Slashdot Mirror
NARAS vs. the RIAA
sdbrian writes "An all around excellent paper concerning the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) and their position with regard to the RIAA has been published on Salon.com. The author (John Snyder) quotes from many articles that have been discussed on here on Slashdot. One of Snyder's conclusions, "NARAS should take the lead in this matter. Those who are taking it now are leading us over a cliff. The RIAA has staked out an untenable position that is as unrealistic as it is anti-consumer and anti-artist.""
The phrase "Those who are taking it now are leading us over a cliff", gives a new meaning to the "Drag and Drop File Sharing"
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
...is money. They have never once cared about the artists, or the consumers. Copyrighting songs was about protecting their intellectual property, not protecting the artists themselves, and their work. Whether it was suing Napster, or price fixing, they've proved that ALL they care about is the almighty buck. No other group or organization has ever been this greedy. The very fact that they seem to lump every human being on earth, into a single category of people that steal music for free, is proof they have no idea what is going on in the real world, and will be going extinct very soon. They just are afraid to let go, even though they know it's going to be over for them eventually.
Defender of Microsoft and Communism!!!
It goes to figure that the artists themselves would have to take the official stance against the facist ways that the RIAA tends to take. Consumers, while holding the majority of the power, take very little action. The artists (whom started this in the first place, btw) need to take the proactive stance to create a fairer system.
I think there is some validity to this position, because there is no possible way to get rid of filesharing, since people will always find ways around blocks...That is the nature of the internet. I've seen many posts on slashdot, and I know that many people would prefer to buy very high quality (i.e. lossless, or 320kbits ogg or mp3) for a small fee. The transition period, as has been noted, is very difficult. Change is always difficult, and the shortsightedness of the RIAA has not helped them. They are obviously either opportunists or vagrants out to steal people's money. If they truly were real business managers, they would find a way to make the current reality work. You can't change reality to fit what you want. This has been shown throughout history (which is also why wars have been fought, ahem, French Revolution). I think it is very good that we don't have to resort to violence to solve this conflict anymore; it shows how far our society has evolved. Anyways, I hope they can figure something out, because I'm tired of 128kbits mp3s off p2p networks =P
If they keep pushing anticopy systems, they're locking, or better "setting a time bomb". Like Alexandria library, but centuries latter and with delayed fire. I hope in 200 years people will not point to us as the persons that left them unreadable culture. If it keeps going on, I know what new career will appear, Digital Art Restoration, with lots of classes about math, cryptography, and electronics, with the purpose of removing the "white paint that was put over the wall to hide the picture".
Makes a great point, as you give the public more options to choose from, you get more of the publics cash....
Maybe one day MPAA/RIAA will learn this...
NAAAAA it's easier to have congress protect them.
http://www.mises.org/fullarticle.asp?record=152&mo nth=5
There's a great article that speaks about mercantilism in an easy to read way. The entire time you'll be thinking "THIS is what the RIAA is about."
Wait one gosh darn minute there ... Don't the people who run the RIAA/MPAA own the copyrights to the stuff ... they're just looking to make sure they get every last sent out of someone elses work. Damn it and I thought they were trying to protect my intelectual property with all these strict copyright laws.
I think the artists (and no I don't mean britney) should take a stand ... and forget their old stuff and the souls they sold ... and move on and make some great new music they own the rights to ... I think the music industry needs to follow the book industry and be publishers, ONLY.
I'm tired of the MPAA/RIAA throwing billions of dollars to buy their laws, if they want to impress me they'd just shut the fuck up and lower the price of their shit.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
And thus we have an excellent illustration of the difference between the interests of certain capitalists and the usual meaning of capitalism, the free market. The copyright regime allows certain moneyed interests to pursue what is economically called "rent-seeking" behavior: the pursuit of legislation and legal precedent for private benefit, without regard for its effect on other people's property rights or personal liberties.
Increasingly, it should be obvious that the "intellectual property" approach -- the discussion of copyright as a kind of property rather than as a special privilege granted to advance a particular public good -- exists solely to make this rent-seeking seem legitimate. If copyright is "property", then temporal limits upon it seem absurd; after all, we do not have limits upon the amount of time any other property ownership remains valid.
However, copyright is not property. It is a privilege granted by government, which permits a certain party (the copyright holder) to forbid others from using their own actual and physical property (e.g. hard disks, CD blanks) for particular purposes, namely copying the covered works. This privilege may well be legitimate insofar as it serves the public benefit, by encouraging the production of original works. Yet perhaps it is not so legitimate, in a period of history when evidently many artists and creators will create high-quality works whilst disclaiming any such protection. I'm not sure.
However, either way, this "intellectual property" talk has to stop. It's just a sneaky way of slipping unfounded assumptions (namely, that copyright is like property) into the public discourse. Let's call property "property", and copyright "copyright" -- and rent-seeking "corruption".
NARAS is a more technical organization than RIAA, right? (More audio engineers, etc., than executives.) And regarding executives...
Record companies are not logical, righteous entities. They are ramshackle, profit-driven enterprises. They act in their perceived best interests, and they act ruthlessly and, in many cases, irrationally. The people who run them still have their e-mail printed out by their secretaries.
Did anyone else visualize Dilbert's PHB sitting at the desk of President of the RIAA? Scary and yet strangely compelling.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The meat of the argument is much better. Thomas Jefferson's belief in the free exchange of information (or ideas) to promote intellectual growth is what I have believed in since day one. Stifling the education process by prohibiting the utility of someone's ideas is not only detrimental to those who can't use the ideas, but also to those who hold claim to the ideas.
But at the same time, plagiarism is wrong. But why should utilizing others' discoveries be illegal if proper credit is given? I can't conceive any principle or moral factor that justifies that.
The problem with ideas, words, and anything related to the thought process is that they are intangible. They can not be proven to be the property of someone else, yet the patent office or whoever is in charge simply takes the first person to show up. Further more, any human mind is capable of innovative ideas that can benefit us all. What if it was my great-grandfather who originally came up with the Dr Pepper formula, but he didn't like the way it tasted so he discarded it, only for his neighbor to pick it up and start a company on it? Bad example, but it proves the point for me: it can not be proven that you're the one who worked to develop this idea or product, and it can not be morally justifiable to grant anyone the rights to prohibit the usage of such ideas simply based on the fact that they are the first to go public with it.
Information, ideas, innovation... All should be public and free to exchange. Prohibiting such exchange is prohibiting the advancement of the human mind and of the human race. We would be in much better shape if we did not have legal institutions in place for restricting our rights to apply our own thoughts.
It's a shame we can't moderate Salon articles... the author seriously deserves a +1 Insightful...
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
It's even worse - this isn't about intellectual property as we know it. This is about IP bought by large companies from small artists. So it's not intellectual property since it didn't come from their intellect but from their wallet. It's all just about money and stupid artists that really believe those large companies are going to do them any good while they only do a lot of good to a few and about nothing for the rest. Their marketing-machine (which is paid by the CD-buyers - the price of a CD is mainly for funding the marketing machine) is waaaaaay louder than that of smaller artists trying to do it by themselves and therefore these companies have by now replaced music with top40 and artists with stars. So I'll say it once again: don't buy CDs, don't watch MTV and if you're an artist: don't go to the big boys. They're crippling their own market.
Real artists don't mind if their work gets "stolen". They're proud it is so good people want to "steal" it.
0x or or snor perron?!
I'm tired of people (on both sides of the music sharing issue) trotting out the same rhetorical arguments all the time. There's nothing new here. Snyder's arguments about growth in other media don't prove his point; rather they show that the decline in record sales can't be blamed on the slowing economy. I believe I bought fewer CDs from major labels this year, not because I was downloading them from the internet, but because I wasn't interested in them. My money instead goes to new, independant artists (via CD Baby a fantastic way to buy music that doesn't make you feel like a criminal.)
I for one don't believe that we're going to (or that we should) do away with copyright. I just believe that the current music industry is going to be end-runned. I hope that we don't end up legislating it's continued existence. By that I don't mean that we should permit illegal file sharing, but that we shouldn't mandate a technological solution which only allows big media to create content.
-c
"If you are an idealist it doesn't matter what you do or what goes on around you, because it isn't real anyway."-R.P.W.
I read through the article, and it seems pretty clear that NARAS has decided to embrace P2P, file-sharing, and subscription models without DRM as the primary form of music distribution. One of the arguments he made was that it turned out to actually profit many artists, and among those he cited was Janis Ian.
/.ers are going to think "Yay, NARAS! Boo, RIAA!" after reading this. Are we looking at a power struggle?
So I found it very interesting that the link off the article to Janis Ian's Internet Debacle quotes NARAS as follows:
The NARAS people were a bit more pushy. They told me downloads were "destroying sales", "ruining the music industry", and "costing you money".
Looks like NARAS has done a 180. But if they previously didn't believe in what this article is arguing for, why do they believe it now? Is it really just because they think they have to adapt to the new model? Or are there other motives which we don't know about? After all, I bet a huge load of