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2002 MP3 Winners and Losers
An anonymous reader writes "MP3newswire.net is running their annual losers and winners list in digital media. Each has 8 finalists with the big winner KaZaa for becoming profitable and doubling Napster's peak traffic despite setbacks like getting briefly booted from Download.com. The big loser? No surprise, it's the RIAA who despite several wins in court have failed in their quest to stem file trading. Lawrence Lessig and Dmitry Skylarov also made the winners list, though as the article points out it wasn't exactly a great year for Dmitry."
yeah, kazaa is profitable... almost enough money to pay off all the law suits.
_
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I think they're forgetting about Radio Shack's investment into RIAA. Radio Shack has invested heavily into ASCAP and RIAA over the past few years. They were hoping for some backdoor alliance with music technology and consumer spending. Guess RS should go back to the drawing board and make blueboxes for Steve Jobs. ;-)
Beep. Boop. Beep. You have questions. I have answers and your home address.
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I love this euphemism. It isn't trading, it's just plain stealing. You can't trade what isn't yours.
You may notice a large number of posts made on Slashdot concering KaZaA, or similar programs such as Gnutella or FreeNet. Often these will be posted under "Your Rights Online" (YRO), in order to show how the use of KaZaA affects your "rights". You may wonder what the hell programs whose sole purpose is to circumvent copyright laws is doing on a conservative (yes, I mean it) site such as Slashdot.
Let me explain to you. In the back of their minds, most Slashdot readers ("Slashbots") know that they simply don't want to pay for anything which they can get illegally for free. Most people are exactly the same way. KaZaA et al allows them to get music for free, so they use it. They know that this is copyright violation, which is a bad thing to do. This brings them feelings of guilt which they want to do away with.
How do they do this? They rationalize it away. It's the copyright laws that are wrong, not them. DCMA needs to be rewritten. The MPAA needs to be destroyed. It's an expression of free speech. And those greedy record companies take all the money anyway. Never mind that with pirate mp3s the artist never sees any money anyway. This way, they are sticking it to "the Man", who exists to make life difficult for 31337 Linux users like themselves. Yes, it is flimsy, and yes, it allows them to take the moral high ground by robbing hard-working artists. Yes, many will say that modern popular music is all horrible anyway, and that their favorite music is the only worthwhile type, but then go on to slam others for being "elitist" in any discussion in which Gnome or KDE is mentioned.
And what about the United Linux beta? Didn't that violate the GPL by attaching a boilerplate Non Disclosure Agreement? And remember the cries of the Slashbots that United Linux should be sued, destroyed. boycotted, etc.? All because United Linux who was helping out the Linux community mistakenly added a certain clause to their beta, which violated the GPL. As you can see, the "community" is quick to cry foul when the copyrights on their software is violated, even by companies with good intentions. Our copyright good, yours bad.
It's called "hypocrisy" and if you read Slashdot enough, you'll have to get used to it.
Now ask yourself exactly why ther is coverage of KaZaA on a site obstensibly devoted to Free Software. KaZaA is proprietary as hell. Isn't proprietary software bad? Isn't all free software superior? Isn't "open sourcing" a piece of software the best way to improve it?
These are all bleatings of the party lines. Here, we consider proprietary software Evil until Rob Malda tells us otherwise, or it gets ported to Linux. Then it becomes a special class of proprietary software which somehow becomes better than the rest. KaZaA is one example. WordPerfect is another. Somehow, they are able to ignore this seemingly large discrepency by claiming that these companies are "helping" the "community". The only one being helped is VA Research^W Linux^W Software who gets to sell ads to these people after giving them free publicity on the most popular "Linux" site of them all.
Stop lying to yourselves.
I hope this is really good news in the long run.
Today I finally went over to the EFF site and joined up after I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that now is the time to keep the internet from going the way of marijuana and any other ideas, items or whatnot that have been made illegal. Just to keep someone's pockets lined with green that he's sharing with a few of his buddies which help make and enforce our country's laws. I love my country, but I feel we are not really as free as we should be, and that our freedoms are being traded for profit.
What is it going to take before the companies realize that the best way to fight their losses is to join in on it. By that I mean that they could release high quality mp3s (or OGG, but hopefully not wmp formats) with commercials tagged at the beginning and end. Sure, most of us here can edit them out, but they will still be heard. My idea probably sucks, but there has to be a solution, a compromise, or we all will end up losers.
Indeed they may be, but the point is that they can't sue at the same speed new file sharing systems will pop up.
They can destroy one or two, but not stand the growth of what is without any doubt the most convenient way of distributing media.
It's not a matter of which file sharing client does what, but of a proven matter of fact: there's no more need for media distribution companies: they exist only to suck money to artists and customers. The Net is the medium and artists want to distribute directly to the public (Just ask some artists what ridiculous percentage they get for their work. You'll be surprised.) The RIAA might get totally crushed in a few years if people agreed to give money where it really belong, eg. paying artists with direct donations and stopping buying CDs.
I'm not sure Kazaa being profitable is that good of a thing for the 'net in general.
Remember, Kazaa is a Spyware/Adware-filled program which brings along with it a lot of annoying programs that pop-up ads while users are browsing sites other than their own, redirect click-through commissions from sites other than their own, and spy on users when using programs other than their own.
Kazaa simply has no morals. They're not just stealing from the RIAA, but if you run a website they're stealing from you too. If you haven't noticed, they don't have much respect the laws of the U.S, Canada, Mexico, U.K... or anywhere else that says stealing is wrong.
Kazaa should just go away... the online world would be better off without them. Them being profitable is a very scary thing...
The problem is, they not only own the content, but they also own the "distribution channels" that control what content is pushed into the marketplace.
The RIAA's MP3 fear is not that they won't be able to make money off of MP3s, but that people other than the existing RIAA members can as well. What's more, it'd be possible for an artist to gain popularity without needing the help of an RIAA label's publicity machine, therefore the artist could make 100% of the money off of the recording, and not have to give the RIAA members any cut of the action.
That's why the RIAA is trying desperately to block the progress of 'net-based music distribution in any file format by anybody. The fact that some people are surcomming to illegally transfering music that the RIAA owns the copyright on just makes their illogical case easier to argue. What they want is for the music distribution system to stay as it is for as long as possible, because if we ever transition to an effective electronic system of any kind, they will be written out of the story.
No we don't want anything like that to happen. But both Adobe and US justice system should apologize for Dmitry's detention and make sure nothing like this will happen again. Otherwise, they will have no recourse when a tourist from Texas is jailed in Europe for keeping a firearm in his house.
There are other ways to protect local laws. US certainly could deny a visa to Dmitry or make it illegal for anyone to buy or sell his/her software while in the country. Countries can also sign extradiction treaties to enforce common laws. But if I do something which is legal in my country and then come to yours and follow your laws while there, you can kick me out but not arrest me.
I know someone will say that IP laws are different from making people wear a veil or stay away from a particular religion. But, just imagine you didn't grow up conditioned to the stuff. Then, one day someone tells you a story that you like very much. You are happy and share this story with your friends. Would you expect to end up in jail, even if that someone asked you not to repeat it?
Also, consider the Church of Scientology. If a country accepts their IP rights and prevents people from distributing scientology texts, isn't it a form of religious control? True, in US you will probably get some cease-and-desist warnings before you get arrested for practicing unlicensed scientology. And you might go to a nicer jail than in totalitarian countries. But now we are talking about methods, not principles.
Anyway, countries should just agree to only abuse their own citizens and just decide weather to let others in. In the meanwhile, I hope Adobe is carefully considering foreign laws and background of their employees before sending someone on a business trip. I hear preventing someone from backing up programs they bought is illegal in Russia.
They weren't in trouble because they had a product that was sold in Russia. They were in trouble because they sold the product in the U.S. With a major point being that they used servers owned by an American company. As with the recent court cases concerning whether Calif. courts have jurisdiction, that fact was important. Without the sales in the U.S., they could not have been tried.
"An acquaintance recently purchased the new Peter Gabriel CD. It played fine on her standard CD players, but would not play on her computer at work where she regularly listens to music to pass the tedium of her job. What did she do? She simply downloaded the files from the Net onto her PC and played that instead. The problem is she was still angry that the CD she bought was intentionally disabled, preventing her from using it as she wished. Do you know what she did next? She returned the CD. A perfect example of a dissatisfied consumer who (had) already committed to the purchase and was completely discouraged by the intentional hampering of the product. Scariest for the music industry was when I heard her angrily mutter these words..."I won't make that mistake again."" Did you hear that, RIAA? Your antics are really pissing off your customers! Oh wait - I forgot...you don't call them customers, do you? You call them thieves and pirates!
First of all, p2p is used for more then piracy. Its not the "sole intent" as many people like to pretend.
Those who use P2P for legal uses are fine. Those who use P2P for illegal uses are in trouble, it's a bad sign that there's more in the second category than the first.
Yes pirating occurs.. but so does drug running on our roads.. does that make it the 'sole intent'. No of course not.
The highways in the United States are used for legal activities that the government actually wants to occur far more often than drug running occurs. We do make an effort to arrest the drug dealers who use the highways that way. Besides, if the highways were being used by drug runners at the same percentage that illegal files are going over P2P, the government would likely have stopped maintaining the highways anyway.
Plus you are also not considering that waht you consider piracy only applies to YOUR country. many do not reconize copyrights, so its NOT, I repeat, NOT piracy there...
Check the list of countries that don't enforce the simple (non-DMCA-like) copyright laws, and you'll notice that they're mostly countries that have problems with human rights as well. Since you're capable of posting on Slashdot and are refering to copyright-lawless lands as "there" rather than "here", I assume you are not living in such a country. If you'd rather their set of laws for its copyright feature, be willing to accept the rest of the package.
Try to spread the truth, not biased lies desgined to skew public opinion.
A biased selection of facts designed to skew public opinion is what you practice.
Let's face it: What you want is a cheaper alternative to CDs. Why would record labels want to give up their highly profitable and legally established right to sell CDs at $17 a pop in order to collect pennies in royalties off some Internet service
What it'd take is some CD pubisher willing to publish good music for $5 per CD, and making up the difference with volume because they end up selling many more copies at that price. The CD as a format is cheap enough to make that each disc could be profitably sold for $5 each. There's no need for a cheaper distribution media.
The problem is, once this anti-RIAA label makes its splash with quality albums for $5 each, all of the RIAA labels will flood the market with their products for $5 each. The upstart will have a hard time competing with its only distingishing feature being duplicated by everybody else, and not having the same publicity machine advantage as the RIAA labels. When the anti-RIAA label is wiped out, the price will then methodically go back on a path back to $17. Therefore, anybody with the money to launch an anti-RIAA label has no real incentive to do so.
What I want to know is: why would they choose Kazaa as the number one winner?? That makes absolutely no sense. They talk about how great it is that they are profitable, and then in the same breath explain how they got that profitability: "by stuffing the app with adware, spyware, and most notoriously Brilliant Digital's Altnet, a distributed computing program covertly placed on users machines when KaZaa was downloaded." What is the author trying to do, promote such underhanded moneymaking techniques? When other developers and companies read this, they will undoubtedly make a connection. "How can we be more profitable? Well, Kazaa did it with adware, spyware, and lying to its customers." All those things should of course be mentioned, but in the Losers list, not the Winners. The adware, spyware, and covertly placed programs were the reason I never downloaded Kazaa, and never will. If Kazaa is going to be number one, they should be there because of the FastTrack network, which I think is wonderful. My vote would have gone to Kazaa Lite, which should definitely be up there on the list. It connects you to the FastTrack network without spying on you or lying to you.
Kazaa Lite is the real winner, not Kazaa.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.