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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."
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).
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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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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.
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.
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.
"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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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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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)
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.