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Cringely Tries Snapster 2.0
Fungii writes "Following up from this story last week, here is an update on Cringely's site about the snapster idea. He writes about some of the more interesting reader responses to the idea. Raises some interesting questions."
If this actually holds up in court. An amusing thought experiment though..
Fair use isn't actually fair.. I don't think RIAA, with all its money and lawyers will let this slip through..
Though of course, I hope it does..
I'm not the devil.. just his advocate.
You don't think that if he exploits this 'loophole', it will get patched immediately by the RIAA? If anything, legislation or rules preventing this 'loophole' will emerge.
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Interestingly, if you rent a DVD from them you get an edited DVD and a copy of the original DVD in a tamper-evident container which you are not to open. That way they ensure that they own one original copy for each edited copy and that you can't watch both at the same time. More importantly, you can't watch the edited one while your neighbor watches the origianl that you lent him. This is very similar to the ideas that Cringely puts forth in the Snapster 2.0 idea, except for the editing part. The fair use and mutal ownership aspects though are identical.
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That depends on whether or not Snapster can make enough money quickly enough to hire better lawyers than the RIAA can.
Doubtful.
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How is his suggestion theft? For every simultaneous copy being played of a given CD, there is a physical CD bought and paid for not in use.
In other words, the physical media is still payed for, it's just not being used. The digital copy is. And only one digital copy is allowed to be used in the system at a time per physical media purchased.
If you look at the fair use subsections of US copyright law, you see that there is very clearly a difference between individual fair use and fair use by a library or archive.
Instead of arguing that P2P should be allowed as inidividual fair use and that P2P users are patrons of an archive, I think the better analogy is that each P2P node IS an archive and should be allowed to lend to other archives.
According to the law, one copy can of a copyrighted work can still be made specifically for lending to other archives.
The stipulations are that the archives must be without commercial advantage, open to the public and retain any copyright notices.
Now, the one copy part might not fit Kazaa, but a differen type of P2P app could meet this requirement. It might not be as efficient, but it would still be P2P.
So where does that money come from? Once you drive CD manufacturers out of business, this royalty scheme will be the dominant one. I don't recall the fund plan having any means of generating capital beyond the initial offering, so any royalties that come out, come from that original bag o' cash, which will dwindle faster and faster.
This plan continues to look like a lot of hand-waving to me.
Despite all his conspiratorial talk and financial maneuverings, what Cringely is basically talking about is an online music library, like the one you go to to borrow books. You listen to music by electronically checking it out, and no one else can listen to it while it is checked out. The question is, do the Fair Use provisions and First Sale doctrines that protect physical book libraries also protect online music libraries?
Well, it's up to the judge. Both sides have a strong argument:
In defense of Snapster, ordinary libraries are definitely legal, and the doctrines that protect one could be argued to protect the other.
On the other hand, the mp3.com precedent is not sympathetic to the effort, and the ease of making a copy of a streaming download might suggest to the judge that Snapster is yet another means for facilitating copyright infringement. There's clear precedent for banning programs that do that (napster, morpheus), so once infringement is seen as the primary purpose, it's all over.
On the other hand, physical libraries permit patrons to borrow CDs, and these can easily be ripped. Such does not make infringement the primary purpose of borrowing CDs, as evidenced by the fact that libraries are still legal.
So the million dollar question is whether Snapster is seen as a scheme to facilitate infringement or a legitimate library. It's up to the judge, really.
The upshot is that Cringely ought to drop his conspiratorial muttering and winking, and he REALLY needs to pick a different name for it. Why not something like "Music Library"?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Huh, I didn't read the first snapster article, because I doubted it would have plausible ideas. This sounds interesting, basically in the electronic database, there would be one physical copy of the song that could only be used by one person at a time. This seems to make it legal - fair use is preserved, and communal ownership is possible.
I dunno about it being cheaper than the other ways of buying the music in many cases. Particularly if the music is popular: In that case, many people would want to access the music at once, requiring many physical copies to be purchased. You would always be walking a fine line between providing a useful service that is cheaper than outright ownership, and annoying people with a busy signal. Plus, as you bought more copies, the cost would go up.
Where this could really shine is building archives of music where overall volume of the archive makes it more valuable than being able to get to a specific song. There has been a lot of music made in the past, an enormous quantity really. Classical music fans would doubtless appreciate the ability to access recordings of as wide a variety of music as possible. Getting the latest hit single would not be a priority, and there are frequently multiple recordings of popular works anyway. Most other works would not have a much competition for access at any given time.
Building an archive that people would want to access would have to mean an archive that would rival any individual's collection of recordings, while costing significantly less. But if this holds water legally, it might be possible. It would take a lot of cdrom drives though, unless the media was transferred to disk, and the physical copies were merely tallied and stored.
indeed, but it's an electronic implementation of a traditional library (e.g. if someone takes the item out, no-one else can have it until it's back).
I think this is a great idea!
Ponxx
Just charge 110% of retail price. Then anybody who doesn't cancel gets a disk shipped to them, and the system still makes the 10%.
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What if you could play 50 different songs once a day for a monthly subscription of $15? That is $200 per year to access a potentially enormous archive of music, giving you the ability to hear more music than you could ever hope to buy at that price. I think it is worth it, but you should only be able to download as many songs as you can play. Screw the hoarders who want to copy the entire music archive to their giant raid array. Besides, in this case, there would be no reason to hoard, as you own the music, along with a lot of other people. The organization is just storing it for you and handling loaning it out - a bit like a private subscription library.
50 songs at 5 min each, that is 250 minutes. That is 8+ hours a day. In other words for less than $100 a month you can listen to music for all your waken hours. And if you charge $0.02 per song, than it becomes $40 per month for continuous music...
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I think there should be digital libraries. The traditional kind where you have to bring items back. You could for example have to right to have 10 CDs worth of music at any time, or maybe two or three computer games, or a couple of books. We know it's possible by mail (NetFlix) it should be even simpler electronically.
All that is needed is a DRM solution that lets you check-out and check-in items. The provider then needs sufficient licenses to cope with parallel use. For anything that's not particularly new, i'm sure there are never more than a couple of hundred people world-wide listening to the same track at the same time...
If you have 100 Mn subscribers for say 10 dollars/month you have a lot of money to buy licenses (+profit!)
Ponxx
This system is not supposed to be a distributed sharing system. All the discs in the system are bought by the collective and centrally stored. Thus you cannot put discs you own into the system yourself, while retaining your copy. This would create obvious problems if you listened to the disc, or a fair use copy you had made of the disc.
True enough that adapting this system into a car or regular cd player would be implausible with current technology. It would only work on the computer. Yet if it worked well enough, it might be viable as a distribution method.
1) The "borrowing" model reminds me of the Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice bit in the climax of Trading Spaces (Murphy/Ackroyd).
2) The record labels do have one function that makes them a "necessary evil" : tour support. Bands can't really break into a national scene without playing outside of their regions, and that in America gets *expensive*.
Even a modestly popular and established band like Marillion, who when they tour small clubs selling out 600-1200 seaters throughout the states, will *lose* $30,000. Generally, that $30K is covered by the record label (part of a secondary "advance"), who account for it in the hopes that it will be made up for in increased record sales due to the promotion.
3) There's one other Force against Nature in all of this, one whose legal budget alone is worth more than Snapster could ever hope to raise : ASCAP. They won't go for this. ASCAP wants to and WILL take a cut from every copy, not just the original purchase.
In the example of a clothing store in a shopping mall playing the local top 40 station, ASCAP collects first from the station's purchase of the CD, second from the radio station's own broadcast license, and third from the clothing store itself to have a "public performance" license.
Out of an annual income of $8.6 billion, ASCAP claims to give 84% of all its income to the copyright holders. Sounds great, until you realize just how many lawyers can be bought with 16% of 8 billion dollars...With less than one year's "profits", ASCAP could buy controlling interest in Snapster 2.0 and shut it down in a heartbeat. Or just sue it into oblivion until a broadcast license rate is reached that makes operating it prohibitive.
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-- Joe
I really think you will have great problems convincing thousands (or millions) of people to essentially give up the ability to play at will the tracks of the CDs they own. Yeah, if everyone suddenly became part of the collective there would probably be enough overlap so that no one would ever really have to wait very long. But for the more obscure tracks there could be a definite shortage of slots and the possibility could be very real that the owner of a CD would be unable to play his library for a significant time period until someone checks something in.
And, this all completely ignores the problem of enforcement -- how do you:
If courts find that there is significant or rampant evidence of these protections failing, then the legitimacy of the plan really takes a hit. And let's face it, people are used to copying MP3 tracks at will, so why would they ever be inclined to voluntarily restrict themselves (and pay for the right to do so)?
I'll admit, v2.0 is a lot closer to legal than 1.0 -- in fact it would actually BE legal if you could enforce the above restrictions... but human nature being what it is, I wouldn't count on it. Finally, to get mass appeal you would have to stay clear from proprietary formats or DRM, and that usually means that your chances of enforcement through software go way down.
At the end of the day, this is just a very efficient library. However, it achieves this efficiency by eliminating the one thing that guarantees the legitimacy of the library: the fact that the items are physical units that pass from hand to hand, so that the one-copy-per-use notion is enforced. By doing away with the physical item, you open up a huge degree of efficiency and scale, yet you also make it very easy to cheat the system... and at then end of the day there's no way to ensure compliance, so this will fail along with all the Napsters and MP3.com's of the world.
The basis of this system is that since we have a fair-use right to listen to our music at any time, and we are only actually listening to a single cd less than 1/100th of that time we need to we are wasting money. So instead we can share that cd with 100 people and take full advantage of it (actually we would need more than one cd depending on peak listening hours and popularity of certain songs)
The problem with this system is that if it ever took off, and was actually maintained legal in court, it would mean that there would be a lot fewer CD's being sold, since we are squeezing more use out of them. Therefore, as demand decreased, prices would rise, since an artist would have charge more money for a CD to make as much money as he used to. The result - it becomes too expensive for a single person to buy a CD, and and the only economical way to listen to music would be to belong to some sort of 'Snapster Fund', which probably wouldn't be that less expensive than it used to cost to buy CD's, and possibly more due to the overhead costs in running it.
So in effect it would not decrease the cost of music in the long run, and would simple make it manditory to go through this additional middleman. Note this plan does nothing to get rid of the RIAA - heck if they couldn't beat it they'd probably end of buying it. (/me shudders)
This already exists. It's called Amway.
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The site:
http://www.mont.lib.md.us/researchinfo/ebooks.asp
Excerpt:
Who promoted Napster? Simple. Use the internet to promote music, a musician makes a website and promotes their own music, they pay for advertisements like everyone else, if they are good their songs will be put on web radio (which will replace the offline radio), and word of month will promote them.
The RIAA does promote some artists to success, but then you have other artists which got almost no promotion at all but sold tens of millions of copies.
Look at the Jackson 5, they came along before there were ways to "create" a star, they used their actual talent to promote their music, What about stevie wonder? Hes blind and he managed to sell music on his talent.
Now you have Britney Spears with no talent selling music because the RIAA pours money into a music video. I say we let the internet take over as promotion, eventually there will be streaming music videos on the net to replace the MTV distribution, and I'm sure you could design P2P systems to support streaming music video advertisements. This way a user can click a button and watch random music videos just like MTV.
you could also listen to random music via web radio, college radio etc. You could use google to market your website, and you can use worth of mouth to get people to trade your music around.
Sure its not going to be easy, but musicians would make a shitload more money making 25cent per song than they make from the RIAA (25 cent per CD=15 songs)
But I'll tell you this, if a musician cannot market themselves, let them hire a professional marketer to make their website, create their music video, and work on their Ads. The RIAA is not needed for this, theres plenty of teenagers on the net who know how to make a successful website or market a product, The napster kid sure knew what he was doing.
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"Nothing in the preceding sentence shall apply to the rental, lease, or lending of a phonorecord for nonprofit purposes by a nonprofit library" So it's a library. And just because it's nonprofit doesn't mean it can't charge a fee for it's services.
What could make sense is to have musicians set up affiliate programs (like Amazon) that pay the fan a commission if a link on a fan's site leads to a sale.