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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...
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.