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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."
So... he's writing... about what we said, when he wrote to us... about what he said?
.....
1.) Write Article
2.) Get Feedback
3.) Write Article
Ow. I think I've gone cross-eyed. : )
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
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.
I really like the second version he's come up with. I think the first version was just way too risky legally. This version sounds really solid though IMO.
I would love to see this cross-apply to different industries as well. Essentially it's just a digital library. I can't imagine why it wouldn't be legal to operate snapster 2.0.
I for one would join for certain.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
He almost has it there. Maybe more like the system that Lloyd's of London has where the members of Lloyds are responsible for the loses of the company is more like it.
Snapster sounds like a good idea, but the RIAA lawyers will fight it tooth and nail, which would be a problem regardless of whose side the law is actually on... a netflix for CDs would be much the same, except there would be higher distribution costs (offset by lower legal bills). Of course, they would have to make it clear that you shouldn't rent a CD and then rip it to MP3 before sending it back (wink wink).
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
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.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
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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Danger! Danger Will Robinson!
You've used the word 'theft' in a thread on music piracy. Expect 500 Slashbots to jump down your throat telling you that downloading music without paying for it is not the same thing as theft adn another 500 to jump on them saying they're just doing that to try and justify their actions.
Abort! Abort!
His plan of locking physical access to the CD's has some practical problems. Let's say that you have 1,000,000 users. Let's suppose that each user has 2 cd/dvd rom drives they can put cd's in for access. That leaves us with 2,000,000 CDs peak. It seems like alot of CD's but how do you ensure that there aren't 2,000,000 Britney Spears CD's on the network instead of songs you'd actually want to hear.
If my 4 yr old wants to play the same song 50 times everyday for 2 weeks (week days only). Is that 500 plays at .05 per play = $25?
That is the model the record companies want to have.
Embed wireless DRM in everything, you have access
to every song ever written for .05 each.
Every time you play it.
is the same problem mp3.com had when the riaa successfully sued them for their virtual music locker. the idea, was that mp3.com's software would scan a CD to verify you owned it, and afterwards you could listen to the songs on it anywhere, without actually having to rip or upload the mp3s yourself because mp3.com had a master copy. IIRC the courts decided this wasn't airtight enough even with random "please insert the CD again so we can verify you weren't just borrowing it from the library" checks.
if anyone tries snapster 2 they'll lose in court for the same reason...
That depends on whether or not Snapster can make enough money quickly enough to hire better lawyers than the RIAA can.
Doubtful.
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
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While this may allow others to download and listen to a song, then listen to it then notify snapster that they are done with it so that copy of it can can be "freed up", it does not allow the downloader to make a copy of a song.
If this was not a streaming only service then
RIAA would argue that people are copying the songs, and thus violating the copyright, which is most likely what will be happening.
Another problem with is if I have a copy of a disc, and I register it with snapster so others can "borrow" it. If I dont get a notification that it is currently lent out I (or someone else) will be in violation if I listen to it. I can not belive that I will tell snapster every disc I bring into the car or play.
It's an intresting idea, but I dont think it will ever fly.
Are you paranoid if you know that they just want to know everything you say and do?
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.
I wouldn't be surprised to see someone make this system, and then to see the RIAA use all of its immense financial resources to pressure Congress into changing the "fair use" laws so that it specifically says you personally have to own the CD to hear a song... so much for radio if that happens!
stuff |
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.
My idea is start up an online music store where people buy physical CD's. Once they buy the CD, they can also download the MP3 files associated with it, which is legally within their rights as new owners of the CD. The physical CD won't ship for 72 hours, so they have 72 hours to cancel their order. Then charge a 10% restocking fee if they cancel within the 72 hours, and request they delete any downloaded mp3's. Of course no one will delete the mp3's, so effectively they will have bought mp3's to the CD for 10% of the physical CD cost. And it is all legal. Even if the record companies choose to not sell them additional albums, they could buy them from individuals and sell them. A couple of CD's should last a while as long as people are canceling within the 72 hour period.
Fox
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"?
Ed
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.
I almost completely ignored this comment because there's always someone bringing up libraries when this type of discussion comes up.
But gee, you're exactly right. Behind a layer of mutual fund bullshit, he's described exactly what a library does. Why not just form a library instead of all this legal rigamarole?
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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
The method presented in the second article (only allowing one check out at a time) is what I thought Cringely meant when I read the first article.
I don't see why it shouldn't work, after all Apple is paving the way for electronic music distribution, as a store. Now we just have to implement the electronic library.
It could be as simple as time stamping an expiration time in the file. Of course you would need a plug-in for various players (winamp, etc) to "enforce" the time stamp. If you get two requests simultaneously one has to wait the three minutes until the first stamp has expired and then fire off the file to the next listener. If you get more than some set number of people in the queue, creating too long of a wait, the server could be set to place an order for another hard copy of the disk.
This would create the problem of winding up with 50 copies of the latest #1 chart hit, but in a few weeks, when the online demand has ebbed, you could resell the "used" disks to people who want to buy them at a lower price. (A good deal for the buyer as the "used" disk would probably still be in the wrapper!)
The biggest problem would probably be the necessity to keep detailed logs of what was distributed and when, so that when (not if!) you are dragged into court by the RIAA you could prove that you had purchased a physical disk for every concurrent user.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
"NetCDs" would actually be more open to liability than Snapster 2.0. the NetCDs type system would be open to the charge that it facilitates copying, since many (most) users would in fact rip the CDs to their HDDs. the Snapster 2.0 model, however, avoids this by using a streaming approach, ala Songster which is clearly legal. As long as every copy being streamed is only being streamed to one client at a time, and the technology can actually enforce this, Snapster would merely be doing what Songster is, but buying the rights to music by buying actual CDs rather than direct rights from the RIAA.
Of course the eventual downfall of this system is that either CSS-like encryption is used or CDs become software programs that play music, and the EULA indicates that Snapster 2.0 is an unpermitted use.
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Mutual funds are regulated by the Investment Company Act of 1940. To simplify a bit, a mutual fund can only invest in securities; it cannot actually run an operating company.
First there is the problem that Snapster is not planning on buying any securities. By law, this must be a mutual funds main business. A CD is not a security.
Second, Snapster is really going to be an operating business, which a mutual fund cannot run. A rental company, like Blockbuster, cannot organize itself as a mutual fund. Even without the distribution of physical tapes, a satellite company, like DirectTV, cannot organize itself as a mutual fund. An ISP cannot organize itself as a mutual fund.
Snapster 2.0 is going to need servers, databases, system administrators, etc. This will make it an operating company, not a mutual fund.
A mutual fund run business functions to the extend needed to track shareholders and make investment decisions. Snapster's lending of CDs goes way beyond this.
First, I think Snapster 2.0 might appeal as a middle-road of the services out there. The most profitable target audience would be users who listen to lots of music but not for a long time (e.g., to try out new bands or following fads).
But this is really not much more than a combination of the two types of services already out there (but a co-op model instead of top-down). In one corner are monthly-subscription services that offer a limited number of downloads. In the other, iTMS which charges per download, and then it's yours.
Snapster 2.0 instead has a subscription fee (share purchase) which determines how many CDs (or number of songs) you can keep out at a time. Then, each download costs a small amount of money to cover bandwidth and other expenses. You'd need to have some sort of protection to keep from CDs being locked up forever from users who pay once and then don't use the CD for a while, which would keep others from using it.
The physical-distribution record companies would fight hard, too. It would be only a matter of time before Snapster 2.0 would contract directly with artists and become another record company.
And, only music that is popular would really benefit since niche groups would only get a CD or two in licenses purchased.
Finally, how would you go about deciding which new licenses to purchase? If all CDs are taken, purchase another when requested? Since you ultimately cannot return the original purchase to the artist, this would end up losing money.
Somehow you would have to buy a new album only for each new share, but it might be difficult to decide which to buy. This would mean a critical mass of initial shareholders would have to join to make the library large enough to attract further shareholders.
I think I'd invest in it, but not my life savings.
As a matter of fact, some libraries do exactly this right now with e-text. When you "check out" an e-book (or whatever you want to call it) you get access to html'ed book available online. Nobody else can check it out while it's checked out to you.
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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
A download system that benefits the artists more via micropayments, and I mean less than the $1 or so AppleTunes charges, can end this nonsense about getting around RIAA and so on. Anyone not willing to pay no more and probably less than $0.50 for a single is a jerk who probably deserves to have their hard drive invaded.
Of course this would not apply to recordings to artists currently under contract, but so be it. (Those contracted artists who complain about losing money are idiots. They signed that opportunity away long and should shut up).
Ideas like Cringely's sound good on the surface but seem to be nothing more than instigating rock throwing fights with the RIAA and other idiots (politicians, some artists, etc) who share their philosophy. Let's move forward.
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.
Since they are "real tangible" things, like books, only 1 subscriber can borrow a CD at a time.
So let's automatize the lending process: only one subscriber can lend a MP3 at a time; at that time, the MP3 becomes locked. It's only when he checks it back that it is unlocked and someone else can borrow it out.
What he does with the MP3 when he has it his is own business (and in Canada, making a copy for your own private use is LEGAL - that's how I made my own MP3 collection).
Of course, if some americans would borrow MP3s, and it's illegal for them to copy them in the US, well, that's a problem for the US, no? And given how the US/Canadian networks are intermingled, you can't be sure packets won't go through the US. As a matter of fact, to go to my library, eight blocks from my home, packets go through New-York City:
traceroute www2.ville.montreal.qc.ca
traceroute to montrealweb.ville.montreal.qc.ca (65.39.219.34), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 Montreal-HSE-pppxxxx.sympatico.ca (65.95.xx.xx) 7.259 ms 7.217 ms 7.52 ms
2 dis4-montrealak-Vlan200.in.bellnexxia.net (64.230.237.130) 7.986 ms 7.829 ms 7.497 ms
3 core1-montrealak-Gigabite2-1.in.bellnexxia.net (64.230.240.61) 7.525 ms 8.529 ms 7.509 ms
4 core1-newyork83-pos1-2.in.bellnexxia.net (64.230.240.78) 15.416 ms 16.171 ms 15.896 ms
5 HSE-Sherbrooke-ppp98979.qc.sympatico.ca (64.230.223.118) 16.103 ms 16.248 ms 16.18 ms
6 208.50.13.129 (208.50.13.129) 17.011 ms 15.065 ms 15.398 ms
7 pos2-0-2488M.cr1.NYC1.gblx.net (67.17.64.145) 15.663 ms 15.865 ms 15.641 ms
8 pos0-0-2488M.cr1.JFK1.gblx.net (64.214.65.162) 15.161 ms 15.854 ms 15.653 ms
9 so0-0-0-2488M.ar1.JFK1.gblx.net (64.214.65.198) 16.12 ms so3-0-0-2488M.ar1.JFK1.gblx.net (64.214.65.202) 15.865 ms 15.664 ms
10 Peer-1.so-2-0-0.ar1.JFK1.gblx.net (67.17.161.118) 17.287 ms 17.566 ms 17.64 ms
11 OC48POS3-0.mtl-core-a.peer1.net (216.187.123.233) 25.005 ms 24.602 ms 26.489 ms
12 Gig5-0.mtl-gsr-a.peer1.net (216.187.90.6) 26.721 ms 25.644 ms 25.271 ms
13 65.39.219.252 (65.39.219.252) 26.458 ms 26.752 ms 26.453 ms
So, this clearly shows that the system is definitely b0rk3n, and that scheme could really force a redesign of the whole IP hoopla...
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 model sounds very much like that of something another company is doing.
Console Classix is providing a similar service in the emulation industry. They have a physical repository of old Atari2600, Sega Genesis, NES and SNES cartridges. All of these carts have been digitally imaged into a server. By logging into their server you can "check out" a particular cartridge and play it using their client client software. The central server locks that cartridge so no one else can play it at that time. When you close the client software the central server releases the locked cart for someone else to play.
So far they have caught the attention of Nintendo of America Inc. but NOA has not pursued any sort of Cease and Desist or any other legal manuvers.
I like Cringely's idea, but I would propose that, as part of the start-up capital, the mutual fund should hire a few well-known groups to each put out a CD in order to start sales off with something the RIAA can't fight legally. This way, if the RIAA comes up with some sort of miraculous legal victory, Snapster could work towards luring away the artists, thereby crippling the RIAA. If they could make $1.50 on a $3 CD, odds are the RIAA would lose enough musicians that they would either go out of business, or lose enough power in the music market to make things competitive once again.
I'd like comments on my idea, everyone please check out my journal,http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=display I'll also post my idea now.
Please review it and find its flaws.
The solution for musicians and music fans is for us to become the distributors of music legally.
How?
We replace the RIAA and distribute music via P2P systems.
The solution is a P2P system which intergrates into the web, there also needs to be a payment mechanism, (maybe paypal?)
Users buy credits in this system, credits represent dollars and cents. So how do you get into the system? You buy in by buying music from fans who are already in the system.
Say you are an indie musician, you make a bunch of music and you create a website, you then intergrate this system onto your website, allowing people to download off a certain P2P network via your site, almost like magnet links. The person who downloads from your site pays
So the fans take the place of the RIAA as distributor and take 25 cent of the 50 cent, so the musician gets 25 cent and the fan gets 25cent or 25 credits. When the fan gets 50 credits they can then go buy another song, so its a system which allows you the filesharer to get unlimited access to music (Free Music) because you become distributor, you legally pay the musician for the music so the musician is happy.You may even make a bit of money. Everyone Wins.
Consumer/Downloader --> $ = $ --> Distributor&Creator , Consumers = Distributors & Downloaders. A closed system where we are the distributors, the creators, the owners of the intellectual property, and we get paid while having access to unlimited free music.
You get free music as long as you share. Musicians get paid. New people have to pay their way into the system but once they do, they get free music or money, whichever they choose.
If we can put the RIAA out of business, alot of the famous musicians which everyone likes would agree to such a setup.
What do you think?
I think its better than snapster because there is no central company involved.
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The site:
http://www.mont.lib.md.us/researchinfo/ebooks.asp
Excerpt:
Snapster 2.0 is a subscription library (which is perfectly legal and which has existed for hundreds of years). The technical details are all but irrelevant.
The real question is:
Should a right that no longer makes sense be perpetuated at great cost to society? Before recording equipment there was no recording industry. If you wanted music you played it yourself or hired a musician.
Today, recording and duplicating stuff is trivial but we want to create complicated laws and technologies in order to force ourselves into a virtual past where recording and duplication were expensive. This seems stupid (as in both wrong and ultimately ineffectual) to me.
It seems stupid to me that it's even legal to sell DVDs that can be legally purchased in Europe and then not be played in the USA (and vice versa), especially when the technology has intentionally been crippled (it's not like the PAL/NTSC incompatibility we have with video tape).
In theory, when you photocopy a book you are infringing copyright. But "fair use" means that if you don't do it with bad intentions or on an industrial scale, you don't go to jail. In practice, the main reason that people don't photocopy expensive books instead of buying them is that the copies are ugly and inferior. Likewise, avid fans of star trek prefer DVDs to home made video recordings with ads and poor reception etc. When the copies are sufficiently perfect and cheap, the market will ignore copyright, as well it should!
In theory, I probably "own" the air around my house. Exerting any ownership rights is essentially pointless, arguing that my trees are converting my neighbour's carbon dioxide into oxygen that her large family and pets are consuming is similarly pointless. But sometimes residents band together to stop large companies building factories, or creating pollution standards for cars.
Economists -- should any read Slashdot -- will point out that I'm confusing a "commons" (the air) with a "public good" (Intellectual Property). But Economists would also note that IP should, theoretically be FREE and that patents and copyrights are a kludge to encourage people to produce IP and publish it in exchange for a temporary and limited monopoly.
When companies are able to perpetuate their copyrights (e.g. the way Disney can remaster the audio in Snow White and extend copyright for 75 more years having NEVER provided the public with a master copy of the original version to duplicate once copyright on that version expired) the system has failed and needs to be fixed. Fortunately, digital copying gives us a de-facto fix for this big problem and we should resist any attempts to subvert it by making it more complex and expensive than it needs to be.
I would argue that intellectual property is in the process of moving from being "like a manufactured good" to being "like the air". The law needs to move from managing trivial transactions (e.g. do I own more Nelly CDs than I play simultaneously) to large scale infractions (e.g. SPAM is large scale pollution and abuse of the internet and it's reasonable to regulate it).
We can argue all we like about how to micromanage the collapse of intellectual property as we know it, or instead we can start planning for what the world is really going to be like down the track. We never figured out fair or intelligent systems for dealing with the threat to IP posed by VHS, compact audio cassettes, or photocopying. We got over it.
I'll give you 50 cents if you stop promoting your pyramidal scheme right now.
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.
This is where Cringley's dividend kicks in. One penny per download goes back to the physical owner of a CD. When a CD gets popular, somebody will
1) notice
2) go buy one (or several)
3) put it in the archive
4) Profit!
Wait a minute, there's not ??? here! I must have missed something!
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
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.
Independent of that, I don't think a single artist would support this. Some artists do make lots of money from CD sales, and even those who don't are not going to be willing to give up their royalties.
Ah, ignorance. Such a wonderful pasttime.
Let's get to some facts:
Rarely do any music artists make money. Remember, the record company makes the artist pay for EVERYTHING but promotion, and sometimes that as well.
Tom Petty rocked the industry in the 80's by declaring bankruptcy and making the whole world realize that the shady, awful deals then made them, basically, indentured servants. Petty realized that no matter how well his new record did (Damn the Torpedoes, as I recall), he could not make enough money to pay back the record company for what he owed.
Most bands make their money from touring. But again that's a vicious cycle because you have to pay for the crew, the pryotechnics, the t-shirt vendors et al.
All of those huge 50's and 60's songs that the oldies stations play without end? Yeah, about 95% of them are broke.
Even in the 70's, the only people who really benefited from that era were the Bee Gee's, because they sold about 20 million records. And even at a few cents per sale you're bound to make money, and that's how they made out.
Abba makes more money now with their theater show (in London, I believe) than they ever did with "Dancing Queen". And almost everyone's heard that song, or have seen the record in their parent's old collections. But who has heard of their theater setup?
The only flaw I can see, and a small one at that, is that he hasn't mentioned artist payment directly. However, that doesn't mean this is a failure and that doesn't mean it's a bust. I'm sure he can work out something like this lately.
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.
How is that different than what the original poster proposed. The musician pays a commision of 50 cents to the 'referrer' - the only difference is that the downloader gets the music from the 'referrer' directly. This would save the musician on hosting costs - something they may be rather keen on.
it coudl be implemented both ways. Higher commissions could be paid when the 'referrer' themselves serves the content. If the musician preferred, any downloads requests to the 'referrer' could use them truely as a referrer, pointing the downloader back to the musicians source content. Perhaps the referrer in that case would only receive a 15 cent commision, etc.
In short - I like it. It also allows us to hook up our friends. The individual user can also be a marketer as well as distributor. Where do I sign on?
-shpoffo
This idea amounts to statistical multiplexing, where you get the most efficient use of a fixed resource (in this case CDs) by pooling consumer demand for that resource. An IP router works this way to manage demand for bandwidth.
Statistical multiplexing has real value when the average consumer demands far less than the entire resource. If you play a typical CD in your collection for an hour per week, then that CD is being wasted for the other 167 hours it's sitting on the shelf unused. The idea is to share this single CD with 167 other friends and thereby distribute the costs. (The real answer is somewhat less than 167 in order to decrease the likelihood of collisions when trying to access the resource -- "buffer overflow" in the router analogy.) Interestingly the method is most valuable when applied to the music that you play the least.
When applied to a large number of subscribers (large meaning much larger than the number of distinct CDs in release), the economics are very attractive. If the average subscriber listens to music 10% of the time, then the per-subscriber cost of purchasing the entire central CD repository is only 10% the cost of a single CD!
One challenge would be convincing the court that the technology really does limit the number of simultaneous listeners, and that there's no way to spoof it (this killed mp3.com). At a minimum you'd need a persistent net connection to request/release control of CDs as you play them. I could see a scenario where you purchase the music that you don't want to be chained to the net to listen to (e.g., in your iPod), and you listen to the rest through the service.