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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.)
Users can circumvent everything... except Palladium! That's right, our patented DRM technology is the ONLY thing that our report indicates will be immune to these devilish file-sharing schemes! Sign your record label up today before your business goes to pot, and recieve a free Microsoft Toaster! (Requires MS Bread and an MS Power Converter, best served on MS Plates with MS Utensils.)
# Erik
Trying to stop any popular activity brings more problems than intended. I'll use as an example Prohibition of Alcohol in the USA. It was a big boost to Organized Crime.
Who knows what kind of problems the MPAA is making for itself by going after something that has been done since recording devices were made available to consumers.
Ursula Andress, Catherine Deneuve, and Charo, twice...
... until all means of transfering files over the internet are stopped, and that isn't going to happen. Even if the powers that be manage to lock down everything technological down with DRM, there'll still be ways of bypassing it, and it only takes a single person to figure out how to bypass it for the file to spread around like the email 'viruses' did a couple of years ago.
As I've said a number of times, the music companies know that music sharing is actually increasing sales at the *moment*, but once broad-band becomes fast & standardised, sending a whole album will become as simple as sending a 5kb file... people will think "I'll download that" rather than spending half an hour downloading a file and thinking "I'll buy the album".
I can imagine albums being released, 'music warezers' cracking the DRM within hours, and the albums spreading like wildfire across every instant messaging client in sundry.
It certainly shouldn't be considered infringement in the US either. It's a moral issue and the copyright holders pursuing this are in the wrong and should be ashamed of themselves.
It's actually a case of stating the obvious. However, things never get accepted until someone "does a study" or "submits a paper".
It's the classic water leak problem...the RIAA is trying to bail out the extra water while what they should be doing is plugging the leak - ie. take out the root cause - expensive CDs.
This doesn't mean that file sharing will stop altogether. But it DOES mean that a LOT of people out there would cough up the cash because it doesn't burn a hole in their pockets. It also means that artists would get more revenue.
The problem though is that this means cutting all those profit margins - the RIAA would like to have their cake and eat it too. Sorry. Can't happen. In addition, trying to force the issue would just make sure that they end up with some super strict CD protection scheme which will hurt sales and basically backfire in the long run.
Also, it's not like CD sales have decreased. How many studies need to be published before they get it into their heads that sharing music also increases an artist's popularity?
Corporate greed makes you stupid and blind.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
I really don't see how anyone could think you CAN stop something like this, given the number of people involved in it. Ok let's try looking at it from a logical standpoint:
Given:
Anything someone can invent someone else can invent a way around
Alot of people are interested in file sharing.
Hardware adapts slower than software. (Software can just recompile, hardware needs to be fabbed, purchased, and installed).
Anything that can be read for "authorized" playback must be by definition readable, and therefore can be manipulated.
Therefore:
The contest of technology comes down to a battle of man-hours. Who can put more time in a war of outhinking the other? A team of 100 professional programmers, working 40-60 hour weeks, or 100,000 crackers working nights, weekends, and vactations? No contest.
Also, you run into the same problem as the clipper chip. If you try and hardware protect things, you're stuck with it until you can update hardware if a vulnerability is found. Unless people start buying new CD and DVD players every week, there's no way not to have a window in which someone has cracked your system so it can function as the users want.
Now if your total protected data was small, or you had unique protection for each piece of data, you could probably manage. But having a seperate encryption for each audio file in existance is absurd. Getting the player to work with it would be impossible, and if the player has to work, then there's a way for someone to get the data.
This isn't to say that no copyrighted material goes over filesharing networks, that would be impossibly naieve. However, there's not going to be much that can be done about it other than waging a war that's going to be impossible to win, just because of sheer numbers on one side.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
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?
I haven't been able to read this paper yet (my 56k is bein lame) but i seriously think it'll only be 2 years max before the whole p2p thing blows up, and a major shake-up of the industry is required. If the big labels continue to impose restrictions on CDs, the bands that are really into music will simply leave the label. I find it astonishing that Cradle Of Filth, a very alternative Death Metal band, are actually singed on Sony. I'm sure that msot bands like this would quickly quit a label that insisted on releasing their albums so that they only play in CD players and Windows PCs. So two things will happen:
>Proper musicians (not Britney Spears) will leave their Corporate Label and simply distribute their own music. They'll make the majority of their profits from playing live gigs, something that pop acts aren't usually very good at.
>Music will be sold at a much cheaper price, perhaps free if thats what the band wants. I beleive that around £5-7 is a perfectly reasonable price for an album.
Unfortunately though, as much as the Record Companies would like it, i don't think that legal downloading of music from the net can ever became possible. The Net community has traditionally managed to crack and hack anything that requires paying for...
Everything sucks except musicandstuff
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.
A product like, say, a movie DVD gives the buyer a number of benefits. One of these, the ability to watch the show in high quality on demand, comes with the digital file, and this file will always be copiable.
The physical commercial DVD offers a number of other benefits though. There are the sleeve notes, photographs, the idea that the item is part of a collection, or provides some kind of link to the people who made the show or its stars.
There will always be people who just want the digital file, but there will also always be others who want the other benefits. Just as in the same way that some people will drink water from the faucet whereas others buy branded bottled water.
"Well, put a stake in my heart and drag me into sunlight."
As it's been pointed out before, they don't need to "stop" p2p networks to stop file sharing. I speak for my self when I say this, but I believe many others will agree: If the music industry gets off our backs (i.e. no excessive DRM), and sells music for a decent price (i.e. lets us buy songs individually and for less than $1.00 each), I will stop using P2P services.
Yes, people will always "illegally" share music. But if given good enough of an alternative, I think a large portion of current P2P users will go back to legitimate means of getting music. And the industry will still make money.
---
Open Source Shirts
Not only is DRM ineffective at stopping real hackers, it actually promotes filesharing. Why? Because of all the things you can't do with a DRM disc:
1. Back it up
2. Make a playlist from it
3. Play it in your car or DVD player
4. Play it on your iPod/Nomad/etc
It's far easier to download your song from any one of a dozen filesharing services. All that's needed is one guy who figured out how to rip it. Many CD-ripping programs, including open-source programs, have already developed ways to circumvent most common forms of CD copy protection.
All DRM schemes are horribly misguided because they make it difficult/unpleasant to be honest, because they are easily circumvented, and because only a few people need to circumvent them for the whole world to benefit.
The ONLY solution that I can think of -- the general solution to piracy -- is to make it not worth the trouble to pirate the songs. If you can get a 320-bit unencumbered MP3 from (say) EMI's site, for $1, without having to hassle with remote queueing, poor quality, getting the wrong file... Most people will pay the $1 and that will be that. I would. But I would never pay a dime for DRM material unless it was for a research project on how to crack it. If I can't put it in my MP3 collection, it's useless to me.
The record industry is like any other evolutionary system -- they'll either adapt or die. I have no doubt some companies will survive and prosper. But those who think they can keep pushing the '70s industry model forever, propping it up with DRM and other nonsense, will spend all their money and then die.
All the current legal efforts are the last desperate attempts of a doomed evolutionary niche to be relevant. They are fighting so hard because they have little time left.
The result? It's given birth to powerful drug cartels (which is an even more vicious group of people than the mob during the Prohibition), crime, violence and prisons chock full of small time "criminals" like pot dealers.
People assume that they have certain rights, which legally they may not have. They will often wish to make a compilation tape (legally), and also often want to give the compilation tape to someone else (probably not legal)
In this case, the law doesn't matter to people. They know they're not doing anything wrong, and would be quite shocked to be accused of stealing. They aren't stealing. They bought the tape/CD. You can argue that they're wrong, but I'm not the person you should convince. Everyone else is.
The thing is that people want to be able to do this. Even if you can stop them with a perfect DRM system, people will not accept it. It prevents them from doing something that they want to do, and the vast majority have no moral qualms over. If the majority disagrees with the law, then surely the law is wrong, not the people.
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
Big corporations have invested massively in developing technologies like Palladium & TCPA. They plan to sell huge quantities of the new restrictive hardware and software to idiot consumers during the next years, that will keep their big profits increasing. Consumers' refusal to buy the new restrictive hardware and software is the worst that can happen to their business plans.
Unfortunately many people are naive, credulous and easily fooled and it is likely that they will not resist a massive PR/disinformation/advertising/marketing campaign. Many of these fooled consumers will not even realize that they will not actually *buy* the hardware and software, but they will in fact *rent* them since they will lose full control over their software and hardware, handing over their control to Palladium/TCPA software and hardware providers.
Considering that DRM will not work just because Microsoft wants us to believe that Palladium & TCPA is not about DRM, is just wishful thinking and another PR move.
*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?
Realize that it isn't the DMCA where this comes from, but rather from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and a treaty agreed to by some 38 countries. Few of those countries, oddly, are in the EU, even though the treaty was signed in Geneva. Article 11 of the treaty reads:
Article 12 is also interesting, but more or less a corollary. It requires contracting parties to make it illegal to remove copy management information from a work or knowingly transmit a work which has had this done to it. I'd love to see a good page listing to what degree this treaty has been put into force of law in agreeing countries.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
I would gladly go to a music store and buy CDs at that price, instead of downloading anything. But why would I pay $15 for downloading the music that fits in a CD? Someone would get the CD itself, and everyone else would download it. Let's face it, if the full cost for producing and distributing a CD is less than $2, on-line music shouldn't be more than $0.10 / music.
Because irrespective if they do make a DRM system that is secure, you can still intercept the audio and video outside of the computer. With DVI video interfaces and fibreoptic audio outputs, the loss of quality would be negligable.
Or do they intend to make everyone use "sealed" computers...
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.
I know that I would buy media online if the idiots who owned it would just bother to take my money. The problem here is not so much taht people pirate media, it's that the media companies don't provide any reasonable alternative. (Aside from "Wait for ten years until we get our act together and until then shut the hell up you whining customers!" that is.)
Microsoft to Consumers: It is impossible to force restrictions on consumers! And we will provide the ability to break Palladium/TCPA! Forget that we have just invested trillions of dollars in developing Palladium/TCPA that will force new high restrictions on consumers in order to "protect" our incresing big profits from these consumers. Anyway we want you to believe that the system can be easily broken and that it is impossible to force restrictions. Now shut up, buy Palladium/TCPA & go to sleep. Palladium/TCPA is not about restrictions, it is not about DRM. Sweet dreams!
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 a dramatic term: The Darknet. Rhymes with "Terrorist" and "Pedophile", I suppose.
Anyhow, my point:
Can anyone see how DRM will actually WORK work? Like, we end up with a stable set of technologies that make it very difficult (if not impossible) to pirate copyrighted media? I can't.
All I can forsee is a quicksand scenario where the DRM technology changes so quickly, in an effort to stay "one step ahead" (hah!) of pirates, that the average user experience is complicated beyond What The Market Will Bear. Who wants to buy a cd player for their car, when in two years they will have to replace it to play the New CDs?
I'm guessing the trend will be towards digital radio and play-once licences. Selling discs is like selling tapes is like selling vinyl. Once you've sold it, it's no longer under your control.
BTW: Other than a slight degradation in signal, and a lot of sitting around waiting, what is so hard about taking an analog signal and re-digitizing it? Isn't this a pretty good low-tech way to get around any form of CD-based DRM?
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Will they music industry just stop these stupid efforts to play with their rules and finally addapt themselves to the new market?
Right now, because of copy protection systems, it is even more interesting for the users to buy a pirated CD. When they should be thinking of how to add value to their product -like including video images or extras with the cd- what they are doing is making their product lose value.
Have they ever thought of using new technologies - online distribution to retailers, CHEAP downloading services, online registration for cd owners to get some extras...- to make a better cheaper product?
How long does it take to any of us to get the songs through internet and then burn a CD? 15 min, half an hour? Don't they tell me they cant offer a competitive service given the massive economy of scale they are playing with...
Yes, this should be their way. Compete with file sharing networks.
I'm sure most persons here know that there is a large cost involved in the promotion and discovery of talent. It is probably true, that illegal file sharing is probably going to really hurt the music and movie industries in the future. Why not take this line of thinking to its final outcome?
:-)
When this happens, you will probably see the result of the reduced funding for things like:
MTV
radio stations
fewer new artists
less promotion
fewer gold and platinum records
fewer concerts
Yes, fewer concerts. With less money for promotion and advertising, and fewer people aware of in love with the record companies' artists, how are they going to fill the concert venues?
How are the "artists" going to live like millionaires after even the most popuplar cannot sell more than a few hundred thousand copies of their album? There will be less of a disparity between "discovered" artists and ones with record deals. MTV Cribs will be kind of boring.
Will MTV be able to pay for a Times Square office space for TRL? Probably not.
If the rappers were poor, think of what would happen to the 20" wheel industry alone!
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
I have a fat unmetered broadband pipe to my PC. I can download entire albums in the tiume it takes me to fix a coffee. Yet I still buy three or four CDs a month. Why?
I'll tell you why.
1) CDs sound better.
Most Internet monkeys can not encode mp3s to save themselves. My sound setup cost me a bomb so I can tell the difference between 192kbps and the CD itself.
2) CDs are not just music.
Some album sleeves are works of art in their own right (e.g. Tool - Lateralus). There is also an assosciated boast factor in having proper CDs compared to home-burnt ones - like the difference between a beige box and a Cooler Master. There are subtle physical differences, but the Cooler Master owner is infinently cooler than Mr. Beige. And that's partly why he bought it.
3) If I didn't buy CDs, the artists would stop making music.
Even if I'm talking about purchasing demos straight from the bands themselves. Giving the band my money, no matter how indirectly, helps ensure that they will continue to make music in the future.
Hint: go get CDex and use the LAME encoder at 192kbps (or make it vorbis). All my CDs are ripped like that, and my WinAmp list all sounds great.
-Mark
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?
Not to beat up on you any further (I see the other geeks have done a pretty thorough job of that), but I disagree. Your investment of time, talent, and money in making the album is just that: an investment. Nobody guaranteed you a profit.
Now, given the REALITY of the situation these days, you have a choice: sign a contract with a label, let them run things, and hope you get some money out of all their hype and networking. And get pirated, if anyone likes your stuff.
Or, you can go directly to letting people pirate your stuff, and with a little marketing effort of your own, hope that enough people want more of the same to make your money back.
I'd say the odds are pretty tight either way. Playing gigs aint exactly a goldmine either, though. So tough for you: you are finding out that being a musician/composer does not guarantee you a life of leisure and wealth. Join the club.
So cry me a river about your production costs. If you had a reasonable expectation of making money on it, you probably already did before the mp3s started flying around. And like everyone says: prove that pirating hurts sales overall.
Anyhow, it comes down to this: do you want people to hear your music, or do you want to make money. They can't BOTH be your first choice, man.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Many will not want to steal, that is a fact at least at this point (I won't say "most", just "many") that should be capitalized. There really are those that would use a system that pays directly to the artists and direct management even. What organizations like the MPAA and RIAA are more afraid of is NOT the theft of music, but the eventual rise of pay for play systems that would cut them out.
Think about it... what is the purpose of management, producers, lawyers, marketers, etc when it comes to music and movies? Answer: Very important, it is what actually puts the media out there in a usable format. It is what organizes the distribution and makes deals with various vendors (i.e. theaters and stores). These groups (RIAA, MPAA, etc) have like most bureaucratic organizations, mutated into a beast that spends more internally to keep their own infrastructure up (justifying their own existence) than performing their primary task. The end result is a reduction of efficiency (results or output) at a higher cost (input). Like all things in our society, it is the savvy industry that embraces the surrounding changes instead of running from them in order to reap the benefits. Had these groups spent their resources on adaptation instead of futile efforts to stop the media trading, then they would be in a VERY good position now. I think they realize that and like a child that made a mistake they are now throwing a temper tantrum for all to see.
To a band, movie producer (not publisher), etc... the only thing they want is an efficient method to create and distribute their product/service. If they can do this through the web (or at least utilize many parts of the web) and therefore bypass the more costly (in time, money, artistic freedom, etc) venue of a formal RIAA affiliated management organization then why would they want to stick around with the bloated management group?
In any socialist situation you end up inevitably with a welfare program that, as mentioned above spends more on internal infrastructure than in its primary function. The US government's steady fall into this system shows agencies full of internal bloat and inefficiency that has more internal support roles as it does the actual roles directly supporting their stated "customer." Why should the government have all the fun? Many companies would like to create such a self justifying organization that views its existence as a measure of sheer volume rather than actual output of goods and services. The problem is (much like with the government) that there is really only one road for such organizations... collapse from within. They will therefore lash out with all their collective might in an effort not to adapt, but to grasp and restrain the flowing waters of expectations tied to the observable change. Change is the only constant (and Death is the most constant of changes) yet these people live more for the static than the reality of the world. Why would you even TRUST such an organization that cannot even grasp the most basic tenets of the universe?
RIAA and MPAA are going down... sad thing is, they don't even realize that it is because of their own misguided efforts that it will happen.
surely the adult entertainment industry was more threatened by the internet than the record or movie industries were. so, where's the porno lobby that's trying to stop p2p?! it's all about embrace and extend. granted that sounds a little rude in this context... but i'm sure it's business rhetoric that movie and record industry execs have heard a thousand times before. how about putting it in to action? there're obviously insurmountable problems with the old business model, so here's another bit of biz-rhet for ye: adapt or die.
Back when this first came up in major news... june 2001:
This is in regards to the proposed plan to 'protect' copyrighted audio recordings distributed via CD.
I think you are making a big mistake, as other consumers will confirm for you when your products are either boycotted or wholesale pirated as a result of this 'protection'. Regardless of what you do to 'protect' this material individuals will make recordings and redistribute to the demanding public. (Any CD player that supports your new 'protection' is certain to have a standard AV port, a really easy way to re-record audio data.)
Ever hear of a thing called supply and demand? Nothing you do will stop this. The only thing this proposed plan will do is take away any control you currently have.
The biggest problem you have created for yourself is pricing albums at $15 - $30 each. Consumers feel as if they are paying enough to justify redistribution to close friends, etc.. especially when they may only really enjoy one or two of the songs on the album. Selling singles of hits isn't enough.. the radio usually plays those particular songs enough.
Your only rational recourse is to create a distribution channel which adds value to your products which consumers will pay for. Obviously they don't feel the current situation provides enough.
One idea is to create a subscription service, wherein the user would get to pick out several songs or albums from the genre they subscribe to. Consumers might prefer to have a complete set of songs from which to make their selection instead of the mixed and potentially corrupted selection they have from online sources. For this service you could charge a monthly rate dependent on the genre or number of downloads, etc. use a focus group or something to decide how to bill people..
I think you'll find that all people want is the selection of songs they get to listen to without the overhead of buying every CD that comes out. People also like the fact that when they 'get over' a particular song they don't feel like they wasted their money. Some music does 'get old' rather quickly.
What I'm saying is that you need to abstract the value you are selling from individual recordings or artists. Music is an ephemeral sensation... what gets me going one day may change the next, that's why radio works, they can adjust for the current environment. Not to mention that there is sooooo much music available now, compared with 20 years ago. Personally I don't have the time to listen to it all but I can listen to the song a friend recommends or sends to me via ftp etc... do you get it. We don't have time to go to the store to buy the cd that has one song we like and if we're going to take the time to buy it online we may as well spend the same amount of time finding a free copy.
By providing 'free' access to all the types of songs that I like you would make it alot easier and quicker for me to find the music I enjoy. How about charging me $15 a month for access to 'hip-hop' or 'rock' genres with a full search on title and author so I can grab 20 songs I really want to listen to that month. What's to keep me from keeping them and trading them? Nothing, but why would I want to go to all of that trouble when I have the convenience of my monthly selection online. Storing all that data is a real pain. Keeping track of which song is on which cd is also a pain. Programmers have spent lots of time trying to make free software to keep track of that stuff and none of them do it right. Plus, you get $15 monthly from me just so I have access to new titles, old titles, whatever, in a convenient and time saving system, w/o the overhead of storing them all, etc.
Okay, do you get it finally. We want service, selection; added value. We won't pay for anything less (ie: cd's with just the songs on them)
Sincerely,
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
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
Personally I have found numerous tracks that have been discontinued or have an incredibly high price tag, online through various means. The RIAA's business model is very old. What good is it to pay upto 40 dollars for an imported CD, when one can download it at a fraction of the price. Or, some of my favorite tracks are avaliable only on vinyl, as the industry has opted for greatest hits collections instead of re-issuing albums and singles to CD. And if someone has the track ripped from vinyl to MP3, they have already saved me time by doing the same process, as well as spending time just trying to find the rare release. Thats where P2P and sharing has helped me at least, no real loss of revenue because they are not distributing that track or album anyways. The RIAA has become a dinosaur, trying to save itself by forcing governments to pass laws to tax blank CDs. For the record, not all blank CDs are used to pirate music, and in fact, some businesses I work with use CD-R only for backup purposes for their databases. But at the same time, the RIAA is collecting money from the sale of these CDs, while the tech industry (who's software is getting pirated just as much), gets zilch. Frankly, if I bought a spindle of CD-Rs, and for each CD-R i'm paying money towards the record industry for the "possibility" that I'm pirating music, perhaps I should download some music to get my money's worth from paying the tax (since its assumed I'm guilty).
It DOES make it difficult for the common non-techie person, which is 90% of their market..
Plus it adds more foolish restrictions and absurd laws that the rest of us have to deal with/work around.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I agree toally with the whole DRM is pointless argument, simply because as long as record companies charge ridiculous amounts for music then people will look for a cheaper source of music elsewhere. In the case of music and movies its P2P systems that people turn too.
Recently it was announced in the UK that singles sales had halved since 1988, why 1988? IIRC 1988 was the year that CD sales started to make an impact on vinyl sales. I alse remeber noticing that a CD single cost £2.99 in 1998 but a vinyl single cost £1.99. The same trend applies to CD albums they are more expensive than their vinyl ancestors. We are also seeing it again with DVD.
Now I don't know if it is cheaper to produce a CD/DVD then their analogue ancestors, I would say it is, despite what some people say about patent royalties etc. All I know is that record and movie companies use every little excuse in the book to put their prices up and make more profit, completely oblivious to the fact that they are alienating consumers. Is it no wonder we turn to P2P systems when it costs £16.99 for a CD and £19.99 for DVD? There is also the irony that the costs of developing DRM and copyright protection technolgies is passed on to the consumer, alienting us even more!
They need to learn that if they reduce the prices of thier products, people will buy them rather than copy them, simple really? In fact I would go as far as saying the record companies are following a business model that is doomed to failure. Does a department store raise its prices and force people not to share clothes they buy when their sales drop? Nope, they reduce prices to encourage people buy more clothes. When will the record and movie companies learn the basic concepts of how businesses operate?
Yep, you sure do seem weird. Especially to pay for a high street CD when you've gone to all the trouble of first creating a good copy yourself.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I think another solution to piracy is to create something of genuine value that can only be attained if you purchase the CD legitimately. It amazes me that record companies are not conducting market research to determine what such "extras" would be best to motivate people to purchase their CD's. Case in point -- I know a lot of people who've purchased copies of Blizzard's new "Warcraft III" game because with a pirated copy of the game, you can't login to Blizzard's Internet play servers and play against other users across the world. And this is clearly a feature that almost any player of the game is interested in. Case in point -- Some DVD's contain things like extra angles for some scenes, dubs of the speech in the soundtrack into other languages or large photo galleries that can't be converted into JPG's automatically. This type of content can almost never be downloaded online, and people buy the DVD in order to get a hold of it. Case in point -- The latest CD from Garbage contains a unique ID that allows you to subscribe to their web site, where you can download software that allows you to create your own unique remixes of some of the songs on the disc. While this didn't motivate me to purchase the disc personally as the software is only available for Windoze machines, I know several people who did purchase it for exactly this reason. If record companies are concerned about CD sales, they should make this sort of thing the norm. They should be spending their money researching the best way to motivate people to purchase the CD, not on ways to stop people from downloading it. Unfortunately the problem with big business is that they almost never think about giving consumers more value for their buck. The idea is simply abhorrent to them. They can't wrap their tiny little minds around it.
Please God, let me find my blue hat with the red trim. (Frances Farmer)
I agree with this post, you'll never be able to prevent any file sharing. That's a fact, whatever a computer can see/hear it can pirate it..
:
The RIAA and the MPAA would be better off using their money into finding a new way of selling music.
Crosbie Fitch has an excellent article at gamasutra which, among many other great things, exposes his views about a new economic model for such materials
"It's not a problem to ensure that communication is secure, from vendor to purchaser, but how do you prevent the purchaser from passing on that information for nothing and thus devaluing it?
(..)
Why should anyone produce a movie, album, or other easily duplicated work of art if only a single sale can be obtained?
Well, it's difficult to swallow, but the answer has to be that the single sale must cover the cost, even in spite of the fact that the work is unlikely to have a resale value."
In software development it is called the Ransom Model. It worked great for Blender, why wouldn't it work for music and movies?
(yeah there are lots of reasons but this is a viable solution..)
cb
It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life, and I'm feeling good! -- Muse
An excellent point. You may never have heard of a given artist, but you pay for his work nevertheless, if you buy a product that sponsored him. From the moral point of view, if I pay for artists I never heard, it's only fair that I should be allowed to get other artists' work for free.
The bottom line is, there aren't many artists starving. Mariah Carey, for instance, got $28 million for failing to sell enough records. The whole media industry is a rotten and immoral system, if P2P will help us get rid of it, good!
While not from the paper in question, my favorite quote on the topic is "The marketers can compete with free; it just has to be better. Look at bottled water if you don't believe me," - Jonathan Potter, Digital Media Association.
(Found at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/1982
Pretty much sums up my feelings on how the entertainment industry can survive.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
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.
on-line music shouldn't be more than $0.10 / music.
By USA law, the songwriter gets eight cents per track for any copy of a sound recording. In your pricing scheme, this means the songwriter would get eighty percent, leaving little to nothing for the performers and those who provide the service.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Artists get *screwed* by their contracts. Labels won't just let a band leave. Why do you think you see quite a few bands release a "Greatest Hits" CD after they've made only 3-4 CDs? It's to fulfull a contractual obligation, that's why. White Lion (80's band, but it's a good example - shows how long this has been going on) was basically broken up by their label, forced to put out a "Greatest Hits" CD, and was barred from ever performing under the name "White Lion" again.
See, you can't just up & walk. Do what rap artists do - create your own recording company and let someone like EMI handle distribution.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is: Radio is _not_ free. Your fee is being paid by someone else.
Well, when you download from someone, the person you download ripped the mp3's from a cd, so they have paid the license fee, or perhaps it was who they downloaded from - *someone* paid the license fee. Maybe they recorded the song from the radio, and so the radio station paid the license. But someone paid.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
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.
...dictates great or popular music draws a higher price. It's not just an exercise by musicians, it is an expressive activity. Some music does better, other not (though someone still wants to buy it), and capitalism rewards that.
the full cost for producing and distributing a CD is less than $2
That's not a full picture, nor an accurate price -- they spend that much on the dosk and packaging alone, depending on the volume of the run. (The cost-per-disc people usually cite tends to be the price in a mega-run of a hit, not an average. As in many industries such as pharmaceuticals, the successes pay for the failures.) There are many other costs, including a significant retailer markup; there's no one making a $10 profit on each CD.
If these companies that are building DRM get their heads on straight, and think about how to build it correctly (using really cryptography and not just security through obscurity), then yes... DRM may be possible.
All they have to do is encrypt the data using a known algorithm (RC4 would work) and then have the algorithm and key hardcoded onto the hardware, probably with high-level FIPS hardware potting so it isn't reverse engineerable. Then all they have to do is make sure that no one on the inside tells the Key to people on the outside.
With a large enough key, it would be theoretically impossible for the it be discovered, and since the decoding happens on one part of the chip in a "black box" style. There would be no way for the end user to get the key.
Simple, and easy, eh? Too bad they aren't smart enough to hire qualified cryptographers instead of just programmers. Or perhaps in your case, this is a good thing.
~ kjrose
John Lettice at the Reg has a very interesting take on this subject, wherein he suggests that MS may know EXACTLY what they're doing with the subject paper. (Yes, I posted this in another thread yesterday, but some of you may have missed it).
Sigs are bad for your health.
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.
DRM for games is thus becoming a solved problem. DRM for video is tougher, but watermarking video, coupled with restrictive monitors, will probably work. DRM for music will probably never really work well, because watermarking audio has consistently been a flop. Either people can hear the watermark, or it's too easy to remove. Usually both.
Public policy should reflect this, and to some extent it does, in the Audio Home Recording Act, which permits some home copying.
I recently laughed myself silly when I saw a DirecTV advertisement for internet service.
The first thing in the commercial is a guy in a music store going to the counter holding several CD's. He says: "I'd like track 5 and 6 from this one, all of this one, and (several forgotten) tracks from this one." Then the ad breaks into promoting that you can make your own mix CD's by downloading all the mp3's you want.
If a big corporation can actually promote downloading mp3's in a national (?) advertisement, then what does this say about how mainstream, recognized, and accepted the phenomena has become?
Hillary Rosen would be spinning in her grave if she saw this ad.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
music is no longer about scarcity, even special editions seem to remain on the market forever. look around for that short run boxed set you wished you had purchased. i bet it is still on the shelf.
music is now a service, like a cell phone. and, like cell phone service, the cost is going to continually decrease, while the traffic continually increases. the music undustry wishes this were not the case. but, progress marches on, and over those who refuse to acknowledge it. songs for a nickel, hosted song lists, and shared song lists, like iCal. the data is disposable, and will be treated as such. but, the information--the lists and sound tracks, the songs are not. if i could download an album to my hard drive, listen to it, and when i need room, toss it or move it, i would likely stop buying cd's. perhaps they are also trying to protect their cash cows.
2002-11-23 11:21:28 Why DRM is going to fail(articles,music) (rejected)
thank you, editors.
now hit me with your favourite -1 item.
It's not *whether* a substance is mentally or physically addictive - it's how this addiction affects you.
For example, if you're looking at mental addiction, in order to gain some perspective on things, think of trousers (or "pants" as they're called in the States). Trousers are very mentally addictive. Deprive a man of his trousers in a public place and he will instantly experience severe cravings for them.
Compared to trousers, marijuana is hardly mentally addictive at all.
So don't talk about addiction without some reference to the effect of withdrawal, and how badly that effects the person. I am probably mentally addicted to tea in the mornings. Without it I become restless and I attempt to seek it out. But I don't become a social problem.
And it's nothing like removing my trousers.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
My guess is that this scheme relies on the popup to set some variable(s) which are checked for in the main page. It doesn't seem like a very big deal for browsers to not block popups, but rather make them invisible (or something like that) to defeat this sort of thing. What a silly idea. I can't believe people will pay money for this crap
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
Some people do it for love... others do it for money. Which would you rather be?
Being a musician can suck, at least financially, just like being an artist. Most artists, however, don't do it for the money... it's all about expression, the creative muse.
In the digital age, being a millionare musician may be a dying phenomenon, for reasons already discussed. Obselescence sucks, but what can you do? Using technology to prop up a failing business model is doomed from the start.
Do it for the love of the music, and realize you may not get rich (though you might still get famous, groupies, etc), but take pleasure in it. Music is wonderful... enjoy the creation and performance; take pride in your musical gift (and a tremendous gift it is!).
Don't become bitter... don't overlook the pleasure for the sake of a dollar.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
When I buy a CD (which happens rarely), I convert it to mp3 and drop it into a directory on my hard drive. When I go to a LAN party, it is shared out along with ISOs (I create custom ISOs of my games and include the latest patches and nocd cracks, mainly because I hate looking for a CD to play a game) of my latest games. If someone wants an mp3, they take it.
They would have raided the LAN party, confiscated all the computers and given you a gigantic fine(think at least 5 digits).
Perhaps they'll try that in the US sometime.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating