Slashdot Mirror
EFF Ad Campaign On File Swapping
miladus writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation is launching an ad campaign
to
counter the RIAA's lawsuits about file
swapping. There are more details available at the File Sharing: It's Music To Our Ears subsite." The press release kicking off this campaign says that "EFF's Let the Music Play campaign provides alternatives to the RIAA's litigation barrage, details EFF's efforts to defend peer-to-peer file sharing, and makes it easy for individuals to write members of Congress."
The RIAA/MPAA know how to manage our lawmakers - through their lobbying and campaign contributions. EFF's attempt to mobilize the voters is really the only chance we have against that kind of influence.
Our work newsgroups went into a panic when the RIAA announced that they were going to be sueing people.
Amusingly it took them about 30 seconds to get around to Freenet and how it might be worth investigating it.
Evil contains the seeds of it's own destruction as they say - being over zelous with a bunch of basically honest people who like to share some music yet still buy lots has foced them onto a more efficient, totally untraceable (or rather plausibly deniable) network. It's certainly not pushed them towards legal services.
Beep beep.
I like the Ad .
It's simple, and to the point. However the site with more information is waaaaay too complicated for most people. I've been trying in recent times to explain to people why I stopped buying cd's. Why the RIAA suing for 98 billion dollars is recockulus. But people in general don't understand. And this site is too complicated. People will read it, say wtf is "compulsory licensing" and go back to downloading porn. What we need is a good site with the whole idea explained simply. That would be excellent.
...it does.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
It's good to see that the EFF is focusing on getting them to create a way to pay people, rather then the usual P2P chant of making the theft legal.
Apple has it right, people will pay if there is a way to do so, otherwise they WILL just steal stuff.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
For those of you who do not feel the need to RTFA, and might easily take the slashdot story the wrong way, here is the important part of what the EFF is after (Paragraph 2 on the the EFF site):
The problem is that there is no adequate system in place that allows music lovers access to their favorite music while compensating artists and copyright holders.
This is quite different from the 'illegal-file-sharing-rules!! the RIAA-sucks!!' idea I got from the slashdot story. I very much agree and support the EFF in this effort. Give the artists what they deserve, give me what I want and stop artificially inflating the music prices.
Copyright violation!=stealing. Damn some people are dense. Is it nice not needing hammers around?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
It's about time Pirates started acting like them.
Hasn't worked for the millions of pot smokers being persecuted in the name of the children.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Stealing is a crime, you can go to jail for it.
Copyright violation is a tort, you can be sued for it.
There is a difference.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is the age of information, the age of technology. Anyone can get a computer, and a nice one too, on a months salary or less. It is very common to find multiple machines in a single household. With broadband you're seeing even more online and online often. The computer has now been put right up there with the television as an entertainment device. As more and more people adopt this mindset, more and more people are going to be using this so-called 'entertainment device' for, wait for it.. wait for it.. Ah! Entertainment! Music is one of the most basic forms of entertainment there is. And if people are looking towards computers to provide that, the RIAA needs to adapt to that demand of the market. Thus far, no one has responded well except Apple, but I'll get to them in a minute.
.wav files for a few seconds of audio. Granted MP3s were several megs for a full song, but this was much better than 50 megs for the same .wav file. I knew then, when I found myself 'collecting', that this was going to be a problem.
When I was sent my first MP3 on IRC back in '96 I thought it was pretty cool. No longer did I need 10 meg
In any case, the word about MP3 spread like wildfire amoungst people 'in the know' and FTPs were set up all across the 'net housing files. This was a some what underground thing until Napster showed up. Once again, proving that the more you yell about somethig, the more popular it gets, Metallica single handedly made MP3 a household name.
By now, the idea of getting music online was so entrenched in everyones minds, the thought of not being able to play music on your computer became an almost alien concept. In my opinion this is where the RIAA, if they were sensitive to consumer opinion, could have stepped in and made a killing. As of now, they're only alieniating potential customers. As was said on Slashdot:
"I don't get it! I've threatened them, sued them, and they still won't buy my products!"
Apple has the right idea. They're selling single songs. Not only have they made a few million so far from this, but its proving that people _will_ buy music online. Why? Because the computer is now an entertainment device. There has been some opposition to this by people like Linken Park (do people really listen to this crap?) and Jewel (who openly admitted to downloading music a few years ago). Basically they say that their work is art and should be taken as a whole. But lets look at that.
You make a CD that kicks ass in every way possible, every track has you giving 100%, every second is thought out and wonderful (like say, Tool ). And then say you're some corperate crap band that makes _one_ good song. You'll both make the same money on CD sales because the prices are all the same. I think this is bad. If you put your blood, sweat and tears into a full 10 tracks, people will download them all, paying you for every ouce of effort you put forth. If you make _one_ good song, you make money off that one good song and thats _it_. This model that Apple has created is the best system of 'natural selection' amoungst artists I've come across. Personally I'm all for it.
The RIAA needs to wake up. While, yes, its technically illegal to have music you didn't pay for, p2p by way of IRC and FTPs have been around since the early 90s. This isn't going to stop, even if every p2p network is shutdown perminatly. The _reason_ its not going to stop is because people have changed what they use computers for. As I said, they are now as much of an _entertainment_ device as a television. If the RIAA had responded at the time, or even takes Apples current model, people would not be downloading illegal music. I feel that as long as the RIAA uses these strongarm tactics against the very people that provide them with a living, people are going to pirate music.
I'm not going to pay "leives" or taxes or any other form of "presumed guilty" tax.
If they stick a P2P theft tax on my cable modem bill, I won't pay it.
If they stick a tax on blank media, I'll just order it from overseas.
I don't download music, movies or software illegally (or at all), as SCO, RIAA and MPAA would have you believe and I will not pay for the actions of others in a collective punishment manner such as they propose.
That's just as wrong as saying that because a *few* bad people used guns to kill someone that everyone that owns a gun is a bad person and a killer..
Wrong answer, collective punishment is wrong.
Copyright laws are fine. They make the GPL possible fer chrissakes.
If I write a song and don't want anyone to hear it, that should be my right. If I want to charge $100 per listen, fine. If I want to place it in the public domain, I can do so. I could even GPL it.
No. The problem is not with copyright law, it's with a bureaucratic elimination of competition. IMHO, it's insane that anyone should be demanding distribution methods that the free market can easily provide, as the argument goes, because it would be so damn popular.
But what I've recently realized is that the whole take on the issue is rather short sighted.
Ask yourself what the real problem is. Most will probably say 'I can't make copies of my music for my own use'. Or, 'I can't preview music for free'.
With regards to the former point, people in computer science must recognize that duplication of data (except for Backup/QOS purposes) is an evil thing. How much time, effort and storage media is wasted by storing a song in a gazillion places - by a gazillion people?
If any network administrator discovered that the file containing the company's phone directory was stored locally on 400 machines, he'd have a fit.
Much better is to have it stored in a central location where anyone can access it at any time. And, it can be backed up/mirrored to make sure it's always accessible.
So the solution is central storage. Streaming audio is very do-able over broadband today. Wireless shouldn't be too awfully far behind. Your current system with CD rack/jukeboxes and/or multi-gigabyte MP3 storage can devolve into a wired/wireless receiver that will be served whatever you wish.
You'll be able to create your own playlists in many different ways. In short, you'll be the programming director of your very own set of radio stations - each of which, you can select at will.
Yeah, it will cost something. In most cases it will mean (nicely targeted) commercials inserted by the servers. But it would be a trivial thing to allow/encourage commercial free programming for a monthly fee.
And the artists would get a micro-cent every time their song is selected. Seems fair. 'Course if the had a problem with this, the could release their songs (or just a demo song) as 'zero-credit'. In other words, no charge. And the end-user could select these exclusively.
I know that there are a lot of system administrators out there that actually like to manage data. I just want it to be there when I want it. All of it.