Slashdot Mirror
Attempts To Stop Music Sharing Pointless?
job0 writes "An interesting paper (Word document) has been submitted by some Microsoft employees (although they are careful to state that that the views are theirs and not necessarily Microsoft's) to the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management stating that attempts by the record industry to stop music copying will fail simply because a) the growth and availability of affordable broadband and cheap data storage devices and b )ability of users to circumvent any DRM measures means that the number of people willing to swap is growing and will soon outstrip attempts to shut them down. The paper goes to suggest that the record industry should concentrate their efforts on trying music cheaper and easier to get hold off. I wonder if Hilary and friends have had a read. The BBC is also carrying the story." (OpenOffice has no problem with the paper, btw.)
It's very easy to understand why digital restriction mechanisms are absolutely incapable of "working" as their creators intended. I'm sure plenty of people will post on this below and it's already been discussed thoroughly on slashdot. What we really need to worry about is:
*What's going to happen when accessing content as we always have been able to becomes (to a greater extent than it is now) a criminal act?
*What's going to happen when people place their trust (and vital information) in a system that is fundamentally flawed?
The MPAA recently filed a comment on the danish implementation of the European Copyright Directive. The directive demands that "circumvention of effective technological measures" be made illegal in a way similar to the US DMCA The interesting part says:
the legal protection in Section 75c should not be interpreted to the effect that a technological measure must be unhackable. All technological measures can be hacked. It is for this reason that the WIPO Copyright Treaties and the Copyright Directive have introduced legal protection for such measures. (Emphasis mine)
The comment was submitted, because MPAA fears that only truly "effective" technological measures would be legally protected.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
> The Net community has traditionally managed to
> crack and hack anything that requires paying for
Despite which, companies like Corbis and Getty Images do make money selling photographs on the web. But they usually don't go after folk who use their copyrighted JPEGs/PNGs as wallpaper.
I think the key here is: do you see your customers as thieves (which is essentially what the RIAA does), or do you see them as reasonable human beings?
Talk about left hand not talking to the right hand. (yes, I saw the disclaimer about views not being their own etc). If MS has employees, employees that are obviously involved in digital rights management and secure document/media distribution (an assumption based on the topic of the paper), then why the hell has MS spent all this time and money on pushing ideas like Palladium, and secure music within WMP?
:)
I mean, these guys put forward a logical and convincing argument - and yet still the behemoth churns out anti-consumer crap like "limited copying" in WMP and "trusted computing" with Palladium. What's the goddamm point?
I'm not a big MS fan, but seriously, I think it's time for a generational change at the top. Ballmer & Gates are still thinking in late 80's and early 90's terms for so much of MS's strategic decisions... they're gonna go the way of IBM.
Actually, maybe they should leave management as it is...
-- james
*What's going to happen when people place their trust (and vital information) in a system that is fundamentally flawed?
They go out and buy a copy of Windows.
Seriously, it's all in the marketting. Had the RIAA gotten on board with legislation when Napster had first opened its doors we'd be seeing a much lower level of filesharing since John and Jane Sharer think it's a bad thing or hard to do. Now that the non-technically inclined masses are informed and technology is easy enough to use file sharing is becoming as commonplace as VCRs and Tape recorders.
Luckily pushing bad laws takes time AND money. If it were only the latter we'd all be in trouble.
--- Need web hosting?
Look at it from your clients point of view: if you think you are entitled to get something for your $10000, why can't we make sure we are getting something worth it, before we pay $10 for your CD?
You know, by sending a $1 or $5 bill to the artist you are supporting them a hell of a lot more than their label probably is. I know a lot of bands that would much rather have their music be available and have fans simply send them $5 if they like it or whatever than get their 67 cents per CD sold in retail stores.
Maybe it's hokie or whatever, but I bet when an artist gets a hand addressed letter with a crisp $5 bill in it, they remember why they started making music in the first place.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
That's a good point and it's the subject of Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's Dilemma". He presents several examples, from earth excavating machines to retail stores, showing how well-managed large corporations are unable to shift their business model until it's too late.
In Christensen's jargon, downloading music is a "disruptive technology" which will lead to a whole new market, dominated by new companies. The current media giants will disappear, just like the vacuum-tube manufacturers never made it in the chip business.
I think they should fired the heads of the RIAA for such poor tactics, I mean come on.
First off, these constant lawsuits and actions made the RIAA one of the most despised and hated organizations among music lovers. And as they keep on doing it, it only provides more press for kazaa (like they did napster), gnutella, etc. making it grow faster. These P2P organizations *depend* on users, the more users the more quanity and variety files shared, the more it thrives.
That simple, in end effect, their constant berating of it made more and more people check it out, who wouldn't have otherwise, and legitimized it as an alternative to going to the local music store.
Second, these DRM on CDs is plain stupid. I bought 5 cds this year, and returned 4 of them, since they wouldn't play on my computer, (threatened fraud since it doesn't play on a cd player like it's supposed to.)
RIAA, do the math. It takes 1 person to hack and post that cd onto kazaa, and wallah, it's out there, spreading like a virus.
While droves of normal users end up returning your cds or not buying any more since they don't play. Hell, who knows, it might even drive them to P2P since they can't get the freaking things to work like they should.
Face it, RIAA, P2P is here to stay, adapt to it, or die. That simple, and legislation won't kill it off now.
Some suggestions to keep sales up, if you please:
For 15-20+ a pop, music companies should be regular packing some extra goodies with the cds regularly, hell make some knicknack crap in china for 10cent a pop, people love that shit. Or include 50% coupons off that artists next gig, whatever? It's not that hard. Or include a multimedia DVD with studio footage and all that, that shit is too much for 95% us to download right now.
Any thing that is cheaper than what your doing now, with your hundreds of lawyers flooding the courts, because even if it's shut down here in the US of A it'll happen in all the other countries.
What percentage of popular music will be pirated when obtaining it is as simple as clicking "download" on an mp3 warehouse with easy access to *what* you want *when* you want it, and paying $.25?
Although the RIAA loves to squawk about the artists losing money due to file-swapping, the fact is that the artists get nearly nothing in the present system, and the corporations keep almost all of the moolah. This despite the fact that they contribute literally none of the value that consumers pay for when they buy music. You can't just replace Alicia Keys with Madonna; but it is completely irrelevant whether a CD is published by Warner, Universal or my cousin Vinnie.
They've been able to do this because they have had control over three elements of the music business:
Now, technology has loosened their grip on all three of these areas, especially the last. Neither the corporations nor anyone else can control how music is distributed any more -- it is, or could be, entirely in the hands of consumers. And distribution networks have a "word-of-mouth" effect on spreading knowledge about new music, so that corporate marketing is a little bit less important. And although they still run the studios, and probably always will, manufacturing CDs is almost obsolete now. All you need is a file; the costs of replication are nil, and consumers can do it all themselves.
I believe that most consumers would be willing to go along with schemes by which they pay for copied music, as long as the music costs significantly less than it does now (say, $1 for a CD), and if most of it goes to the artist (say 90%). The record companies will get much, much less than they do now, because we hardly need them any more. Of course, they do some work that is necessary and should be compensated, but it will end up being much closer to their true economic worth -- and that means a very small fraction of their current income.
But before that happens, they are going to bite and scratch and scream, and it's going to be ugly. They have a multibillion-dollar cash cow, and they will do everything in their power to save it.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Well, many people are saying that the music industry willl survive if they started aoffering cheap downloads of songs. Well, both EMI and Universal are working in this direction. Infact Universal has already made about 43000 songs availaible for download, and they cost 99 cents per song.
These songs are in wma and liguid audio formats so that they can build DRM protection into it.
But the big question is do we want songs with DRM? If yes, why do we want them so? So that we can redistribute them? Would it be fair to redistribute songs which we downloaded for 99 cents to millions of people using Kazaa? Why are songs any different from licensed software?
What exactly is the ideal solution that we are looking for?
What's under yellowstone?
The premise that something will work simply because huge wads of cash have been poured into it is not valid. There are many examples of products or services that people put serious money into goods or services that flopped because people still did not buy it, no matter how much advertising was done that stated you're a dork unless you have this cool thing. Anyone care to buy an Edsel? How about a Betamax? Or maybe you'd like a Sega Dreamcast?
Yes, when you state that there are gullible people in the marketplace, you are correct. But I am slowly seeing the DRM battles become more and more public. It is moving out the geek-only arena and into the public eye. Or in other words: when Granma finds she can't play her new CD on her PC while she's IM'ing her needlepoint club, that's when you start to hear about it.
Also consider the fact that technology is advancing too quickly for these companies to keep up. And before you say it, you cannot use as an argument that these companies control the technology, because history has shown time and time again that all you need is two or three geeks and a garage and you can start a new technology business to compete with the existing companies.
The only real danger is here is not from the businessed but from governments. We have to watch that governments do not try to legislate DRM. Fortunately, several of the more heinous attempts to do this have failed, but too many smaller ones have succeeded for comfort.
Karma: Frotzed (mostly due to the Frobozz Magic Karma Company)
Man, those big companies need nothing like DRM to stop p2p networks. They just need their boxes in the network sharing corrupted copies of their copyrighted content. Considering most of the new p2p sharing applications make use of advanced protocols that let you copy files from several people at the same time they would just need a few boxes sharing content on high-speed connections and voila'... you're making it hard to get the right thing. And this is DRM free.
;-P
Remember, the weak point of p2p networks is that not everyone wishes to share... so they would only need to make sure that what they want to share (the corrupted file) is ALWAYS available for a big number of connections. Hell someone could even start a company to offer this service to media giants for a small ammount of money, and I bet the bastard would become rich in a matter of weeks.
Heh, I better go copyright this idea before it's too late.
Decameron
diegoT
Currently Exchange points carry up to 80% peer2peer traffic. The more bandwidth ISPs provide the more the fileshares use. In the long term this will lead to ISPs block or shape filesharing. Its time for protocols which have a great scope on locality of traffic otherwise the p2p users won't participate in the bandwidth boost and your DRM is a financial aspect of your ISP.
lolo
Few of those countries, oddly, are in the EU
Actually, none of those countries are in the EU.
Some of them are in Europe. Those that are, are in Eastern Europe.
They might be in the EU one day, but for the time being, they are rather the main source of piracy in Europe. Many warez sites are hosted there, and illegal "physical" copies are also mostly originated there. It seems, that this treaty is rather a sign of goodwill of the respective governments to do something about it.
I wouldn't be surprised, if those countries were pushed to sign, by being hinted they would have problems ever getting close to be in the EU if they didn't sign.
It's also conspicious that all of those countries that have signed (except for the US) are rather poor, yet western oriented. The citizens of those countries would be better off, if they could copy freely, because they probably can't afford to buy the originals. Hence, all of those countries might have been pushed to sign in order to maintain some sort of political or financial help.
I can't say that it helped much though from my experience. Also, most of the stuff I download, i mean: would download if I wasn't terribly law-abiding comes from within the EU, like Sweden where they seem to have rather liberal laws, and they are rather well off, so the US government wasn't able to pursue it's globalized war against terroristic piracy there.
..and frankly I hope they never will
the most sexp i get is my paren-mode.
Gary Franczyk wrote:
:b
> I'm sure most persons here know that there is a
> large cost involved in the promotion and discovery
> of talent.
Sure, the dumb way the evil sharks do it has a large cost. High paid exec goes through large numbers of hopefuls (takes a while and he is high paid) to find someone *he* likes. The promotion that follows is mostly trying to brainwash the world into thinking this performer has any talent. Many hours of high paid exec's time plus much slick advertising equals large cost and a lot of non-talented "pop stars".
On the other hand, a college student/musician has a professional recording studio (a Mac, some hardware and software, some microphones, cheap soundproofing from the hardware store he put up himself, etc.) in his basement. He records some mp3s and puts them on the P2P networks. Some people sample them, and tell all their friends (off and online) that this guy is awesome. Word spreads, and this guy has a market for his CDs that he sells online. The equipment pays for itself, because of his CD sales, and the recording and web site design he does for his fellow student/musicians.
Lower cost (free after the equipment and web hosting costs) promotion, no discovery costs, the artist gets to keep his copyrights and gets the lion's share of the money. Multiply him by hundreds and you have a new, better, music industry growing in the shadow of the old. Plus the guy has a choice of careers and real experience to put on his resume.
Sorry, all you Mr. and Ms. High-Paid Music Execs out there. We don't need you. We would have better music without you.
"They bind our hearts: 'Let's sell them again and again!'
Our plan understands the sea; we can wait for her coming."
From the song "Infanto no Musume" in the Japanese version of Mothra (1961).
buy songs individually and for less than $1.00 each
... well, haven't we all used a jukebox now and then? How much is it worth to us merely to hear a song with crummy fidelity JUST ONCE? There are other differences, but I'm suggesting a price scale. Parenthetically, that $1 price won't work with current payment schemes because a third would be eaten up just processing the payment. (That's a whole 'nother problem...)
I curious about the incredibly low price (IMHO) many expect for individual songs. I suggest the price for individual songs should be relatively high -- like singles at the record store -- and entire albums sold as a package discount. The singles price accounts for overhead and transaction costs, as well as the songs that didn't do so well but still cost money to produce.
If $1 is the most you think fair for that great song
Anyway, it is not ethical to try to extort better prices from the industry by telling them I'm going to go on breaking the law until you do what I say. It's not like they are putting an extortionate price on your daily bread. If you don't like the prices, give up the product. If it weren't for fricking piracy (and you need no quotes around "illegally"), which no I don't do, the industry wouldn't even bother with DRM; after all it costs money and good will.
True, as a marketing strategy, lowering prices will decrease piracy. But you can't spin that around to say that piracy is a vlid strategy for reducing prices. That's just rationalization for what you want to do anyway.
$15? What part of the country do you live in? I went to go buy a CD (my first in years, and not because of MP3s, but because I don't like music that much). Almost all the cd's I saw were $20.
You know, I worked in a record store during the intruduction of CDs. At the time they priced cd's roughly double the cost of records and tapes, to supposedly cover the lack in supply and demand. The promise was that as CDs replaced tapes and records, the price would be adjusted. Well, here we are, and not only has the price not gone down, it's increased beyond financial environmental factors (inflation, consumer price index, etc).
_______
2B1ASK1
> The people who pirate something would have rarely bought it to begin with.
?? no way. the people who are pirating desperately desire the stuff they're copying. Have you ever heard the pleas in a warez chat room? People pirate this stuff because they can't afford it . I can get 12 hit songs overnight, sure I'd love the higher quality CD originals with cover-art and all those extra tracks, but I could not afford to buy 12 CDs in one weekend.
Mangu is right. There is no reason for us to sympathize with artists or the riaa. we have glorified these people with fame and money for too long while real heros like medical researchers continue to work without recognition for peanuts. I hope this is the end of an era. If individuals are gifted and truley love the arts they will continue to create great work, but now let the limelight shine elsewhere. Isn't the world tired of hearing on primetime news about extravegant details of some barbie-doll singer with an oversized pocketbook and no real creative spirit to boot? I for one wouldn't miss such spectacles a bit.
true music lover
ôó
Most "pirated" copies do not represent lost sales for the content owner. Individuals with large libraries of MP3s (for example) would not have purchased the CDs for all of that content if the MP3s had not been available. Content owner revenues are maximized by setting the prices appropriately. The best price is not necessarily the one that maximizes the number of disks sold. Major-league baseball teams, as an example, generally find that revenue is maximized with ticket prices that leave 10-20% of their seats unsold.
Quality should also be reflected in the price. If the choice is between a 64kbps MP3 and nothing, then the MP3 might be a good deal. Different people will make different choices between the MP3 and a lossless original based on the price. Even in the darknet world, these things have different "prices" in terms of storage space, download bandwidth, and availability.
You're making two fundamental mistakes - you assume that the only way to make money from music/film is exclusive control of distribution channels, and also, that people will only produce content for money.
1) The Free Software industry (free as in speech, though often as in free beer as well) has demonstrated it's quite possible to make money even when your basic product is given away. People will pay for things other than basic content. Convenience, time saving, value added services. If, for example, a service was setup by the big 5 music companies, providing access to their entire back catalogue, so you could download any mix of tracks, unrestricted by DRM, for a reasonable per track fee (no shipping costs, or physical media, and probably lower quality than the CD track), many would signup in a heartbeat. The shear convenience would be worth it, and the ability to find stuff easily of good quality, especially of older or rarer material would be gold. Toss in good quality recordings of live concerts, and you've got a licence to print money. Make the service fast, comprehensive, easy to use, and people will come to you instead of your competitors.
The same principle applies to movies, once bandwidth becomes cheaper. And I don't care how many bad quality rips of films turn up, they don't beat going to see a good film with a bunch of friends in a good quality cinema. Nor do cam rips sell less fluffy toys, McPlastic affiliated meals, or TV broadcast sales.
Equally, unsigned artists can compete on the same terms as the signed artists. They can give their stuff away on the public networks, and either sell value added services (fast, direct, cheap access to their work, new tracks first etc) accept donations, or live off the concert revenues. I know some unsigned artists that GIVE their CD's away, to build up exposure.
OK, crap films and plastic, by the numbers artists artificially hyped might make less money, once good quality competition is allowed into the market.
"Where would we be without Britney/Madonna/MichaelJackson/ElvisPresley?"
With the exception of Elvis, better off. I'd rather have a 100 artists making a good living than 1 artist making a mega living and 99 being stiffed by the record industry because of their monpoly on distribution.
And that brings me onto
2) Lets assume no-one is willing to ever pay for music, never goes to concerts, never listens to the radio (who pay broadcast licence fees). Pretty unlikely, but we'll go with it. What about the hordes of people doing it for nothing? For the love of it?
The Free Software movement has shown that people don't only work for money, quite often they only do it because they want to, and any money they make is incidental.
How many people do you know jamming with their band in their mum's basement, or in their local pub? Some of those do it because they like to play, yes? As an musician myself who used to play simply for the thrill of entertaining an audience, I can promise I'm not the only one.
Personally, I'd quite like to see music move back towards entertaining people, and being something done for the love of it, rather than a life of virtual indentured slavery in the hopes of one day making it big, while company execs make millions in stock options.
Once the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, it's hard to put it back. The government (and the RIAA and the MPAA, who have strong governmental forces behind them) can certainly slow technological adoption, especially when the money flow to the rich and powerful is threatened. But the "natural order" of technology will prevent it from being squelched for long. For example, P2P networking - the heart of any truly free communication process whether electronic or interpersonal - has been temporarily squelched with the recent demise of Napster. But while P2P still thrives in the underground, quietly P2P is finding its way into the mainstream, for example IBM's YouServ.
The RIAA (to pick a target) built their business model on scarcity - creating first vinyl, then CDs, was something the public couldn't do, and they provided a service. They developed that service into an empire, and now they are using lawyers and laws to enforce an artificial scarcity to protect that empire.
What the folk at the RIAA have failed to grasp is that the world is changing. Though they will no longer be able to gouge the artists, they are in a unique position to drive the future distributed music business model. One possibility is for the RIAA to take the pulse from the 'Net and promote the acts that people want to see, rather that pushing the acts that they have signed to a market segment. The power shifts from corporate to public, but there is still room for corporations to make a lot of money - if they act in the public's best interest.
So given that the RIAA is not leading the way into the brave new world, we can expect to experience a period of instability during which many new technologies and business models will be created along with as many, if not more, laws attempting to preserve the aging status quo. Bottom line, I believe that there will be a music business in the future. But as it will be distributed and likely open, more people will make more money, and a few will make much less.
Finally, I'll bring up the Grateful Dead. They were the top grossing band of their time, and they made it off of performances, not album sales. In fact, they are famous for encouraging people to tape and trade their live concerts. They made money and their promoters made money. Ultimately, for any "software" (defined as anything that can be reduced to bits) the money is in the timely creation (performance), backup, search and retrieval (libraries, Google), authentication ('is that really an authentic <fill_in_the_blank>?') and support. Classic distribution channels are dead.
Similarly, government efforts to curtail technological advances such as encryption and (Internet) free speech have lost. Such efforts will be again doomed (ultimately - though perhaps not without great struggle) when they return (in all probability) as part of Homeland Security.
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins