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Kazaa, Verizon Propose Compulsory Music Licensing
akb writes "USA Today is reporting on an interesting new alliance between Kazaa, the dominant file sharing network, and Verizon, a company with revenues of $67 billion. The two companies are floating a proposal to ISPs and the computer and manufacturing industries to lobby to force the music industry to license their music. Royalties would be payed to artists directly, thus circumventing the stranglehold the RIAA has on the music industry."
Sounds like a great idea, and it'd most likely result in Verizon and Kazaa being the sole distributor of said licensed music, making them lots of $.
As long as the RIAA doesn't get to do the fucked up stuff it does now, I'm all for it. As long as it's an open market, so we're not just stuck with one distributor.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
About time someone started sending the money to the people who slave away to make the art.
i've been asking myself this question over and over:
Who does the RIAA benefit? themselves?
oh, when the RIAA was first enacted, it's purpose was to protect intellectual property rights worldwide and the First Amendment rights of artists.
however, now it seems that the RIAA doesn't even acknowledge the artists anymore.
it's time for RIAA reform, or do away with them completely.
Verizon's plans are a step in the right direction...to help artists make money making music. isn't that what it should all be about?
The business plan amounts to $2B in revenue:
Recording Industry Association of America president Hilary Rosen calls the proposal "the most disingenuous thing I've ever heard. It's ridiculous."
The logical statement:
"It would be like me opening a video store, charging 10 times what others were charging and only offering videos in the Beta format," Guerinot says. "In any business, when you have billions of downloads occurring, you don't say we're going to ignore that market and try to create something else. You serve your customers."
Why the hell is Hillary Rosen in charge anyway? Attempting to change an industry that already exists and is going strong into what you want it to be is stupid. This is a great turnabout though, I'm glad to see some heavy hitters start going against the RIAA. I'd gladly pay $1/mo to download music legit. Assuming the majority of that $1 went to the musicians. I'm paying for the network from my own bandwidth and hard drive space, and I'm glad that Guerinot seems to understand that.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Of course the cost will be passed along to subscribers. How can that not be clear? Only a moron would willing give up $1/user/month and get nothing out of it. The ISPs don't gain anything from this venture. If anything, they lose because it will encourage more Internet activity and increase the bandwith costs. So if anything, the subscribers will pay more than $1/month.
Frankly, I don't understand why I can't just buy the music directly from the artists, at $1/song.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
My first thought: this is far to sane to actually take place. Then I read:
Sooo, let me get this straight: it is riciculous to directly pay the artist who produce the music.
Well, this is very telling. I sincerly hope compulsory license comes to be... it seems about the only way to tame the RIAA beast. Maybe it will even save internet radio.
"Kazaa, Verizon Propose Compulsory Music Listening"
I got an image of being *forced* to listen to whatever music I download...
Statements like
Who does the RIAA benefit? themselves?
-and-
however, now it seems that the RIAA doesn't even acknowledge the artists anymore.
only go to show what you don't really know:
That is that the RIAA is a secret Iraqui agency working for Saddam Hussein. What seems to be the RIAA's plan to take over the world is really Saddam trying to take over the world. All that money that supposedly goes to the "artists" is really funneled into an Iraqui weapons program. I mean, what really happens to the artists anyway? Just look at people like Vanilla Ice, Weird Al Yankovic and Marky Mark from Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. THEY were really killed to hide the truth after their money was secretly sent to Saddam. The next thing you know, he'll be commanding all the world's computers using something called "Brilliant Digital Projector..."
Or, it could just be a scheme run by The Brain from Pinky and the Brain.
The "Music Industry" is unlikely grant licences which efectively cuts the royalty payment to themselves.
All eveidence is to the contrary - start back in 1985 or whenever it was that CDs started replacing wax - the wax was more expensive to produce yet CDs cost more that the equivalent 12" LPs. I never heard about artistes getting paid more then.
I also remember the promise of DAT - was supposed to replace casettes . That didn't happen because the "Music Industry" was paranoid about people being able to make perfect copies of LPs.
Then there are all the artistes that get dropped like a bad habit when their records don't sell in sufficient volume to suit the record company ("Music Industry"). Of course, when the artiste wants to break the same contract, they find they can't.
For "Music Industry" read "RIAA" in this instance.
yes I'm rambling - it's 12:20AM and I should be asleep. Bottom line is I can't see this one suceeding unfourtanately.
seriously, why must this always be handled via legislation? We live in a free market society right, if there is a viable business model here it will be found and worked out. It should be obvious to everyone that this genie is out of the bottle.
all this "solution" would do would be to result in a tax on internet use applied to everyone "who benefit(s) from the availability of this content." Essentially this is the same thing as putting a surcharge on blank CDs. Also since it's legislated it would be difficult to change when we discover the bugs.
thus circumventing the stranglehold the RIAA has on the music industry
No! I can not say anything nice about Verizon! I'll seize to be! Curses.. foiled.. gahh.... getting dark...
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
Kazaa lobbyist Phil Corwin says a $1-a-month fee per user on Internet providers alone (it's unclear whether costs would be passed along to subscribers) would generate $2 billion yearly: "We're talking about a modest fee on all the parties who benefit from the availability of this content."
I don't like this idea one bit. It's the same principle that would end up letting a whole host of "fees" into the bill that we get from our ISPs at the end of the month.
It also reminds me of the college tuition bill. The tuition, and then the tens of fees tacked onto the bill, that end up summing at nearly $1000.
Don't let people nickel and dime us to death.
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.
Recording Industry Association of America president Hilary Rosen calls the proposal "the most disingenuous thing I've ever heard. It's ridiculous." Oh theres a shocker... someone comes up with a decent idea that doesn't involve the RIAA making more money and Rosen calls them disingenuous. Ha, what the hell is the RIAA then? Like they really serve a point by paying the artist pretty much nothing and profiting on other people's work. Yeah whos the insincere bastard here. Ironically this idea, no matter how crazy it is... might just work. I'd be willing to give an extra dollar a month for internet if it meant i could download music without worrying about the RIAA or kazaa using spyware (which I'd hope would dissapear if they actually had real money exchanging hands, that and i'm sure Verizon can spare some change).
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
- the label does promotion for the artist
- the label records the songs
While the labels are almost certainly ripping off the artists, they are doing something, and can't be excluded so easily, I mean no matter what the studio tech has to eat. Of course, all new contracts will simply agree to the label being a "marketing corporation" and getting x% of any revenue generated by the artist anyways.I'd do something interesting, but my server can't handle a slashdotting.
What about all the people that arn't technically minded and don't want to download music? I don't see this working at all, because lets face it, the majority of people want to buy their music in a physical form of a CD with the nice packaging etc, rather than fiddle around on their computer.
If a lot of recording artists put their support behind this proposal, the RIAA might be just a memory in a few years. I like it. Of course the devil is in the details - how to track usage while respecting privacy, how to pay artists...
but it might work...
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
This still presupposes that the consumers of the above items are going to engage in 'illegal' copying.
I think we should adamantly refuse to support any proposal which presupposes guilt - I think it's a dangerous precedent.
MjM
<%=$SomethingHomerSimpsonSaid%>
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Strange, I thought that the proposal was one of the most rational proposals I have heard yet.
Speaks volumes about character of Hilary Rosen.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
While I find the RIAA practices despicable to say the least, I can't exactly bring myself to trust Verizon or Kazaa, especially the latter.
Im not sure of whether a case of the lesser evil is really going to change things in the music industry.
The RIAA doesn't want the music control being handled by someone else, for obvious reasons. At the same time, they afraid to go into the online market properly for the fear of competition, thus they think that by suing the living crap out of anything online, it will eventually go away.
But trusting Kazaa to provide a music service? The same guys that have done a deal with brilliant digital entertainment?
Why can't a group of artists, group together, make their own online service, and provide it a lower cost than the RIAA? By being legal, this will literally force the RIAA to react with an online service thats cheaper, and thats good for consumers.
But until the RIAA have competition from the artist's themselves (and popular ones), they will continue to fight in the courts. The Kazaa/Verizon idea is a bad idea from the getgo.
Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door.
...especially considering they're getting essentially nothing now, any money is a major change. there was a recent article in rolling stone magazine about how the manager of some pretty big name acts (beck, no doubt, etc) had pulled his artists' songs from the RIAA-backed nonsense thing cos they weren't getting anything out of it. if this gives the artists anything resembling money, expect them to jump for it.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Kazaa lobbyist Phil Corwin says a $1-a-month fee per user on Internet providers alone (it's unclear whether costs would be passed along to subscribers) would generate $2 billion yearly: "We're talking about a modest fee on all the parties who benefit from the availability of this content."
Uh, NO, you charge the people who are using the service. Why the hell should my grandmother, who has no idea what an MP3 is, pay this fee? Make it $1 per month per file-sharing user. Hell, you could set it up like adult-check, where every P2P app queries the same database before allowing you to login. You pay a buck a month to the database administrators and they distribute the funds where appropriate.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
What the article doesn't expand on is what computer manufacturers and blank CD makers will contribute. Define computer manufacturers first (Gateway, HP, Dell, et al or does that include the guy slapping clones together in his garage?).
And I'm 100% against taxing blank data CDs to pay artists. We distribute our own software on CD-Rs; why should we have to pay artists for distributing our own software? Or why should someone burning Linux distributions have to pay up too? What about the other myriad non-music CD-R uses?
Um. Let's just remember who we're talking about here...Verizon isn't any better than the RIAA when it comes to corporate citizenship...I vaguely recall them suing 2600 for registering verizonsucks.com, and they refused to install DSL in my apartment when they found out one of my computers was running Linux.
We have this already. It's called "the RIAA".
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
What we have now: "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
Compulsory licensing is a great idea. We have that now with radio play and with some kinds of patents. We would apply directly to the artist, or to the artist's designated representative, for a license. Instead of a band making 2 cents an album, it would get all the money.
Give in? No, they're going to put enough companies at odds with their position that they'll be legislated into licensing the music.
The RIAA is somewhat powerful, politically and financially - but going up against the computer (hardware and software) industry, ISPs, the artists themselves and basically everyone who listens to music is a losing battle. They're making a lot of enemies and no allies - politicians are getting heat for siding with the RIAA. The RIAA is completely unnecessary - and by making so much noise, they're causing a lot of people to ask why they exist and why so much money should be being diverted to the RIAA's coffers. It's my prediction that Hilary Rosen is going to be looking for a new job in a few years, because the RIAA is going to go the way of Enron and Andersen. This particular idea may or may not work out, but they're making it clear to everyone that the continued existence of the RIAA is not in the best interest of the artists, the customers or other companies that deal with music in some way.
You should not have to pay $1 WHETHER OR NOT you have any interest in downloading music. Likewise, people buy CDs for many things other than burning music. How about you pay artists directly for downloading their music. They give you high quality sound files. You give them cash. No record companies need apply.
If somehow we're going to tax the Net and distribute it to musicians (by what formula?), how about another tax to be distributed to writers? And what about visual artists? How about erotic visual artists?
/.'s writers invest in the insightful (hint) public service of posts just like this one!
Let's be honest about it: music is just a branch of the sex industry. (Okay, we still have military music too, but you're downloading that, right?) So if we don't want a tax supporting the sex industry, we should probably disallow erotic artists, whether visual or aural. Still, shouldn't Net users everywhere pay a tax to subsidize the valuable time
___
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Ok, I've read the comments in the thread over, and I've read the article twice... what am I missing?
how will they decide who gets the money?
What did I miss?
...that my ISP will now be on board with tracking what I download and charging me for it? The story sounds a little vague on the details, but an alliance between software, hardware, and bandwidth providers only points to one thing: control of what end users do online.
Encryption to the rescue (I hope)!
Yeah, this is exactly what the industry needs: price controls and mandatory redistribution of wealth according to government policy. That has just worked so very well in the past.
Anything is better than a this proposed tax and commercial welfare system. Well, except perhaps outlawing general purpose computers and network equipment (such as by mandating universal DRM).
This is not about the RIAA.
This is not about the RIAA.
Repeat, ad nauseuem.
The only people I wish to benefit from listening to (say) Radiohead are... Radiohead.
Sure, they will have financial backers. But the the 'closed shop' where the RIAA acts as toll-keeper on music is repellent.
Please, please, please can the RIAA put its head back in the sand and shut up.
--- My dad's political betting
So you assume she knew what she was saying?
Since kazaa probably has the means to monitor which songs get shared how often, they "could" pay the artists according to sharing popularity. Remains to be seen if they would though.
I don't know about you, but I for one, could do without most of the promotion the labels put out. All the promotion I need is the music not being crap.
Don't say I would never be exposed to any new music either, since I discover most music I like myself, in ways that cost record labels little to nothing. I think artists would be able to pay for recording if they were getting a fair amount of compensation for their work.
In short, greedy labels do nothing nothing for me. Out with them.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
I don't think the music industry could be described as "free market". The scarcity of its product is artificial, determined by copyright law which is the result of a bargain struck by the stakeholders. The major labels have manipulated the current bargain to gain a strangelhold on the industry.
Now that we have new technology that will change the way the bargain works the major labels are looking to tighten their grip and kill off the potential of new competition. Read some Larry Lessig, he refers to them as the dinosaurs looking to kill off the mammals.
The important thing to remember is that this is a bargain between all members of society. Don't believe free market drivel that tells you that you aren't a stakeholder.
KaZaA is proposing one dollar per user as a fee, which is very reasonable, and will apparently generate 2 billion annually -- but where is KaZaA getting that kind of money? Advertising revenues? Don't make me laugh.
This may be a great idea, but there are definite consequences.
The proposal is similar to what's being done with the blank audio cassette levy in the US (see Title 17, section 1004) and the Canadian CD-R Levy (see this random link I found on Google).
But the question is: how does the collected money get back to the artists? There are two ways:
1. Use the BMI or ASCAP system that already exists to pay artists for music rebroadcast.
Of course, this has problems of its own (see ASCAP & BMI -- Protectors of Artists or Shadowy Thieves?). This is unlikely, because the sampling method used to dole out royalties is even less valid for the Internet than it is for rebroadcast and live performances. Additionally, it's unnecessary because they could just...
2. Track actual downloads from the Internet.
Think about it -- to accurately divide a >$2B pie will take a very thorough analysis to get all parties comfortable. It's easy to legislate: either all download sites or sharing systems aggregate their download data in a central database or they will be considered illegally supporting piracy. IMHO this will very shortly be a part of the proposal.
Note that this could use unique IDs, assuring that your actual music listening habits won't be tracked, etc. But do you really believe this will happen, when there's yet another advertising vector to exploit? Think about the metadata that could be gained from this data...the licensing opportunities...the marketing...the potential for privacy intrusion....
Who would control this big usage database in the sky? Who would you trust?
According to Chip.de Sonys copy protection technology could be bypassed altogether by just a Permanant Marker. Apparently the bad data that copy rights the CD is on the outer edge of the CD and blacking the final track appears to completely remove the restriction.
Rapid Nirvana
Once again, we find ourselves faced with a large company with far too much power for it's own good (AOL-Time Warner, anyone?), since it seems ovbious that the RIAA will fight this. Yet, this time we're not faced with the Big Bad Wolf. As said by perdida, they're not completely bad. They help artists keep a good hold on what's theirs (though in some cases, this is questionable *cough* LimpBizkit *cough, hack, gag*) and they're paid for their work. However, it isn't right for them to keep a hold on the music industry the way they have been. They keep their hands around money that should go to the artists we care about, money that could be used for new equipment or just building a third pool (depending on your imcome ^_-). Yes, the RIAA deserves this. But, something should be done to make sure they're not left completely out of the circle as well. So, what then? Do we continue allowing them to keep too much power? Or, potentially lose their services?
"Those who fear the darkness have never seen what the light can do."
I'd go for that.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
of how much of the "work" is really yours. If your music could not sell a single copy, but for some reson somone is able to add something to it that now is worth millions, then you still have your original work, it just happens to be worthless.
Imagine a different scenario. Let's say some brilliant mixing artists takes a recording of a busy intersection and somehow turns be honks, beeps and shouted curses and turns it into a hit song, is there really anything owed to the original people honking and cursing?
Admitedly, your goat analogy is a little off the wall, but if somone can make a million from selling goat bleets over your music, it stands to reason he could have made just as much selling goat bleets over ANYONE'S music, so the fact that he happened to chose your is moot. If anything, he will be generating sales for your de-goated original, that you still own, that otherwise you would never have gotten.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
does nobody know what ASCAP is? This is what happens when you cut funding to music programs in public schools.
According to Courtney Love, the band/performer pays for everything to begin with. Even the payola to radio stations is probably pulled from the royalties.
- Who distributes the money?
- With a flat fee artists whose work is popular, and therefor downloaded by more people, will not be compensated any more than an artist whose music stinks.
- A tax on DC-Rs? Of all the CDs I've ever burned, only six have contained music.
- A $1.00 "tax" added to my Internet access bill. Okay. Not a bad thing. But wait! What about a $1.00 fee for writers whose books are downloaded? And a $1.00 fee for porn that is downloaded? And what about a $1.00 fee for
... Pretty soon you get a LOT of fees.
- And speaking of fees, why should I pay for services I don't use? Why should you?
I don't like it.Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I'm an ex-musician and, in case you con't guess, I HATE the parasite, dog-scum, suckin' xxAAs with a passion.
Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen can find a nice place in Hell and burn there in agony for all eternity like the creativity deprived fuck-wited Luddites they are.
God. Just thinking about 'em makes me reach for Piperazine.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Who remembers the DAT tax? Before doing digital audio on computers was made practical by mp3 and cd-r there was DAT. And the music industry clamped down hard to prevent it from becoming a consumer product. So they got a tax placed on DAT media and devices and had a chip implanted in every DAT device to prevent copying.
;)
Thought it was relevant to this, but didn't think the slashdotters would let me do a feature
Anyhoo, here's some reference links
The right way to tax dat by RMS
Phillip Greenspun comments and gave testimony before the Senate.
What happens to the money that the Library of Congress collects.
How else do you propose to "handle" this? We live in a society of laws, and legislation is how the will of the people is expressed. The laws we currently have are incompatible with music sharing; laws can be changed. You'd prefer ... what? A "market solution"? Do you actually believe that there's a "free market" that exists? It doesn't -- the market metaphor is a way to describe certain mechanisms of exchange, not predicative, provable fact -- and it's certainly got nothing at all in common with any sort of natural law, cretinous Chicago-school idealogues or no.
Just for the record, a $1/month/user surcharge is a goofy stupid idea, but at least it's an idea. Without someone holding a bigger stick than the RIAA's control of virtually all rights to the music that you want to listen too, we're stuck with their ideas.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
At first blush I would disagree; I don't see anything intrinsically wrong with a "content tax" - or ideally, a "content redistribution." Copyright IP monopoly is a violation of the free market too, but it has beneficial effects so we make that compromise. Since IP monopolies and licensing like Copyright appear to be problematic in their enforcement and perhaps ultimately pernicious for our intellectual and economic development (not to mention basically unenforceable in any way compatible with civil liberties and human rights), by all means, let's consider alternatives for creating an incentive for art.
The problem, however, is how the distribution works. The laws we already have that function this way are a perfect example. They're basically highway robbery - we allow the 5 major companies at the heart of the RIAA and MPAA to collect a tax! They're supposed to distribute the booty to the artists... want to guess how much of it any of them actually see? And do all artists get the same? Or some more than others? Who qualifies as a "content creator" and who doesn't?
It's not pretty. I like the pre-DMCA status quo better (bootleggers are prosecuted, and "recreational" duplication is de facto permitted). As distribution technology gets easier, the content industry revenues gradually attenuate. It's too bad, but I won't lose any sleep - they were ushered in on a technological accident just a few years ago, and they'll be ushered out on one. There's no god-given right to become a billionare selling music. The first technological revolution in the content industry - the phonograph, and the radio - already caused a far worse tragedy, removing the livelihood of many millions of professional musicians. Life will go on.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the net effect of all this that the middle-man is simply cut out of the transaction, and the old "semi-voluntary" model where the audience compensates the artist directly comes back once again.
We're on the road to Tycho.
Legislation is what makes Intellectual Property exist in the first place. It makes sense that changing the legislation could solve the problems with Intellectual Property law enforcement.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
You're misinformed wrt radio.
Yes, many labels opposed radio in the early days. Capitol Records, though, when they started in the early 40's, began the process of encouraging disc jockeys to play their songs on the radio. Within ten years, Capitol was the dominant label, mainly because they had built up relations with all the radio DJ's and had a much easier time geting their artists on the air, which resulted in higher sales (which they parlayed into being able to sign the bigger artists, such as Sinatra in the 50's).
You're both right. It was Bowie AND Queen collaborating. Go watch some VH1, buddy!
Error: PANTS NOT FOUND. Press <F1> to continue.
From the splitting hairs dept:
It's actually both, but the song first appeared on a Queen album. 'Greatest Hits', I believe.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Its about making fans pay for access to new music. why shouldnt a musician be able to take a box to their concert and like a vending machine people download mp3s into their portible players from these boxes.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
if not worse, and we'd just be trading one set of ignorant asslickers for another. Kazaa has shown such great business acumin with brilliant digital. I'd not trust them to steal from me let alone provide a service I would pay for even if it was decent.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
You know it's going to be Celine Dion and Charlie Pride too. Good thing I have a Mac, so that it will break when they make me listen to that junk....
Oh, its still a scam on the artist, I know that for a fact, I used to work at a few labels, but I am just trying to put it all into perspective. you slashdot folk can be really brainy and also really obtuse.
You're right. I'm not a recording artist (be thankful). However, I do have about 5 books that have been printed by big publishing houses. I can certainly say that my book contracts are nothing like music contracts. I get a fixed percentage per book - that's it. The only recoupable cost is the advance. At signing, I received a (non-recoupable) stipend for purchasing supplies, and there were a few cases where I needed some hardware and the publisher provided them free of cost. My first two books barely sold enough to cover the (small) advance I was paid. Writing Linux books in 1995 was a rather bold move.
Distribution and manufacturing? You gotta be kidding. Compare a $17 CD to a $50 book. Which do you think costs more to ship across country in quantity? Which costs more to make? My books are make in the range of 10k-20k units. Probably harder to make than just stamp a piece of metal, huh? Which costs more to sell? Hell, there's noone reading my books over the (public) airwaves. Maybe I should suggest it for my next book. Funny, I don't see deductions on my royalty statements for advertising or manufacturing or...well..*anything*. I also don't think I'll be going into bankrupcy anytime soon either.
If the labels are really doing these kinds of things, it's no wonder people hate them so much.
Now they will be made to pay for downloading music that they never download nor ever listen????
Didn't Prince have something like this worked out? He's got a online fan club where you can download music and videos. And you can buy CDs directly from him. So...
(The first of two comments.)
There's rampant piracy of software on the 'net, too. So, how about we place a modest fee on everyone's Internet service account, to license all of the software for everyone. The money raised would be distributed amongst the commercial software vendors. Then, downloading any software will be legal.
Just a guess, but the average American on the net probably downloads, buys, or upgrades maybe $10 a month worth of software. That would be a reasonable fee.
Give me a break.
This is ludicrous. This is wrong on so many levels that I fear enumerating them, since I won't even come close to a complete list!
The chief problem:
I don't use commercial software, nor do I pirate it!!! There's no way in hell I would allow myself to be subjected to such a tax!
The proposal from Kazaa and Verizon is dumb for exactly the same reasons. In analogy to the example above, I don't download illegal copies of music!
Kazaa lobbyist Phil Corwin says a $1-a-month fee per user on Internet providers alone (it's unclear whether costs would be passed along to subscribers) would generate $2 billion yearly: "We're talking about a modest fee on all the parties who benefit from the availability of this content."
:) On top of it, where are all of you /.'ers that advocate a voice with your money? Give up a dollar a month for stuff you don't even use, and how are they going to distribute it? Does Britney get a bigger share because she's a top seller? What about the little guys? Where's your voice now?
It would be passed on to the consumer, it would be inflated by the ISP's due to handling costs and the increase in bandwidth being used.
On top of it, I don't find file-sharing all that damn great of a service. If I want to hear music, I'll turn on the radio, or download some indie stuff. If I want to buy it, I'll buy it. I don't want to pay artists like Britney Spears for her bubble-gum pop, or anybody else for that matter, if I'm not going to listen to it.
"So it's only a buck?"... You can buy alot with a buck.
Geez... Why don't we all just pay a portion of our paycheck to a system where people get to stay home and not work and get paid.... oh, wait...
Snooze and you lose your sushi.
Hysterical dude. I absolutely did, too. I was thinking about music being distributed on one of Verizon's pages. I figured that they would never carry my kind of music (Alien Sex Fiend, Big Black, Wedding Present) so I left the page. Came back and I *swore* the word changed to licensing.
Thanks for speaking up! Guess I'm not entirely nuts..
Intelligent Life on Earth
What's the best way to tame the best? Revoke its corporate charter. I am certainly no proponent of a generalized corporate death penalty, but the courts should have the Supreme Courts should have the discresionary power to summarily revoke not-for-profit corporate charters based on the history of the organization. The RIAA has a history of legal terrorism against any potential threat. It wields state force as a weapon via the courts in order to maintain the status quo, a strategy irreconsilably at odds with free market capitalism.
What should terrify the RIAA is the possibility that the USSC will pull a Roe v Wade re copyright law; that suddenly out of no where it will take a fish hook to copyright law and essentially disembowl it. That is what Roe v Wade did to abortion laws. There is far more constitutional ground to oppose the DMCA than old anti-abortion laws.....
That ruling on virtual child pornography should have been a wake up call for the RIAA and MPAA because it shows that there is a hardline utilitarian streak to the current USSC. That ruling showed the public that utility matters to most of the justices, especially ones like Scalia that typically rule against big government (which is what the DMCA really is, an excuse to increase police powers).
A good legal argument to use before the USSC against the DMCA is that it violates the first amendment. The bill of rights was ratified AFTER the body of the Constitution. Therefore federal copyright law must be restricted by the first amendment since it came AFTER the clause in Article I, Section 8 establishing IP enforcement powers. Since the provision that "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech" came after said section, it naturally follows that said section cannot restrict freedom of speech.
(Now what would really be nasty is if the USSC ruled that because local governments and corporations are both chartered by state governments, the states can legally hold not for profits like the RIAA to the provisions of the bill of rights)
The song writers get paid per play by radio stations with moneys distributed by this group which is headed by elected representatives.
Musicians really could use something similar...There the ones getting walked all over by record companies.
We have a system called GEMA here in germany, basically they 'tax' blank audio-cassettes (CDs are being figured out), and the money is supposed to go to the artists. The problem is, that the GEMA is a bureaucracy, and most of the money vanishies into supporting itself, so the evident purpose of the GEMA has become, to support itself ...
One problem (and the reason why you need a bureaucracy of a kind) is: how to distribute the collected money fairly among the artists, the GEMA invests so much into solving it, that hardly any money is left to distribute, which is also a kind of solution.
Also now they got it into their head, not only to tax blank media, but also CD-Burners, Harddisks and whole PCs, and with significant taxes at that. Naturally the PC-Industry isn't happy with that, so there's some haggling going on (basically the PC Industry is putting it off as long as possible, and argues, they should use DRM-solutions).
Another thing is, that they somehow also get a cut for public concerts (don't know why, but it even applies if you hire some band to play at a family occasion if theyre registered with the GEMA, or cover any registered artist) if there is any artist registered with them (i sure know, that i will only hire local Bands if they're not registered with the GEMA, i prefer to hand them the extra money directly instead of investing it in overhead.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
The fair way would be to track what people are downloading, and dole out the money proportionally based on that
The American Society of Composers, Artists, and Publishers solved this scaling problem a long time ago. ASCAP takes a 24-hour sample of each radio station's airplay. Not all radio stations are monitored at the same time.
Kazaa and Verizon could do something similar, by setting up some high-capacity super-nodes and logging all downloads started through those super-nodes. It wouldn't catch all downloads, but it would catch a significant sample from which Kazaa could compile relevant statistics and cut checks to ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Since I already buy physical copies of my music legally (on CD), I don't see why I should be forced to pay for it again.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If I'm not into MP3s and stuff, I shouldn't have to pay it. Instead, they should offer a "tier 2" ISP service like cable does. A lot of people would be willing to pay more $5/month or more for such a service, but if I don't want it I shouldn't have to pay for it (which a lot of other people have suggested, but I didn't see anybody draw the cable analogy. Just my $0.02)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Was. Not is. The "No Electronic Theft" Act and the DMCA made copyright infringement above a small ($1,000, IIRC) threshold a criminal act in and of itself, whether or not for commercial gain. Thank your Congressman.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
So this amounts to either the ISP agrees to tax their users accross-the-board, or they add billing for users who elect to use P2P-type protocols (of course you can always tunnel over XXX etc etc).
Already here in belgium the basic cable ISP doesn't let me run a server (block incoming SYN, NAT etc). If I start having to fork out extra to 'enable' ftp, irc, ntp, ??? WTF? what if I want to play protocol-architect with friends far-afield? yikes.
Oh, here's a wild idea: make the Kazaa network fee-paying! BwahahahaHaHaHAAAAA!
I like the idea, because it works on many levels. It is probably the only way that the only way that any money would be consistently collected for artists. It will permit people to use the technology without an artificial restraint on what they can and cannot do. It is applicable to other media that can be easily traded, such as Movies, Literature, and perhaps even Videogames.
But this does have some problems. The one good thing about the capitalisim is that it is a pure meritocracy. People vote with their dollars. That is why despite the horrible things you hear about Walmart, they make money. Or why you always hear horrible things about a politician who is consistently re-elected. Under this system the problem becomes one of fairly distributing the money collected from this sort of fee.
The fairest way to distribute the funds would be to track what people are downloading and from where, and use the data collected to divide up the money. If one file accounts for 3% of all mp3 downloads, then it gets 3% of the collected funds. This sounds good on the surface, but lets see what can go wrong.
First, you are relying on the accuracy of the stats. There is no way to ensure that the stats are not artifically inflated. Second, collecting those stats would rely on a Napster like system of servers. It would be impossible to get useful information from a true peer to peer setup. Third, there are privacy issues in tracking what people are downloading. Almost I do not think that anyone cares for the idea of any company or organization being able to figure out what you are downloading and from where.
Still, once you work past those issues, the idea is still a good one.
END COMMUNICATION
Distortion, by definition being something not present in the original, is added, deliberately or otherwise. A filter only lets part of the original through, whether it's everything above sub-woofer frequencies, red and infra-red light, or fresh-brewed coffee. A distortion filter would be something that removes distortion.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
As a small ISP myself, I have two words for this idea: Like Hell!. And as someone who only rips music he owns, I have the same two words for the idea that I should pay for someone else's music.
for the music inustry to charge us for songs we didn't listen to, to give it to artists that had nothing to do with the songs we did download.
Compulsory licensing, where the copyright holder has to license on statutory terms, is reasonable. But taxing the Internet to support the music industry is not. It's important to distinguish between the two.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
But Guerinot isn't ready to dismiss it out of hand: "Any model that starts to accommodate monetizing the artists is worth looking into."
MONETIZING!?
What the hell is wrong with 'paying'? Why is it that buisiness community has to constantly make up stupid longer words to use instead of already existing ones?
It's not big, and it's not clever.
Don't say 'leverage' when you mean 'lever'.
Don't say 'burglarized' when you mean 'burgled'
Don't say 'monetized' when you mean 'paid'
Really, it's not that difficult...
I too think this idea is ridiculous. Here is why:
asuume you got the tax levied. Now how do you
distribute it to artists. You can't track usage
(otherwise you could stop current p2p flood), and
if you pretend you can then you'll be swamped with
lawsuits from artists who claim that usage of their art was undercounted.
Now then, how do we distributed the dough? Given
that the proposal is to use the legilative approach, my guess is this will result in a disaster just like NEA. You'll get boards and committees and shadowy money flow. My guess is
that in the end most artists will see as much
money as they do now.
Personally I think the solution is to prohibit
assignment of intellectual property so that only
its creators ever have any rights to their own
work. The artists aren't that different from other
IP creators such as inventors. Inventors go to
venture capitalists or angel investors, develop
a business and possibly cash in. Artists should
record their works using an equivalent venture
capitalist system, then hire marketing people and
get their works out to the public. No need for
RIAA and no need for universal taxes. Once each
artist is their own label, and there is real
competition, then prices will come down to a
point where buying a CD is cheaper than paying for
a CD-R disk and download bandwidth. At that point
p2p problem is solved.
"Direct to the artists", right. How would that work, exactly, when the vast majority of artists don't own any rights to "their" music?
And how exactly would the money be split up? Based on the tracks downloaded? No, they can't monitor that reliably (given that 90% of the music that I download is mislabelled, truncated, badly encoded or fucked up radio edits). They'll use the same model as for radio play: it'll be based on the number of albums sold, it will go via the labels, and it will be given (grudingly) only to those artists who have the financial clout to demand what they're owed.
Foreign artists will get nothing, regardless of how many US citizens download their music. Independent artists will get nothing. Artists who distribute their own music online will be in the worst position of all! I don't listen to Angry Young White Guy rawk, nor do I listen to la Spears. But any tax on my internet connection will go mostly to them, simply because a lot of teenagers do what they're told to by the marketing $$$ and purchase their albums.
And now let's talk about the free market economy. If the music industry becomes supported by a tax, then what exactly is their incentive to even pretend to give a damn about producing actual music?
The situation is bad enough as it is, what with them controlling the means of production and distribution, but they still have to persuade us to buy the stuff. And they already assert that they have a right to receive an ever increasing revenue stream (viz their hissy fits every time sales slump), and Congress and the courts seems to agree (the DMCA talks about "promoting commerce" more than "protecting rights holders", and the Elcomsoft judge agrees that it's all about the money). How much more government mandated guaranteed revenue do they need?
That's a rhetorical question, by the way. Anyone outside the industry would say "none", anyone inside it would say "we deserve to have all the money in the world, while the rest of you die cold and hungry in the gutter, wishing you were us". I guess it'll come down to which of us our elected (ha ha) representatives (ah hahaha) choose to actually represent.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Superficially, taxes are annoying simply because we have to pay them, and I have no love of paying taxes any more than I have love of paying RIAA for music.
However, a free market which is unregulated will almost by definition fail; The very reason that markets work so well, namely that they rely on selfish agents also points to their flaw (namely that they rely on selfish agents). The classic (and perhaps somewhat outdated) example of this is a lighthouse: A particular shipping firm might decide to install a lighthouse for their personal benefit; however doing so carries benefits for other shipping firms as well. You want a system which builds lighthouses whenever the total benefit to society exceeds the total cost: not that they are built when the selfish benefit exceeds the selfish cost. Legaslation is the only way to distort the market away from it's "natural" form into a more ideal market.
So, I'm all for an efficient government (which we don't have), but paranoia against legaslation is also counterproductive.
Intellectual property laws were introduced to foster creativity. If that same goals can be achieved by a more direct means (a tax on internet users), without the cost that IP brings (namely that art/knowledge is selfishly withheld even though the cost of distribution is virtually nil), then
I'm all for!
--Eamon
Just believe me, thinking involves not just believing anyone.
Some of us have been saying how for quite some time here (I won't repeat my rant, look at previous comments if curious). Suffice it to say, the problem is the bottleneck in the (antiquated, insecure, 1950s) payment system everyone assumes will be their only choice, ever.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Britney Spears gives Aural Sex!!
...Kazaa, the dominant file sharing network
except that direct Connect has over three times as much data on its decentralised network, but doesn't shove its marketing in your face to the extent that Kazaa does.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
The RIAA is not the labels.
Um. OK. But really, the RIAA IS the labels. It's a trade association whose most important members are Warner Brothers, EMI, Sony, BMG and Universal. These just happen to be the 5 biggest labels, comprising like 96% of all published music. Oh yeah, and over 800 other labels too.
So. I would propose that an association is made up of its members, wouldn't you?
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
We don't live in a free market society. We live in a heavily legislated society where the most effective way of conducting competition can be in the courtroom. We live in a society where branding and commercials and spin form the basis of our spending decisions. It is extremely hard to enter a fully consolidated market.
It's imperfect. But until the courtrooms start to reject more cases, and lawmakers start to limit the right to sue, this is what we're stuck with.
Stop the brainwash
I can just picture the RIAA rolling over and playing dead on this issue. I mean, they don't really care about money or anything. Sorry, but Verizona and Kazaa are in no position to take on the RIAA. Verizon may be big, but how much of their business are they willing to put behind this to make it fly? Whereas this IS the record companys' businesses. They're going to put everything they have against this. Sorry, I don't see Verizon willing to put up that big a fight.
People also pay for roads they never drive on, and many other public services they never use. The difference in this case is these aren't public services. They aren't necessarily available to everyone, and the money made from them isn't going into the right pockets. This is essentially a tax, but the revenue isn't going to the government, it's going to private citizens/businesses, whatever.
Although, they might handle it better than the government who just gave 10 billion to corporate farms so food prices will be lower and small farms can all go broke, wheee!
What?
>A distortion filter would be something that removes distortion.
Then what's a low-pass filter, or a high-pass filter (and please don't say the wrong definition for high-cut and low-cut because when I took EET most people called 'em low/high pass)?
Brain... exploding...
POOF!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
But wait, the RIAA is not happy with just a slightly increased revenue. They feel that if a new technology comes out and people open their wallets, the money should be poured directly into the RIAA. Which would be fine if the RIAA was doing anything for the service. If this plan works, all they have to do is license their music - no additional production costs, no need to market it, no R&D. Their cost of entering this is zero, they get a piece of the new pie, they can still munch on their traditional pie, they can still screw artists as much as they want, and their revenue is practically guaranteed to go up. Why wouldn't they accept this offer?
Because they see a bigger fish. If there was an RIAA-sanctioned digital content delivery mechanism that protected their intellectual property while moving the content to a subscription-based service, the RIAA could get a huge piece of that pie on a monthly basis. Plus, since the technology would be so limiting, they'd push customers towards buying CDs (as if we should now have to buy a CD and then rent the same content in order to space-shift it).
Greed is their big problem. If the RIAA would sit back and realize that they will make more money by just selling licenses and collecting royalties, the P2P applications would suddenly become legitimate - meaning they'd start behaving like proper applications without spyware and pop-up ads all over the place. There would be at least $2 billion floating around for the artists and the RIAA every so often. CD sales would not decline unless the RIAA made a lot of bad PR moves or much of the music they crank out really sucked (as has been the case recently). It's a win-win-win-win situation (RIAA, ISPs/P2Ps, Artists, Consumers). But the RIAA wants a "win everything"-lose-lose-"pay-per-listen" situation.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Why the hell should I pay an extra dollar a month for something I don't use?
And, for those that say "it's only a dollar"... Next year it'll be two dollars, the next year more dollars.
Unlike the "information wants to be free" crowd of wet behind the ears college idealists; I buy my music.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Not that it isn't perfectly true for the music business, if not more so. But we might as well try to get the quotes right.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Why can't we have (besides the fact that **AA's don't like it) services that offer downloads for a subscription fee, but host all the files themselves? Sure, that does mean they have more costs, and maybe their service will be more expensive. But perhaps some people would prefer that over getting some crappy rip encoded with some crappy software that dumbed down the quality a bit to tighten the file. Compulsory licensing should be just as applicable to this business model, to allow it to be a viable choice in the market and see if it will make it in the market.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Maybe it will even save internet radio.
You haven't been paying attention to the problems with internet radio, then.
It's not that the RIAA is not allowing internet radio stations to license their works, it's that the proposed royalty rates (which are due to be accepted by Congress with a week, so give your local Congresscritter's office a phone call today if you care!) are amounting to what currently pases for 5 to 10 times the actual revenue taken in by even the more popular webcasters. Compulsory licensing doesn't help you if the rates are set too high...
A quick summary, sensibly titled Give me the story in 90 seconds is available, and information on who to contact and what to tell them can also be found at SaveInternetRadio.org
Jay (=
(Who mailed his letters off last week...)
I think Kazaa is missing something here. If filesharing was to be totally legitimized by a coalition of ISPs setting aside funds like radio stations to pay artists --which seems amazingly sensible-- then it would be much more logical from the ISP's position to use NNTP for their wholesale music distribution than P2P for obvious bandwidth reasons. Rather than letting the users suck up the net bandwidth that the ISP pays for, they'd obviously want their users hooking up locally. I don't see where Kazaa would still have a roll.
From my experience, many ISPs don't offer full news services precisely because they think there are a lot of legal issues they don't want to get into with the binary groups. If an agreeable rate not unlike that paid by radio stations was reached which legitimized file sharing, then it seems obvious that NNTP to big ISP hosted RAID drives with months of retention would be the way to do the distribution rather than having users rely so heavily on P2P. A few hundred terrabytes of disk space may seem like a big costs at first, but compare the cost of distributing all that data locally rather than letting users go connect with who-knows-where in some other hemisphere. Sounds like a great scam for big ISPs really if they could pull it off. Users would still pay for their bandwidth, but they wouldn't really be using much of the ISPs actual pipe to the net.
Besides, using NNTP, you could have it relatively organized to the extent that you could have moderated groups along the lines you'd find in record stores or a library. It just sounds like Kazaa is asking for a solution so big it will make itself irrelevant which is fine with me. It still doesn't work under Wine, does it?
Thanks for the link to the correction.
More a pause for thought.
.sig. I'll amend my .sig with a couple of leading dashes on a seperate line to prevent any confusion in future.
The WTC casualties were very highly publicised and originally vastly overestimated. The Afghan casualties have hardly been mentioned at all.
By the way, the "Really, it's not that difficult" was part of my posting, not my
Darn. now I've changed it the length is too long - changing (3000-3400) to ~3200.
I agree. This is a government subsidy that comes out of the pockets of non-users. ...) but not for what is, basically,
That's fine for essential services (fire stations, schools,
production of luxury goods.
Try looking at this analogy. Imagine how you'd react if M$ started getting $1 out of your ISP
fees to compensate them for all the illegal copies of Windows out there ?
I *really* don't like the idea of having a dollar - or five - transferred from my pocket every month to pay Kazaa's bills.
What would Lemmy do?
But the proposal here was to include a payment to artists in ISP charges. Since I need an ISP, I'd then have no choice.
If it's a separate voluntary network, then I have no problems with it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10