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How to Legally Infuriate the RIAA?
An anonymous reader shot us off a link to an article discussing how to use the RIAA's System to Broadcast Music Legally. Now, I'm no lawyer, but if the facts are correct in this article, we're talking about a price point that makes streaming radio extremely inexpensive. There's a lot of worthless spite in this article, but if you can look past that, you might see something worth thinking about.
If you do the math, and they make good on their threats to sue "thousands" of P2P users, the odds of any one of the 35 million plus users of Kazaa, not to mention the dozens of other networks, being sued are on the order of one in 10,000. Think roughly the odds of being trampled by a herd of zebra above the Arctic Circle, while being hit by a meteor and lightning.
1 in 10,000 ?, thats a bit low for my liking, and now I am more worried about the zebra's than the RIAA.
From the article :
...
THE RIAA is one of the most evil organizations on the planet. [.....]. If you want a good start, go to Slashdot, and do a search for RIAA.
Charlie Demerjian is obviously a junior journalist
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Or you could ya know..
Continue to pirate mp3's from P2P programs
"Continue to pirate mp3's from P2P programs :)"
;)
Um, you mean share, right?
When will people get it?
.. THEY CAN BE FOOLED.
RIAA has money. They own shares in CNGRS (Congress).
Worldwide we need a better tactic of defeating them. The laws of all countries (not just USA) are being written by these guys. The world will become more restrictive and of course the general public won't give a shit because hey gues what
Can somebody come up with a practical idea that informs the public of the evils of RIAA and the true virtues and benefits of P2P and why RIAA must be stopped in their campaign to destroy the technology.
In an effort to stamp out piracy, the software should also do something that most people would find a little offensive, in a spyware sort of way. The software should search all cache directories, and, without the users knowledge, or more controversially, permission, and rename all .MP3s and .OGGs found to the encrypted file types. Guilt is presumed, that should make the $!#£@*rs happy.
Sounds like a great idea up to this point! What the hell are they thinking? Why would you need to do this?
Why should all the songs that I personally rip and use LEGALLY be changed to some other format?
This guy does have a great idea... I don't know why he threw this little curve ball.
Davak
So if I understand this correctly, music will be streamed to "cache sites" which will than be available for streaming to end users and the cache sites will pay the use fee. IANAL but that places the cache sites in the same boat as file swappers today, distributing music without a license. What am I missing that makes this legal?
At the bottom of the endless pile of paper work which characterizes all regulation lies a gun.
Alan Greenspan
The inquirer handles pretty hefty traffic normally (a lot like the register). No need to make a copy of it.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
But the point is doing it completely legally, using *their* system. Following the letter of the law, but not the spirit. The spirit gets STABBED AGAIN AND AGAIN, which is an idea that appeals to me.
"A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges .07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song"
.07 * 100,000 = .70?
huh?
uh, more like 7K?
He's obviously not read the regulations very carefully...
Among other places where this scheme is legally questionable, the rules explicitly prevent radio stations from doing things like allowing listeners to democratically select which songs to play.
There are also a whole list of regulations specifying what orders songs can't play in, how often they can play, etc.
And that's not even getting into the somewhat complicated setup with the actual music houses that collect royalties, which aren't the RIAA itself.
This guy needs to do a little more research and try again.
In actuality, the entire article in an anagram.
What it really says is:
How To Quickly and Easy Get Posted on Slashdot
In a time where flattery will get you everywhere, there is no group to which this better applies than the geeks. Of course, we could have referenced other geek sites (that one with the 5 in it), but we chose not to. Geeks, who feel oppressed and underloved by society, love nothing more than to see their name in lights (or pixels) by a worthy editorial such as this. We chose to use the most whimsical of the geek-sites, Slashdot.org, and will see how quickly it works. A breakdown is as follows:
Read Entire Translation...
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
IANAL so I would like to know what requirements are set upon the webcaster of audio for purchasing the IP that is being streamed? Must the 'DJ' account for his having purchased and through fair use ripped the copy that is streaming across the net? Can a lawyer help me out here.
Fnord.sig
Additionally, this form of 'encrypted caching' is almost certainly reversable by the user without too much effort (you have a player that can play the stuff, right?) and would almost guarantee a legal battle.
I applaud the out-of-box thinking, but still think the only way to win is not to play. That, or just play indies I guess.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The Register also has an article on webcasting and the RIAA. The two articles together show how webcasting may be the RIAA's Achilles heel.
He links to the rules regarding royalties, but the method violates virtually every regulation governing webcasts:
1 4
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#1
Not much sense in renting pffice space for the survivors of people who have been trampled by a herd of zebra, while being hit by a meteor and lightning.
Damn, I was hoping to hit on the grieving widows...
I've got an idea! Lets flood the P2P network with fake files that have the same names and file sizes as genuine music files that the RIAA would be looking for. OK yeah sounds stupid, but keep reading. :)
Then when the RIAA knocks on your door you can claim you were actually trying to help them by poisoning P2P networks to get the "evil" pirates.
After they falsely accuse you, get on TV/Radio/Web telling everyone about the RIAA's false accusations and after a few reports of false prosecution they'll have to stop trying to sue individuals because there will be too much doubt over them actually finding any genuine file swappers.
You wouldn't need to do this for very long either, after 5 or 6 false accusations they'd stop and you could remove your "fake" files from the network. Sure in the short term we're killing P2P ourselves, but if it stops the RIAA then I'm for it. :)
So isn't the answer $35?
This is the main reason why we are losing this battle. People like Charlie Demerjian, so vehemently oppose the [RI|MP]AA, their words and ideas are poisoned to the point it does nothing but turn off the casual reader and make us look like a pack of bloody savages.
While he may have a good point (donation to the EFF), this reads like a 17 year old who just got punished and is now lashing out at his/her parents.
We need THOROUGH research into ideas and solutions and then we can practice them. And believe me, when the solution which is right and true (as well as easy and quick) DOES come out, it will be accepted and adopted by all (references: Napster, KaZaa, et. al.).
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
Hold on while I obfuscate my code by renaming all the .py files to .pl as everyone surely knows .pl looks just line noise. :-)
On a more serious note, how sad is it that a person describing a technical solution comes up with such a method for "obsucating" a file. Or are the MS-world media player dumb enough to ignore the contents of a file if the extension is not known? I know that you wouldn't be able to just double-click on them, unless you tell it (on the first time) which program to use with those files, and most of the ordinary people are too scared to open "unknown" files with any program.
The author suggests searching all "CACHE* directories and encrypting them. This is an (honestly weak) attempt to limit people from requesting songs and then keeping them on their computer for reuse, which I think would be theft in the RIAA's eyes.
As long as you weren't ripping your own music into this program's cache directory, it would be safe.
Yeah, so which is it?
.07 = $350
.0007 = $3.50
20,000/4 *
-or-
20,000/4 *
--
Obviously a rookie mistake
Unfortunately, the author is math challenged to the tune of 100x: that's actually 70 dollars per song.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I've got enough here to get a station going. Time to make a windows client and go for it.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
no current internet radio software allows you to pick the songs you want to hear
False.
It is called Otto.
SPAM
Sheesh, the article author doesn't understand the RIAA rules. Here they are in an easy to read format...
t ml
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/webcasting.h
His idea of tiny, one-song webcasters won't fly. However, the idea could be modified to 100-song webcasters and you might make it work, for an end user cost of about 10 cents for the 100 songs.
I promise you that it would cost the RIAA more to process a five thousand 7 cent checks than they'd earn in the exercise. :-)
Boycott them, dont buy cd's until they stop treating their customer base like garbage.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Lifted directly from the article:
You would think that more people would stand up to protect their legal rights from being trampled, but alas, we live in a world of really really dumb sheep.
Their link, not mine.
Love it.
My
Limekiller
I tried but failed to read the article. Could someone just explain the overall gist of it, so I dont have to subject myself to that juvenile tripe? Oh, and can anyone explain how it is that this fellow has a job? His arguments make as much sense as the war on drugs commercials - except in the opposite direction.
No, he meant make offsite backups.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
As the guy who wrote that, the only response I have is that you obviously have no idea how sarcasm or humor works. Some of the article was meant as humor, some seriously. As someone with (almost) a biology degree, I can say that rather authoratatively that zebras do not herd, much less trample hapless filesharers above the arctic circle. Hell, they don't even do it within about 10 degrees of the arctic circle due to deforestation (again, humor).
One thing I do apologise for are the math errors scattered throughout the article. I wrote it at 4am after reading something or other that pissed me off. Due to time zone differences, I couldn't correct most of the problems before it got slashdotted. Now, it is to late. *SIGH*.
-Charlie
Here's what I do to the RIAA. As a professional cybersecurity mastermind, I know how to take down info-terrorists like Mattel, Michael Sims, and the RIAA.
I'm not Seth Finkelstein. I still speak the truth.
1.Read AHRA.
2.Set up webcast.
3.Wait 3 seconds.
4.Invite RIAA lawyers for a cup of coffee (they'll be at your door by then).
5.Tie them to a chair.
6.Play rockon.html.
7.Videotape the torture.
8.Sell video.
9.Profit.
10.Go back to bed.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
When it says "0.07 cents" it means literally "seven hundreths of a cent". It's not, as you and others making similar comments seem to think, $0.07, but rather $0.0007.
I game, therefore I am...
Regardless, it all points to still lining the pockets of a Juggernaut threatening to bully everbody from the working class to the privledged Senator's child with their parent already bought and paid for. Still a nice work around if legally sound, but how long do you truly think it will last when the RIAA notices a few small specks and crumbs are not fueling their nuclear reaction of lawsuits and intimidation? This has grown to include international threats as the most recent target in Spain has just found out.
If you want to extinguish a fire, remove it's fuel sorce. I think the best bet still will be for everybody as a global community for at least 1 year boycott all purchases related to the music industry. We as a species lived on nothing for a long time, then phonographs, records, and for a long time just radio. Go retro and stick to that radio for a year and see how much love the RIAA feels when they have a global boycott sending a firm and sound FUCK YOU to the artists and their strongarm cluster of green eyed lawyers. All the merchandise sitting in wharehouses just might go for great prices...maybe even reasonable after a year of strangling them where it counts which is all they care about. (I have not and will not buy any music product myself while this rages unchecked)
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
Gee, we could go on that 24 hour news program, CNN. Uh oh. It's owned by Time Warner...
I know, we can go on National news.... oh, yeah, maybe not....
Well, there's always RADIO, but then again, I guess RIAA would take a dim view of Clear Channel doing that, and would cut them off...
Or, I know! We can use P2P to... Oh, yeah, P2P is being villified and made illegal...
(humor mode on)
Well, than it's back to what I've been saying for ages. Quit buying RIAA music, tell your friends, and ask they tell their friends. When RIAA members see their sales go down by even 30%, I suspect that they would start putting pressure on RIAA to tone it down.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
And $0.0007 * 100000 = $70, which means literally "seventy dollars", not "seventy cents."
...when someone outside of the RIAA tries to copy their math. :)
There were a few things that were edited out of the origional, and a few things that should have been, but weren't. First, thanks for the complement, I was giggling my ass of when I thought of that.
:)
As for the stuff cut, there was a link on Mussolini dying that doesn't take much to guess the contents of, and a proposed one to the editorial policies that I will save for another day.
Additionally, I found out the use of the phrase of P*gF*ck*rs gets censored on the Inq.
I didn't mind any of these changes though, some I expected, others I agreed to.
-Charlie
(yes, I wrote the origional)
Even if it is just name such as a 2Kb text file named audioslave-how_to_live.mp3 being shared, the fact is that you are using a name they have unalieanable rights to under the DMCA. You are still subject to all due processes including having your ISP account permanently disabled and much more.
All this would do is give the RIAA more people to sue. (At the very least you would pay their court costs and lawyers fees for knowingly sharing a name they have exclusive rights to)
That's "copy without permission", not "pirate"! ;-)
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Set up your streaming web server, and pick a song. Any song, preferably a long one. "Tubular Bells, Part 1" is a good choice, and runs about 24 minutes so you could play it 60 times a day. Every day.
100,000 people would probably tune in at least once, more for the novelty value than that they like Mike Oldfield's work if I'm guessing right. Then you dutifully send your check to the RIAA . . . for seven cents.
Actually, if you were into that sort of thing, you could probably run an accounting DOS on them by paying your royalties, seven cents at a time. Make sure it's a check, because those take a certain amount of work to process. Or better yet, pay by credit card, seven cents at a time. MasterVisa charges a certain amount to process a credit card transaction, and it's got to be more than seven cents. (Even if it doesn't if you do it by mail you have to have someone physically open the envelope and at least look at the letter, which takes time and money. And you would, of course want to send it by letter.)
If people really want to peeve the RIAA a certain amount of old-fashioned monkeywrenching might do the job better than an elaborate high-tech solution.
Disclaimer: This post for educational and entertainment purposes only. Do not try this at home unless you are a trained professional, and probably not even then. I will under no circumstances be liable for any monetary damage this causes you, including the seven cents you're out. Close cover before striking. Your mileage may vary. The management is not responsible.
Someone you trust is one of us.
From the article: "the software would need to be custom, no current internet radio software allows you to pick the songs you want to hear, they do it for you."
Apparently this guy has never heard of Massinova. Massinova is an all request trance webcast. The listeners pick the songs via the website and the system queues them up and plays them. It's a great way to find out about good trance.
and, if some of the posters above are right, probably is.
The whole point of his idea is to transform the webcasting royalties into a device for selling mp3 files on demand. Buying mp3 files on demand is a great idea, possibly even under a compulsory licensing regime, but 0.07 cents a song is really too little.
I recently heard someone describe the current stage of the IP discussion as "prerevolutionary rigidification". He then shared his worries that the harder the forces of change were bolted down, the more destructive an explosion would follow. This article would then be an "early warning" shrapnel sample.
Enraging RIAA may be very funny, but he's considering the whole copyright system collateral damage. Our generation will set the trend for copyright in the information age and should show more responsibility.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Organise CD swap meets outside the local CD emporium. Hitting them in their pockets makes so much more sense than adding to their pile.
Sig pending!
Or maybe it's just coincidence.
First, if webcasting is "so expensive that the small guys are forced out", how come the same price structure is so cool for playing songs legally?
Second, what's with the missing zeroes. I mean, just proofread the damn article once, and make sure 0.0007 is not 0.07 or whatever.
Thirdly, good journalists do not mix emotion and reporting. Yes, you touch a chord with those who feel like you, but they're listening anyhow. And the rest of us simply say "immature shit" and stop reading. Every sentence you write is the weakest chain in your argument.
The article defeats its own logic, starting with "web casting is too expensive" and concluding with "everyone become a web caster".
Sigh. OK, it is Sunday, I guess.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
In the link you provided, very good by the way, it says:
.... wait for it ... professional DJ! They will even pay you $1 per year to make it legal. Then you can be a DJ, make your own radio show, and do it as a legal employee of the company. That should follow the use terms, or can probably be made to.
"If you want to do something different than what I described above; for example, if you want to let users choose the songs to download, or you want to archive dj sets, or you want to allow the world at large to collaboratively dj by voting on what song to play next, or anything at all interactive that actually takes advantage of the power of the internet: well... you're fucked. When you go into that world, you are out of the ``compulsory license'' territory, and must negotiate with all of the copyright holders individually, which is prohibitively complicated, since there are so many of them."
In other ways, it describes how the RIAA basically outlaws anything other than the most basic webcasting, and crushes anything resembling free thought. Not so, you are thinking inside the box again.
As I wrote one of the first people to send me such a link, there is a way around it, a creative, bent way, but a way. Think about this for a minute. When you sign up for the service, you are a listner, one who can only tune in to channels that professional DJs create, no preannouncement, you get what you get.
Now, when you want, you can click on a handy button, provide a few details, and the service will hire you as a
The whole point of the article was to make people think, and sadly very very few of them, judging from the letters I am getting are. There is a loophole that you can drive a truck through, and no one sees it. If they see it, they won't bend anymore rules, or at the very least literally interpret rules.
I am sad to say, I expected better of the slashdot crowd. There are a few of you out there who can see the big picture, I know, there is at least one story a day here about people who do. What I am hoping for is that someone picks up my idea and runs with it.
All you need to do is set up a company to take the rules that they set up literally. It doesn't matter if every person on the service is a DJ, and you only ever listen to your own station. Things like preannouncement can be gotten around by looking at your playlist editor. Duh.
This kind of thought is necessary to screw people with the laws very they are looking to break you with. Don't see a rule, set up a roadblock for youself, run into it, and go home, use your brain.
-Charlie (Yeah, I wrote the article)
Or is shoutcast not classified as internet radio as such?
Technicly if you had the bandwidth you could have a mass audience....
Mod me down im a newf (wiki)
The way it was worded, it also sets up a folder that contains an 'encrypted' cache of songs, ostensibly to ease bandwidth. This encryption involves changing the last letter of the filename. How long do you think it will take people to come out with a one button, highly illegal, program that loots this cache, providing you with an easy way to legally download lots of MP3s at 7 cents per hundred. If it takes 5 minutes, I will personally e-mail the authors and deride them for being so damn slow.
There are other benefits also, but the two you pointed out are some of the better ones. I was aiming to screw them with their own rules. Go nuts people.
-Charlie
The sad part of all this is that the RIAA seem to be working with a simple concept: "How to make more money for themselves".
And they are thereby perpetuating the vicious circle that is going on here. What happens is this:
1/ RIAA sees profits go down (heaven forbid they acknowledge that their products are discretionary buys, which are are always the first to decrease when the economy is in decline, like right now)
2/ RIAA does something (new) that gets them profit. Like raise CD prices. Or sue a few poor sods for $mucho (incidentally.. has any single artist EVER seen any of the money the RIAA made off this campaign so far?)
3/ People can't afford the music they want to listen to and look for other means.
And the consumer isnt the party that can break this cycle. Like the human will to live is pretty much ingrained, so is the determination to listen to music. I know for certain that if CD's would be (say) $10 or less (which is VERY viable given how much the entire CD process costs) I would buy a whole lot more of them.
Anyway to get a bit more on topic, I don't get this guy's scheme, he says we do the right thing i.e. pay for listening to music, how is it that we're infuriating the RIAA by paying them again?
Ok, so we talk about setting some songs on some computers with a bit of clever hiding so it won't be d/l'ed, but streamed it to users on demand. Wow, what an idea....sure wish we had that for the Mac, oh wait we did, and it got broken and turned into a P2P technology.
It really was a good idea the daap:// protocol hidden in iTunes and allowed anyone to connect to a playlist and play it the way they wanted to, but then someone got greedy and wanted to copy the songs they were listening to, so iLeech was born. Took all of a weekend for it to start appearing. Once this guy get's his distributed streaming going for Window's it would be what, all of a day or two before someone has hacked the protocol so that the stream is a d/l?
I want a legal way to share music, and there to be a way for me to pay the artisits for their work, but until the RIAA is bankrupted I'm sticking with concerts, and only the twice a year CD purchase.
TANSTAAFL
That is basically the point. The RIAA would think it is theft, but it most likely technically lives up to the letter of the law. The hope was that any brain dead monkey could go in, copy the files, and have an MP3 collection from it. *THAT* would be illegal though, but the company has nothing to do with it, and frowns on cache tampering, just look, it is in their terms of use. :)
-Charlie (The articles author)
Run freenet.
Also a bunch of nmap idlescans from random hosts on the internet to the RIAA website, is legal and annoying.
Or if you live on the central coast in california, where around 30 miles north of Morro bay(not on most maps) you will find a herd of zebras.
My understanding is they belonged to William Hurstes' private zoo untill they escaped and started living well in our relitivly lion free enviroment
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Heres something that seems so obvious it can't possibly be OK - can it? What if I tune a DAB (or FM) radio receiver to a normal, commercial station, and then connect it to a pc. Save all files to disk, and at the end of the day, look at the radio playlist and decide what to keep. Result: over a few months, one gets a large library, all of which is free, and presumably legal. Also, especially if its DAB (digital audio broadcast), it's in high quality.
One thing about all all these calculations and schemes to "deal" with problems like these is that they are not like physical "laws of nature" which cannot be circumvented, and *legal* laws/rules that are basically constructs intended to serve a purpose that is determined by those with the power to do so. Just offhand - if there is a widespread eruption of such cheap webcast stations, what's to stop the RIAA et al to rework the licensing agreements to make it no longer worthwhile? Say, a signup/startup cost of US$100,000 per site, w/o distinction between high-traffic and low-traffic ones? They control the licensing terms, and unless they were unwise enough to declare these to be as they are and unmodifiable in perpetuity, the rug can be pulled out from under you pretty quickly.
...is that he got paid to write this trainwreck of an article.
Hammer of Truth
the odds of getting struck by a meteorite... only happened once in recorded history
I know of a few buildings, a car, and maybe a ?cow? getting hit, but as far as I know there are zero recorded cases of a person getting hit. Maybe you mis-remembering? Do you have a link?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
that encourages p2p sharing of their music.
Justablip records...heres our last press release:
thankyou for showing an interest in the continuing fight against the corporate strangle hold over the music business and indeed over many aspects of this world.
We are sad to announce
WTF? : The Madonna Remix Project
released only a few short weeks ago..
is terminally ill from liberal overuse of plastic surgeons (too many face lifts)
we will put her out of her misery soon
bLiP is leaving the UK and we will destroy any copies left by the most violent means necessary and possible..
by a certain date whenever we feel like it..
probably when we arrive dans le franglais innit
we want to destroy it in a particularly extravagant fashion
so please, bear with us and whilst you are at it
show your affinity with the riaa and all it stands for by not buying MRP and freely distributing the mp3's to your friends
err no don't do that... if you haven't already, go to our shop instead and buy it whilst it still lives on
http://www.justablip.co.uk/shop.php
and,oi, cast your steak n kidneys pon dis parody of justice
you gotta have a gander at this..
honest...
http://www.justablip.co.uk/madonna.htm
bLiPtr011
Let's do some math. Say you have music of some sort playing most of the time during the day while you're working at your PC, either at home or at the office. To make the math easy, let's say 10 hours a day, 10 songs every hour, 25 days out of month. (this is typical for me, at least)
So.... 2500 * $0.0007 = $1.75. Let's call it two bucks, just to make things easy.
On top of that two bucks, what other fees would be involved? Let's see... if we're streaming the feeds at 64kbps, over 250 hours, I'm using 8GB of bandwidth. If we're paying, say, $0.25/GB bandwidth for broadcast, that's another two bucks per month.
So, we're already at four bucks per month, just for bandwidth and music licensing. What about the other overhead costs -- servers? Software? Sysadmin detail? Even if we're doing this in an open source fashion, our time still has value; let's say that by distributing the work amongst Free 'net community, we manage to keep it down to another two bucks of cpu/server/development/admin per user.
So, we're at six dollars per month for the ability to listen to audio webcasts. Which, by the terms of the RIAA's license agreement, means we're talking web radio here -- someone sets the playlist, and you get to listen to it. You don't get to control the feed. You *can* switch feeds, though, so you could conceivably maintain a central server list of what's playing where, and what's upcoming, and automatically hop from feed to feed -- but, that's either gonna be choppy, or you're going to have delays while you're waiting for "Lose Yourself" to start playing on JoeBob's homebrewradio after "Mmmmmbop" finishes up 17 seconds from now.
What if JoeBob decides to shut his webcast service down so he can max his framerate in Halflife2? *foop!* your song just cut out halfway through.
What if you want to listen to Pepesito Reyes' La Guantanamera, but nobody else is streaming it?
How does all the music get into the system in the first place? Or does it rely on people's own personal collections?
So... $6 per month can get a fair amount of music broadcasts, but not without a fair amount of headaches.
Contrast this with Pressplay and Rhapsody, which provide access to hundreds of thousands of songs on demand, through easily installed software, for $10 per month. Download, install, listen to whatever you want.
Are the commercial stream-on-demand services enough better to justify the extra $4/month?
Or publish your show to freenet. I don't know why more aspiring pirate radio shows don't do this. It's perfect for it.
This guy needs to check his math in a couple of ways: First of all, 100,000 x .07 is NOT 70 cents, it's 70 Dollars. I find this a significant differance (though you may disagree). Second of all, a 1 in 10,000 chance of getting sued for thousands of dollars is not a negligable chance. For me, and I suspect most Slashdotters, there is a significantly better chance of getting sued by the RIAA than getting a date this month. Finally, I don't think he put much thought into just how much this will cost the average user. I listen to music on my computer, by conservative estimate, about three hours a day. For arguments sake, let's call that 3 and a half hours, with an average song time of 3 and a half minutes. (Obviously, if you're listening to 'Thick as a Brick' or 'Autobahn' the average time will increase. Bear with me) So about sixty songs a day, at .07 a song, this works out to about 1.50 a month - sounds alright, but is it really better than 9.99 a month for Rhapsody, after which you own the songs? You can listen to them when you're not online, burn CD's etc...
My user number is the sum of 4 squares.
I take it you saw Bruce Almighty then? :)
--
Uh, no. No thanks. I would rather pay them nothing, and see them go away forever. That seems like the best solution to me.
How will the artists get paid? Well, as has been discussed here endlessly, the percentage of musicians who make money from CDs is very, very small. So for most, CDs are a promotional vehicle, a pure cost. They are a means to advertise your music. Under a P2P system, it costs nothing to infinitely replicate your music. You still get the exposure, if you're good, and it costs you nothing. Neither do you have to sign any draconian contracts nor compromise your creative integrity.
Most artists will continue to make money the way they do now, without the RIAA overhead: they will tour and sell band merchandise. If the RIAA is no longer there as the gatekeeper, it seems like musicians will have a lot more power than they have ever had over the direction and scope of their careers. They will decide what to create, not RIAA marketing dept.s; they will decide how many albums to produce, not RIAA contract lawyers; and they will set their own prices, not RIAA business people.
The RIAA as we know it will disappear, and good riddance. But something of it will remain in the form of boutique marketing and production companies. They will be hired by artists to put together marketing campaigns. They will do their bidding as hired guns. The role they will play for bands will be much like the role Madison Avenue plays for Coca-Cola, Inc.
So please, folks, stop using your brain power thinking about how to devise a system that will pay the RIAA anything. They deserve to go, and we should do everything in our power to usher them out. Buy nothing from them. Discourage everyone you know from buying anything from them. Call your representatives and put them on notice that you're really pissed off about what the RIAA is doing, and that if they are complicit you will vote accordingly. (as an aside, it is not futile to call your representative and do this. they will listen because if you're pissed off enough to call, you'll also be pissed off to work in their district against them come election time. and the six degrees of separation work in our favor on this. what if your uncle turns out to be the local union boss that gave him contributions last time? bye-bye, future contributions.)
You can't believe that you alone have the power to end the RIAA, but you can believe that you can do your bit. So do it.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I thoroughly enjoyed your take on those RIAA blood-sucking bastard assmonkeys (I'm not a journalist, and if I call them that on my website I am projected by the "22 year old college student" defence as HardOCP has dubbed the weblog freedom of speech ruling).
I would like to point out a little something that, although not very relevant to the US, is a thorn in our side up here in Canada.
I'm talking about a little legal wonder called SOCAN Tariff 22. SOCAN (The Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada) is pretty much like a Canadian RIAA, except controlled by the government (we're almost socialists up here, in case you didn't know, but don't hold that against me... I didn't vote for those bastards either). Anyways, Tariff 22 is currently being appealed and for good reasons. It introduced liability for ISPs for caches of material which violats copyright, specifically copies of musical recordings of SOCAN artists.
(What is SOCAN:
SOCAN is the Canadian copyright collective for the public performance of musical works. We administer the performing rights of our members (composers, lyricists, songwriters and their publishers) and those of affiliated international societies by licensing the use of their music in Canada.)
This means that your distributed user-controlled cache-reliant webcast radio scheme would (currently) land ISPs subject to Canadian law in hot water. Sucks, doesn't it?
The appeal is getting into full swing as factum are submitted, etc. The Tariff 22 ruling was based on the appeals court blatantly misunderstanding caching technology, the nature of the Internet, and the role that network infrastructure plays in communications, so things look good for those of us involved in protecting the ISPs' ability to provide service to Canadian consumers (I'm involved from a technical standpoint), however the act remains that Tariff 22 is currently on the books as Canadian law.
Here are some online resources you may find interesting on the subject:
Tariff 22 Intellectual Property laws meet the modern age
SOCAN's Tariff 22 will be the death of Canadian Internet Radio
I hope that the rabid RIAA legal minions don't pay too much attention to us up here, because that would be a way for them to go after litigation targets with really deep pockets... if Verizon thought they had problems with Court Orders to hand over customer data, wait until they get sued for merely being an ISP.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Rather than that idea, how about this:
Write a new filesharing app.
Restrict the app's use by the RIAA with the license aggreement.
The RIAA would only have 3 choices.
Ignore the new network.
Violate the DMCA and reverse engineer the protocol.
Violate the license agreement.
The second two options are currently illegal; however, I don't think too many slashdotters would be upset if those options were legal.
We need to put the RIAA to work for use.
"Our generation will set the trend for copyright in the information age and should show more responsibility."
Responsibility to whom? Our corporate masters? That won't cure any problems, any more than file-sharing will. You don't do master's bidding, you don't steal the master's silverware -- you amend the constitition outlawing slavery. You burn down the mansion.
The only solution that's going to work is one that directly connects musicians to music listeners, without involving RIAA, ASCAP, or BMI.
The web has the potential to be the ultimate "fair trade" platform, if we in the geek community can roll the tools to automate negotiating non-compulsory licenses, and devise a artist-collective alternative to ASCAP & BMI.
The problem always defines the solution. We need to cut out the corporate parasites.
this article was shit. there's no new idea here. he's not even talking about anything, really. he's just saying "we should pay the riaa and distribute the content this way" and changing the subject line to "this will infuriate the riaa i say". what the fuck? was this some article WRITTEN by the riaa to make people think "yeah, implementing the exact system the riaa want in place will really make them mad oh boy!" ?? jeesus people can be retarded.
I thought a fun way to piss them off would be to offer up TONS of mp3s labeled "50 cent: in da club" or "metalica: one" and all sorts of big name artists/titles and have the mp3s audio simply contain "RIAA thank you for downloading this MP3" over and over again. ha
No, no! It's cache them!
If you run a bar, you have to pay the RIAA a fee for the 'right' to play music.
There are 2 payment methods:
1) Pay the flat rate
2) Pay the rate, and keep track of what you have played, that way the artist gets his/her cut.
Why hasn't someone created a program that does #2 for you? A computer with 3-5 CD players, that reads the info about the disk and saves the playlist so the RIAA gets a stack of papers.
Now...here's where #2 gets fun....
1) If the bar plays obscure songs (where the author knows how much the royality check would be) and doesn't get paid....RIAA busted.
2) If the software yet to be designed inputted what they played into a central database, the copyright holders can check and see if they should be paid....if not....RIAA busted.
The extra paperwork alone should bury the RIAA.
...was, in the same article cited above, written by Charlie D, the announcement of the latest piece of vaporware. Hundreds of developers have already not decided to lend a hand, while some handful have even vowed to begin and then abandon the project.
There's a lot of worthless spite in this article, but if you can look past that, you might see something worth thinking about.
/.
Coincidentally I've developed my "looking past worthless spite" ability significantly since the day I first pointed my browser to
Sony sues Sony.
I agree with Charlie that we can find a way to use their own legislation against them. It's that, or put down the Playstation, and cancel HBO, and don't go to the movies, no matter how hot Carrie-Ann Moss looks in that tight leather suit. And those CD-Rs you burn to? See 17USC1003 through 17USC1007 for the details on those royalties.
Vonnegut: "What is the purpose of life? To be the eyes, ears, and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool."
(1) Get legal-insurance. You'll need it with those fucks.
(2) Put as much money as you can into 401(k) and 403(b) plans. According to the law, they are solidly protected from creditor claims, bankruptcy, and lawsuits.
(3) Put whatever's left in Traditional IRAs. They are also protected, by all state laws. Depending on the state you live in, so too many Roth IRA's be protected, though not all states have updated their legislation to provide Roth IRA's with that level of protection.
Thus, they can sue you all they want, but won't get all of your money. If you live in a state where RothIRA's are protected, then you can even get access to your contributions, which they couldn't touch.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
However it seems that a playlist can be generated based on a user voting system (semi-generated for the user), as long as the resulting playlist conforms to the other rules (types of songs per hour, etc). Algorithms can be applied to format the voted playlist into an actual playlist that conforms to the rules (e.g. by padding the playlist with similar music from different groups) where need be.
The author's original idea will have to be manipulated a bit, but it's still feasible in many ways.
A bit of ingenuity can go a long ways.
I have my doubts as to if the general idea could really fly in the current online world, however you never know until you try. It would definitely have to be OSS.
Why bother with suspect technological workarounds. Just boycott music in the vault! .
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
The blank media tax means that it's legal here.
Too bad the money collected by the CPCC on this hasn't been shared to the musicians at all, instead being used to send all the CPCC people to a vacation/conference.
There are thousands of skilled musicians that offer their music free for download on the net. In many cases their music is by a fair span better than most commercial offerings.
I say, instead of giving these people and this bloated industry our money, let's give these young and skilled musicians a reason for playing: being listened to. When they release a CD, let's buy it directly from them, instead of funding indirectly these mammoth organikzations that exist only for their own benefit.
I'm currently listening to Machinae Supremacy, but there are enough of these musicians in every genre. You might be suprised about the incredible quality of their art. Mp3.com is a great place to start looking for free, legal, quality music.
Hopefully, when these people will replace nsyc, madonna, limp bizkit, they will remember that the sharing mentality put them there in the first place, not RIAA.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Have you ever thought of becoming a commercial broadcaster yourself ?
Haven't got the time: an hour or two a day is all that it would take - automated of course.
Haven't got the bandwidth: commercially broadcast to a couple of your friends.
Pay the RIAA: naturally, be generous - round it up to a cheque for one penny per month. (do the math)
Any idea what the banks charge companies to cash cheques: in the UK it is about 40p (some 25 cents).
Any idea how much administrative time it would take to process all those cheques ?
OK: this falls down if you need to pay membership to be able to broadcast in the first place; if not this could be some fun.
I don't really see the point. Say a system like the author describes is set up, basically distributing the cost of streaming the songs among the users, the RIAA still ends up getting the money they wanted. .07 cents va. $.07 aside, if such an endeavor generates $1 million in revenue, all you've done is decentralize where the $1 million is coming from. Instead of $1 million from a single webcaster, now they have 1 million $1 payments? Will that really infuruate them?
A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges .07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
It's seventy DOLLARS per song.
100000 listeners * .07 cents = 7000 cents.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
What a vicious reality check...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
As regular reader of /. for years now, I did know how crappy the search function is. In fact, I used it to get the CARP link. Now if you want shitty search engines, look at the one on the Inq, it won't even let you search the author field. I use google to find my own articles.
-Charlie (the articles author)
Ilegal , But thats the point, its what this law says... Do You porport to be the law? I think the that if we abuse the prosses just like the RIAA its sweet irony. I refer to how and when contravercial emendments where sneeked in. Now if they want to complain that the law is not to thier liking, its almost as if some of the original intent was actually left behind in the law by accident. I for one do not buy to the idea that it is a flaw, its a feature consistent with the originall intent that had the pervasity to survive. So the idea is that corporations still don't write the whole of the laws and some people are left groaping how did they let that happen. Ah democracy...
I felt a shiver when I used microsofts view of flaws and features. I think its just us learning to stoop down to thier level. Shit, in examining my behavior and views, I find I am hoplessly corupted, doomed, and I feel my soul slipping into the abys. Give me some links to some clean music untouched by the RIAA. If we support the other alternatives they will get better.
The author seems to forget that you can't download those 20GB of songs off the net and stream them for money. You have to BUY the songs legitimately, then you can stream them.
Running a radio station, or even a webcast station, is not cheap.
Actually, I wasn't paid for it.
-Charlie
I was thinking about buying a TV/FM radio card for my PC and then setting it up to record a favorite station all day. Then, during playback, I would like to save segments (individual songs) as MP3 or OGG format files for later, creating my own "legal" versions. Is this feasible ? Why hasn't someone else already done it?
Yeah, but if it is legal, you won't have to defend it, you can most likely get it thrown out. Remember, this is an excercise in obeying the letter of the law, not the spirit. The letter is what is enforced, much to the chagrin of people trying to do the right thing, but getting constantly screwed for it.
If you have a clever lawyer when setting something like this up, and you do your homework, you should be untouchable. Using the law to do wrong is a time honored tradition in the US, just look at our government. When was the last time you heard Bush say Enron, or Chaney say Haliburon?
-Charlie
Check out LaunchCast
They've been doing this for several years now (create a personal radio station). They get by the rules that which "explicitly prevent radio stations from doing things like allowing listeners to democratically select which songs to play" by letting listeners rate music, which performs two tasks: 1) a rather TiVo like function, using your ratings to find new music you might also like and 2) to help decide what songs you get to listen to. Note that listeners aren't saying "I'd like to hear song X next." Instead, listeners are simply showing preference for a song, artist, album, genre, or other member's preferences. The best feature is the "Red X" option, to ban a song, artist, or album from your station. It's quite swank. Best of all, it's free for basic service, and an actually reasonable subscription for enhanced features.
This comment was not generated by Uber Elephants...
1 in 10,000 ?, thats a bit low for my liking, and now I am more worried about the zebra's than the RIAA.
I have a rock in my house that's been keeping zebras away for 25 years. If you are interested, I can sell you a chunk of the rock for a very reasonable price.
I have high doubt of any massive legal action from these idiots. You can't stop piracy, they induced it by having high exorbitant pricing. I stongly support the Apple's "$1 a song" thing built into it's media player. That is a nominal fee. Anyways, I still use kazaa, and I have no fear. They wont prosecute me. I can say I didn't authorize them to penetrate my firewall to scan my ports for file sharing. I remember seeing a news article stating since the recent threats from the RIAA, sharing went up 11%. I hope their threats backfire. Let's keep sharing! :)
Take a look.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
Ok, I know this is a slashdot faux pas, but is there anything like this Otto program for Win32? I would love to use something like this for my Shoutcast stream.
Erik
From the article:
.07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges
For the not math challenged, you pay $70 per song.
Tor
I don't know what internet that guy is on, but here on Earth's internet, if you have 100k listeners to a song, you ain't a small broadcaster!
For a more realistic look at the small broadcaster, go take a look at Live365. A plan with 100 simultaneous listeners for your station (way more realistic than 100k listeners) starts at $8/month, and that includes the royalties.
The only reason webcasting is legal at all is the GOVT. decided it had to be legal and a fee system was set up to compensate the copyright holder. If the RIAA had its way, things would be different. Not surprising that someone now wants to exploit a decision by the govt. that limited the RIAAs freedom to sell their property in a manner they see fit. Basically, a system like this will give the RIAA ammunition to go back to the govt and say "see, I told you webcasting was evil. People are buying songs using webcasting for 0.07 cents per song that you made us sell for, instead of the $1 per song that the free market is willing to pay." Next thing you know, the govt will outlaw wevcasting, or at least enforce DRM encryption to stop the end-user from saving the stream.
Vote for Pedro
I'm starting to think the 0 in Hax0r represents extra-wide goatse goodness.
No, Wayne's World.
If he's at "Inquirer Labs US," why does he call them "$!#£@*rs?" Wouldn't that require a £ on his keyboard? Why the hell did I notice that or even begin to care?
There is a higher probability of being sued by RIAA than the probability that the zebra ever existing through the mythical process of evolution. That's 1 to the -87. Basically 1 in 1x where x is 87 zeros.
I'd rather infuriate them illegally.
It's called Radio Heart and they play all kinds of stuff. What they play depends on who the DJ is. Check out the site and see the DJ's playlists for yourself. Anyway, I don't know if they've picked up ALL of the MP3s they broadcast legally, but the servers aren't located in the U.S. That ought to annoy the RIAA. Anyway, check it out. I personally like it.
The new version of K-lite just got released, with built in IP blocker. Bit Torrent runs in the background of your OS, no GUI, no Napster-esque interface, nothing. Freenet, well, the freenet thing is well documented in these parts. I don't think P2P is going away anytime soon, and Matt "Dentist of Doom" Oppenheim, with Cary "Nowhere to run to, baby" Sherman, can keep making their threats and kicking and screaming, because quite honestly, they come off as morons. Sure, they're annoying, but I hardly feel threatened by them. Maybe the dipshit high school girl down the street using the stock version of Kazaa to download the new Avril CD has a very minimal chance of being pinched, but anyone who has a firewall or a non-Belkin router or a K-lite ++ build or any minimal sort of security will most likely have nothing to fear. It's propaganda.
Making money, and preventing other people from stealing "their" money. So you have to wonder if this online purchasing is just another way for the RIAA to line its pockets.. or if they just need to have stupid laws for everything people seem to enjoy.
Damn laws.. I have mp3s, from cds and I'm a criminal, why don't they use the money to go shoot some terrorists or something important..
Those artists all still make more money than I do, so I don't see how pissing someone off like me is going to benefit the RIAA or our suffering economy. I mean shit sorry we all cant afford 20$ music cds and we are all cheap.
BUt some of us have bills.
I just wish the RIAA would go about this a different way, than kicking in the door, waving the four four.
[cx]
a boycott of RIAA sounds fine... which files are covered by them?
.0000000000001 cent charge per music file, how many of us are going to whip out a credit card online and put that number into an online database? personally, i cringe, a little, every time i use a cc number online. yes, mine has been hacked once already.
wouldn't it be ideal to set up music trading that simply excludes RIAA files entirely? if we started a tradition of blacklisting corporate music, eventually it could just fade away.
how can that "free model" be made attractive to independant artists? it would be nice to see artists compensated for their work, without depending on bullies...
if a "free model" were developed, ideally, it would offer better compensation to artists than does the RIAA's corporate block. keep in mind that the artists actually don't get such a large cut of the pie, when their CD's are sold. the "free model" should offer them more per mp3 than the corporations offer them. if that could be arranged, it would become a natural decision for artists to submit work to the "free model" rather than to corporations.
given wide adoption of a "free model," the middleman RIAA would wither into an obsolete machine, because:
(1) artists would get more $ for sharing with the "free model," so even those with wealthy ambitions would choose it first.
(2) the RIAAs corporate constituents' copyrights would gradually go public domain over the next century, thereby depleting their lawyer ammunition ($).
question is, even if there's a
in france, artists get paid by the government. now THAT's a COUNTRY.
Naturally, that anonymous reader is none other than the karma whoring author himself. That thirteen year old zit-faced pubescent hairless wanker makes Madonna truly look like a virgin!
Here's a better way to infuriate them.
Pay for the god damned music you're stealing! Then they'll have to lay off their lawyers.
ETR until pedant emphasizes legal definition of "stealing" over common meaning: 43 seconds
ETR until infuriated college student who doesn't want to face up to their life of crime mods this down: 12.5 seconds
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
I've come across a few examples of waivers (or similar) on the web, but not much. This is actually my project for the day and I just happened to come here first (out of habit). Anyhow, if anyone out here has any ideas I'd love to hear it. I'll be playing 100% independant music and don't expect I'd have much trouble getting a reasonable waiver signed by enough artists to give me a reasonable play-catalog.
Quack, quack.
Neither my sources for MP3s, nor myself personally, are worried about the RIAA, and there is a pretty basic reason why.
As background, I like alot of different types of music. And I have legally downloaded, for free, gigs of songs.
It's quite simple...
Many bands allow/encourage taping of the live shows. Why? They know that these recording will be passed around (via mp3, shn, soundboard>dat>CD, etc). This keeps the existing fans happy, and increases the chance that "not-yet fans" will hear the music. This leads to greater album/concert/concession sales.
Some of the more obvious examples of bands that allow this would be: The Grateful Dead, Phish, Moe., and Widespread Panic.
Other artists that I have downloaded full live shows of include: Herb Alpert, Louis Armstrong, and The Flaming Lips
Other artists allow for the MP3 release of particular (studio-version) songs for free on music-centered sites and/or their own websites.
3 songs in particular come to mind.
1) Lovertits by Peaches - No idea who this was until I found this song awhile ago. Now, I consider myself a fan.
2) Nuclear War by Yo La Tengo - I had heard of them, and heard a song or two by them, but I didn't particularly care one way or the other. Then, I downloaded this song. Hearing this song, in conjunction with what I already had heard, has given me a greater appreciation for what this band does. Now, I am more inclined to listen to them again, and (OMG!) actually buy an album.
3) Fudgy the Whale by Dub Narcotic Sound System - A band that I had no clue existed. Then I heard this song. Its just plain cool. Definitely on my radar.
Even the MySQL guy that sits 3 cubes away from me has heard these songs now (Fridays after lunch can get a little loud in our office). He may or may not like them himself, but he has at least heard them, and this would not have been the case without the existence of the released MP3s.
--
The above long-winded post is merely an attempt to point out the fact that legal mp3s ARE available, and the fact that releasing them does benefit the artist.
It's funny. I haven't bought the new Metallica. But I did buy Peaches. I wonder if there is a correlation?
---
IMHO - One site that is particularly worthy of being slahdotted on a daily basis: www.epitonic.com
I just have a quick question for you all (and everyone for that matter). Why is everyone making such a fuss over music when in reality you're paying a whole heck of a lot more for DVDs and video games? I say give the RIAA and the rest of the music industry a break.
Doesn't western music work on a fairly small set of notes coupled by some power of 2 fraction of a second to indicate spacing?
It ought to be possible to write a simple application that creates a random song and copywrites it... distribute it enough, and then, pretty much every song that RIAA publishes would infringe.
Or, depending on how copyright law works, you could programatically generate all possible songs as a single song, and then copywrite that. Then, any new song would infringe upon your song, and the recording industry has to pony up.
The music industry has a problem in that it is a lot easier to programmatically generate music than it is programmatically generate visual arts. If you have computers making music, even randomly, you can pretty much torpedo the notion of intellectual property becuase a brute force generation of notes on a distributed internet will simply outpace the less numerous and less efficient human musicians.
This is my sig.
Suppose mp3 encoders suddenly started popping up with the ability to output files with the audio reversed so that it plays backwards. Assuming "they" didn't start doubling their database of fingerprints I wonder if that would be enough to defeat spectral analysis fingerprinting?
Alas, I know not whether its even possible to make an mp3 player decode the frames in reverse order. If so, it would just be a matter of keeping tabs on which files in your library sounded like alien gibberish the first time you went to have a listen. Too bad the scheme gets silly once you want put the files onto your portable or burn them on a Red Book disc.
The answer is 42!
Taking away all the juicy spite, here is what I understood of the article.
Currently RIAA charges the broadcasters (and webcasters specifically) 0.07 cents
for each song played for each listener who tunes to their broadcast service.
If you have 10000 listeners, you have to pay 70 cents for each song you play
on your station. This can add up to quite a bit.
However if your "broadcast" service allows each user to select the songs they want to
listen, you can effectively pay 0.07 cents for each song a user listens (*cough*
downloads) which means you can let as many songs as they want for 0.07 cents
a download. Of course this needs a napster like service for broadcasting, with the
DJs forming the p2p network,not for the purpose of allowing music download
but for the purpose of allowing music broadcast.
=== end of summary ===
I think the author has hit the point. RIAA has setup the pricing based on an existing model.
The pricing has got nothing to do with the supply and demand of a song per customer
per se, but rather is positioned in such a way that it is exhorbitant for small webcasters
but reasonable for big-musle broadcasts. Author has found an alternate business model
(which RIAA didnt dream up of, due to their limited field of vision) which breaks their
assumptions and provides cheap music access.
The only downside I can thing is, once this is put into practice (if it is feasible, and lawyers dont find a
problem with this approach etc.) RIAA will easily rewrite the pricing and create a new
scheme aimed at penalising this new model, by lobbying the law-makers again.
Remember, struggle for music is not a moral or ethical question (nobody involved in
this equation really cares if authors are suitable rewarded for their creativity) but a
question of policy : "Should the rich monopolies continue to benefit from their monoply".
As long as this is the question being asked no business models, pricing schemes whatsoever
can bring true music to listeners.
DO NOT PANIC
I don't think I've ever seen anyone jump to so many conclusions in so little space, as you have.
Ticklemeozmo made some very resonable points.
why should riaa get even 4 dollars?! this is a nice article and everything, but we should look for ways to dispose (kill,destroy whatever) riaa alltogether. THEY are the thiefs who make bank on backs of artists and their fans. they contribute NOTHING to music as we know it. parasitic industry association of america just got to go... spending brain cycles on thinking how to take it in the ass "in a nice way" is not helping the cause.
This is only tangentially realted to the topic. But the article put out a call for programmers and this guy was great. I was wondering if anyone knows what happened to the guy who wrote the Hotline file sharing service for the Mac circa 1996/1997?
It actually doesn't have anything to do with zebras.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
If you are, in fact, Charlie Demerjian:
FYI:
1) Don't lash out at people who criticize you. It makes you look bad, especially when those criticisms are valid (and they are valid).
2) Your writing style is unprofessional, disorganized, and unfocused. In simpler terms, it's bad. It doesn't reflect well on you or the people who publish your writings.
3) The person who you replied to did contribute, and he did so positively.
It's an evaluation copy only, I promise! I'll delete it after 48 hours!
deus does not exist but if he does
There's a lot of worthless spite in this article, but if you can look past that, you might see something worth thinking about.
That comment almost made me break down and click the article link, but I figured I would get enough spite reading the comments...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
He suggests a genius programmer and Justin Frankel in the same breath? Justin is the Ringo Starr of the Internet. A person of middling skill who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He wrote a mediocre program (that continues to be mediocre to this day) that just happened to gain a large user base in a time when Internet companies equated users to actual dollars. He cashed in when he had the chance and made out like a bandit. That gave him the opportunity to kick back and do whatever programming he wanted. Hence, further mediocrity such as Gnutella, a fatally flawed P2P program that doesn't scale, and served mainly as a political statement.
The fact that he never seemed to figure out why AOL didn't like his little side projects also doesn't say a lot for his chances of actually being a genius. Any moron can see why they were disturbed at his posting pirateware on websites owned by them. If he had half a brain, he would have spent 0.0001% of his fortune and put up a private web site for distributing his warez. If his contract with AOL didn't allow him to do so, then he's doubly lame for signing a contract that didn't allow private projects in his spare time.
No, what a project like the suggested Internet radio project requires is simply a seasoned, disciplined programmer with great skill. There are thousands of them out there. Doesn't have to be someone made famous by fooling a large corporation into buying a cheesy music application for untold amounts of money, and who crashes expensive cars and writes poor freeware in his spare time. Let somebody deserving make a name for themself with this project.
PS: I've worked directly with Justin in the past. I have to say, he was far from impressive. We were working on something rather basic, but he wouldn't/couldn't even spend the time to read the very simple specs to make it work, and required a bit of handholding. Kind of sad, really.
I've found myself occasionally thinking "hey, this article is toned-down enough that I can send it to other people," and then having them ask me what sort of crazy rabid nonsense I'm sending them. But hey, compared to what I could've sent them, it was calmly-written.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
and stand a chance of beating them legally why not download music off of CD's that you own. That way when the RIAA comes after you all you have to do is to walk into court with the original CD's (all scracthed up) and say that you never made a backup copy of the original and are so glad for all this file sharing stuff so you can listen to the music that you've already purchased again. As far as I can tell, that's legal......
nt
I added a file association so that mw files were opened with winamp. Done.
I think that this is similar to what was suggested here. The files aren't actually converted to another format, just renamed.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
At least when a death result is expected. Many people are afraid of taking a plane, with 1 in a million deaths per flight (or something like that). Many people are afraid of taking a general anesthesic, with an odss of 1 in 200,000.
This kind of radio-on-demand system is already available.
weblisten
puretunes
A new all-you-can-eat music download service that takes advantage of Spanish copyright law. The Madrid-based company, called Puretunes, is the second Spanish Web service to try offering access to a vast and otherwise unavailable catalog of music online without directly securing the record labels' permission.
Full article
The article mentioned a fear of any company with more lawers than what the Enquirer has, could this not be true for RIAA aswell? Why not find a way to prove that Microsoft is in violation of these laws, maybe Windows Update or MSN shares sub-systems with Kazaa that contradict the RIAA regulations. What about MS DLL's used by Kazaa or O/S API's. Surely if these laws could be construed to make Microsoft look like criminals, MS would go OJ on them. I would pay to see Microsoft's army of lawyers Massacre RIAA back into the whole they crawled out of. FFrozTT
Not!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
((20,000,000,000/4,000,000)*10)*0.0007=
((20,00 0/4)*10)*0.0007=
$35.00 NOT $3.50
(unless I mis-read the $/song)
Either way, $0.0007/song beats the $0.79/song currently offered by Apple. I would have to play it or stream it to others 1129 times before it would cost me $.79 for just the one song.
If the scenario in the article were indeed logical, would still be worth it? Read on:
The article, however, happens to be a case of use of bad math. This is the math you should really be interested in:
Here is the math for streaming that equvilates to 1000 people streaming one (non-commercial/non-DJ) radio station's site 24/7/30:
Example 1:
360*1,000*30*0.0007=$7,560/month in RIAA fees
360 (4 minute songs)
1,000 people streaming 24/7 (ultra popular site)
30 days in an average month
$.0007 / song
This would be ugly if they had 1,000,000 people streaming the same station. Besides, since it's a non-commercial station and no one is making any money off of it, why should it be any different than letting your friends come over and hear your collection of tapes and CDs.
Example 2:
Closer to reality:
270*1,000*30*0.0007=$5,670/month in RIAA fees
270 4 minute songs
1,000 people streaming 24/7 (ultra popular site)
30 days in an average month
$.0007 / song
This gives you 18 hours of music time and 6 hours of DJ/news/commercial time. Assuming that commercial time is 3 of those 6 hours, the station would need to sell commercial time for at least $31.50/minute just to cover the RIAA fees.
Unfortunately, the numbers are not added that way and and most radio stations can't even afford to stream music. Unfortunately if a radio station has 1,000,000 listeners, that is what gets used to figure out streaming revenues not actual streaming numbers.
A bit of a problem for a real radio station but imposible for internet geek Joe Blow with his own lp-FM radio station with internet radio streaming.
On the other hand Joe Blow will probably not have a lp-FM station and only be be one of 100,000+ people with their own version of a custom internet radio station and perhaps 5 people (at most) will stream on average (a guess) 4 hours a day.
60*5*0.0007=$.21/day
60 (4 minute songs)
5 streams
$.0007 / song
I ask you, why would I want to pay the RIAA (of all entities) $.21 per day just to allow others to listen to the songs I like? Besides I already paid for my right to listen when I bought the CD.
How could the RIAA guarantee collection of the (in this case) $.042 per 60 song stream? Who is going to guarantee the money gets from the listener to the RIAA if the money doesn't go directly to or is not collected directly by the RIAA? (like I care if the RIAA gets their money, but I know they do and they will get more say than us on deciding if this will be a tolerable solution or not)
The only way this will work is if the streaming is a non-capturable/encrypted format, use of separate paid up front accounts in each listener's name and The listener gets to choose what songs he/she/it is interested in and not what I want them to hear. That or the fidelity must be reduced to that of a lp record or a well used tape. Of course then there is subscription digital radio but even that has it's downsides.
AND....
Since the internet is unstable and streaming has it's pit falls. These are such as drop outs, poor fidelity and firewall issues. Plus corporations are not really all that interested in people using corporate owned bandwidth for personal audio streaming. Add it all up and you get "it ain't worth it". At least not just to line the pocketbooks of the RIAA.
To make (almost) everyone happy...
The only system that will work would be to build a system from the ground up supporting all media types: CD, DVD, tape, DAT, audio streaming and some sort of 'per song' file storage method (ie: wm?/mp?/
I don't know about you, but if you charge $1 per month per user, you can pay the RIAA their $3.50 per 20 GB downloaded, a 50 cent tip on top of that, and with 35 million users, still have enough to pay the rent. Legally. Cool.
NO! NO! NO! That's $3.50 PER LISTENER, you GIBBERING IDIOT! not per SONG!! If you charge $1 per month, you're OUT $2.50 PER USER! Jeez, people! Learn to do SIMPLE MATH!
This is not part of my post. It's my signature. I bet you're disappointed.