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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.
Lets say you buy a 50 pack of CD's....
I might burn 5 music CD's from that.
'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.
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.
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
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.
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
I'm waiting ladies! Big spindle o' 100 CDs just waiting to be burned.
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.
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
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.
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.
Ummm, I think he meant he'd only use 5 of them for music.
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.
-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.
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?"
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
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"
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..
''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)
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"?
Salon has a nice article that shows how "well" Sony Music takes care of artists, at least in one instance...
This is the article.
Wow, you people really jumped on the Rosen quote, didn't ya?
Metaphor, peeps. Not a literal representation of the situation. Just metaphor.
She's saying, "Wouldn't you be pissed if somebody else gained from your hard work without you getting a damn thing?" And she's hoping people will say, "Yes."
Okay, counter-point time... I used the word "gained", and that, in Slashworld, implies profit. But that's not necessarily so. If somebody burns a CD, they've "gained" the benefit of not having a negative impact on their wallets, which surely would have happened had they paid for the music legally.
So the metaphor stands: somebody else using your work for their benefit without consideration for the investment of your time and energy is *similar* to somebody copying a CD without consideration for the machinery, both creative and economic, that went into its creation.
Jesus, people... Stretch your brains a little.
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.
If people keep stealing their music, artists won't have any means or motivation to make more music.
Not that I download music, but no, it wouldn't bother me. I would still have access to 100 years of recordings, more than I could ever listen to in my life.
If nobody wants to create, fine. I don't believe that will happen, but then maybe I can have access to a lot more than I do now, even if none of it is "new".
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.
There is another mirror here.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
And if I get pleasure out of stealing cars, that's okay, right? I mean, I'm not selling them to anybody. I just like to take them, drive them around a while, and give them to my friends.
Yep, that argument fell apart pretty fast.
The difference between stealing cars and burning CDs? Degrees of separation. If you steal a car, you are directly affecting somebody in close proximity to you, and since they know their car, they might just catch you. But burning a CD... you have no way to know the artist, and they have no way to know you. So it's safe, and it's disconnected, and it's distant. So since you don't see any direct, noticeable negative impact, it's okay.
This is not to say that I agree with the tactics of the RIAA. I still think Napster was an excellent vehicle for previewing music and accessing long out of print music, but I also saw a 12 year old girl buy 100 CD-R's at Wal-Mart last night, and I'm pretty sure they weren't going to be used for system backups.
And this from the Salon article:
Assuming he meant blank "VCR tapes," is anyone familiar with this? Someone actually gets royalties for BLANK TAPES?!?! Can anyone shed light on this? Maybe a link to the ruling or law or an article or something?
He looked at me and said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."
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.
AFAIK, royalties are in the low-teens % of the wholesale price (which is like $12.98 or something). Almost all the production expenses and a surprising amount of the promotion expenses for the record come out of the royalties, though, so if the record is not a platinum-seller, the artists get very, very little.
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!
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.
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.
isn't quite the same as
It's the same relationship as
and
I mean, for a law professor, "looking more like it's OK" is equivocal indeed.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
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
Sounds great.
How does 50% unemployment sound?
No, this isn't a troll. Just because Big Company Inc. hoards all the money and starves artists doesn't make it right for individuals to do the same. Until everything is free, people have to sell things to eat. It's that simple, and there's no way around it, utopian idealism notwithstanding.
It occurred to me after posting this that I should have tailored the response more for the /. crowd.
Rosen's statement, as it would apply best to this audience, would be changed thusly:
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote some code or found a flaw in zlib. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote some code, and it was good? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that code and not put your name in the README? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
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
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?'
First of all, it's an analogy, not a metaphor. And an analogy needs to be properly analogous to the situation.
I agree with that statement in and of itself, but read below.
And the musician has "gained" mindshare and publicity. Therefore, the creator has gotten something in return. What, you disagree with using "gained" so liberally? I would say the same about your use of the word. I mean, you're saying they've "gained" the non-loss of money (which they very well might not have spent on the CD)?
The attack of her analogy is valid-- the analogy doesn't hold. Most everyone here would agree with your interpretation of the "metaphor", and go on to say that this is the reason the RIAA is bad-- artists aren't getting what they deserve!
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
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
No, the difference is that if you steal my car you deprive me of it. If you make an unauthorized copy of a CD of my songs, I am no worse off.
Yes, artists should be compensated. But copying is not theft, and pay-per-copy is no longer workable. Time for a new paradigm.
I suggest something based on the same idea as songwriter royalties - I can sing "Rockin' inb the Free World" in the shower, or at a party, all I want; but when I sign it at the bar, Neil Young gets paid (via BMI or ASCAP). Drop the notion of "Copyright" and replace it with a right to royalties on for-profit use.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"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
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?
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
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
'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
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
Jesus, people... Stretch your brains a little.
You must be new! Welcome to slashdot. We here enjoy GroupThink[TM].
Like I said, I don't download music. But with nobody creating new stuff there will be a rise in demand for preexisting content. I'm willing to pay for content now. I just need to know about it and be able to get it. Right now the media interests have no interest in providing anything other than mass content.
I wish artists would quit thinking they are owed a career. Art's been a commodity in this country for a long time. Get used to it. If you're good, you'll make money, if you suck you won't.
I've been poor before. I haven't had a decent job in a year. But I'm not deluding myself that I am owed a living or a job by anybody. I must get it by my merits, not because I am "owed" anything.
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...
Uh, it's also similar to someone reading a library book and thus avoiding paying the author. Or borrowing a book from a friend. Or humming a song for my own amusement.
People share ideas. That's part of the human experience. Sharing by making digital copies is no different than telling jokes, lending books, singing songs, and all the other methods of sharing we've had for centuries.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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."
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.
''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
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
> 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
marketing and sales experience makes good bands?
...
funny, i thought it was musical talent
09
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."
Has nothing to do with "owed." It's one thing for an artist or developer to fail. It's an entirely different thing for them to have never had the opportunity to succeed.
If there is no possibility of making a living in the first place because anything that can be digitized is universally warezed, then there *will* be no ability for these people to do anything creative, because they'll be working double shifts at the FoodKing.
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??
Perhaps the new distribution companies will be webhosting companies. Hopefully this time the artists will gain more control.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
Yep.
It would be spent on nice things and services, so there would be a need for more employes in other areas.
In theory. On the other hand, putting a couple dozen industries out of business over five years or so could knock the economy into a depression for decades too.
People have to get paid. Fact of life. We cannot in good conscience use the freedom and potential of the Internet as license to shoplift every bit of value produced by people on the AGREEMENT that they will receive value in kind for their work.
All work has value.
Lower prices? Fine. More features? Fine. More freedom? Fine. But when all these things are put down on the counter, it is dishonest to just walk away from the transaction without returning some reward, or there will be no further value transactions, meaning no further value.
The sooner we get past this debate, the sooner we can have all the cool promised products.
If it's a creative design in a limited run, yes, something has been lost -- because the chair is no longer a rare item, and the designer has lost control over its duplication.
Would the Pyramids be as fascinating if every other civilization within a thousand miles had cloned them by the score? Would a painter appreciate somebody sitting right next to him, duplicating his every brush stroke, and selling the work when the original painter does -- or, more precisely, giving it away?
If you were writing a novel, and then somebody cracked your account and copied the draft, and then started walking around to publishers... have you lost anything?
And if "distribution control" is not something of value, then exactly what, prithee tell, are the artists selling to the recording companies? Legitimacy for the sake of feeling good? Don't make me laugh.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
So you think that all the money that people spend on CD's now would be lost to the economic
Yep.
It would be spent on nice things and services, so there would be a need for more employes in other areas.
In theory. On the other hand, putting a couple dozen industries out of business over five years or so could knock the economy into a depression for decades too.
People have to get paid. Fact of life. We cannot in good conscience use the freedom and potential of the Internet as license to shoplift every bit of value produced by people on the AGREEMENT that they will receive value in kind for their work.
All work has value.
Lower prices? Fine. More features? Fine. More freedom? Fine. But when all these things are put down on the counter, it is dishonest to just walk away from the transaction without returning some reward, or there will be no further value transactions, meaning no further value.
The sooner we get past this debate, the sooner we can have all the cool promised products.
It will never be a viable business. Music is free now. You can't sell it.
What you CAN do is look at the expense of distributing your music online as a promotional expense. People get to know you. Eventually your music gets on P2P and you don't have to pay for THAT bandwidth.
The whole trick is getting people to hear your stuff so they want to go to your show. That's where money will be made by musicians in the future, NOT by selling the sound waves themselves.
Might take a few more years for musicians and the recording industry to grasp that, but mark my words, that's where we're going.
Someone actually gets royalties for BLANK TAPES?!?!
That is correct, included in the price of every blank audio tape and video tape is a "tax" which goes to the RIAA and MPAA, respectively. The industry's reasoning is that since audio tapes and video tapes are primarily used for pirating, then they should be compensated. The fact that it has always been perfectly legal (the AHR of 1992 was just confirmation) to make copies of your favorite songs from a CD to a tape so you can listen to them in your car was simply glossed over.
If you follow this reasoning, you can say you are prefectly justified in pirating all the music you want since you're paying the record companies anyway in the form of a private tax... if you buy blank audio tapes.
RIAA wanted to impose a similar levy on blank CD-Rs in the USA but it was thwarted by the lobbies for the computer industry who were concerned that such a levy would cut into their profits on CD burners. However, in Canada, I believe such a levy was imposed on blank CD-Rs. Like I said before though, such a levy justifies piracy because the industry is still getting compnesated either way.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
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?
Perhaps in your case -- but that's your decision. If it were a creative work that I did not mean for public distribution, I'd probably destroy all copies (at least the ones that I would have access to) after grading regardless of how well it did.
The artists that the RIAA signs have generally signed contracts that prohibit random third-party distribution. If they wanted to distribute music online for free, they could have opted for that and walked away from the RIAA -- and probably some have done that already. It is their decision to make.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
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.
The question is, why can't the production costs get paid out of the 85-90% of the recordings' price that the artist never sees? Why will the artists see so little money unless the record is a million seller? The answer is that the big 4 record companies have a monopoly on distribution and radio airplay (through the infinitely corrupt payola system), and can essentially force the contract terms they dictate on the artist. Artists have the option of independent labels, but they then face much more limited access to retail and radio.
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
Fair use does allow limited reproduction for education and research, although it's a grey area -- selling "course packs" without copyright holders' permission, for instance, is not a particularly swift idea as far as I can tell.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
In the early days, it would mean .3 billion coasters........
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.
I would say that just about the entire genre of electronic music works this way. Even the largest acts barely show upon the popular radar, and yet they continue to create music. How can it be? Maybe because they get paid very well for making public appearances. Hell, last I heard, Paul Oakenfold was making at least $20,000 a night and I don't believe I've ever heard anything he's done on the radio.
The music 'industry' is a fraud.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
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?
No, no, no. This is not a sig.
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.
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."
You have no imagination. Has there ever been a period of time when there were no musicians? I doubt it. People will make music because they enjoy making music, and yes, they will continue to make money at it if they are good. The only thing they won't be able to do is sell prepackaged music as a product.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote some code or found a flaw in zlib. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote some code, and it was good? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that code and not put your name in the README? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people."
/. mindset, because you clearly don't grasp the concept yet.
If my code was useful to somebody else, and it helped their project, I am happy. I don't need credit. I already got credit for the code being used in the project it was intended for. I don't need payment. I already got it because my work was needed to complete the project it was intended for. I don't even care if he RESELLS my code for profit, as long as he does not prevent me from doing what I want with the code. Are you starting to catch on yet?
Does this suprise you? That people are actually willing to HELP OTHERS by offering them information that costs them nothing to share?
Go back, and "re-tailor" your post for the
Go to the URL right next to my 'user 580 info' there and you will find music you can download and KEEP, for free. Go to the artwork section and you'll find the COVERS for burning free CDs of the different albums. And all those 'buy now' buttons and crap are for ACTUAL RED BOOK COMPLIANT NEVER-BEEN-COMPRESSED HIGH-RESOLUTION-MASTER CDS. Real CDs done right.
And on every CD is written: please copy this CD for your friends.
The CDs have bonus tracks, every time- and why not? But I totally encourage people to rip the CDs in any format you'd like to see around- 256K mp3? Ogg Vorbis? WMA, which I despise? Go nuts, you are free to do so! And then share the fsckers on Gnutella or whatever else pleases you. I mean it.
There are some artists (while he lived, John Lennon was very much one of them) for whom living right is more important than kaching! Mind you, if I wanted to get economically raped, I'd solicit a major label contract instead of keeping rights to my own work ;) but you HAVE to be able to imagine where all this is heading.
In a world where digital information is completely fluid, trying to fix a representation of the information is absolutely pointless. It's fucking crazy is what it is, excuse the strong language. It is the equivalent of wanting to charge for individual electrons in the electricity that powers your house. It's wanting to charge for water molecules in a rainstorm in the middle of the ocean. (damn good analogy actually, as most of the water is undrinkable, the value of really good water is high, yet it's falling from the sky all around you anyhow)
When ultimate broadband, ultimate storage, ultimate compression and encoding and playback happen, what will we have then? You will log onto the internet and someone will put up a file on a website or whatever. "Recorded Music (235T)" Oh, it's the archive of the complete history of recorded music! 235 terabytes. Gee, that's only a five minute download, *click* and so you have the history of recorded music on your Holo-Uber-Optical-Drive.
Now what?
The kind of incredible, unbelievable liquidity of information we're headed for (quick question: over your current modem or broadband, how long does it take you to download more written text literature than you could ever possibly read in your life?) changes the whole concept of the entertainment industry. It is no longer a one-to-many situation. Information storage and processing is expanding so fast that the new problem is not distribution, but overchoice.
At Ampcast, I have an album that is 'noise' music. It's the raging shrieks and staticy roars of a processed shortwave radio picking up things like satellites and atmospheric disturbances. Some people really like this kind of stuff, but most sane people would hate it. Some people really hate Britney Spears but most sane people would acknowledge the cynical competence of her production and tap their foot along to the artifical pop tripe. Yet, in data form, both sorts of music take up about the same number of bytes. And not only that, but an increasingly manageable number of bytes- no sort of problem to keep around. The future will mean you will have every imaginable music and film at your fingertips- and the question will not be 'how can I get this', but 'what do I actually like?'
In the past it was difficult enough to deliver music, that you had to go with what would appeal to a broad cross-section of people. This problem is DEAD... so on the one hand the future contains an ever-widening bunch of genres and musical/artistic styles (try understanding modern electronic dance music forms! Incredible forking and proliferation of distinct stylized forms...) and on the other hand it becomes virtually impossible to sort out what actually interests you from the 20 million other musics and arts that don't do anything for you...
If the entertainment industry had any clue at all they'd be trying to get a handle on this. What they're actually doing, for instance by cracking down on webcasting that tries to intelligently predict listener tastes, is destroy it. But they CANNOT destroy the need for it- because with information as liquid as it's gonna be, the amount of overchoice produces a compelling need for this new approach.
We will end up with a succession of entirely synthetic (possibly CGI!) worldwide superstars- whose appeal is so relentlessly broad that it has no depth or staying power at all- and everything else will be CHAOS... and choice. And just a hint of that meritocracy that the entertainment industry's been outgrowing.
Music by this longwinded geek
Even less commercial music
Who told him he could sing?
Chris Johnson
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).
People have to get paid. Fact of life.
Sometimes people make bad career choices. That's a fact of life too. If you've chosen to sell canned content, you certainly picked a bad time to do it.
We cannot in good conscience use the freedom and potential of the Internet as license to shoplift every bit of value produced by people on the AGREEMENT that they will receive value in kind for their work.
What agreement? If you produce something that can be copied infinitely many times, you should make sure that you are paid before you ever release that thing.
All work has value.
No, it doesn't. Something only has value if someone wants that thing.
The sooner we get past this debate, the sooner we can have all the cool promised products.
Huh? What am I not getting now that you think I will get by blindly continuing to follow the current system?
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
That's great... for you.
I've seen plenty of outrage from people who have had their code appropriated and used without credit. I've seen Slashdot become a firestorm of protest over such topics. While you might not feel at all bad about it, please do not pretend that it doesn't happen at all.
It doesn't surprise me that people are actually willing to help others by offering their time and talents with no expectation of compensation. Not at all. I rather like that aspect of Open Source and the GPL. And I do grasp the concept quite well.
But that concept and the reality of the usual response of the Slashdot community do not always go hand in hand.
Tut tut, you are trolling. Why? Becuase it matters a GREAT DEAL to me if gains on my paper are financial or otherwise. If somone wanted to copy my paper becuase they thought it was really brilliant, or if they wanted to take my research and run with it to develop the next important bit of research, I say GO FOR IT! If, however, somone wants to take my paper, put thier name on it, and sell it to a company to publish for themselves, then I would cry foul.
See? MONEY MATTERS. If somone is using my paper either becuase they A) enjoy it or B) can use it to better the field, then I have no problems with taht whatsoever, even if I never see a red cent from that effort. However, if somone is going to try and intentionally cheat me out of something, then I would be upset. It's all about motivation. 99.9% of "copied" CDs are not sold for proft, and the ones that are, DESERVE to be shut down.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Again, there is an inability of people to think in the abstract. My point had nothing to do with pretending you created content that wasn't yours. The point is purely to do with deriving benefit from the work of somebody else at that person's cost.
In Rosen's analogy, the cost was time and effort put into a paper. In the music industry, the cost is creative effort and production/marketing. In Open Source, the cost is recognition for contributions.
I think the problem here is that a lot of people are projecting their compiled hatred of the RIAA onto this quote from Rosen and twisting it beyond its meaning.
A James Brown record is a tangible asset- it has USE besides just sitting there being an artwork. You can shake your butt to it, get up offa that thing and move. It has FUNCTION besides just being the record of someone having 'arted'.
If you could clone anything and everything freely at no cost, a James Brown record would be MORE useful than a pyramid- because you can't dance to a pyramid. What good is it? What do you DO with it?
If you were writing a novel and, while you were entitled to recognition as the true author of it, anyone could copy the words of it and read it whenever they wanted, what use is the publisher? That is what publishers are FOR, and if they are not necessary, what is the point? If you never show your novel to anyone and it remains uncopied, have you gained anything? If you show it to everyone and half the world ends up reading it and begging you for more, have you lost anything?
The question to ask is this: given the eventual total failure of distribution control, what will happen next? What is left, and who has the power when distribution controllers finally lose it?
My money is not on creators and artists- I'm betting on promoters. We'll see... because distribution control WILL die in the long run.
It's a matter of technology. Imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole in a water glass. Now imagine how much water leaks out of a pinhole at the bottom of Boulder Dam... we're heading towards 'how much water leaks out of a pinhole under the pressure of a contained million megaton atomic explosion', or beyond. Given the increases in technology and information distribution, the speed and bandwidth and storage, distribution control can't possibly survive...
How many full-length feature films will you be able to store on _discardable_ media (not 100$ hard drive analogs but 2$ CDR analogs)... in 2020? How many full-length feature films will you be able to download per minute?
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.)
If there is no possibility of making a living in the first place because anything that can be digitized is universally warezed, then there *will* be no ability for these people to do anything creative, because they'll be working double shifts at the FoodKing.
Even under your hypothetical world in which everything is universally warezed (which would mean an artist would only be able to sell one copy of any recording) they would still be able to make a living by performing live.
What is not possible in such a future is to make $50M by selling vast quantities of $.35 plastic disks for $18.99.
Record companies, book publishers, newspapers, motion picture companies, and other content providers are going to have to adjust to a new reality, in which two inexorable forces are going to drive down the market value of their content.
1. anyone can be their own producer/publisher because the pc revolution and the internet make it possible for any aspiring hack to produce and publish high quality content worldwide for very very low cost.
2. it is virtually impossible to prevent people from making and distributing copies of the work produced by major companies on the internet.
It is a new reality; and it cannot be changed. They must adjust their business models to this new reality or they will slowly whither and die.
So far their reactions have been to attempt everything possible to prevent copying, but it is going to be increasingly difficult to compete with the content created by people not affiliated with the major media companies.
The market value of content will continue to decrease, whether they manage to suppress copying and sharing mechanisms or not.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Ridiculous. You are not owed an oppurtunity to make a living doing anything, nor are you owed CONTINUED oppurtunity to make a living doing anything. Technology changes potential job markets, social changes change potential job markets, political changes change certain job markets. How many professional blacksmiths do you know? How about shoemakers?
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
My intent was not to troll, and I appreciate the variety of insight into my initial post. My post was perhaps a little too confrontational with the quip "Stretch your minds a little", because it seems that the respondents all think me an RIAA shill.
Okay, so money matters. If somebody makes a killing off your work, you want a piece. But if they enjoy it simply for enjoying it, that's okay.
Let's say that your paper is the basis for your career. This is how you make a living. It comes out, everybody loves it, and they want to use it to further humanity. That's great! But instead of buying the copies you've made available so as to keep yourself fed, one person buys it and runs it through a printing press and gives all the copies away, saturating your market with free copies, and effectively eliminating your chances at revenue.
This is, typically, a bad situation for you unless you are depending upon ancillary methods of sustenance (free donuts at the Today Show when they invite you on, money from speaking engagements, et cetera).
And I think that's the key thing - when people are not upset about their work being passed around, is that work what they depend upon for their primary source of financial gain? My guess is that your paper would not make you money whether distributed or not, so having it distributed for free is a nice form of recognition.
But what if you charged for that paper because you dependend upon it and the same thing happened?
Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a music exec of some sway...
I own a lot of congressmen who support the DMCA.
pleased to meet you, won't you guess my name.
But what's puzzling you, is it's a liscense that I claim.
I'm the one you can thank
for the hip hop and swank.
I'm a corporate pimp
leaching off some young skank.
pleased to meet you
won't you guess my name.
But what's puzzling you, is it's a liscense that I claim.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Ummm. No. You do not gain, not having a negative impact on your wallet in a capitalistic society. It's based on the transfer of money, with the reciever getting a positive increase. There is a difference. If I copy a cd from a friend, no transfer of money occurs. According to you, I'm depriving the artist of the ability to lessen the amount of money I have, that's just stupid. By that argument if I give my friend the price of the cd I've gained nothing, AND the artist still has not been paid.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Yeah, I was wrong about the metaphor thing.
Now the gains bit... First off, please don't assume I'm going to object to your liberal use of the word "gained"? I used it liberally myself, so why should I object?
While their is a gain of mindshare and publicity, of what value is that mindshare/publicity if the public at large finds it acceptable to mass copy the work of that musician?
There was another post that said fame and fortune go hand in hand, but unless one is writing a tell all book about how they didn't make any money at their profession because people didn't respect their copyrights, I'm not sure where the money comes from.
Is the RIAA bilking artists? Hell yes. That's not what the article was addressing. The article and the quote, I believe, were meant to address the fact that people feel perfectly fine ignoring copyrights. I feel that the quote and the sentiment stands in that context, that in the current system of copyright and industry (note I did not say artist) compensation, the flagrant wholesale skirting of copyright is misunderstood by the very perpetrators of it.
Does that mean the system is right? No. Does that mean that Rosen hasn't been hypocritical in the past? No. But those items seemed outside the scope of the attack launched on this quote.
Rosen is asking kids to understand the feeling behind having your work taken and copied and used, and she is doing it from the perspective of an industry that depends upon the sale of creative (no jokes about N'Sync) works to consumers.
To that end, the analogy works.
If you've chosen to sell canned content, you certainly picked a bad time to do it.
Ok. Put the music, television, film, software, publishing, and radio industries out of business.
Then, severely damage the shipping, electronics, real estate, utility, insurance, professional services and computer (hardware) businesses.
Then, moderately damage the banks, export companies, retailers, wholesalers, and heavy shipping industries.
Then, take a nice, continent-sized bite out of the tax revenues for all 50 states and the Federal government.
Then, decide what to do with the eight-figures of people that just lost their jobs.
Then, watch the capital markets disappear.
Lather, rinse and repeat for every nation in the world that does business with any of these industries.
How's that? Sounds alarmist, but that is a very real possibility if all the Internet means to people is a digital lootmobile. If we're going to commoditize content (which I think is a paradox anyway), fine. But we can't call it a commodity unless it has at least a marginal value. If it has 0 value, then it will not be produced.
What agreement?
Ok. This will be complicated.
In a capitalist economy, it will be impossible to conduct any kind of value-based transaction unless a business model can be constructed which demonstrates the value of production.
This is why all work has value, no matter how small. Time is money. Time spent on something gives it value by virtue of the value of the time spent.
The agreement is that work invested will give the product enough value that it can be sold for an amount sufficiently exceeding the value of the work to justify the original transaction or investment. This is the basic gamble of all businesses. But it ceases to be a gamble if the business knows ahead of time that the market has decided to buy one and ONLY ONE unit of their product and then proceed to warezzzzzzzzzzz it eleventy hundred million times.
If the latter is the case, there will never be an original investment, which will prevent the work from being done. If digital products can no longer be sold, there will be no investment of time, work or money in them, and they will cease to exist as a professional pursuit.
If you produce something that can be copied infinitely many times, you should make sure that you are paid before you ever release that thing.
Impossible. Who's going to pay for it? If it has no value and cannot be resold, it will command no price.
Something only has value if someone wants that thing.
Not any more. Not if wanting it is measured in clicks instead of dollars.
What am I not getting now that you think I will get by blindly continuing to follow the current system?
Did I say follow the current system? No. If you want $.25 a song CDs, great. If you want to copy, time-shift, location-shift, etc. Fine. I'm all for it.
What I am NOT all for is people becoming their own *AA and hoarding money at the expense of the artists they *claim* to want to compensate fairly.
Compensate the artists and developers fairly. That's all they are asking for, and IMHO they have the right to insist on it.
''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..."
Ok, this was my first sentence:
Has nothing to do with "owed."
Now, how does this make sense:
So we owe people the ability
Hello??
Cool, I'm owed the chance to make a living sitting on my couch and watching my tv
Reductio ad absurdum.
You are not owed an oppurtunity to make a living doing anything, nor are you owed CONTINUED oppurtunity to make a living doing anything.
Fine. Keep your money and put 'em all out of business. No better at "supporting the artists" than the RIAA.
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
in which two inexorable forces are going to drive down the market value of their content.
To what? If it's zero, bye-bye content.
Again (and again.. sigh...), I am not defending making $50M on plastic disks. I'm advocating the same thing that everyone else in this debate is advocating: compensating the artists, writers and developers fairly.
If the Internet is allowed to turn into the warez network, then these self-proclaimed supporters of the artists will have done nothing of the kind.
I think most people will pay a fair price for a good CD or book. I think those same people should frown on people who don't pay that fair price.
I don't think you quite get this, or the meaning of profit for that matter.
Lets say I have a CD with some incredibly expensive software on. Say it's worth $200,000,000.
Now, say a 16 year old kid borrows it, and copies it.
Has the kid suddenly made $200 million profit? No.
Has the company selling the software just lost $200 million? No.
The problem with making assumptions as to the *actual* money lost by the music industry is the fact that you make two flawed assumptions:
1) That for each copy made, the person copying could have afforded it in the first place
2) That this person would also have actually *bought* it, even if they could afford it
Do you honestly think people with hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s would have bought all that music if they couldn't pirate it for free?
Of course not, they would've done without. So hang on, who has lost out here? This isn't stealing. This isn't theft. This is copyright infringement. The original is intact, and no-one has lost out on anything.
Lets say you *could* afford it, which most can't, would they have bought *all* of those songs they downloaded? No. If you paid for songs, you'd be a lot more picky about what songs you add to your collection.. What's a few minutes wasted on an MP3 it turns out you don't like - it's just time. I don't know about you, but I don't go around buying armfulls of CDs in music stores to see if they're any good..
Yes, there are some cases where the music industry is not getting sales they would otherwise, for example counterfit CDs - where the end buyer thinks they're getting a legit copy. Yes, this should be stopped, and is totally wrong.
I also object to people selling on music/software they've downloaded. That's also morally (and legally) very wrong. However, 9 times out of 10, that MP3 they just counted being copied on the net, or that CD bought (and that's assuming all CD-Rs are used to copy their music!), is a sale lost. This is simply NOT TRUE.
When I write papers for school I cite works from other authors. Can you imagine if that was considered IP theft?
And these are excellent points. I agree with them all.
But there's a scarcity element in there that has an effect on the rapidity of distribution. Libraries get a limited number of copies for a book. In smaller community libraries (like the ones around me), you can wait upwards of 4 months to read a popular book which, by then, will no longer be popular. Many opt to simply purchase the book instead of waiting in order to get around the resource scarcity.
Same for borrowing a book from a friend. If one person buys a book and lends it out, the lending period is sequential: friend 1 borrows it, then friend 2, then friend 3. This process could put friend 3 at the same four month waiting period as the library, and they may opt just to buy it. But even if they wait, by the end of a few months time, only 3 people other than the buyer have been exposed to the book. So, in order for 4 million people to read a book in 4 months time, 1 million have to buy it.
Now let's move to CDs. It takes 6 minutes to copy a CD. So the resource scarcity is a 6 minute period. Everybody can wait 6 minutes to get something for free. If you have a party and invite 10 people over and half of them walk away with a copy of the CD, that's 5 copies in the space of an evening. Then if they go home and make copies for their acquaintances (let's say at a 1:1 ratio), there are now 10 copies spawned of 1 CD. If it goes beyond that (let's just assume it's a Britney Spears album), there's the possibility (though not necessarily the reality) of an exponential growth in copies that *could not happen* with a physical, analog media like text on pages. With the CD, it is possible that 4 million copies could be spawned from 1 CD - with none of the copying having been for profit.
Now, it is possible to scan the book. Or to photocopy the book. But the time investment in doing either well is significantly prohibitive enough to prevent it from happening in a similarly exponential fashion. Whereas with the CD, you pop it in and, 6 minutes later, you have a copy with no need for labor on your part aside from the purchase of equipment (one time deal) and a few mouse clicks.
But none of this should detract from the point you made that we've been sharing information for centuries. That's true. But I don't know that we've ever profited from information quite as much as we do these days, or, at least, we haven't traded in a pure information space until recently. We've shared stories and songs and jokes while trading primarily in other physical goods like lumber, glass, and rubber. It wasn't too long ago that information was traded only among the rich because they were the only people who had enough time to amuse themselves with knowledge. Their riches, however, came from physical goods, not from anything distributed as knowledge.
So, while sharing ideas is part of the human experience, we have been changing the labor portion of the human experience more into ideas. We now compensate ideas without requiring any kind of attachment to physical production.
And that's what a CD is, really. It's a small platter that holds the ideas of an artist, and those ideas are easily copied and distributed. But now that artists are depending upon being rewarded for the individual consumption of their ideas, the thought that those ideas could be mass-consumed in very little time poses a problem.
The same will be true for books someday. There has been movement for a few years now to get libraries on a pay-per-read system, and when books go digital, if they go digital, that system will become a reality if the current atmosphere is what we use as a context to judge forward development.
And I think that's awful. But I also don't know what the solution is. Should a musician just not record their music and instead only perform it live? Should governments pay musicians for their work and then release everything to the public domain? Should society be snapped back a bit and have its expectations regarding intellectual property re-adjusted (I vote for this one)?
What system will work? Because unless we are going to change this commoditization of ideas, we're going to run into problems where a person's survival is based upon their ability to sell their ideas, but in a world where their ideas can be copied instantly and uncontrollably.
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
Personally, I don't see the logic behind thinking one has a right to make money off of information beyond a single sale. It would be analagous to me trying to make money off of the air I exhale. I could use your same arguments, saying that since I did all the work in turning oxygen into carbondioxide you have no right to use my air to feed your plants. The problem is that the very nature of information is that a particular piece of information is always in a state of infinite supply.
In the past, it was possible to chain information like music to a particular medium which was too costly to reproduce for most people, thus allowing it to be sold as a kind of "value add" to selling the particular medium.
If I wanted to charge for my paper, just like if I wanted to charge for my air, it is MY perogative to find a way to do it. In reality, it can't be done, there is no possible way for it to be viable. It is my own fault for trying to make money off of such an absurd scheme.
As for those who would then argue that if it were impossible to profit off of music, then there would be no music, that logic simply does not hold. There is no economic value for me posting comments here on slashdot (especially since my karma was maxed a LOOONG time ago), in fact it could be argued that it actually costs me money that I could theoretically be getting by writing code or whatever. But I still do it becuase it makes me very happy. Ask any muscian worth his or her salt, and they will tell you that thier music is not about money, but about some intagible need to create art.
Information sales in an economy based on scarcity is untennable. Just imagine if I had a matter replicator and maybe the logic will become clearer. If I could relicate anything physical, then the economy of money would cease to exist. The only economic unit would be, for example, respect, or trading. If I were an artist in that economy, I could buy and sell based on what I had to share. My N'Synch for your B'Spears. I would have relative wealth based on what you and I had, and I could create new wealth out of my own head. And that wouldn't be a bad thing. I repeat, there is nothing wrong with having an economy based on pure information, it just works differently than the economy you were taught about in school. The only problems arise when you attempt to meld the two economic systems together.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
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.
Excellent points. I am especially enamored of the final paragraph because it touches upon why I defended Rosen's statement as valid: in the current model, what she says is valid. That's not an endorsement of the model, by any means.
:)
Also, it should be noted that compensation in the current model is not as simple as a consumer to artist connection. There really are several layers deep of people who work to make sure an artist is represented publicly, because that is how the current model works. To reflect that, however, Rosen's statement would have to be modified to ask the students if they would be upset if the library assistant who helped them find the books to research the paper was not compensated for their contribution.
Thus, Rosen's statement is misleading, as has been most of her comments about how all this anti-piracy business is for the benefit of the artists. But taken to its simplest form, "Should somebody be compensated for work they do?" (which is the heart of Rosen's statement), the statement stands. We can argue about the form, method, or amount of compensation, but it seemed to me she was asking kids that if the shoe were on the other foot, if their work was being distributed and others were "unfairly" benefitting from it, would they like it? That's a leading question, certainly, because there are parameters missing (Would the benefit negatively affect me? Do I make money from my paper? Are there other repercussions from the appropriation of my work? Will its core meaning be changed but still attributed to me?), but...
Well, actually, I think I just argued myself into a corner.
So, in the context of the model and acknowleding the limited scope of the analogy, it's valid. But given a few tweaks, the answers could vary wildly. Rosen's assumption, though, can easily be seen to be "You would lose something if this happened.", without defining what that "something" would be. And the answers would differ dependant upon it.
Is that a fair statement?
You have received commodity goods at no cost that you would not otherwise have had access to. That's not a gain?
:) But that makes your friend a commercial pirate, and, thus, an outlaw. Most of the discussion here has been assuming that people are giving copies gratis to their friends.
Where once you had nothing, you now have something, without the requirement that you give something in return.
0 + 1 = 1
Though your last sentence is equally valid.
I couldn't agree more. Really.
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
Oh I'm not making a stance for or against the subject. Just pointing out a flaw in the way the gain part is stated. ;) I was trying to point out that in both situations I said (both getting the cd free from a friend and paying the friend for it) it's the same situation to the artist.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
But how will those people whose music isn't able to be played live, such as many in the various "electronic" genres, make money from touring? Are we going to just throw away every genre of music that can't be replicated by a group of people on a stage?
Kevin
I find it disgusting that public funds are being handed over to an industry just because it exists.
The worst part of course is that RIAA/MPAA want it both ways. They want us to subsidize them through private taxes on recording media AND to pay them each and every single time we watch and/or listen to content that we go out and purchase.
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
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
In a sense what Ms. Rosen is saying is a good point and mirrors what you just said, but at the same time when she says something like that it leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. I think that the reason for that lies between the lines in what you just said. Yes it's bad to essentially steal someone elses work, wether that be by passing it off as your own or by taking advantage of the benifits of that work without compensating the worker in some way, but it's the act that is bad, not the things that make the act possible. It's not the web's fault that someone may turn in a copy of your work, nor is it the fault of mp3s that people mass duplicate them over the internet. For that reason we should not strike down the technology that makes music duplication possible, nor should we stop sharing ideas over the web. If Ms. Rosen weren't trying so hard to destroy not only music piracy, but the technology that enables it and many other unrelated good things, perhaps I wouldn't be so sarcastic and upset when she asked us to refrain from what she's trying to force us not to do anyway.
It's not good enough for her just to expect us to live up to our end of the product exchange, she has to be willing to live up to her end and allow us all the rights that come with the licence we purchase. If that means that some people will be able to act illegaly at her expense then she will have to find another way to deal with it.
But what is fair?
Fair can only be defined by stating what is not fair. Zero compensation is not fair. Demanding oranges, then watching a farmer plant, tend and grow an orchard, only to go in and steal the crop in a clandestine harvest is unfair to the farmer.
We have become accustomed to a very select group of megastars who earn monopoly profits. We will instead have thousands of minor stars making a more realistic income. I think that is a net gain for art and society.
Agreed, as long as we don't drift to the other extreme viewpoint, oft quoted here and elsewhere: "if you publish it, we will copy it, and we will never pay for digital content, ever." Such a viewpoint contributes nothing.
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.
That is true and I agree. But I would say that this feeling is vague. She is confusing the two different shades of feeling, one for not being credited for the work, and one for not receiving compensation. In terms of feelings you can identify both as feeling cheated, but the distinction is entirely essential for the fine shades of meaning behind copyright infringement of digital works. Becuase artists are not being compensated, yet credit is still given (at least when copying MP3's wholesale).
Thanks for posting though. For once, Slashdot has a poster who has great insight and intelligence to understand the issue from both sides, yet still have a well-argued stand for one against the other. And the patience to reply to all. You wouldn't happen to be a professor, teacher, or lawyer, would you?
Ok. Put the music, television, film, software, publishing, and radio industries out of business.
All of which together don't add up to more than 1% of the GDP of the US, and not all of which will disappear. Movies, for one, would continue to be made because they will always be able to draw a crowd to a theatre for a good show.
The rest of this part of your post is based on the flawed premise that the economy would collapse without an 'entertainment industry'.
This is why all work has value, no matter how small. Time is money. Time spent on something gives it value by virtue of the value of the time spent.
And once again, I have to point out that unless someone wants whatever you are producing, it may as well be dirt. Effort expended and time spent does not automatically equal value.
The agreement is that work invested will give the product enough value that it can be sold for an amount sufficiently exceeding the value of the work to justify the original transaction or investment. This is the basic gamble of all businesses.
Yes, it is a gamble, and just because something has always made money in the past does not mean that it always will. If you see fit to spin that wheel, be my guest. Just don't expect me to be a part of your payoff.
Not any more. Not if wanting it is measured in clicks instead of dollars.
Clicks don't cost anything.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
I think that the mindshare is still worth something. People are still buying CDs, (and I think a combination of the economic downturn and perhaps a low point in music is probably the cause of the lower sales-- my guess) and so even if someone makes a copy of a CD, that doesn't mean a lost sale (and could perhaps lead to more sales). And I think if CDs were priced much more realistically that people would be buying a lot more of them. My point is that I think, yes, this mindshare is worth something, even with MP3s. If you build a fanbase, those fans will put money into CDs, concerts and merchandise. Or whatever music-related item.
I still think it's worth pointing out how the analogy is off, because I think the way that she puts it is more directly harmful than what is really going on. Yes, people just plain copying CDs and not paying artists for them is not right, but I think what's going on is not so simple.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
The vast majority can be played by a group of people. Those that can't, I suspect they'll haul their computer with them and basically "play along" with the electronic track being played by the computer.
That said, there are many things in the world that aren't profitable. Those things are either done for fun as a hobby or aren't done. Nothing new there...
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.
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
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)
All of which together don't add up to more than 1% of the GDP of the US, and not all of which will disappear.
lol
ok. whatever.
Movies, for one, would continue to be made because they will always be able to draw a crowd to a theatre for a good show.
A crowd of people with camcorders and wireless links back to warez-r-us.com, right?
The rest of this part of your post is based on the flawed premise that the economy would collapse without an 'entertainment industry'.
I didn't say the economy would "collapse." However, without these businesses there to support other businesses (and provide jobs) there will be a lot of purchases suddenly missing from the economy.
Just don't expect me to be a part of your payoff.
Great. Good to see everyone is concerned with supporting the artists.
Clicks don't cost anything.
I believe that was my point.
Live Music
or
Dead Music
?
First of all, I don't think that most of the people we're talking about have "hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s". I'm talking about the more-common person who has, say, 20 GB of MP3s.
Knowing some of the CD collections my friends have, it's certainly not a stretch to say that alot of people can afford to maintain large (100+) CD collections.
If my friend chose, instead, to copy those CD's from someone else, that's a good chunk of change he's saving (and the record labels are losing).
The problem isn't in the one person copying the $2,000,000 piece of software or hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s, because we all know that most people couldn't normally afford that.
The problem is the majority who copy a moderate amount of CD's, and download a moderate amoung of MP3s, that COULD otherwise afford paying for the music legitimately.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
No, most money _now_ is just bits in bank databases. The McGuffing wouldn't change that, it would just make the physical markers untrustworthy.
Even some fairly primitive societies have similar concepts. On some south pacific island, thousand pound stone wheels are "money". AFAIC, the stones have no more intrinsic value than the little pieces of green paper or database entries we rely on. Since people don't want to roll the stone down to the store, they just leave the stones where they are and transfer the title. It's a non-literate society, so people just _remember_ who that particular stone belongs too. Memory is not a problem -- pre-literates have very good memories, although they also have quite a lot less to remember. Obviously, a high degree of honesty is required to make this work, but this is common in primitive societies -- everyone knows everyone, so if you get a reputation for lying or cheating, everyone is going to insist on cash or trade goods up front, and life gets very difficult.
So anyway, this island is really running on a system of credit, kept in peoples' heads. All the physical stones add to the system is a way to really rub in the consequences of cheating -- if you gave John the sixth stone on the left for a bushel of potatoes and Jim the same stone for a couple of chickens, next time you need groceries you just might have to actually roll a stone around...
Of course, credit systems can be made much harder to cheat by the proper use of technology. Until recently, the primary technology was writing -- your signature on a check or IOU establishing your agreement to transfer credit, or government printing to give a piece of paper a value backed by the government. The McGuffin would nearly obsolete that system, since by the time matching up serial numbers showed that money or a signed check had been duplicated, it might be impossible to uncover the original cheat. But with databases, the internet, and secure encryption, a lot of sales are already being charged to credit cards with no paper used. Electronic money per se hasn't taken off merely because the need isn't yet pressing enough to force people to abandon a 5,000 year old system while it still works.