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Lessig And RIAA Answer NewsHour Questions
Zeta writes "The answers are finally in! Stanford's Lawrence Lessig and the RIAA's Matt Oppenheim have responded to all the tough questions on copyrighted music, many from Slashdot readers, for the online part of the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Take a look - some of the responses may surprise you." We ran the original call for questions a few weeks back.
"just because a car is sitting idling and unlocked does not mean that you can get in it and drive it away for your own use"
The Riaa Guy
I'd let anyone make a perfect copy of my car and drive away with it if they'd like, I still have my car.
"B. The record industry has been hit very hard in the last few years as a result of illegal downloading and piracy.
In 2002, unit sales were down about 11 percent.
In 2001, unit sales were down about 10 percent.
In 2000, unit sales were down seven percent. "
No, you jackass! Your sales are down for other reasons.. not illegal downloading.
1) Only so many bands can look and sound identical, before people need only buy ONE album and pretend it is five different bands.
2) Music sucks.
3) CD's are overpriced for what you get.. when Rush used to put out albums, five or six songs were GOOD and the rest were OKAY.. now your pablum barfing force fed musicians are wont to put out one hit, on a record that Im payign 16 dollars for.
4) see #2
5) ITS THE ECONOMY STUPID!
Thank you.
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Haven't read it all so far, but this is just blaring...
Nobody is really "sharing" as we traditionally think of the term. Sharing involves lending something to somebody, and while it is on loan, the owner no longer has it. "Sharing" in the P2P context has become a euphemism for "copying." That copying is neither legal nor ethical.
So...why do they say copying music files is "stealing"? Nobody loses any physical property, nothing of monetary value, but yet "copying" is equal to "stealing" in their minds...
From an ethical perspective, when individuals engage in illegal copying, they are taking money out of the pockets of all of the people who have put their hard work into making the music
Yeah, and from an ethical perspective suing a student for creating a search engine and letting him go for merely all he's worth is just dandy.
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
So, this guy's saying that we should let everything stand for a few years, and then all of a sudden companies are going to make things _less_ restrictive? No offense, but I'm not holding my breath. I wouldn't trust the major labels to do that for a second, much less years. If we let it go until then, the DMCA/UCITA-type laws will be firmly entrenched and fair use will have disappeared entirely in digital media. Anyone else want to wait for that to happen?
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One industry you don't hear complaining about P2P sharing is the porn industry. Needless to say, you can get more videos and pics on file sharing networks, etc, than you can shake a stick at (not to mention posting on newsgroups). What's their stand on file sharing? It seems like they really could care less.
The RIAA is desperate because bands that used to make good records can't make any more. Why? Well, because:
1) they may not have been that talented in the first place, and/or
2) it's hard to be that inspired when you got 5 million bucks in your pocket.
Ever seen 5 million bucks? Most people, one they get that kinda money, go one of 2 ways:
1) they get super-greedy, and try to just make super-popular records, which flops hard at some point.
2) they just say "ok, i'm done" and that's it. The RIAA needs to realize that people are gonna listen to the music one way or another if 1) you can't hear it on the radio, and 2) the band's new stuff blows, or 3) if they want to hear something to see if the band's new record blows, which it most likely does. STILL, did Eminem go platinum? Yes. RECORDS ARE STILL SELLING IF THE MATERIAL IS ALL THAT GOOD/POPULAR! People really don't want the hassle of the internet, unless the material is hard to find elsewhere, i.e. at stores, or if they are unsure of the quality of the material, etc. DUH.
stuff |
It seems to me that one of the big reasons for people buying fewer cds is that they have become a major pain in the ass. Why should I go spend $20 on a cd when i'm I can't even play it in my computer, nor am I sure it will play in my car cd player. But that argument aside, my friends and I simply paid for a lot more cd's when it was easier to copy them. We would basically each go out and buy a cd or two a month, and burn copies for everyone who did this, and we ended up getting 6 or 8 cds. If the cd was really good then we probably all ended up buying it. Now it's a pain in the ass and you can't always do that anymore, so we think "eh whats the point" and just download off kazaa. In the end we as a group purchaced fewer cds.
This is really a moot point anyway, because as many people have said before, music sucks.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
"If the RIAA wants us to listen to music the way we want, why don't they let us GIVE THEM MONEY for things like music downloads or at least some sort of "approved" form of media other than $25 CDs that we can listen to however and wherever we wish?"
You mean like Apple iTunes, and what Microsoft's coming up with?
Yes radio sucks, yes many riaa bands suck but there are definitely work arounds. I've bought more music in the last few months than I have in a really long time (mostly stuff from metropolis/different drum/emperor norton/spv and some european equivalents). Shoutcast has been a godsend for those of me , I buy records but the kids who run the radio stations on shoutcast provide a great way of discovering new music. Need decent non-riaa music for your car, leave a few shoutcast streams on overnight and rip to cd/rw while you shower and play it on your mp3 cd car player. Use opennap/gnutella/shoutcast whatever to find your new music but if you LIKE the ARTISTS and BUY THE MUSIC! Most of the smaller labels need you to do this to survive. I honestly don't think the smaller bands care if you've discovered them by browsing some kids opennap file share becase some friend of yours told you about some new ebm band called "brudershaft" and you want to know what the hype is all about. But listen to it, if you think damn this rocks, this shit should be on the radio, buy it, it wakes the radio stations up, it gets the peoples making all the cool new music the recognition they actually deserve and it'll make the radio stations not suck so hard.
-blo
I was loathe to read the RIAA response since its a given that the RIAA representative will lie like a spammer. But I was drawn to it anyway.
Every time the DMCA was brought up the RIAA guy said it was just fine because it promotes innovation, rental models, blah blah blah. And that there's that copyright office exemption thing that comes up every few years.
Of course, what he didn't mention is
1) The exemption doesn't do a damn thing for devices. Sure, you can break the copy protection mechanism... just don't build a device to do it.
2) The RIAA will lobby $trenuously against any proposed exemption which affects them.
Anyone else notice that when you surf the net for music files, you're messing with their intellectual property -- but when THEY surf the net looking for music files (and finding stuff which doesn't belong to them) it's not about property?
Matt Oppenheim (from the RIAA): Intellectual property should not be treated any differently than other property. Unless you buy it, you should not copy it for your own use.
Umm, the whole point of intellectual property is that it is treated differently than other property. If you buy something, absent copyright or patent law, you can copy it.
If intellectual property shouldn't be treated any differently from other property, why can't I take it apart and examine it without violating the DMCA? If they are to be treated the same, why can't I charge an admission fee to show it to my friends? After all, I could do that with my brand new Porshe, right?
The RIAA rep shot their entire propoganda campaign in the foot with this gem:
So, according to this guy, "sharing" only takes place when the lender doesn't have the shared book/CD/whatever available for their use. If the lender retains a copy, or the original, then it's not, "sharing," but, "copying."
However, the RIAA -- and, to be fair, just about every other intellectual "property" advocate -- often refer to unsanctioned copying as, "stealing."
Except... Wait a minute. Isn't stealing where you take a thing from someone such that, as the RIAA guys said, "the owner no longer has it?" Indeed, isn't the primary distinction between lending and stealing the consent of the owner?
So if, because the owner retains a copy, it's therefore not sharing, then how can they possibly make the argument in the same breath that's it is stealing?
Answer: They can't. They're trying to have it both ways. It's not stealing, it's copying, a distinct activity.
There's little question that it's illegal -- the lobbying dollars of the RIAA and like organizations have ensured this. Whether or not it's ethical is a question that is still being discussed, and is by no means a closed subject.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
I am sick and tired of people comparing the sharing of music and movies as the same shoplifting or stealing a car. This is a ridiculous analogy on many levels, but my main gripe is with one level in particular: if you steal a shirt from a store, that store has suffered an actual financial loss. When someone downloads a music album from somebody else, the record company doesn't suffer direct financial loss to the same degree as if the product were physical merchandise that couldn't be digitally replicated. The record companies may suffer an "opportunity loss," if indeed that person would have purchased that album anyway (lots of people download music that they would never have spent $15/disc for), but that's not the same thing as losing the production cost and the opportunity cost.
The marginal cost of production for music, movies, software, and other intangible property is almost zero, and it's about time people took this into account before coming up with absurdly misleading analogies.
And when I buy it, I should be able to copy it for my own personal use, in the device of my choosing, and not encounter crippling technologies that prevent me from doing so.
I pay property tax.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
Did anyone else besides me stop reading what Matt Oppenheim had written in response to these questions?
.05% of copyright holders!"
He should have just said:
"While lobbying for insane copyright extensions, suing kids, and whining about not milking that extra billion from teenagers over the last three years is generally not in the best interests of the public at large, it sure is helping us flog the last few drops out of a dying cow for benefit of the interested
And left me some time to read Lessig's well
thought out, poignant, and meaningful answers.
NMG
There's a difference, you are providing content on a public web server. This is obviously intended to be viewed if you haven't taken steps to prevent people from viewing it (password protection or a notice outlining the rights they have to access the material). The MP3 has been taken from a CD which has stated its' copyright claims, however the copyright notice has been 'removed' by the time you 'find' the MP3.
From Matt Oppenheim's comments:
On the Internet however, it is extremely easy to download and the audio quality is near CD. Millions of people now mistakenly believe it is legal. The RIAA, among others, has been trying to educate people that downloading recordings from unauthorized services on the Internet is, in fact, illegal.
Millions mistakenly believe it's legal? Do they really believe this, or is it just a good line? The truth is that pretty much everybody knows that downloading copyrighted music is illegal, and pretty much everybody figures it falls into somewhat the same category as driving five miles per hour over the posted speed limit, except that maybe speeding is a little worse, since it can actually hurt someone.
The RIAA isn't trying to convince people it's illegal; they're trying to scare people that they're going to go to jail or be hit with fines that are completely out of proportion to the offense.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Appropriate term. At least their own unique expression of art is slowly dying while they wait to have the chance for an audience. Not that this is the RIAA's fault totally - as any good conglomeration of companies, they merely react to perceptions about public interest, and perceptions about expectation of income. They have no place for promoting art in general, or offering a forum for untested or less-than-totally-popular art.
It's just sad that this indirectly puts them as such odds against any art that is not generating income for them.
Ryan Fenton
The main difference between these two:
Lawrence Lessig:
"The DMCA is an embarrassment to copyright law. Copyright law has always been about balance -- about the balance between restrictions and access.
The Constitution expresses that balance: it requires that copyrights be for "limited Times;" the First Amendment requires that copyright yields to "fair use." "
Matt Oppenheim:
"If you are attempting to distribute recordings that you own the rights to and the RIAA is in any way preventing you from doing so, you should contact us immediately."
Note how Lawrence Lessig focuses on balance, while Matt Oppenheim focuses on saying what consumers are allowed to do. (Lessig does not explicitly refer to people at "citizens," but Oppenheim does at least once refer to individuals as "consumers.") This shows their respective trains of thinking quite well.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
IANAL
The propaganda term "Intellectual Property" is a creative fiction designed to confuse two separate types of limited control granted by government.
1. Patents - A limited monopoly over the commercial implementation and distribution of a novel concept IN A PRODUCT. Patents represent a trade-off to encourage open distribution of the concept after the limited term of the patent. Note that a patent doesn't prevent someone from using a concept for their own use.
2. Copyright - A time limited monopoly over the commercial distribution of an authored work. The term is limited and this is traded by the government to encourage the creation of a large public domain. Note that this is intended to prevent PUBLISHERS from making money off of other publishers works.
Note that in both cases the primary motivation is creation of goods for the public.
The fiction is that it isn't property at all... it's a time limited grant of monopoly, and it's meant to expire. Property is a durable item, not a lease.
</ANTIPROPAGANDA>
Sales are down over the last two years not due
to lost opportunities as a result of file sharing,
they are down due to the fact that CD TECHNOLOGY
HAS BEEN SURPASSED by magnetic media.
News flash: LP sales are down every year since
1990. You know why? Because CDs replaced them.
Well guess what? CDs are now yesterday's
technology... I can't fathom spending money to
buy a physical medium that's more difficult to
transport, less durable, skips, can't record,
etc. etc. etc. The combination of computer
digital media management plus affordable
portable digital music players have made CDs
OBSOLETE.
Jeesh. Wake up RIAA.
-Pez
Quite true, but I think you're missing his point, which was that although the technology may be getting cheaper, it is becoming increasingly more costly to produce good content (he was just plain bullshitting about distribution) in the sense that finding good artists these days is harder, and movies and games have skyrocketing budgets. All of these factors add up to make it more expensive for content producers.
There is one difference that echoes throughout the responses that both give to each and every question. At every turn, Professor Lessig gives deference to the needs and rights of the Artists and the Recording Industry in an attempt to find middle ground. At the same time, Mr. Oppenheim only recognizes the rights of the companies he represents, completely forgetting the concept of fair-use rights and the necessity of the public domain.
-R
The problem is that copyright is essentially unenforcible. Unless the people enforce copyright on themselves, you can't do it for them. Why do people enforce copyright? Because it's seen to be *fair*. You make something, you get to own it for a while, after that it goes into the public domain.
That's what's missing here. There is no "goes into the public domain." People are individually and unilaterally repealing copyright law, because it's not a fair law anymore. The people who make something never have to share it. That's not fair, because so much of what the creators do is stolen from the public domain (like all of Disney's plots), and just about every jazz riff.
If you're interested in the law, go read Bastiat's _The Law_. It will explain how a law is seen to be fair.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
That being said, it would be interesting to see these two discuss issues with each other, rather then answering questions and not interacting with the other side.
Debates between two intelligent people like this are a relatively straightforward way of determining which argument holds up and which one was contrived for the sole purpose of masking another intent.
...and am not merely licensing it!
The only issue would be if you decided you wanted to download somebody else's copy of John Denver's Greatest Hits (which was likely from a CD, and a much higher audio quality).
Just as you would not go into a video store and steal a DVD copy of Star Wars and claim that you should be permitted to do that because you own the VHS version, you cannot download somebody else's copy of a recording.
If they were licensing the song/or whatever to me, they shouldn't care where I got it, as long as I have a license. This says to me that they are selling me the copy, to do with as I see fit.
You're using her as bait, Master!
Now, copyright infringment is illegal. Fine. But in 5 short years P2P services have gone from brand new to being used by double-digit percentages of the entire population of this country. A hundred million people may not be right, but you can't simply tell them they're wrong and throw the lot of them in prison. If a law is being ignored by nearly everyone, it says more about the law than the people breaking it.
Dyolf Knip
Let's examine several of Oppenheim's outright lies or dodges:
Sharing involves lending something to somebody, and while it is on loan, the owner no longer has it.
The question is, would he then support a virtual library of music, which purchases music/etc at bulk price and so many copies of it, and if it has 3 copies of song X, it allows 3 people to listen to song X from it's server at a time? The answer, I think, will be no, which would make him a fucking hypocrite.
when individuals engage in illegal copying, they are taking money out of the pockets of all of the people who have put their hard work into making the music
Nope, wrong. There's nothign that says the individual who downloaded a song for free would have blown away several bucks to get that song on a CD. So his statement is incorrect.
AMEN!!, [in response to Lessig's statement that although the sharing of copyrighted files is illegal under current law, technology can not be made illegal if it has substantial noninfringing uses]
I must admit, I was at first pleased upon reading this response from Oppenheim. However, if Oppenheim -- who is representing the RIAA -- really believed that, then the RIAA wouldn't be trying to stop P2P developers and shut down P2P networks, or destroy these networks by flooding them with crap.
There are quite a few ways that these technologies can incorporate safeguards to prevent copyright infringement.
What Oppenheim conveniently leaves out is that it is almost inherent that any technology that filter's out infringing use will also filter out non-infringing use. Computer's cannot determine whether or not something is infringing copyright. Sometimes judges can't even determine that. Any technology which very efficiently prevents copyright violations on P2P networks will very severely eliminate legitimate uses.
The DMCA Anti-Circumvention provision is not intended to stifle technological innovation.
Intent is irrelevant. It already has stiffled innovation and free speech.
All that aside, the DMCA Anti-Circumvention provision has specific provisions built into it that exempts true scientific research.
Which obviously weren't good enough. See Felton.
every three years, the United States Copyright Office reviews whether specific exemptions need to be added to the DMCA to address this issue.
In case Oppenheimer doesn't know, the scientific community doesn't operate on a 3-year basis. There is extremely rapid turnover in the scientific community. Current knowledge today will be old knowledge a week from now. 3 years is a long time to slow down science.
The goal of copy protection in CDs is not to prevent individuals from making copies that they want to make for personal use, but rather to prevent individuals from distributing the recordings or making copies they don't have a right to make...Many copy-protection technologies include on a CD a second copy of the album in compressed form ready for transfer to an owner's computer
Never-the-less, the DMCA allows copyright holders to effectively circumvent fair use. It allows them to prevent something from ever being public domain (in addition to their bribery of Congress to retroactively extend copyright laws...fucking crooks). Simply allowing such an atrocity is inexecuseable.
irresponsible copyright holder makes a mistake, the DMCA has a process built into it for counter-notifications to be made in which an individual can dispute a take down notice.
This is Oppenheimer's response to the cease&desist questions. For the most part, I found his response here reasonable, but this is a half-truthed statement.
The DMCA may have such a process in it, but that's irrelevant. ISP's will automatically take down the sites of anyone accused of infringement, and they have to counter-claim etc to revoke that (because ISP's aren't liable if they do such). This is a bad
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
I think discretionary income that people would normaly use to buy music is getting spread out in the music industry. Due mainly to the quick easy access to new artist.
It wasn't too long ago that RIAA would beg radio stations to play their artists of choice (top 40 anybody). Heck, they probably still do beg and pay kickbacks too. Remember when that was a scandal? They weren't too concerned about copying back then.
But radio airtime is a finite period to a finite audiance. While P2P sharing of music is a infinite period to an infinite audiance. (I use infinite quite loose here) I'm sure that back then, as it is now, it was cheaper to promote a big artist to concentrate in a few products rather then promote alot of artists across the board.
Now, with the P2P method of distributing music, I theorize that peoples tastes are diverging because of the easy access to non-mainstream music or even just older music. THey have more choice now and they are taking it. While tastes are diverging, the RIAA and the Industry still hasn't "got it". They still use thier old models in trying to promote a few stars. Look at the all the recent flops and huge contract dumps in the past few years.
They cannot control the tastes of music listeners anymore and their tastes are diverging. Making it more and more expensive for the Industry deliver. It will get worse before it gets better (read somebody in the industry comes in with new ideas). They are still trying to sell 10 million records of one artist, while what they really need to be doing is concentrating a couple of hundred thousand records each from a bunch of artists.
When you buy a CD, you should feel free to copy it for your own use.
- Matt Oppenheim, RIAA
I'd love to, except that some nefarious individual seems to have "copy protected" some of my CDs.
So by that logic, the inventor of the automobile stole the livelihood of all the buggy makers, horseshoe making blacksmiths, and so forth.
This is the logic of those that think that just because they found something useful to do and are making money off it now, everyone else therefore has an obligation to avoid doing anything that will make what they're doing less useful, and therefore less lucrative, in the future. It's the logic of entitlement, of protectionism, of the Luddites and all their kin.
The record companies once performed a valuable service. They got paid for it. When technology changes so that service isn't so valuable anymore, they should adapt and change so they continue to offer value and earn money. Instead, they try to turn back the progress of technology via legislation. They seem to believe that, having once provided value, they are now entitled to be paid in perpetuity, without earning it.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
If you're going to sue me for damages for my mp3 collection, it assumes that they lost the money I would have spent on the product. This is faulty logic if i never had any intent on buying their product. 3 scenarios:
1.If I like the song (and others on the album), I'll go and buy it. Thus, they've suffered no lost
2. I don't like the song very much after all or the rest of the album is bad. I'm not going to buy it. My actions don't result in a loss because I don't buy CDs based on one song on the radio to begin with.
3. I have zero intention or have zero ability to purchase the album. Maybe it's a joke song. Maybe its a crappy song I'm downloading to irritate my roomate. Maybe it is something out of print or not offered by any retailers I have access too. There was never an anticipation of the RIAA getting any profit from me, so my download has no net effect.
Now I don't exactly think this arguemnt will stand up in court or anything. The RIAA has purchased enough laws to prosecute anybody they want. But the fact of the matter, which is made very clear by the RIAA goon's statement, is that the RIAA just doesn't get it. They've stifled the public's ability to get a variety of music for so long and now the dam has burst and they're drowning. People like to hear music. It makes us happy, sad, romantic, nostalgic, etc. But when you charge people inflated prices for little discs, raise concert prices above the $100 mark, homogonize the radio, and protest at the slightest attempt at competition, people are bound to turn on you at some point. The fact that they still haven't figured that out is a testament to how screwed up the industry is.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
Why should I care about the "value" of my car, if I can still drive it to where I please?
Anyway, it's a bad analogy since not everyone can make a car, and cars cost a lot to produce instead of being easily replicable.
Anyone can sing or play an instrument. Even if you sing poorly odds are that you can improve with some training.
If we dump the RIAA and its megacorp labels, and instead we sit back and let the Internet's enormous potential do its magic, the end result would be the same.
I think that if a musician is truly great and people love what he does they would have no problem sending him a dollar through paypal.
Multiply this by the billions of Internet users worldwide and what you get is that it suddenly becomes feasible to make a living as an artist without needing any major labels.
Added bonus, you get less exposure to annoyingly talentless manufactured pop stars that never make it to their second CD, and more exposure to the kind of music that you love.
Of course it doesnt have to be entirely voluntary. Highly successful singers could very well demand a fee before letting ppl listen to their new album.
It's a little ironic to think that musicians can live off the same one-hit-wonder for the rest of their natural lives, while a scientist could invent some sort of miracle device that does untold amounts of good for the entire human race (like, say, a lightbulb), as opposed to the artist, who only does good for his fans, can only live off of it for 17 years. Wow, nice priorities, there.
Sharing involves lending something to somebody, and while it is on loan, the owner no longer has it. "Sharing" in the P2P context has become a euphemism for "copying." That copying is neither legal nor ethical
and then From an ethical perspective, when individuals engage in illegal copying, they are taking money out of the pockets of all of the people who have put their hard work into making the music...
Yet using the same logic, reading a book checked out from the library would be just as unethical since you are "taking money out of the pockets..."
Those companies (including Pressplay, Rhapsody, Listen, etc.) are delivering to consumers high quality music online in a format and form that consumers have demanded.
Actually, a quick look at the subscription numbers of those services shows quite well how that is simply not true. Consumers have not demanded a crippled product that disallows most of the abilities they want.
The goal of copy protection in CDs is not to prevent individuals from making copies that they want to make for personal use, but rather to prevent individuals from distributing the recordings or making copies they don't have a right to make.
Yet it seems they have not discovered the magic way of discerning between those two, so will happily prevent both.
The record industry has been hit very hard in the last few years as a result of illegal downloading and piracy.
In 2002, unit sales were down about 11 percent.
In 2001, unit sales were down about 10 percent.
In 2000, unit sales were down seven percent.
During that same period, illegal Internet downloading has skyrocketed. On the FastTrack network alone, there are about 900 million files being distributed at any given moment. The majority of those files are music files. Polls confirm that those individuals who are downloading illegally online are buying less. That illegal downloading is decreasing sales is probably not a surprise to anyone.
Such a common, simple, wrong assumption at work here. A decrease in sales and an increase in music downloading have *not* been shown to be related. The economy as a whole has been hit very hard in the last few years. In fact, studies have suggested this effect can explain nearly all of the riaa members' decreased sales. It is handy to have a scape-goat, but as usual, the scape-goat is likely not the problem at all.
In any event, are you suggesting that a royalty dispute between an artist and a label is justification for stealing from both of them? Would you feel free to shoplift a CD from a record store based on that logic?
Hm, I wonder, is it ok to steal from a thief. You could just as easily frame it as 'how dare you steal my stolen goods!'
Given the increased cost to produce and distribute copyrighted works, Congress has tried to keep pace with what it has believed is necessary to continue to incentivize creators and publishers
Increased cost? That seems to be backwards, progress has decreased the barrier not increased it. As for the second clause, bullshit. Congress has bowed to corporate lobbying. You can't honestly say with a straight face that any person needs life+70years' worth of fiduciary recovery as incentive.
Just as you would not go into a video store and steal a DVD copy of Star Wars and claim that you should be permitted to do that because you own the VHS version, you cannot download somebody else's copy of a recording
Again, apples and oranges. Stealing a DVD is depriving ownership of an object, Copying a song is depriving no one of ownership.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
If you are a car dealer, you're done for
Exactly, yet if you are an original car maker, then you are still in business.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
RIAA: "Intellectual property should not be treated any differently than other property." Yeah, but it *is* different than other property. Duh. Why are we having these discussions over and over? If they keep telling us this they hope we will finally believe it. Those claiming ownership of that which cannot be contained run to the regulatory agencies in hope of enforcing their position. They will win only if we give in to them. Let's back legislation that allows for *reasonable* profits and open access. Who decides what that means? We all do. I'm done.
The music industry loves to draw the analogy between stealing tangible products (shoplifting a CD, etc.) and making copies of intangible products that leave the original untouched, and of course they use the term "theft" to describe making those copies. For those who would mindlessly nod their heads and mumble about how correct this analogy must be, a simple definition of "theft" puts the lie to it:
(emphasis mine)
I'm not saying that making copies is not a violation of our woefully-imbalanced copyright laws, because in many cases it is a violation of the law (i.e., when no permission from the copyright owner exists, whether on an individual or advance license basis). But the "shoplifting" analogy should immediately result in derisive laughter until the person presenting it is silenced and never brings it up again.
Just my humble opinion, of course. :-)
No Laughing Allowed!
I've suggested this before. I think that one factor contributing to the suck of music is record label contracts. They have gotten progressively more onerous as time goes on. Bands have to keep making music with each other, album after contracted album, until the contract plays out. Anyone who's done any serious creative work knows that you can't keep doing the same shit over and over.
People keep saying "all the bands suck" but this is clearly not true, because all these bands have hits that you've heard and liked at some point. They just can't sustain that creative energy.. they hit a configuration of art and artists that work for one song, or maybe one album, and based on that they are enslaved into a contract and forced to churn out crap for the rest of their lives.
Bands, like any creative labor, need to try different material to keep the quality of work high. They can even go back to their original stuff after a while, but to keep that engine turning they need to prime it with other sources of creative energy.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Property is physical. It can be destroyed. It can be damaged. If stolen, the rightful owner no longer possesses that property. These rules do not apply to ideas. If someone has an idea, and someone else gets the same idea, the latter has not deprived the former of their thought.
We are (were?) on the precipice of a new era -- the end, or moderation, of scarcity -- information, education, knowlege, and culture all widely shareable, across great distances, cheaper than any other time in history.
What have we done with with our newfound resources? We've created artificial scarecity! We've invented whole new concepts, laws, and systems to contain the ethereal, replacing it with tired Machiavellian rules.
"Hey Albert, Good luck exploring the infinite abyss."
"Networks like Kazaa, Gnutella, iMesh, Grokster and Morpheus, among others, are encouraging and helping individuals to distribute perfect digital copies of music to millions of strangers simultaneously. "
Rubbish. Hardly anyone shares FLACs, WAVs or SHNs of commercial recordings - they're mostly MP3s, which are hardly "perfect digital copies".
"Nobody is really "sharing" as we traditionally think of the term. Sharing involves lending something to somebody, and while it is on loan, the owner no longer has it. "Sharing" in the P2P context has become a euphemism for "copying.""
This definition of "sharing" is utterly flawed.
For one, sharing is not as simple as this guy is tring to claim.
Sure, sharing can be lending your friend a car.
But sharing is giving a recipe to a friend to copy. Or music for that matter
Having fully read the article and read a number of the replies I'm quite amazed at how many people seem to think it is ok to download music, that they are doing no wrong. This idea that because something exists in a digital rather than a physical form means that by copying it you are not harming the industry is crazy. Imagine you are an aspiring writer and you've written a book in the hope you can quit your job to pursue your dream. Now imagine someone got a copy of that book and distributed it online and everyone read it, no one paid for it, and you still had to work in your crappy job. Sure the money is not the main motivation for an artist, but in our society when we find someone with talent we don't mind paying them (often greatly) so that they can enrich and entertain our lives. Someone else can pack groceries. If you think an album is over priced or a musician is untalented then don't buy it. But don't download it and claim some moral high ground. Yes the RIAA is rich and powerful, but that doesn't make stealing from them is right. Granted the DMCA goes too far, but using Kazaa all the time won't change that. You can pedantically pick apart some of Matt Openheim's sentences out of context all you like, but if you're listening to music, or watching a movie that you haven't paid for, how can you say with honesty that you are helping and supporting an industry? Peer to peer technology is great and can be used for legitimate reasons. Let's not be naive though, it's main use is for piracy.
This does bring up a very interesting point.
Imagine, for a moment, if the idea of the free, perfect copy applied to the physical world. Imagine that there existed a box which costs a few thousand dollars, that can make a flawless copy of any physical object you hook it up to. Imagine the untold bounty and wealth that humanity could experience if such a thing were real! Is keeping a few auto manufacturers, home appliance makers, etc. in business really a good reason for restricting the use of such a thing? Of course not! It would be ridiculous.
Sadly we can only duplicate digital works. But is keeping a few aging digital media companies in business really a good reason for restricting the untold bounty and wealth of media that computers and the internet bring?
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"The DMCA Anti-Circumvention provision is not intended to stifle technological innovation"
Just like the Gatling Gun was meant to end wars quicker, not make the murder of huge numbers of people fast and efficient.
So what with intentions; It sure as hell IS stifling innovation, no matter what you say (See kid who wrote search tool, lost life's savings to RIAA). That it (supposedly) isn't meant to stifle innovation, but can, doesn't matter to large corporations that are so consumed by moneylust that they will do anything to turn a profit.
Maybe people should stop trying to make a living producing things that can't reasonably be sold for profit.
There is no fundamental right to be able to earn a living by making music. People used to be able to. But if technology is now destroying that ability, so be it! Nobody these days makes a living manufacturing vacuum tubes or writing letters for people who never learned to read.
Unlike physical property, "intellectual" property is a total fiction of law. If technology makes that fiction untenable, perhaps it should be rethought. If rethinking it destroys the lifestyle of people who are relying on music to feed themselves, well, shit happens. Lots of people have to change their lives, change how they make a living, all the time for much less important reasons.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
In spite of being pretty young, the only music I can stand was made, generally speaking, thirty years ago and released on LPs. By any reasonable, useful interpretation of the concept of intellectual property, this music should be in the public domain by now and free for the taking. John Lennon is dead. Jimi Hendrix is dead. EMI and Parlophone making $14.50 off my CD purchase is not going to encourage them to make any more records. Intellectual property, to start with, is a fiction; back in the day some guys figured out that if they gave authors an artificial monopoly on their works for a limited amount of time, they would write more. There's nothing inherent to the rights of man about IP; it isn't even property so much as a promise by the government to break people's legs if they don't pay up. So I have absolutely no qualms about downloading Revolver off Kazaa; the artists got their incentive and are now filthy rich (or dead), and any royalties Yoko is getting now are a perversion of a system that was borderline extortion anyway. I'm a law-abiding citizen in every respect except this one, and if I ever get caught on it I'll tell the judge the truth: that I can only be pushed around by major corporations so far, and that I really couldn't give a damn anymore.
" Maybe people should stop trying to make a living producing things that can't reasonably be sold for profit.
There is no fundamental right to be able to earn a living by making music. "
I'm glad you said this. Now you and your fellow geeks please keep it in mind as your jobs are shipped to india [correction:vietnam], and you're on the bread line. Shhh.
"Unlike physical property[1], "intellectual" property is a total fiction of law."
If you want to get technical society is a fiction of law. Remember not all laws come in books.
[1] Actually some Indian tribes would disagree with you about the idea of a person owning the land.
You could "own" what you produced, or what others agreed to exchange with you.
" No, you're wrong. An artist can not exert that kind of a control over their work. They would have to trespass to break into my house and hear me singing the song in the shower."
What if you were singing in the street? What if you were singing in the park?
The fact is that it's illegal for you to sing an artists song. If anybody heard you singing that is a performance and you owe the record company money. Sure if you are singing in the shower the police would have to break in but if you are singing in the street they don't have to.
You can make all kinds of speculations about whether they would arrest you or not but that does not change the fact that what you are doing is illegal. I remember a time when the cops would never arrest you for smoking a joint, in fact one time a friend of mine got pulled over with a bag of dope and a bong the cops just confiscated his stash and let him go. These days the cops would throw you in jail and confiscate your car. The laws that are not being enforced to day could be enforced with a zero tolerance in the future.
War is necrophilia.
no he has a license to the CONTENT of the 8 track edition.
He has a license to the content of the 8-track version, which includes all the noise of the 8-track version. He does not have a license to the extra bits of dynamic range included on the CD version.
And if you bought T2 on VHS, you should be entitled to reencode it and record it on DVD
Exactly. You have a license to the content of your VHS tape, but you don't have a license to the extra bits of dynamic range included on the DVD version.
The RIAA representative's position may look like cow manure to some readers, but I think I know where he's coming from.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You probbably also noticed that tiny distinction that Lessig made:
But that's probably obvious... (It was so blatantly obvious, lieing directly under my nose, that I for once couldn't think of it :)
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Unfortunately for the RIAA, producing music is not that hard and no longer requires millions of dollars in equipment.
You mean recording music has become easy and relatively inexpensive. This is correct.
But before a song can be recorded, it has to be written first. Writing original music without accidentally stepping on somebody else's copyright (e.g. "My Sweet Lord" by Harrison) seems nearly impossible, and I can mathematically prove it if you want.
Given that the RIAA contributes virtually zero to the music production process
The RIAA is an association of record labels, and I think of record labels as venture capitalists who invest in recording artists (advance) in hope of gaining a return (label's share of royalties). Just as with traditional VCs, many of a label's investments fail to recoup.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Maybe the goals of humanity would change, away from money and greed ?
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
Thank you. If musicians (with business sense) ran the business, consumer costs would probably be limited to equipment, maintinence, delivery and related costs, with enough profit margins to keep up with technology. This way the musicians can concentrate on making their music and fans still have easy access to it.
Do not make yourself sound stupid by insisting that expensive equipent and studios are needed to make good music. They are not.
A little close there. While none of that is needed for the music part of it, high quality equipiment is needed to make good *recordings* of music. Recordings, whatever format or legal grounds, are great ways of letting people hear new things.
Veering off to left field...
As a musician, I see no need to make money from my work. It would help, and I'd probably be able to focus on it more if money came back from it, but it is nowhere near nessecary. IMO, real artists are willing to do whatever it takes to make their creations. Work two jobs for studio time, eat nothing but ramen noodles for a month to buy a new instrument, still creating new works in their free time. whatever. Music first, money later.
Scratch that, it applies to every creative endeavour I've seen. Art first, money later.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
Once again, the News Hour shows that they can present television news like no one else. Consistently, this program provides in-depth analysis of issues that get, at best, a 30 second report with useless graphics and video on other televised sources. Of course, for this, Jim Lehrer and Co. are rewarded with terminally low ratings. Thankfully, PBS accepts these low ratings as the payoff for integrity and thoroughness.
It is ironic that, in order to get a thorough and relatively unbiased presentation of the day's stories, one turns to a program partially funded by the US govt. Say what you will about whether there ought to be public television or not, a point which is obviously controversial. Whatever one's philosophical analysis says, at least PBS (and NPR, too) provide a valuable service in presenting news in greater depth (and with less dumbing-down) than can be found in any commercial enterprise.
Phiwum's law: anyone that names an obvious law after himself and then puts it in his own sig is just pathetic.
Hydrogen fuel cells allow us to do what you talk about right now. Essentially they'd run on air itself, the energy produced from the air turning into water and back into air again provides almost unlimited energy.
We also have thermonuclear fusion, which provides almost unlimited energy as well, but its not as safe or easy to use in its current form. We also have organic energy sources, which provide energy.
The problem is not energy, the problem is will, our big businesses dont think its profitable for them to build tons of robots and give us cheap energy.
The world would change if we developed robots and had them do harvesting and other jobs, suddenly free food, water, etc could be provided. This wont happen at least not in Capitalist countries, perhaps it will happen in China.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
True, but on the other hand I'm afraid it would be a bad thing for innovation. Who will be motivated enough to put lots of time, effort and money in developing new stuff, if they know they won't ever sell more than a few items?
This is the same argument the RI** uses: if no one thought they could get rich, they wouldn't bother making music/movies. That's demonstrably crap. There have been musicians and entertainers as long as there have been humans. Why would that change, just because we got rid of the outdated, bloated overlords of entertainment? It's not the artists these guys are afraid of losing. It's the executives.
http://xkcd.com/386/
In the US there is. It's in the Constitution.
No, it's not. It's an unfortunate and political renomenclature for what is collectively known as copyrights and patents, which as I mentioned above are provided for in the Constitution. To be sure, there are people who are looking to redefine the terms so that intellectual works are protected as strongly as physical property, and they're at odds with the Constitution and will ultimately fail if the system works, but your assertion that there is no right to make a living from creative works is on its face wrong as a point of law. People are not entitled to make a living producing things that other people don't want to buy (e.g. vacuum tubes) but they are entitled to a limited (in time and in terms) monopoly on their creative works.
Technology that makes it possible to duplicate and distribute those works cheaply does not invalidate that protection, it just makes breaking copyright laws easier. I'm generally not one for making the kind of specious analogies employed by the RIAA, but I think in this case your extremist position warrants one: Machine guns make it easier to kill people, does that mean the law against murder is obsolete? The idea that technology erases accountability to the law is absurd.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
There is no fundamental right to be able to earn a living by making music.
In the US there is. It's in the Constitution.
Can you point it out to those of us who couln't see it? The only thing I saw that even remotely resembles a reference to music is congres's right to make laws promoting "useful arts" - and that doesn't say anything about a musicians right to earn a living by making music.
People are not entitled to make a living producing things that other people don't want to buy (e.g. vacuum tubes) but they are entitled to a limited (in time and in terms) monopoly on their creative works.
Yes, they're allowed a limited monopoly - but that monopoly doesn't guarantee the right to make money from it.
Your statement is somewhat contradictory, as you first say that they don't have a right to make a living from something if nobody wants to buy it, then you imply that they do.
A monopoly doesn't guarantee the right to earn a living from something if nobody wants to buy it.
There is no contradiction. You aren't entitled to make a living, you are guaranteed a right to control, within certain limitatons, the reproduction of your creative works. By virtue of this protection, artists (to use a generic for all creators of intangible works) are guaranteed that they will be the primary beneficiaries (assuming they don't sell their rights to a record label or the like) of their work's reproduction.
Making a living from creative works requires that the right to copy them is retained. You don't have to make a living from creative work, you may give it away for free if you choose to do so, but as the creator you are given the right to make that choice. When someone else copies and redistributes your work without your permission, then they are violating that right and, likely, any opportunity you might have to profit from your work.
Let's say The Really Shitty Garage Band releases a homebrew CD and tries to sell it for $20/copy. Noone likes it and noone buys it and The Really Shitty Garage Band does not make a living from it. The Really Awesome Garage Band releases a homebrew CD and sells it for $5/copy. People love it and The Really Awesome Garage Band makes a decent living from their music. A perceived value in the creative work has created a market, and the creators have profited from it. Good for them. What copyrights do is ensure that if you produce something people want, that you will be compensated for it if that is what you desire and they think it is valuable enough to pay for. If one person buys the CD and releases it on the Internet without the band's permission, then that person has undermined the bands market, and potentially destroyed their opportunity to make the greenbacks that will finance their future work.
What is so unfathomable here? The Constitution's authors recognized that creative works are vital to society and promoting them by guaranteeing benefits to their creators to encourage their work benefits all of society in the long run. Now, the copyright industry is getting way out of line with their attempts to perpetuate eternal copyrights, because that undoes the social benefit of a vital public domain, but that is another topic altogether...
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.