically infinite perfect copies of their music for nothing, and SELL every copy to everyone. This is a little loophole that no car maker, livestock breeder, surgeon or construction worker will EVER get to enjoy (barring massive advancements in quantum physics). For a few decades this loophole netted the music industry BIG bucks and transformed music from something we all made a personal part of our lives with our families and friends into a commercial commodity worth billions of dollars. Then, technology advanced again, and the loophole closed. Now, we too have the same ability the recording industry has had for decades, now WE can make copies of the artists work. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away. Seems fair from that perspective if you ask me. I agree with a previous poster, music should return to the verb it once was, not the noun the recording industry pimped it into.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Live Music
or
Dead Music
?
> Not once did the article raise the possibility that maybe, just maybe, poor product might have something to do with lower CD sales.
We've had higher CD sales over here in the UK recently, and we are still being deluged by the same load of corporate s**te they're dumping on you.
49 or 50, what's the difference?
It's ok if artists want profit for selling thier music, But MY GOD, why do all the top pop stars and rock stars DEMAND more money when they've got enough for 2000 families?? It's absolutly absurd! If burning CD's hurts anything, its the SMALL RECORDING COMPANIES!! (and possibly the poorer artists).
Always think what the value of things are. 1 cd = ~14$. Thats enough to feed someone for a month!
That just goes to show that the school systems grading system is as unbalanced as the DMCA, not that copying is wrong. The highest form of praise is emulation.
First off, it's bugging me at the moment so I think I'll just talk about definitions a bit. To me, what most people call "art" can be subdivided into two categories: true art and crafts (okay, technically I guess a work of "art" can be placed on a scale between those two points.) True art conveys a message that is impossible to convey through the senses or through language. Consider van Gogh's Starry Night . No matter how many words you speak, there is something conveyed by actually seeing the painting that goes beyond description. Crafts is the use of learned skills to create a representation of something. I always use the example of those copper-plate butterflies you see at craft fairs--most people call that art, but I say it's a craft. After searching the Internet a bit for an example, if I tell you I saw this rusty dragonfly on a rod that you can put in your lawn, then show you one, I think you'll agree it offers little more than its descriptive representation.
Now that I got that out of my system, I'm not sure why I did. I guess I want to focus on "true art." Yeah, that was the point ... When I say "art" from now on, I'm referring to things that are more like true art and less like crafts. That way, the primary value of a work is in its content, not its materials.
I want to focus on art that has similarities to music. Consider short films, for example--a group of people collaborate to create a short work whose value is defined by its ability to convey a message and the complexity of that message. Pretty similar to music. Also, consider stand-up comedy--an individual [or several individuals collaborate to] creates a joke whose value is defined by its ability to make people laugh and its complexity. Also pretty similar to music ... at least in that narrow sense.
What if I buy a collection of short films and make a copy of one of them for myself ... a copy that, despite the change of medium, would otherwise be considered identical to the original. Have I broken existing copyright laws? No, under the provisions of fair use. What if I give a copy to my friend? Well, yes, then--technically--but it's generally not enforced. What if I make a thousand copies and sell them? Well, then yes, I'm definitely breaking the law.
How about the peculiarities of stand-up comedy? What if a stand-up comic tells a joke like, "Aren't you glad plants aren't like people? I mean, how would you like it if some flower came over to you when you hit puberty and cut off your genitals?" [I hope nobody ever did that joke because I made it up ... it's not really very funny anyway.] This comic makes money because I either pay to see the performance or I pay for a recording of a performance. What if I tell that joke to a friend of mine and I didn't give credit to the author--would that be stealing? It's a bit different because the humor of a joke is often just as it's written ... sometimes the performance adds something but it's really just the writing or original idea that has value.
Now, why is it that even the most successful makers of short films and all but the top 20 or so stand-up comics are often on the verge of being broke? The most successful musicians--probably around a thousand of them--can make a decent living just making music. Why is there this disparity? Maybe if there were only a few well-paid musicians, I'd be willing to shell out cash for their higher quality performances. Hmm ...
The second [and much shorter] point I wanted to make is about fair compensation. I take artistic photographs as a hobby, and I think it would be great to make a living at it ... say a good living ... US$150,000 for instance. I doubt I'll ever get there, but I think that would be just swell.
What if a moderately popular artist wanted the same thing ... let's say they were popular enough that each year they sell a million CD's and they have four people in the band. To pay each member of the band $150K, it would work out to $0.60 per CD--and that's if they never performed live. If the material cost of the CD is $1 each (which is par with what you'd pay each for 1,000 CD's) and you've got to pay marketing people and some others (what?--maybe another $500,000 total or $0.50 each copy) and there's a 20% markup by the record stores, the end price is still only $2.52 ... now where does that other $12 to $18 go? If CD's were all three bucks, would that half-hour of tinkering around on your computer to make a copy really be worth it? Hmm ...
That's pretty much how far my thinking on the topic has gone in this direction so take it as it stands in all its conclusion-free and solution-free glory.
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
replying to content,even dynamic content, in a parent post is not Off-topic!
for the reason it can't get a date.
Reality dictates you ask it,
"yes, but might it not have something to do
with being a cadaverous,rotting zombie that
looks awful and smells worse?"
Music is too expensive. Dig?
Nobody wants pay to play.
Drop your prices and increase your volume.
Adapt to the new tech.
Don't try and stop the earth from spinning so
you can preserve your Ludditte Business Models
in formaldehyde.
Your customers hate you.
So do the artists.
Still Open Source needs to come up with a copy control scheme that protects fair use, not file
swapping for freebie.
File Swap only with yourself or you are part of
the problem.
Shooting at both sides, I am ?
That's how you know I am giving you the straight
goods.
A big Dummy up to Geeks and RIAA,
who are both selfish and in Denial.
The latter more than the former, but still
part of the problem.
I want my fair use.
Illegal Files Swapping is wrong.
Linkin Park is a crappy boy-band singing throw-away songs which make no sense or emotional connection. They play generic rehashed riffs and sing over them with their shrill voices.
As for Incubus, I have to admit I haven't heard much by them, but what I have heard sounds pretty throw-away as well (ie. "Iiiiii wish you were here. Iiiii wish you were here. Iiiiii wish you were here." repeat about 20 times. Viola! They have a 'song'). If they could at least play their instruments well, that might make up for their absolute lack of talent.
Ms. Rosen speaks of an analogy of sharing a research paper. I think that is a fine analogy. To answer her question, no, I would likely not like to see that paper distributed to others. There may be times, though, when that is okay. Should we get rid of all photocopiers because they may be used for copyright infringement? No, of course not. Rather, we would allow photocopiers to be used for legitimate practices, and go after those individuals whose seek to use them for copyright infringement.
Copy-protection of a CD is also the wrong solution. Let's extend Ms.Rosen's analogy. Say I write a report which you purchase. To prevent you from sharing that report, I make it so that most photocopiers can't copy it. However, because I did so, you are unable to make a copy for your personal use, in case you spill coffee on the report, or your kids get to it, or perhaps so that you have one copy for when you work at home and one for at the office. Additionally, my method of copy-protection makes the report illegible except under proper lighting, and even then you swear that it's a little "off".
This is what happens with CD copy-protection. By eliminating all copying, it prevents legimate use of copies: backups, additional copies for personal use, creating "mix" discs of personally owned music for personal use, saving to a personal MP3 player for personal playback, etc. Additionally, most copy-protection scheme prevent playback in computers and many DVD players. Even when used with "blessed" CD players, some people believe that they can hear the difference.
I respect the fact that the RIAA views copyright enfringement as "stealing" from the RIAA and the recording artists. However, attacking CD burners in general, including legitimate personal uses and even non-music uses, is clearly the wrong solution.
I've probably bought 300 blank CDs, and I love my burner (12/10/40 Teac with BurnProof(TM)) ... and I've yet to pirate a single music CD, or commercial software CD.
... NEVER underestimate the bandwitdth of a FedEx overnight envelope loaded with CD-Rs! ;-)
Let's not forget that there are plenty of perfectly legitimate uses for CD-burners. I use it for Linux ISOs, system backups, data backups, archives of various things. I've yet to violate a copyright. I haven't even (yet) gotten around to making backups of out-of-print music CDs I own, even though it would be perfectly legal.
And for data transfer
In 1991 I had 14 400 bps (14.4 Kbps Modem - 60 mins/mp3). In 2001 I got 400 000 bps (400Kbps Cable Modem - 2 mins/mp3), an increase of 28 times in 10 years. I am currently in the process of getting a 1 536 000 (1.5Mbps ADSL connection - 25 secs/mp3), an increase of 4 times in 1 year. Even using conservative figures by the year 2005 I should be able to download an MP3 in less than 1/2 second, or a whole CD in approx 7 seconds, or a full length movie (600MB) in about 1 min. God knows what will happen in the year 2010.
The motion picture industry will survive because people will still want to see movies on the big screen (you can't download the atmosphere), the real sufferers will be the Music Distibution Industry (ie the record labels) and the video industry (why rent a video that is six months out of date when you can burn a recent release movie in a couple of minutes). The artists will survive, the top ones probably won't make as much money as they are now, but it will be distributed more evenly amongst ALL musicians via sales of special edition CD's, merchandise, sale of music for advertising, airplay, concerts, sound tracks, private performances etc etc.
These are the facts and no matter what the Record Industry does, the future (for them) does not look promising.
One day we'll look back on these times with nostalgia and tell our grand kids how once upon a time, many years ago, for a brief period before the internet, the whole music industry was controlled by a small number of greedy companies that were only intersted in making money for themselves.
VIVE LA REVOLUTION
If the record companies get paid a royalty on all blank media, and these blank media become the preferred choice of archiving/distributing data (including MP3's) then why bother having the musicians at all. We'll use the law to prop up the failing profits of the record companies (as long as they continue to make campaign contributions) and the artists can starve, the record companies have found another better cash cow, one that doesn't demand a limousine and free drugs.