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Ring Tones Will Save the Music Industry
tabdelgawad writes "Well, not quite, but according to Jay A. Samit, senior vice president for new media at music label EMI Group PLC, quoted in this Washington Post article, "This is huge. This is the largest growth area for music companies and our artists". The article goes on to prove two facts we already know: that the music industry is greedy (already asking for a bigger slice of this pie!) and that the porn industry is a prime innovator in marketing and technology :-)"
But will you have to pay royalties if your phone rings in a crowd, and others hear it?
Going off in a theatre is bad enough, but just imagine if it rang in a taxi-cab!
What worse way to become musically recognized:
"I take good songs, and translate them into annoying beeps. I'm proud of that and would like to publicly take credit for it."
Then again, with the general level of quality that the music industry expects of it new up-and-coming groups, he just may be able to get that fat record deal he's always been hoping for.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
ring tones become p2p ware and the music industry use this as a new excuse to close down p2p.
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
My brother lives in Tokyo and actually made some ring tones for Yamaha over there early this year. I thought it was weird cuz it seemed like such a big deal over there. Besides their phones being about 5-10 years ahead of ours (for real), they had a completely different attitude about it. They threw a huge party for the release there. He's a dj too, so they supported him spinning and had their ads and stuff all over - I guess kinda like a record release almost.
But it seems tho that since we're so behind here that that won't materialize like it has overseas - and not just Japan, but in a lot of other wireless countries. I dunno, our attitude and recording industry cartel just seems different here; hard to say what will happen..
Expect a phone call from the RIAA When you answer it, you get threatened with a DCMA lawsuit for infringing the intellectual property of a long dead classical composer.
Of course, you can expect the RIAA to try to have it outlawed...
Im fine with the 35 ring tones that came with my Nokia 3310 Phone, and tone codes are everywhere on the internet, but there are all the stupid losers who phone £1.50/minute 0906 numbers to get a bastardised beeping version of the latest chart hit.
With Processing power on Mobile Phones getting better, it would make sense to be able to play REAL Sound files. A 20-30 second sound mp3 file could easily fit on a phone, and it could be worth the price of around £2 per mini song, but not a couple of silly beeps
Landline phones are starting to get more spiced up, the singing lizard phone for example. But they are FREAKING PHONES after all, and they are supposed to go RING RING, not beep beep beep beep beep beep beep, leave that to Ellen Fiess!
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
From the article:
... Hm. Hey, so anyway, did you watch Friends last night?..."
Approximately 50 percent of Europeans under the age of 30 have downloaded ring tones, according to Stonefield, who believes the U.S. market is ripe for similar growth. "There is no way that kind of distribution is going to be held back; it is a real social trend," he said.
Yes, it is a social trend, but not a U.S. one.
Most of the fads we see tend to have some obvious -- if obnoxious -- logic to it. Macarena? Catchy and annoying as all get-out. Pokemon? Competition, community, kids running around saying dumb things (which is precisely what kids are supposed to do). Micro RC cars? Cute and disturbingly entertaining to everyone but our employers and cats. I could go on for quite some time but because I wish to annoy you, the gracious reader, as little as possible, I'll get right to the point.
What do frickin' ringtones offer?
"Oh, hey! Cool, Rock Me Amadaeus as a ringtone! Sweet!
This is not a U.S. phenomenon and it won't ever be a U.S. phenominon. I'm not trying to imply that the United States is somehow more sophisticated, I'm suggesting that Americans tend to view cellphones ringing about as enjoyable as listening to a car alarm going off. And not because they're boring, monotone and tedious, either. We dislike the phone because it represents an interruption, rendered jarringly, like an audial ICQ popup (though I'm told they don't do that anymore).
Again, from the article:
"This is huge," said Jay A. Samit, senior vice president for new media at music label EMI Group PLC. "This is the largest growth area for music companies and our artists."
This is a sign that companies are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel, not the bleeding edge of the Next Great Thing.
My
Limekiller
"Ownership" is a legal concept, "greediness" is not. Most people who are greedy do, in fact, own everything legally. Therefore, the music industry's use of the tunes they own can still be greedy. Uncle Scrooge was greedy, but presumably not usually a crook. And greedy behavior is sometimes followed by outlawing formerly legal behavior; loan sharking, for example, is greedy behavior that is now illegal. You see, it's we, the people, who ultimately decide where the boundaries of ownership are, and greediness is one factor we consider in those decisions. Is that simple enough for you to understand or do we need to draw you a map?
Ringtones, THE way to get your music out there if you're a mediocre musician with no originality at all...
After all, did you ever hear an original ringtone...?
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
The music industry may be able to make some money off ring tones that are distributed commercially. However, I seriously doubt that they can prevent you from programming whatever ring tones you like into your phone. And many phones now have digital audio recording of ring tones, so, at least technically, you can simply record whatever ring tone you like from whatever source you like, including another phone.
...given the unabashed greed of the music industry, we'll probably have to pay every time our cell phones ring when a copyrighted ringtone is used.
"Quick! Answer it on the first ring or it's another dollar to the RIAA!"
~Philly
I can't describe why I think it's ghetto, but I do.
Blar.
I'm slowly veering off on a tangent, but I think I'm actually impressed with the music industry - haven't decided yet whether or not that's a good thing. Now that technology can make music free (and available), why not make it omnipresent as well? Commercially, music is already tied to fashion and social identity. What about a signature song that uniquely identifies you? Sure, you can put it on your cell phone...or better still, what if *your* song played every time you called someone else? (Throw this onto other suitable appliances as you will.) For me, someone who wants to be accompanied by a walking bass line at all times, this would be a perk. If you had the money, you could even pay someone to write you that special, identifying song. Maybe the musicians and techno geeks out there should get a piece of this - I'd love to write my own ringtone and put it on my phone, and I doubt I'm the only one. Offer the wireless companies this customization at a less exorbitant rate than the RIAA would, and you'd have a pretty nice offer.
.sig
Therefore, someone could create a comprehensive database of all possible ringtone combinations, copyright it, and publish it.
Then sue the RIAA for infringement.
ho ho ho
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You'll have to put up with the imperial march every time some random asshole wants to call you. I like the idea of theme music, I used to have IRC scripts that played music in the background when certain people joined, but widespread use of this would be bad. Keep it for the geeks, kill off everyone else.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Legally, maybe; morally, definitely not piracy.
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
I live in the UK where cellphones are very big, it's pretty much reached mass penetration now. Everyage group has mobile phones, even my grandmother has! In the UK a couple of years back pre-pay phones took off big style and there was a very big price war with handsets going for as little as $45 with no contract. Now.. the companies are finding it very difficult due to the amount of phones that have been sold people are not as keen to upgrade them as they would like. Except for the geek/uber stylish crowd everyone is pretty happy with their handsets. Now, because the lack of handsets being sold the mobile phone companies are in trouble due to: Paying ££££ billions to the uk goverment so they can have the spectrum for 3g phones. Vast market penetration of mobile phones already and a majority are not willing to upgrade Lot of people on pre-pay and using phones for "emergency use only", operators find it hard to break even. So...... all the networks are betting their bottom line on things like ring tones, downloadable screensavers (!!), logo graphics and picture messaging. Already ringtones are the such like have boosted profits in the shorterm, but I think picture messaging will (hopefully) be the saviour ... or job cuts abound :)
So we need subwoofers for cell phones. Or at least speakers that can go down to 100Hz or so, to get rid of that tinny sound. Of course, you need some high notes so people can find the cellphone; with nothing but bass, the wavelength is too long for localization.
Can someone please explain why the music labels feel that they deserve to get any cash for these ring tones ? I am not a copyright lawyer, but I have been connected with most of the arguments.
AFAIK this is a classic example of a (remotely) derived work, and lets face it a phone going dee-da-da-dee-da is not in really remotely related to or produced from the actual music that they phone melody makers are trying to reproduce.
The ring tones don't use any samples from the music and the music composition is totally different, both through different timing of the notes and through playing only one (or a couple) of notes at a time. Therefore the person who makes the phone ring tone is making a completely new piece of work and shouldn't need to give any cash for the permission to distribute it.
The only thing that you could even try and argue is under copyright is the songs name, which would/should get laughed out of any court.
So although it looks like a nice revenue stream for the music industry, why should they get any cash ?
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Another great example of reducio ad absurdum - taking something to its absurd extreme. Or they could be simply making fun of the international copyright system.
Cue The Sun...
The record companies have the rights to the sheet music I would guess
That's true if the record company and the music publisher are owned by the same conglomerate, such as Warner Bros. Records and Warner Chappell Music (owner of "happy birthday to you") both owned by Warner Communications, a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc.
but they must not have any ownership if I listen to the radio and transcribe it myself.
No matter how you hear a copyrighted musical work, it's still copyrighted. Unlike with computer program copyright, there's no way to "clean-room reverse engineer" around music copyright. Even if you only unconsciously plagiarize a copyrighted musical work, you're still liable under USA copyright law.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The Nokia Ringtone Composer (part of this package here for the 3360) allows you to compose ringtones and send them via IR. You can also import MIDI songs and play with them from there... I'm sure there are more tools on Nokia's site, but these are the only ones I have experience with. These are great, though. Ringtones, sync with Outlook, full phone backup, etc, all over IR.
Yes.
DNA just wants to be free...
Envisional, a UK-based Internet monitoring company, even goes so far as to claim that "Illegal downloads of mobile ringtones costs music industry $1million per day ". However, in all fairness, that article does mention that the estimates they talk about are rough, since "Reliable figures on the total ringtone market are very hard to come by...but there is no doubt as to the scale of the problem. This is another Napster in the making."
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
It occurs to me that there are a finite set of possible ring tone combinations
Yes. However, even if you limit it to 16 notes of 12 pitches (do through sol in the next octave, or do chromatically through ti in the same octave) and short, medium, or long duration, you get 36^16 possible notes, on the order of 10^25 or 2^83. That's possibly several zillion times more information than exists in all the libraries of all the congresses of all the countries of all the planets in our galaxy.
However, copyright law does consider some partial melody matches to constitute infringing misappropriation. Look at an essay I wrote about the "Yes! We have no bananas!" case and musical combinatorics that argues that there exist fewer than fifty thousand melodies that a judge (who is not a musician) would consider distinct.
Therefore, someone could create a comprehensive database of all possible ringtone combinations
That's been tried with telephone numbers.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Who cares about the music _industry_, who's going to save music?
'Nuff said.
"Old man yells at systemd"
what is the difference between me playing a tune on my piano at home (presuming that I've legally bought the music sheet) or me playing it on my phone?
Subject to the fair use doctrine and some other exceptions, the owner of copyright in a musical work has the exclusive right to perform the work publicly (17 USC 106). Playing a ringtone is potentially a public performance; playing a song on a musical instrument when nobody outside your family unit is present is not (17 USC 101 definition of "publicly").
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now I believe that one of the specific "fair use" exclusions to copyright is for reporting purposes.
:-)
In such cases of course, the excerpted piece of otherwise copyrighted material must only be a small percentage of the original work.
This allows one newspaper report to quote a few lines from a competing publication without fear of breaching their copyright.
So what's wrong with the claim that turning 10 seconds or so of a top-40 song into a ring-tone isn't also covered by this "fair use" exclusion because it's only a tiny percentage of the original work and it's *reporting* that someone has called your cellphone?
It would certainly be an interesting sharkfight if someone decided to test it out in the courts
If I am at your house and use your phone for 500 minutes, how much does it cost you? Nothing (beyond the money you already spent to have active service).
You see, in many other countries, there is a per minute fee, on top of the monthly fees, to use your land line phone. Given the insane prices of local phone service, it is no surprise that mobile phone rates (especially the early days of digital networks) looked very reasonable to them, and completely outragous to us.
As for the notion that we like big out of gluttony, I think you are overgeneralizing. Small cars are popular in Europe because of their narrow, treacherous streets, many of which were laid down before cars existed. Most midwestern US cities became heavilly populated after cars existed, and grew up around big roads. I own a massive Crown Victoria, but if I lived in Europe or Japan, I would want a little Mini or something, if I owned a car at all.
Likewise, we have big yards because real estate is so much more cheap and abundant than elsewhere. I would need to be a multi-millionare to own a house as big as mine in Japan.
How we dress? Have you been following Japanese fashion at all? The most excessive "fashion slave" in the US would become exhausted trying to keep up with changing J-pop trends.
"A smaller phone is not very likely to be perceived as being better, here in the US. Put some beazzler jewels on them, and a "Polo" label on them and then they'll move."
A stroll through Best Buy proves you wrong almost immediately. Small fold up phones are almost always double the price of a big blocky one with the same features. We put a very high value on small phones, and the only time people buy color bezels is when groups of them get identical phones from work, and want to be able to tell everybody's phones apart at a glance.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
What if you own the CD - should you pay again to listen to a degraded version?
Interestingly enough, copyright law in New Zealand is about to undergo a bit of a shake-up that would have an effect on this.
At present it's illegal to make *any* copy of any disk you own -- that's right, there's no fair use provision here.
However, the government (in an uncharacteristic exhibition of wisdom) appears to have decided that it makes sense to allow people to copy for the purpose of "format shifting" -- ie: from CD to MP3 or from CD to tape, etc.
This would create a very interesting situation where someone already had a specific CD but chose to download the MP3 version of its contents from a P2P network rather than rip it themselves. Under the proposed new law, this could be considered a completely legal act.
To make the matter even more ridiculous -- the proposed changes appear to have some DMCA-like provisions that prohibit the cracking of copy-protection schemes. So, if you've just bought a new CD which is copy protected -- it would be legal to download an MP3 version from the Net but illegal to rip it yourself.
Don't ya just love politicians and the laws they make?
Oh yeah, and this is a very likely scenario, given that EMI Australia has announced that it will be copy-protecting *all* its disks as of next year.
And "we, the people" have nothing at all to do with deciding where ownership ends and greed begins. Ownership of something is a real, legal, fact.
You are fucking daft. Ownership is a legal fact. You admit to it, but you say we the people have nothing to do with deciding where it ends and begins, which is wrong! If you erase all of the laws, I own nothing. Not a thing. Now, I may possess some things, but I have no indefenite control on them. They are only mine until someone big enough to take them away does. Under U.S. law, however, if someone big walks up and takes my keyboard away it is still mine. I still own it no matter what happens to it from there.
All I want is my car alarm to scream out, ala James Brown "HEY HEY HEY HEY HEY"
My phone's ring is The Liberty Bell March, also known as the theme to Monty Python's Flying Circus. It came built in to my phone. I don't confuse my phone ringing with anybody elses, and I get a secret little geek thrill every time my phone rings.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Fucking Morons
Blogging because I can...
Sure, these ring tones are inspired by original tunes, but the process of producing them is not an electronic algorithm. An artist (perhaps of dubious talents) has to "compose" these ringtones so that they sound right.
Ringtones technically are not degraded versions of original sound files; they are compositions "inspired" by other sound files.
Your CD licenses don't cover these ringtone compositions, however derivative they may be.
blog
Assuming you're not in a space where noise would be a problem, having a personalized ringtone helps users distinguish their ringing phones from others'.
Whenever I'm in a public space and I hear the "Nokia" ring, I often see 4 or 5 people going for their phones. If those had people personalized their ringtones, they might have been able to save themselves a bit of mad scrambling.
(FWIW, when I'm in public, my cellphone is set to vibrate. No confusion for me.)
blog
The ring tones don't use any samples from the music and the music composition is totally different, both through different timing of the notes and through playing only one (or a couple) of notes at a time. Therefore the person who makes the phone ring tone is making a completely new piece of work and shouldn't need to give any cash for the permission to distribute it.
Re-read that paragraph.
If a ringtone's "musical composition is totally different" from an existing musical work then, by definition, it doesn't sound the same. However, what we're talking about is works that do sound the same.
Note, there is a distinct difference between "identical" and "the same".
When I was a kid, I could play John William's Star Wars theme tune on my tinny Casio keyboard. Sure, it wasn't "identical" - nobody was ever going to mistake my performance on a kid's toy with that of a full, professional orchestra - but it was "the same" as far as any listener was concerned. My friends and family were impressed I could play Star Wars and, to a 6 year-old kid, that was all that mattered.
However, if I had tried to sell recordings of my rendition of the tune as an original work then the corporate lawyers representing John Williams (or his record label) would have stomped all over me, and rightly so. I would have been infringing on the copyright of an established artist, pure and simple.
The same is true today, and not just in the arts world - just because I could create a close (but not identical) copy of the classic Coca-Cola bottle that doesn't give me the right to use it commercially packaging my own brand of cola or other beverage.
Bottom line: there is a world of difference between composing an original work (even one that is inspired by or draws on previous works) and a simple reproduction of it, no matter how basic. (I won't even bother expanding on the argument that the next generation of phones that support polyphonic ringtones can produce tunes that are as good as 128kb/s MP3s.)
If it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, then it's pretty likely to be a duck. Similarly, if a ringtone sounds like Run DMC's Walk This Way, The Prodigy's Firestarter, or whatever, then the same rule applies.
Finally, your assertion that "the only thing that you could even try and argue is under copyright is the songs name, which would/should get laughed out of any court", is laughable. You claim to be familiar with the arguments surrounding copyright ownership but yet you don't know that you can't copyright facts?
If what you said is true then the record labels would have shut down CDDB and FreeDB years ago. And artists (or their labels) would be suing each other left, right and centre over song titles. Last time I checked, Huey Lewis And The News weren't suing Frankie Goes To Hollywood over the name The Power Of Love, or vice versa.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Yes, a ringtone is *way* too short to be anything but fair use. If a one minute, low-quality clip on Amazon.com (or anywhere!) is fair use, then a TEN SECOND SEQUENCE OF CRAPPY BEEPS is DEFINITELY fair use.
So tell those stupid greedy bastards to read their copyright law again before they start reaching for our wallets on this one...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Since when did programing in Q-Basic (cause thats all you need to make these ring tones) start paying cash?
There are a lot of rogue WAP servers out there, and if you know where to go you can download the tones for free, the only thing you have to pay for is airtime, which would be ~30sec-1min (or you can download them to your PC and then PC-Link it to the phone). Also Nokia introduced a MIDI phone about 6 months ago, some of my friends have it and have set up their own WAP servers with MIDI from which they uploaded the song (apparently the PC link to that phone doesent seem to work). But i must admit that the sound is cool! (Ever seen heads turn as someone's phone starts ringing Zelda theme in full MIDI at the top of its digital lungs?)
Here is the link to ONE of the MIDI phones.
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
Who thinks that the whole mobile telephony market is the grossest example of feature overload ever? It puts dot-com boom to shame. You can take pictures with a cell phone, but you still can't have a conversation without static and a choppy signal. There's no such thing as perfect nationwide coverage, but you can customize the image on the screen. Who gives a flying fuck about playing a bad, not-even-midi-quality song for a ring tone when the phone itself works badly?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
The first GSM mobile phone I ever owned (back in 1999), a Nokia 3210, had a ring tone composer which I could use to send ring tones I composed to my friends who had compatible phones. Newer 3xxx (e.g. 3310/3350, etc.) models even have the ability to resend tones that have been received. Heck, if this isn't (an admittedly primitive) P2P network built on top of GSM, I don't know what one is. With SMS chat services, getting the tones you want is not too difficult.
But then again, it seems that the United States is somewhat backwards when it comes to cellular telephony for some reason. We've been doing this in the Philippines for at least five years almost.
Odd thing for a third world country like us to have market penetration rates for cellular phones approaching that of the wealthiest European nations. Heck, I see street vendors here who have GSM mobiles!
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Two years ago: Nobody would pay for this shit
Now: Some people would.
Percent incrase: ((Now/Then) * 100) - 100
WARNING: DIVIDE BY ZERO!
INFINITE GROWTH!!!!!!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Ordinarily the pub would already be paying fees to BMI and several similar organizations to cover that. Basically BMI and friends go around to any place that has/might perform/play music publically in some fashion and demands money (this includes having a TV in the room with working sound).
Doesn't matter if you only play non-BMI-represented artists (as far as they're concerned, it's impossible to play music without playing something by someone they represent _sometime_).
But yes, so pubs and such are nominally covered. The aforementioned MP3 cover collection wouldn't be.
Same way you would for a song otherwise. For copyright purposes, the lowest threshold for uniqueness is four notes[1], but you might want to copyright something just a bit longer for a saftey margin (since you probably don't have high-powered industry lawyers to back it up).
---
[1] Yes, I realize at this rate we'll run out of non-copyrighted melodies in a decade or two... but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. In reality it's not quite so bad because that standard isn't consistently enforced.
DNA just wants to be free...
Man that's hard not to interpret as a euphemism for "orgasm!"
Well, so long as your phone plays the Python theme and doesn't vibr...er...it doen't vibrate, does it?
: )
You can't take the sky from me...
... for any of the ring tones I compose on my phones.
I always put one obviously wrong note (or two) in them, just for kicks. Kinda like how Bugs Bunny would play them.
Someone's phone is ringing.....
Oh, that's DEFINITELY mine.
What about parodies? A lot of parody (say, Weird Al) has music almost identical to the original works, but they don't even have to get permisison if they don't want to!
I personally think ringtones fall nicley into the "Parody" category, as almost always it's just kind of humorous to hear some butchered rendition of a song you know as a ring.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My 6310 came with a pale imitation of it. No downloads required. No royalties either.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
I want my car's arm/disarm sound to come from the subwoofer in the trunk. A heartbeat might be nice, or a couple of nice drum kicks. Of course, when the alarm gets triggered, there'll be a nice, screeching sound, but when I'm arming it, I don't need that annoying chirp. I also don't need music.
Synergy is your friend
* oh, come on, you remember Demolition Man. All restaurant jingles are for Taco Bell...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
At least where I live. So many sites has been shutdown because they offered FREE ringtones of copyrighted songs.
So new pay sites came along, then then even ad's on tv for those sites. The kids love those ring tones, and those guys in the sales dept.
my sig
link to the sky car
Surelly such restrictions applies to the bloke in the article too?
Kannel, a free WAP and SMS gateway, for all your ringtoning needs.
He was implying Europeans actually turn their phones off at the flicks while Americans don't.
The implication being that Europeans don't complain about mobiles going off at the flicks because it doesn't happen there.
I just bought a new Samsung SCH-A460 from Sprint, after losing my old phone -- it was decently-priced and had a bunch of neat features that I wanted to try out. One of those was polyphonic ringtones....... however, after much searching, I couldn't find places that I could buy / download ringtones from on the web.
I received a message back from Sprint's customer service, a few days after I had initially inquired about ringtones. Apparently you need to subscribe to a service ($4/mo, I think), which allows you to download 8 ringtones per month. And until you subscribe, you can't review any of the "titles" available for download -- which makes it quite useless if you're looking for a specific ringtone (Our Lady Peace's "Starseed", for instance).
Basically, I ended up buying a more colorful phone with a slightly improved alarm clock, infinitely crappier menu and panda "screen saver" for my cash. I'd have no problem paying for ringtones, even at $0.50 a pop, but I have the same problems here as I do with online music -- I wanna try before I buy. And as for monthly charges -- hell no.
MIDI only requires a license from the songwriter, and those are cheap.
Not only cheap, but compulsory. [pdf]
I think the ringtone craze is kind of cool... back in the days before CD-quality audio I used to be amazed by the chiptunes that talented game musicians could coax out of the meager little 4-voice FM synthesis chips on the old 8-bit consoles and computers. Just like the Gameboy Advance has kept the 2D scroller alive while the high-end consoles are all doing 3D, I see these programmable ringers as keeping the old chiptune music alive in a way.
. . . is it's own eventual destruction, or conversion into the book publishing industry. it is out of hand, fixing prices, and simply unresponsive to market demands these days. if it all fell apart, there might be fewer backstreet boys, and more musicians making better livings and owning their own works once again. . . . .
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
As the other poster pointed out, you are incorrect that you need permission. Note that Weird Al is very nice and always asks for permission - but if you knew your Weird Al history you would remember that there was some confusion between Coolio's agent and Weird Al, which resulting in Weird Al releasing "Amish Paradise". Coolio did not authorize that song at all, and was very upset about it - but it still remained on the CD, Coolio got nothing for it, and it sells to this day.
Just because Weird Al asks does not mean he has to.
Also, note the many many parodies put on Dr. Demento, broadcast over the radio - do you really think all those guys asked for permission, and got it? I don't think so.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Glad to see SOMEONE got the reference... ;-}
...I've done that (no, it was not at a university's student center, or anywhere in public for that matter). I don't actually use it though.
I just wanted to thank you for clarifying what Chris Dunn meant when he made the quote referenced above. At first, I thought, "Wow! Batman was at the mall! And Chris Dunn heard him!" Thanks to your insightful editorial alteration, I now understand that he only heard the theme song to the television show by the same name. The fourteen extra bytes transmitted to convey that information was well worth it.
Keep up the good work!
Yours Truly,
-Joe
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
I just wonder how to verify that when writing my own songs ... how to guarantee ... that my music is, in fact, original. I post until I happen to find somebody who has been in the same position and can give a useful answer.
Ahhhh. I completely missed your intent. I didn't read it as a question, I thought it was commentary. I kept comming across it in the middle of copyright vs fair use controversies. I couldn't quite figure out if it was an attack overstrong copyright, or of attack on the fair use defence. Chuckle.
I'm not in the same position and I completely missunderstood you before so I may not be much help, but i'll take a shot at it anyway.
I don't think there *is* a solution. There's no way to guarantee that the song you just wrote doesn't happen to be similar to a song you may or may not have heard when you were 6.
Have music publishers been asking you to make that guarantee? Have they been making an issue of it? If it's just a minor point in the bolier-plate contract it is probably just supposed to prevent intentional copying.
The case you cite is probably quite execptional. Are you asking because you've discovered that you've unconciously done this? If not then you can probably just look at that case as someone getting hit by lightning. It is a danger that everyone lives with, but it's not worth worrying about.
If you want real headaches, try writing a program without violating a half dozzen idiotic software patents you never heard of. There maybe a million ways to say "I love you", but only a couple of usable ways to sort a list.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
After you do that, look up, and check if the stars are going out. Not much point worrying about what happens next...
(xref the Arthur C Clarke short story.)
(this is not a
There's no way to guarantee that the song you just wrote doesn't happen to be similar to a song you may or may not have heard when you were 6.
Does this mean that if I don't want to go to prison for failing to have enough income to make payments on damages from a copyright infringement lawsuit, I should simply avoid composing and having published musical works that I reasonably claim to have written?
Have music publishers been asking you to make that guarantee?
Yes. Music publishers and record labels require in their contracts that all works submitted by the artist are original works that do not infringe on the rights of a third party. Here are some sample contracts:
Are you asking because you've discovered that you've unconciously done this?
Yes. Several times, I have wrote a song that I thought was original, and then a couple weeks later, I heard it on an oldies station. I have talked to others who have had the same problem, but they provided no solution as to how to avoid the problem in the general case. Though I caught myself before publishing anything, I'm afraid that next time I won't be so lucky.
Will I retire or break 10K?