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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?
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
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.
.07 CENTS. IE: 7/10th's of a cent. So, yeah, 7000 cents, I get $70 dollars.
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
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.
It would be more constructive if someone devised a new model that would allow both immediate distribution of music, like P2P provides, and the artists to be paid as well.
The core problem with the RIAA is not really that they are greedy and heavy-handed, the real problem is that they are the promoter of a dying kind of business, that of distributing music on a physical media. Their entire model is based on 1 medium == 1 copy of the material on the CD. That model has been overturned by the internet, and they struggle like a drowning man to save the old system.
The reality is that the RIAA will disappear eventually, the only question is how much damage they will do before they die. The other question is this : it's all well and good that music can be distributed digitally, and that the RIAA is on the go, but nobody has come up with a good distribution model that would allow the artists to be paid without the RIAA. As long as someone doesn't find a solution to that problem, the RIAA will continue to survive, annoy the living hell out of everybody, listeners and artists alike, and P2P users will continue to be thieves (yes they are, for most artists).
The key is a new distribution/paying scheme. There is some breakthrough to be done in that area. When people can download a piece of music immediately and the artist get paid the second later in a totally reliable, trustworthy and non-big-brotherish fashion, the middle-man RIAA will disappear naturally and in no time flat.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
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!
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. :-)
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
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
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.
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."
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)
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.
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)
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
...is that he got paid to write this trainwreck of an article.
Hammer of Truth
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?
No, no! It's cache them!
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
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.
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).
As I said, my post was a summary. It wasn't the exact rules. If you wait more than an hour before you play the request, and you don't let anyone know exactly when or what you're going to play until you play it, it might be legal. Of course at that point I'm not sure exactly what the incentive is to the person broadcasting the songs who has to pay the RIAA.
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 think once you've followed all the rules you'll find yourself with a radio station. Maybe a good radio station, run cheaply through volunteer DJs and volunteer bandwidth, but still just a radio station.
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.
True, you never know until you try, but I don't think the potential benefits outweigh the difficulty of making the software. Of course, I'm not that big a fan of radio stations, even good radio stations. If I'm going to pay for digital music, I'll just use Rhapsody or something.
Problem with your argument chief:
/. articles, there has been loads of proof posted on this and I am too lazy to reproduce it here.
/. stopped buying albums, the RIAA would see a loss of about, Im guessing, less than 10% overall sales. This they could quickly blame on piracy, makes some apperances on local news broadcasts to drum up anti-piracy support and jack the prices even further. Joe six-pack will then blame the tech crowd for stealing usic and forcing him to pay an extra $5 on that new Creed CD he wants.
Most artists will continue to make money the way they do now, without the RIAA overhead: they will tour and sell band merchandise
This would be nice if it was true. Some artists, the Eminems and the JLos of the world make a lot of money touring, but most artists do not. Check the last couple days worth of
Boycotting could be an effective means of driving a point home, except that most people do not care. If every person on
Now a total boycott, that would hit them in the sack, but I don't have a clue how to get everybody to back it, and you need everybody, not just one demographic.
Where the blow needs to be struck, is by the artists themselves. We are not far from the day (if not there already) when an artist will be able to produce an album without a studio, and distribute it direct to fans via the web. No middle man. The RIAA's recent actions are especially going to encourage acts to start doing this. If the RIAA no longer controls the goods, then nobody is going to need to patronize them. They shirvel up like a slug caught out in the sun...
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
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!
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)
Actually, I wasn't paid for it.
-Charlie
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! :)
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.
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