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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.
That sort of brings up issues about if an auto manufacterer could stay in buisness if everyone did that doesn't it?
Record companies don't want to lock music up -- after all, why would people buy it if they could not listen to it in the way that they wanted?
DOES THIS GUY LISTEN TO HIMSELF? 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?
"Ford," he said, "you're turning into a penguin. Stop it."
AMEN!!
Was he saying 'Amen' to the answer from the other person,
Or the question,
? ;)
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Of course we all know they mean that we are stealing from a vapor of revenue they "could have" made if the person:
A. hadn't copied the file
B. still wanted it enough to pay $16
I don't have a problem paying for music, but the RIAA is making a big mistake if they think they can legislate out of existence economic law.
Supply vs. Demand. They should view P2P as COMPETITION, not as theft. Then, they would realize what it is: An inferior method of getting inferior versions of a product for a low low low price.
Back to the sharing!=copying!=stealing, I think that the original intent of copyright was to safeguard initial profits of a trademark or intellectual property, but then eventually safeguard the data so everyone can be enriched by it. I mean, that's what humanity is about--sharing and loving stuff, right? When did money become more important than happiness?! The RIAA wants to control everything, and they are seeing their empire collapse from under them as new, open sources of information take over where they couldn't go. Information wants to be free.
Anyway, maybe if the RIAA LOWERED THE PRICES ON THEIR MUSIC, more people would buy it. $16 isn't reasonable. That is 3 meals. Why do we as a society accept rockstars that make a lot of money anyway? They don't deserve it. They just waste it on clothes and drugs and cars. Personally, I am happy to support good and hardworking stars that come to my city on tours. But I will never buy a CD from the big5 again. Sigh, I digress.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
With people walking up and driving away with perfect copies, suddenly your car has no value.
If you are a car dealer, you're done for.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. It is not the Recording Industry and Artists Association of America. It says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
sums it up nicely
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
What I am reading in these reponses is a whole rash of rationalizations:
Let's face it: We like the music and we want to use the technology that enables us to copy and share it over the Internet for free. We want the product, but we don't want to pay.
You can put forth all kinds of hypothetical situations where illegal and unethical intentions are not involved, but let's be grown-up enough to admit that getting something for nothing is 99% of what this is all about.
You know what I think ought to be done about it? I think that the RIAA ought to start putting their product out there so cheaply that people won't object so vociferously to paying for it. If we could pay 5 or 10 or 25 cents for a copy of a song (I can already see pricing them on a sliding scale -- with the most popular stuff being priced highest, according to laws of supply and demand, kinda), I think that most of us would do that -- for a multitude of reasons:
So maybe I'm too naive about this stuff. But it seems pretty clear cut to me. Making copies of CDs for anything other than your own use is illegal. Does that mean that everyone who does it should go to jail? Probably not. I DO think it means that the RIAA had better wake up and realize that they have a MAJOR problem on their hands, and revolutionize the way they do business, if they want to stay in business.
It's not even a fun show anymore... they've become complete bores; the tribe has spoken by the millions: it's time for the men in the sharkskin suits to leave the island.
Mr. Oppenheim remarks: "If art of any form is going to survive and flourish in our culture, we need to support it and protect it."
This is a cynical and ingenuous statement. Perhaps Matt believes that is the goal of his organization, but its aims appear now to have more to do with lining its executives' pockets than with the promotion of the arts. The music industry wants us to believe that without them there would be no more music, no more arts. What crap. People would still write, play, and even record & distribute music. People did plenty of that before there was a music industry. The only difference would be... no music industry ! Which of course means no more fat cats, no more industry control of popular culture, no more middlemen whose main purpose in all of this is to keep their jobs.
And yes, Matt, some of us have considered that whole infrastructure from Sheryl Crow to the clerk at the local CD store and everyone in between. The Internet indeed threatens the existence of that infrastructure, and it is in the way of such things that your industry would rather fight than switch. I find it still ludicrous that iMusic and similar services are being touted so loudly, when the total amount spent on a CD's number of songs still comes to what you'd pay for a CD in the store. Yes, we get to choose the tunes, but we actually get less (no packaging, no Easter eggs, no value added) for the same money. Which means your industry can charge essentially the same amount of money for the product while eliminating the infrastructure you yourself want us to care so much about. Hmm...
Here's a real idea, Matt: Why doesn't your industry get it together to place kiosks in my local CD store, kiosks that are basically high-speed connections to a content delivery service. These stands would let me select or even design the CD cover material, then I could download and burn the content to disc right then & there, I get the jewel case and all. Hey, if I spend enough maybe you guys could throw in a little extra value, kinda like all the bonus material you get from a DVD. You think a store with maybe twenty of those kiosks would do a bumpin' business ?
So there's an idea, Matt. I haven't copyrighted or patented it yet, so I'll let you have it for free. Go ahead, share it with your friends. I'm releasing it on the Internet under the GPL anyway...
Who owns stolen property? The original owner, or the thief? If "fair use" privilege travels with ownership of the original media, then the RIAA loses either way.
You buy a CD, and rip it to mp3. This is legal, right? You own the CD.
I then steal your CD.
So: who owns it now? Who has the "fair use" privilege?
If I own it because I stole it (more precisely: you NO LONGER own it because you don't have it anymore), then I can rip it to mp3 legally even though I got the CD through illegal means. What you and I would do in this case is rob each other. You steal all my CDs and rip them, and I'll steal all your CDs and rip them, and aside from the crime of theft (and neither of us press charges, and "accidentally" leave our crates of stolen CDs at each other's houses next time we visit), no laws have been broken.
If you still own it even though I stole it, then you still have all your fair use rights, including making a new CD to replace the one I stole.
We can still rob each other.
How would the RIAA answer that?
My hunch is the only way out for them would be to claim that there is no "fair use" rights on stolen property, and that everybody loses their rights and has to buy new copies. (Which of course works out wonderfully for them.) I guess at that point your recourse is to consider my theft of your CD a "loan" so you can burn a new CD, claiming to still own it. So the theft victim's claiming ownership of the stolen property is the only way to retain their "fair use" rights.
Isn't this astonishingly stupid?
-- http://frobnosticate.com
Ever stuck to an arguement even when you knew you were wrong, because it looked like you might be able to at least prevent people from finding the truth (image).
Ever seen the 8-year-old that told an unbelievable lie, only to compound it with more wild claims in attempts at justification... it's like digging your way out of a hole but piling the dirt on your own head.
The RIAA hasn't grown up. They're still in big-lie syndrome... and as long as some people believe that filesharing is the cause of their woes, they get some form of retribution/compensation/etc despite the shittiness of their own business model.
Example: my neighbor is a doctor who rotates responsibility for the hosiptal's medical library. Several years ago the documents (journals, etc.) began arriving there on CD. The anticipation was that they would be cheaper for the hospital to buy (lower production and shipping costs than for all that paper) and it would be easier to share with clinics and other doctors electronically (the library had to mail away the documents and have them mailed back).
The reality is that the CD compilations now cost more than the paper documents did before, and they arrive with license restrictions stating that *they cannot be shared at all*. Multiple copies are now purchased at even greater cost.
Better living through technology, eh?
no he has a license to the CONTENT of the 8 track edition. It's the copyrighted material he has a license to, not the media on which it is recorded.
And if you bought T2 on VHS, you should be entitled to reencode it and record it on DVD, you own a license which permits you to have one copy of that film, on any media. It does not have to be the same exact copy either, copyright law does NOT indicate this. If I lose my copy, I CAN legally aquire another copy. I CAN'T take a dvd from the video store because even though I own the rights to one copy (any physical copy, not just the physical copy purchased) I DON'T have the right to deprive them of one of the copies which they purchased for resale. There's a big difference there.
It's a sad fact, but when an industry becomes obsolete, people stop making money.
People shouldn't feel hung up on the rights of the recording industry or any other one concerning their right to make money. What should matter, since it is the public that should decide, is the overwhelming public good. Why should we reward people who attempt to sell us something that can be produced and distributed for practically nothing. It makes no sense. It is an entirely useless allocation of capital that could be better spent on other things.
Don't let anyone scare you, there will still be good music around when the recording industry dies. It is inevitable, no matter what the laws are. Letting the industry die makes too much sense, and keeping it propped up would be far more costly than any impartial person would think reasonable.
Wow...you know very little about manufacturing. Go read books with titles like "Industrial Production Techniques", and you'll be surprised at the fact that the prototype is just the beginning of the manufacturing process.
In other words, once you've done your research, and made your first protoype, only then can one really start work on the manufacturing process; that is when you start designing and buying molds, presses, lathes, parts and electronics in mass quantaties.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Yeah, because nobody would *ever* make something good and useful unless they could get strong copyright and patent protection on it, would they? *Cough*Linux*Cough*.
There's no doubt the business models would have to change. But really, is the 2003 model of a car really so much better than the 2002 model, or the 2000 model, or the 1990 model? There might not be as much incentive to spend time to develop new models when the old one is "good enough". On the other hand, if enough people have enough need for a new "X" they'll either make it themselves or pay someone to make it for them. Sure, they'll have to live with other people having it as well, but so what?
I think the incredible success of Open Source / Free software has proved that people can and will design and build amazing things even if they can't sell the design or the end product for much if anything. If the physical world of car manufacturing were similar we'd probably end up with some pretty funky looking cars, and a lot of cars might have some really odd UI "features" and some odd bugs, but so what? I, for one, would not cry if Ford had to close down because there was no margin in designing the newest Mega-SUV.
As for music and other artistic processes, there was music before copyright, and there would be music afterwards. There might not be an N'Sync because the margins just wouldn't be there, but there would probably be just as many, if not more, local bands. To make money, musicians would have to play gigs. Guess what? Most of them do that anyhow, and many of them really enjoy it.
I say, why fear change? Sure there's a downside to getting rid of IP laws, but it's pretty obvious there's a huge downside to keeping them in place as well.