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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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
" 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.