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What Counts as Music and Why?
The Importance of writes "There has been much discussion about compulsory licensing schemes. Most of the debate has been about music. But what happens when any file can easily be converted into a sound file and back again? Can shareware authors convert their software to digital music and get paid for sharing it? Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound? Scott Matthews has written a program (Ka-Blamo) that does the conversion. LawMeme looks at some of the issues. This raises the question, what should count as music and why?"
IMHO, this is a fundamental problem with this kind of non-transactional pricing scheme. Our categories such as "music", "noise", "data", "spam" are fundamentally perceptual definitions. Once you try to divy up a share of profits among a variety of things that people are accessing with their bandwidth, there are no objective criteria by which to separate one from another. It becomes an issue of who is making the most noise and can muscle their way into greater (non)-market-share, which is why this issue is being discussed in relation to music in the first place. The determination of who gets what share becomes a contest of politics, rather than quality. It becomes rather like the attempts of socialist governments to control pricing; even with the best of intentions there is no way to make this fair. Either we vote with our dollars or let someone else vote with them, based on their perceptions.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
If he can convert the new Metallica album into music, I'll be impressed.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Perhaps it has to sound different if played backwards to be music?
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
Making a software program and converting it into an audio file is idiotic. If the purpose of the file is not to listen to, don't even try to argue its consideration in any kind of licensing scheme...
Simple - just click here and type cat /dev/dsp > MyFile.raw
Yes, but just remember, it's not the size of the song that counts. Even a short song like this could deeply penetrate P2P networks.
From http://whozoo.org/mac/Music/Sources.htm
They go on to say:
Ok, this makes sense to me but we also do the same thing with words... and words can be made into speach. Why not say the same thing of patents... Our minds take existing ideas and change them... thoughts get put into actions, actions into motion, motion in physical parts, physical parts into machines, machines into processes, processes into... well, you get the idea.
All of our existence as humans (including our own being) is parts being put together into something greater than the whole, and this happens to include music... music has bizarre rules, and most everything else can be made into music. Does this mean the rules of music apply to the other items?
Reminds me of the DeCss as free speach argument.
So be it.
Hypothetically speaking, is it still considered music if it was converted to a non-music format? If not, why not convert to another non-music format for filesharing purposes. I wouldn't mind downloading an image that just happens to be a converted song if it meant the RIAA couldn't intervene.
The reason to ask this, is .... that is the amount is just split amoung more people... who cares? It's better than the system now, where there is no compensation...
If everyone gets a minimum, then yes, we should care because the total cost of the system is increasing as more people grab from it...
'Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?'
...that dance artist (about 3 or 4 years ago IIRC) who made the graphic thing in Windows Audio Player show a (somewhat poor but still discernable) picture of himself.
It is only a picture, though, if it were being interpreted in this way.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
turning images into sound?
Please don't make me list to goatse!!
> Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound?
The question is, can it turn an image into the real thing?
Seems the program has been renamed from Ka-Blammo to Baudio, and Not-Ka-Blammo to Baudio Decoder.
While I can appreciate you displeasure with the RIAA, MPAA, etc, your approach is fundamentally flawed. Not to mention your language...
If all you pay is at the concert, you are contributing to skyrocketing ticket costs for concerts. Composing, recording and producing an album takes time, talent and money. Artists and technicians involved in that process deserve to be paid for their work just as you are paid for yours.
I do believe the system contains massive amounts of unnecessary overheat. The meat isn't very lean, so to speak. Record executives rake in huge salaries, while most artists, which pay those execs, are lucky to make gas money. This needs to change. It will be a long, slow and painful process, but I think we are in the beginning stages of that now. Just remember, the execs won't give up their fat salaries without a fight.
I remember when concert tickets for a major act were $20 at a major venue. Going to a concert was affordable then. And I went to a fair number of concerts. Today, the major acts are pulling in $75 for those same seats. Sure, you can go to some shows for $35, but those are generally acts from the 80s or emerging bands. Even so, it's nearly double what it was less than 20 years ago.
If concerts were affordable, I'd go far more often. Paying your fair share at every step of the process (not just for concerts, but for the CDs, too) will help.
Piracy only makes the problems worse and it's a lame excuse to break the law.
If it was made to be listened to by a human ear and only by a human ear, it's music.
If the end consumer is a computer, it's not music.
According to websters: Music \Mu"sic\, n. [F. musique, fr. L. musica, Gr. ? (sc. ?), any art over which the Muses presided, especially music, lyric poetry set and sung to music, fr. ? belonging to Muses or fine arts, fr. ? Muse.] 1. The science and the art of tones, or musical sounds, i. e., sounds of higher or lower pitch, begotten of uniform and synchronous vibrations, as of a string at various degrees of tension; the science of harmonical tones which treats of the principles of harmony, or the properties, dependences, and relations of tones to each other; the art of combining tones in a manner to please the ear. Note: Not all sounds are tones. Sounds may be unmusical and yet please the ear. Music deals with tones, and with no other sounds. See Tone. Rap contains only beat, and is therefore not music,
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
music The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre.
Random sounds are not music.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Okay, it's a heady subject, I'll admit. I read this article in Linux Format magazine about steganography, wherein the least significant n bits of an image's pixels are hijacked for hiding data. The image changes so little that the average viewer can't detect it, and heaps of data (pardon) can be hidden there. Will the next P2P app use steganography to hide (music, et al) files in very large graphics? I'd think that courts would have a hard time determining that the original file wasn't just coincidentally the same as the encoded bits.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Trying to be clever and inventing some idiotic scheme like converting some program files into a sound file and calling it music. Crap like this just makes people look foolish rather than actually bringing up a thought provoking argument and discussion.
Laptop Reviews
Technically, you're not distributing this code, are you?
This example just goes to show what a mess will be created if the govt. simply collects a pot of money from ISPs and then tries to divy it up to the recording inductry. Everybody and his lawyer will be in line for a piece of the action. In the Soviet Union people stood in lines too for similar reasons, and look how that turned out. The system is inherently unfair because the one who gets the most money will be the one with the best lawyer and the most lobbying money, instead of the person with the most talent and the ability to write something someone wants to hear.
Vote for Pedro
Wow, I think obfuscated code is pretty 1337 now (e.g. Perl code in the shape of a camel), but I'll be seriously impressed when someone writes a "Hello, World" program that converts to an audio file of them saying "Hello, World." Any takers? :)
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
anyone tuned around their radio lately? well if some of the stuff you can hear on the radio is considered music, then by all means random binary data should have as much of a chance or better at being considered music... also think about this: if they decide to define "music" as something created by humans, then where would something like electronic music stand, since that's created with a computer. also, what if mit's music synthesis program (it was posted on slashdot a while ago) releases a hit single? Can tha be considered music? dunno
Investing forum
Whats the big deal with this Kablamo program?
People have been converting thing to "music" for quite some time...ever hear of a telephony modem?
If the RIAA can use this kind of technology to come up with country music that cannot be played outside of Arkansas, I'm all for it.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I imagine if you converted Windows into music it would probably be a pirates tune with some background singers saying things like 'World Domination'.
Can shareware authors convert their software to digital music and get paid for sharing it?
Why would they want to do that? It's better for a copyright holdere not to be forced to offer a compulsory license.
If it's got a good beat and you can dance to it???
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Boy bands aren't musically talented, so they're music must be free! ... Wait, that doesn't help us at all!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
do you wish to discriminate against Yoko Ono? What has she ever doen to you?
Personally I prefer the Term "media-whoring" ...
It's just some dork trying to get publicity to a point that's null and void.
Great! Another possiblity to show off the wonders off Ogg Vorbis! I can't even wait to see how OpenOffice works after encoding :>
maybe we'll just lose some random featrEUs? (liek spellcheeeking)
mats
One man's ceiling is another man's floor.
Ever hear of atonal music?
I once heard a musicologist say "music is just pure tone plus noise, and everyone has their particular preference for their favorite type of noise."
Damn I wish I could remember who said that, it was brilliant.
If you're being sued by the RIAA, it's 'music'.
We have jury trials.
We can't define what's music, but we know it when we hear it.
But I'm drunk and didn't read the f-ing article.
Maybe it has something to do with having a beat and chords . . . ?
-Peter
Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound
when u download their new audio files instead of the pics would it sound like a girl, then you could then make a copy of that, decode into the image file and u get porn with audio included
Webster's defines excellence as the quality or state of being excellent.
This program sure is nice, but the fact that I could 'cat /vmlinuz > /dev/audio' was the thing that got me started with Linux and saved me from windows years ago. Nautilus sounds better though
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Ever hear of atonal music?
Yup. And I have also heard of Giant Shrimp.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
That is one of the examples how any idea could be turned into total nonsense :). You don't even need to convert something, just generate random data... But actually this can be solved quite easily. First, one will be unable to prove his copyright for that as music, as noone will be able to recognize it by ear. Or just get say 15 people, and ask them is that music or noise :). If 14 of 15 say it's noise, then ban it :).
We could have saved sixpence. We have saved fivepence.
this is the best argument i have heard yet against this scourge on the face of humanity:
The OpenBSD 3.4 Song: Theo Sings Back-up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
A thousand sounds is worth a picture.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This is freakin hilarious.
Oh and I for one welcome our new Software on Tape masters.
The "Rap contains only beat, and is therefore not music," line is misleading : Webster doesn't state anything like that.
And actually, most percussion instruments have a tone, so _your_ statement is bogus.
If it is so easy to change everything to wav. what is going to stop people from converting .mp3 or .wav into text files - ect, and then simply sharing those?
You would do far better to piggyback music on another music track. Steganography will work on pretty much any binary file, it's just that some work better than others because the format provides more "tamper area" of relatively insignificant bits to play with.
I'm sure if you have a low enough bitrate MP3 you can encode a reasonable amount of data in it without a overly perceptable change in the audio.
The real problem with all of this is that steganograhy of this kind requires sender and reciever to have a copy of the original binary file - which means you need to have the original image/music available as well, otherwise no one can extract anything. At that point it is pretty easy to show that the binary diffs amount to some encoding of the copyrighted work.
Why go to all this trouble? I mean really, if you want it that bad why not just BUY it?
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Yes that was my statement, sorry for the formatting error, I did not mean for it to appear as part of the websters definition.
"The United States has no right, no desire, and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." - Bush 05
Rap contains only beat, and is therefore not music
br>Until your favorite song is sampled in a rap song, I suppose...
At first this seemed like a clever idea, turning binaries into music and then getting paid for sharing them as music.
But wait a minute here.
Nobody gets paid for sharing music. The RIAA does collect fees and pay royalties for licenced copyrighted works that have been registered under them; but not just any musical work is covered by them. I mean, there is a procedure for this that is a little more complicated than just declaring it so. They have to agree, in a contract, to include your work. If they dont then even if you have legitimate music you don't get to collect royalties from them.
This whole idea is a total red herring.
"Life forms.... You tiny little life forms..... You precious little life forms.... Where are you?"
Damn, just broke the law.
"Derp de derp."
If you have ever read "Dirk Gently's Holistic detective agency" by Douglas Adams, you might recall that the piece of software that was being written by one of the main characters Richard, was called "Anthem" and converted factual data or basically anything with numbers into music.
Art and life eh?
Hey, guess what? You have to use judgement. In fact, they actually have people in court called judges. You know. Those guys and gals in the funny black dresses and/or wigs depending on where you hail from. Last I heard the judges--get this--actually have to judge things. They haven't been replaced by referees who simply follow the rules as written. We know that because they aren't wearing black and white striped shirts, and they don't blow whistles (or whatever it is refs do in other games and countries besides USA football).
Of course there are guidelines. Personally I'd say anything that can be played live and sound enough like the recording for a jury to identify the tune as unique from other tunes, and to name that tune, is music.
Thus, bit barf dumped to a .wav file is not music because nobody can play it on an instrument, and most bit barf would sound very similar to the jury.
But of course you'd have to use judgement. Some wrapper stopping and starting bit barf while bragging about his sexual conquests might fall into the grey area, but if enough people testify that they find it entertaining and prefer Cornrow Groovy bit-barf fine ladies to other works of the same genre, then guess what: It's music.
But the bottom line is that somebody will have to make up their minds, it may be subjective, and the loser will have to live with the answer.
Yeah, that's tough. Nothing's perfect.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
> Can shareware authors convert their software
/dev/audio was world-writable by default and doing 'cat ~quincy/myhomework/* > /dev/audio', watching them jump up startled as if a train ran through their heads.
.mov and .avi into binary files... We need to come up with a new crash signal, like `SIG69: Erection fault, load dumped'.
> to digital music and get paid for sharing it?
> Can pornographers get paid for turning images
> into sound?
Unix has done this for years, without a conversion program. I remember telnetting to classmates' Suns where
BTW, what if pornware authors convert their
The music produced by Ka-Blamo can be copyrighted by the owner of the material used to produce the music. Not nearly enough of the original art is being changed. For you to turn an mp3 into a wav file.
What's more interesting in this type of music is the way in which it is translated from it's original source into music. That is also something that could be copyrighted.
Exactly! Can you imagine those who're sued by RIAA saying this in the court room?
"But your honor, I was only trying to make a point to my friends by sharing with them the kind of noise these boy bands make however much they want to call it music! Not in my books they aren't!"
--- root@127.0.0.1
FWIW, the copyright "conundrum" posed by the conversion of ordinary files into sound files isn't much of a conundrum at all. (The mp3-ified version of the file is simply a derivative work of the original file and you can work out the rest of the details from there.)
The real conundrum is why everyone thinks of P2P networks as being for stealing MP3 music and not for anything else.
P2P could be a sort of everyman's easy to set-up FTP server. But from day 1, the companies involved have pushed them as MP3 sharing tools and nothing else (as I mentioned before, Napster was for MP3s only--they didn't even try to PRETEND it was for non-copyrighted music until very late in the game.).
So the P2P companies have blown it from just about day 1. They could have been selling P2P as a useful general-purpose tool. They could have been making some real effort to promote legal, valid uses. But they didn't.
Meanwhile, if the music companies had publicly made a case against "music stealing" and sued 100 Napster users right in Napster's infancy, they could have nipped this right in the bud. Instead, they muddle along, suing the wrong people, letting everybody get used to the idea of MP3 sharing as a perfectly normal activity, missing every possible opportunity to turn the situation to their advantage, and generally acting like the over-capitalized, over-fed, calcified, ossified, petrified, walnut-brained dinosaurs they actually are.
So it's very hard to feel sorry for EITHER group of companies involved here--P2P companies or record companies.
Listening to the congressional hearings, one can scarcely avoid wiping away a tear shed in sympathy for the poor, starving musicians whose music is being stolen without compensation. But are the musicians going to get any portion of the compulsory license? Certainly not musicians whose music is owned by the big record companies . . .
Whatever happens, you can bet that some P2P companies might prosper, and the big record companies will prosper. But I don't see much in this for the musician or the consumer . . .
In fact, the clamps put on by the compulsory license schemes I hear bandied about more and more often, are likely to benefit the large record companies and disfavor the independent musicians. Just for example: I used to have several internet radio stations on Live365.com playing my own music. I didn't have millions of listeners, but I certainly had a few every day.
When the compulsory licensing scheme for internet radio came into play, Live365 had to start charging broadcasters hefty rates to cover the compulsory license fees. This priced me right out of my radio stations--even though ALL the music on them was mine and I completely owned the licenses to them.
Same with "licensed" P2P networks--my own MP3s appear on these networks from time to time, a situation of which I heartily approve. But would they appear on a "closed" system with compulsory licenses? Would they even be allowed there?
BTW, one of my pieces was indirectly mentioned in the article (follow the link about DNA music; mine was made by reading off DNA sequences into musical notes, rather than the more usual method of reading them off to make proteins). There's got to be a little karma in that, hasn't there?
See (or should we say, hear?) Music of the Human Genome
--B
In 1787, Mozart invented A Musical Dice Game for Composing a Minuet. Given the results of the game, I assume that one can derive the dice numbers that created it. (If not, it shouldn't be hard to modify the game to possess that property.) Now, play the game using a fixed string of bits instead of a random number generator. The result is very definitely music, and it isn't steganography.
The use of a Mozart encoder and decoder would be even more powerful than Ka-Blamo.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Back around 1990 I was stuck with the problem of sending a binary file thru an e-mail system that could only handle text.
First, I sent a basica program to put the file back together, then sent the "packaged" binary to do the same thing, but faster, then sent the file.
I just wrote each byte as a comma delimited file with values from 0 to 255. I wrote each byte value as a text representaqtion of the number. I also wrote the file name and a checksum at the end. It worked rather well, though the files were a bit long (which didn't matter to the e-mail system).
The file in transit wasn't a program, as it could not be run, but upon re-assembly, it was fine.
You need to avoid the RIAA entirely:
1. Don't buy CDs on RIAA labels.
2. Don't go to concerts by artists on RIAA labels.
3. Don't leech or share RIAA music.
4. Don't listen to ClearChannel.
5. Don't watch MTV.
Heh heh... Isn't this a bit too much like Richard MacDuff's Anthem software that turned corporate accounting files into music, so you cold 'listen' to good finances or bad?
As I recall, the head techie was Gordon Way, whom I always took to be a nod to Alan Kay, one of DNA's dear friends and a music geek himself.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
and that is all.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
I don't know what's more interesting, that he wrote this program or that he wrote it in PHP?
...compression increases entropy. Listen to this wav file of a Windows BMP file, and the corresponding wav file for the GIF version. The former has definite periods of high and low tones, but the latter sounds like white noise!
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
Who'da thunk a telnet port would get slashdotted.
How about requiring "musicians" to perform before they can copyright music?
A "musician" is a person or group of people, not a machine.
To "performance" is when the musician(s) perform physical actions on the instruments that produce a work that the audience recognizes as being disctinct from other copyrighted works.
An "instrument" is a device that is designed to produce sound when acted upon by a musician. A song must have a minimum number of "notes" to be copyrighted. There must be at least one physical action on the part of the musician to create each note. Thus, a computer is not an instrument because it has purposes other than producing sound. It's perfectly OK for the musician to enhance his music with a computer, but there must still be an instrument hooked to the computer. The musician cannot simply hit one key on his MIDI keyboard and use it to trigger bit-barf on his computer. That would be a one-note song and thus not copyrightable.
Furthermore, a "musician" must have had several paid performances of the work, indoors at an establishment that serves food and/or a concert hall, and there must be no kickbacks from artist to venue. Works that fail to meet these criteria would still be protected by copyright; they just wouldn't get compulsory license fees.
A piece of "music" must be distinguishable from other pieces of "music" by a jury.
There might still be some loopholes in this, but I think that covers it pretty well. You can't license bit-barf under these rules. Nobody will come to hear it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
How do you explain artists such as Aphex Twin (who purposely encoded his face into a song for his listener's enjoyment)? As one who enjoys Richard D. James' music, I have to argue that listening to images as audio is a reality. And honestly in many of his songs you can't even tell the difference between his homebrewed instruments and his face. Granted his face isn't generally the most beautiful thing about his music.
Probably sounds a lot like this when you convert it to a wav...
Oh s**t! oh s**t! oh s**t! oh f**k! oh s**t! god damn mother f**ker! and it loops for about 3 days.
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
My network hub tends to makes a faint but pleasant audible sequence of rhythmic tone changes. I look forward to clicking through the articles to hear the beautiful music created thereby.
The RIAA's home page, on the other hand, yields a raspy cacophony of gibberish, and certainly does not count as music.
Back in '82 I found someone throwing out their collection of Apple ][ cassettes. Up the street, someone was tossing a cassette player that still had batteries in it.
My friend and I walked the rest of the way to school with 6502 machine code playing from our impromptu boombox.
Little did I know.....
--
The legal system is mostly about intent; this is why we have judges and juries. Life is not black and white, it is greys; decisions are made as to how blackish something is. The primary interest in this item is to explore the regions of "grey" than not. Most juries and judges will not agree that simply saying something is music makes it music... that is, unless you are Phillip Glass.
...the WWV radio clock? :-)
...is it free speech again?
This won't happen in practice. The issue is that the ratio of hidden data to container data is very low. If you wanted to pass a 5 megabyte MP3 file, for example, you'd probably need at the very least a 100 megabyte container file.
If there were a whole bunch of similar but different 100 megabyte files being passed around for the purpose of exchanging MP3s, it would become pretty obvious to everyone what was going on, and it probably would not be difficult for an observer to extract the hidden data. Much easier to simply encrypt the MP3s.
So some judge is going to rule on every file that shows up on a P2P network? Yeah right.
This is like a judge ruling on the definition of art, or love. Anything he comes up with would be completely meaningless. I suggest you listen to the music of Oval. This guy started out by playing scratched & mangled CDs by other artists and recording the results, and plenty of people think it's music. It could easily be argued that this is not far at all from encoding software as music. Point is, any creative sound can be music, and no one's arbitrary judgment can change that.
i have no time for music as i plan to RULE THE WORLD. muha. muhahahahahahahahahahahaaa.......
I disagree.
Piracy is urging the industry to change its ways. I've explained this before: The movement of information is fluid; you have to work with the tools available. Now, the tools are interconnected powerful computers.
IF digital information can be copied perfectly, infinitely then no amount of legislation is going to put the genie back in the bottle. The "public stockade" approach of the RIAA right now will only swell Freenet and it's descendants, continuing a cat and mouse that started long ago.
SO, once the info is released, it's free. Before releasing the info, you have to collect. Just like before the show, you have to pay. This is the premise of this article. A pool is collected and then doled out. The article argues that discimination by type of digital information is useless. Size, quality, format are all vaporous. Ok, so thats just part of the new paradigm.
Collection has to be based on our first metric: Tracking the consumers of the information. Since it is impossible for the technology to get tracked to the individual, we build classes of users. Mandatory license fees for computers, CD writers, CDs, network cards, connections, bandwidth, etc. all try to classify the consumers into contributors for this pool. A corporation setup that Labels, manufacturers, retailers join and pay into based on their sales numbers. It is a license fee for participating in the flow of digital information.
Why? NOT because people do not want to pay for the information on an as-needed basis, but because the technology doesn't ensure it any longer. Even those who play by the rules and buy CDs can't put the genie back in the bottle. This is a "fault" of any type of user, it's simply the fact that the tools cannot be ignored. If all P2Ps were shut down tomorrow, more would take their place. Low-band types of copying would still happen (copying parties, ripping, trades, email, web, etc). We're going to do what we can get away with, simply put. Better to work with that premise than against it using a method larger than the medium - by going to brick and mortar you encompass the digital arena and get to real people.
A second metric needs to track the information "presence". This is already done using very shaky sampling: radio hit lists, TV ratings, poll companies. The public realizes the money is going somewhere, so they just vote it to their favorite target. With a good sample set, this system works.
There will have to be at least one legal entity for this. I don't approve of the government doing much more than enforcement of the fee structure. So, I can imagine at least one company that implements several polling techniques to gather these metrics and selling them as a service (think Neilsen Ratings of TV).
Then, this pool is given to the artists, or the entities they've signed to represent them (yes, a label, shudder to think). The meat is devoured amongst these entities, much as today. However, the accounting is top down instead of bottom up, much as any large business pays for itself with divisions.
Until such a system, or something similar, is put in place, we're headed into years of burned CDs, memory cards of copied music, movies, photos, books, etc. The content creators will persecute only the inept obvious within the pirating world. The savvy will continue to copy info at their leisure. This is how we've arrived at smuggling in the physical world, but it doesn't need to repeat itself in the digital world.
mug
Is it really reasonable to believe that "major acts" will lower ticket prices if they begin to sell more CDs?
I find that very difficult to believe, unless you mean something quite the opposite of what I suspect by "major acts".
Bands charge what they do because they can, and once they have become convinced that they are worth X amount per ticket, they most certainly will not find any reason to lower tickets; after all, "they're worth more than that".
How many "major acts" are doing it "just for the music"? Only those who are already so damned wealthy that they can afford to project the image that they are doing it "just for the music".
"Composing, recording and producing an album takes time, talent and money."
I'd ammend this to read, "Producing a successful album takes time, money, and possibly talent."
The solution is for bands to give up the dream of the "lifestyle" that so many so covet with big grins when they are trying to "get into the biz".
The opportunity is there now; there is no excuse. Either they are selfish, or it is about more than "just the music".
Yes, you may have to work a part-time job, and no you might not tour the country or even outside a 20 mile radius of your home, but if it is really about the music and not about the dream of the lifestyle, then put yourself to it; the opportunity is there if you are willing to work at it.
If you want to sign yourselves away and pack the pork of big labels and big markets, then by all means, you are free to do so, but I'll be damned if I will support you. When you take that step, when you sell out, you are on your own.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
These kind of IP questions shine a spotlight on the elephant in the corner of the room: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS AN ILLUSION. Intellectual Property is a shared idea; it's an agreement amongst people. It is NOT a real thing that inherently exists out there somewhere. Those aren't songs on your computer. They aren't emotions, or musicians, or anything else. They are organized magnetic fields that when processed through a complex field of low entropy cause air molecules to vibrate.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
...instead I take an incredibly novel and often over-looked approach: I just don't listen.
.sig Realistic fines for copyright in
For a new type of file manager......."hmmm Jim, it sounds like a pdf file."
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
I covered these issues in my essay sharethemusicday.com . In it I advocate a voluntary compensation model
Here's what I wrote:
Compulsory licenses seems to be the "cleanest" solution, and it appears to have implemented in Canada with moderate success, but the approach has fundamental problems. First, it seems rather easy to game the system to make some songs appear more popular in popularity statistics. It seems to offer a lot of advantages to incumbents at the expense of emerging artists. Second, frequency of sharing may not correlate well with user's perception of value (although it may turn out to correlate well with what would have been actual sales figures). Regardless of whether we love the Spice Girls, their files are going to be shared more often than that of Simulacra. Second, a flat fee imposes a cap on potential profits and creates a reason for music businesses to seek "tax increases" on a regular basis. This is more of a "user fee" than a tax, but still establishing a "just rate" would probably result in prolonged battles in public. Just look for example at the ugly negotiations that Internet radio had with the music industry. Third, it's unclear how to measure user statistics when mp3's can be played or downloaded in many different contexts. Should we measure radio plays? What about music scraping applications? What about IRC? What about Internet radio (which plays to multiple listeners)? What about venues in which multiple people are listening? What about foreign listeners? What about car radio? What about PC makers who include freebies like a DVD with free music? I fear that any measuring system will lock us into one specific method of sharing, and it will reveal the folly of trying to micromanage an economy.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Take innagoddadavida convert it from a wav file to an image file to see what the fuck they were talking about!
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
You should check out this song I just got! The lyrics are kinda weird though. They go: "Yes! Yes! Harder! Yes!"
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okIf software patterns can generate audio that could then be construed as "music", then the reverse is also possible. That is "music" can be reduced to binary patterns that are actually computer code.
:)
This creates an interesting situation. People didn't share "music", they shared binary bit streams of code and thus the RIAA has no authority. Or, all the software ever written could be interpreted as music and thus copyright under music licensing laws (ah, the joys of paying royalties
Since it has already been determined that a painting doesn't have to represent anything real or recognizable to be construed as art, can the same reasoning be applied to the audible senses as it is to the visual senses? A canvas covered with splotches of paint is basically visual noise and can legally be considered art and can be a copyrighted work. Thus, digital noise could also be considered music and fall into the same realm.
I'd hate to be the judge who has to seperate these two concepts.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
IDM is music too, you know...
Who says that guns are only useful for killing delicious or deadly animals and keeping the king of england out of your face. Theyre also a handy Measuring stick
I don't post often but I really wish I could mod you up. It is going to take revolutionary thinking for our global society to cope with a relvolutionary situation. I encourage everyone to think about these issues on a fundamental level. You might start with "What is the purpose of intellectual property?" and follow with "Who is the current system benefiting?"
One assumption that I make is that the human spirit is basically good. I assume that if I meet a person for the first time they have a sense of right and wrong and respect for the world. However large structures are in place that work to divide and conquer the populace in order to keep everything under the control of the powerful. Cooperation can be a beautiful thing.
Well I've rambled enough but extra credit if you can connect this to the civil War on Drug(s) users. But maybe that is too political for this forum.
Mr. Matthews could and should change his system to generate real music rather than scrambled garbage. He could even enhance the system so it plays different sets of instruments based on the MD5 sum, for example.
Suppose Mr. Matthews were to create such a system. Suppose he were to stream open source software from an internet radio station. Suppose lots of people tuned in to listen to it. Would that count as music?
Frank Zappa once said that ANYTHING can be music as long as you can score it out and reproduce it. To use his example, even someone just swallowing orange juice can be music if you score it out and reproduce it faithfully.
I tend to agree. If Justin Timberlake can call what he does music (as opposed to the prepackaged sound-based diversionary tactic it REALLY is) and the Beatles can call somebody repeating "Number Nine" over and over music, then, really, music just becomes another arbitrary term that is defined mostly by someone's personal taste rather than an actual discernable entity.
Several posters have commented that music is best defined similarly to obscenity ("I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it . . . "), and thus the output of Ka-Blamo doesn't count as music.
In tandem with the above quote would be "I don't want others deciding what is obscene, only I should make that judgement". No one (well, almost no one) wants some external person or persons telling them what they can and cannot look at. Much like art. You know what it is when you see it, but have fun trying to pin it down exclusively.
Same goes for music. How many of us have parents who told us that "Rap isn't music", "Disco isn't music", or, for the old-timers in the crowd, "Rock and Roll isn't music".
You may not agree with me, but damned if I'm going to let YOU decide what I find obscene. Same goes for what I consider music.
Incidentally, there's a lot of trance/ambient that sounds eerily similar to putting an old Commodore data cassette in your stereo. No, contrary to popular myth at the time, it isn't dangerous to your equipment, but it's really weird to listen to if you haven't before. So I synch it up to a rhythm line, and who are you to tell me it isn't music?
Oh, but wait, it's just a bunch of binary data emitted in a different form, and combined with an audio representation of a much slowed-down RTC signal.
Food for thought.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Even so, it's nearly double what it was less than 20 years ago.
Devil's advocate here, but you do realize that with the exception of consumer electronics, pretty much EVERYTHING costs double, triple, or even more than it did 20 years ago.
Remember being able to buy a $5,000 car? A $50,000 house that wasn't falling apart? 25 cent hamburgers? $5 cassette tapes?
Ah, back in the days of $3 minimum wages...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Music must be in 4/4.
Music must have lyrics.
Music must consist of a drummer, a bassist, a guitarist, and a vocalist.
Music must last no less than 3, and no more than 5 minutes.
Music must be: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, verse, chorus.
Music must be accompanied by a video.
Music must be about love.
Music must have a 30 second instrumental intro for the DJ to talk over.
Music must rhyme.
Music must be able to be danced to.
Why don't you just do what Freenet does and encrypt everything so it would be impossible to tell what the file contains anyway, without the key. Of course, for Freenet that means that you may indeed be hosting kiddie porn, but who knows? Now we're dealing with philosophy: just because you don't know does it exist? Do you care? Should you care?
If you had enough volunteers, you could create a set of 65536 sounds, allowing you to map every two bytes to a unique melody. You could generate another set of sounds to transition from one melody to another.
To get more complex, you could have one part of the data set the beat, another set the pace, and another set the style.
This sounds like it would be really nifty. I could see an entire open source project springing up around this.
If it is copyrighted by a RIAA member company, it is music. If it isn't RIAA, then it is not music, and would be illegal to listen to.
--jeff++
ipv6 is my vpn
Ever hear atonal music?
I suppose it might be music, but only in the sense that paint thrown on a wall by a monkey is "art," and Slashdot articles are "news."
Or since its possible to determine arbitrary digits of pi, just tell people which digit to start at and how many to count to get the numbers that will encode (in a given format) to the latest hit song.
If files are defined by content, and not by format, then what if I share a song as an image file? The purpose of it is to be listened to, but I'm giving it as a .jpeg. Should those still be licensed?
That answer is totally inadequate. By this rationle the only things worth defending are those which are valuable enough or owned by those with enough money or influence to litigate an entire court case. If some one steals my car, they get in trouble, with very little financial or legal burden placed on me. It's my car, it has value, stealing it is wrong, everyone agrees. If I had to prove that my car is a car and is capable of fullfilling my transportation needs and that depriving me of it is indeed a crime to some judge that may be some how incapable of understanding the mathematical, logical, and economic implications of my dilemma, well, that just wouldn't be justice.
To expect judges and court cases (with all of the practical implications thereof such as socio-economic power differentials between litigants, etc.) to decide subtle issue like this with little or no guidance from the people via their legistlatures is naieve. (Of course, don't get me started about the sorry state of our representation, and by our I mean all of us, black, white, poor, rich, geek, and grandma alike, but that is another issue.)
With Goldwave (or at least, the old version I played with) you could open ANY file as a sound file. There were interesting possibilities with uncompressed graphics formats. Pop open a BMP, and so long as you avoid selecting the beginning of the file, you can apply sound filters and effects to your image file, getting effects you won't see in photoshop. Mostly worthless, but some quite cool.
I remember reading a syndicated pc computer columnist in the Houston Post talking about listening to lotus spreadsheets way back in 1989.
Heck, there is a way on a solaris machine to listen to the network traffic - it sounds like waves crashing on the ocean.
j00 n33d Zm0k3 l3zz cR4cK y0 & l3zz |_SD ...
Finally, you should have no problem remembering how those idiots in washington finally threw up their hands in frustration and recinded that limit to 65, and then 70 - essentially putting things right back to where they were more than thirty years ago.
In other words: some of us need no "excuse" to break insane laws. Some of us do so flagrantly and willingly. And some of us just do it because we're sociopathic freaks.
Long live the freaks.
Most of the new crap that plays on the radio these days doesn't count as music.
You'd use an overly high bitrate mp3/vorbis to hide data in, now a low bitrate mp3/vorbis. Fundamentally, images (and audio, to a lesser extent) have "excessive" information. The result is one can tamper with the data to hide data in less significant bits of data (the result being a 1/256 change in brightness or maybe a 1/65536 amplitude shift). Jpg and mp3, though, both dump a lot of this "insignificant" data in exchange for a smaller file, so steganography is much more pronounced in jpgs and mp3s, even when encoded at a higher quality. What's worse is data is normally stored at a rate of 1/8 or 1/16 the size (ie, a steganography file is 8 to 16 times larger than the file it contains). For jpg and mp3 which reduce the file size (compressed to lossless formats), that only exasperates the issue. And trying to increase the rate of encoding only increases the obviousness of the encoding.
As for your statement about needing the original image, that's not true. A search algorithm could try different steganography approaches on images until they either find a header or give up. Having the original image around only makes it quicker to verify that an image is unaltered.
St. Anger is, in my opinion, the only Metallica album so far to be a complete disappointment. The drumkit sounds like utter crap, the singer sounds like he's screaming from the room next door, and the actual "music" is so distorted and compressed that you can't even tell whether it's supposed to be music.
Silence is part of music. Any not-silence may be defined as techno. Anything can be used as sample for example in doom metal.
Playboy picture converted to audio file is better kind of music than Britney Spears. Shareware binary converted into mp3 is still far better than Metallica's St Anger.
and michael is "not a homosexual cock munching child rapist"
In recent decades the definition of what is considered music has evolved quite significantly. The current Merriam-Webster dictionary defines music as:
a : the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity b : vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
Therefore, rap is msuic - despite what many traditionalists would like to think. What is apparent, however, is that the sound of an executable file is not music; it is noise.
so, thinking of cool stuff to use this program for...
so we can add a layer to p2p. prossses your existing music (mp3/ogg/ac3/flac/other...) into these files and distrubte them over the p2p. but the p2p program *should* *not* automagicly run them through back into the pervoius. These files sound like the planted music. Would that be enough to discourage p2p monitoring? and add enough pain and hart ach to thier court weilding efforts.
Imagine a group called the Society for Appreciation of Large Numbers.
They have a website. Members of the Society list their favourite large numbers and the reason why they like this number.
Some of these numbers are quite large, i.e. about the same size as the binary number produced when a 3 minute song is encoded as a FLAC file.
Some members post their favourite numbers along with comments like : "this number reminds me of the song Novacane by Beck".
Would this be illegal? After all, even if this number actually sounds distinctly like Beck's song Novacane when treated as a FLAC audio file, it is still just a (large) number.
Perhaps, but it's still subjective
Forgetting the origin of the product.. remember these ?
t _o r_veg.htmli x_hedden.cfm
http://www.urbanlegends.com/science/tomato_frui
or
http://www.lawyersweeklyusa.com/n
tomato - fruit or vegetable ? no problem, tax people know, ask them.
This song is, according to its information page, made up of samples created from converting non-sample data (I don't know if it's using the same technique as Baudio or not) such as command.com from MSDOS 6.22. Does that count as a DMCA violation? Do they need to pay royalties to Microsoft for the use of a sample? I doubt you could extract command.com from the music, but it's something to think about anyway...
Maybe the conversion rate of 1 picture = 1000 words isn't that far off...
Afterall, the only reason why the RIAA has been fighting the battle harder than the MPAA is because of the higher bandwidth requirements for video, but their day will come too. So, why not whack all of the moles at once with a blanket solution?
Have whatever "rights tax" that applies to music apply to all forms of bits, therefore software, movies, TV shows, books, etc. all fall under the same blanket. Let the size of the file times the number of transmissions be the decider in how big of a slice of the pie you get. Measure things by the size of the actual file transmitted. (This would present the theory that the easier you are to compress and downsample, the less effort was likely to have been put into your work...)
If we're gonna build a compulsory license system for music, we might as well let it cover anything that can be converted to bits. Then all forms of piracy complaints will be resolved at once.
The issue is not "what" something is. It's "should I charge for it, and if so, how much?" I wouldn't call some of the so called "modern art" anything but crap (which ironically is sometimes used to make it). Whatever the end result of this little program is, if someone enjoys it and you get something in return (fame, money, personal satisfaction or all three) then that's all that matters.
As far as the "what" is concerned there are only two options: tangible and intangible. Tangible things are covered by property laws. Intangible by IP laws.
This is article brought to you by a philosophy major who couldn't get a job.
"What is music?"
There is no universal answer to that. I would consider it patterned rythmic noise. Banging on on a garbage can some would call noise although they can be used to create patterned rythms that won't get the contents of your intrument thrown at you.
Turning an image (or anything for that matter) into random sounds I wouldn't consider music. But then, maybe some starving philosophers would if someone were to pay them enough to argue their case. Or maybe just a starving programmer who needs a gimmic he can sell to make a few bucks.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Same thing as an uninitialized variable.
Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound? Scott Matthews has written a program (Ka-Blamo) that does the conversion.
/bin/ls > /dev/audio
?
% cat
And it would STILL be better than the Spice Girls.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Have a nice trip (or sweet dreams if you're so inclined)...
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
dArn Slashcode!! (yes, I know, preview...preview...)
/dev/hda0 > /dev/audio
$ cat
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Litigious bastards
I was at a gem conference this spring and listened to a diamond. Very interesting hearing what the gemprint sounded like. An interesting point was that the better cut, the better the "music" was. Patterns really are pleasing.
Only tangentially on topic, but I thought it was cool.~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
And yet, despite all this, I don't think that spam is going to go away because of legal efforts. It will take technical ones.
I think that email is a doomed beast, though I'm sure much effort will be spent trying to save it. The ability for anyone to freely send you email into your inbox is a relic of the 70s and 80s, much as anonymous ftp sites with incoming directories for handing files around were. The email system obviously is great if it can operate successfully -- but I think that it's ill-adapted to today's social environment. Reminds me a bit of communism -- sure, it'd be great if folks could get it working, but you have to assume that people will willingly cooperate and not abuse the system. These assumptions have been found to be false, and modifications made to all other major in-use protocols to prevent abuse. (I've been involved in adding anti-abuse modifications to P2P clients, and have run into plenty of this myself.)
Email in its current form (where almost anyone can send almost anyone email freely) will eventually (and probably painfully) die, and alternate systems, where most communications are whitelisted, will come to the fore.
May we never see th
But the probability of a file containing an identical pattern of size n bytes is so low that there would be little difficulty satisfying the burden of proof required in a civil case. 'On the balance of probabilities' isn't particularly onerous. Perhaps more difficult would be to identify the source of a given byte sequence, given the huge number of ways to encode a track. Downloading each image file and comparing its contents against potentially tens of thousands of sources is likely to be very expensive (computationally). In typical RIAA fashion, they're more likely to simply supoena users sharing several hundred image files > 3MB in size. ("Satellite images? Aren't they illegal?") :-)
---------- Jaani.net -- internet law and technology
There's NO WAY to specify what's music or not for digital content.
A digital file is just (and nothing more than) a NUMBER. Pretending number 123456 to be a song or a image or any other thing is just a (silly?/useful?) convention.
Digital formats are just arithmetic properties that defines families of numbers. Any number can be converted to any other by an infinite number of functions.
What's in a sig?
A program that takes a binary file, such as a program or a picture, and turns it into an audio representation? Your modem does that, just record an upload.
John Cage composed a piece called 4'33", which is exactly that... 4'33" of silence.
No it does not raise the question of what counts as music, unless you are an idiot. A big stinking idiot. Most people know music when they hear it, because it is MUSICAL.
cat random binary file > /dev/dsp
At that point it is pretty easy to show that the binary diffs amount to some encoding of the copyrighted work.
What you need is plausible deniability for the file-sharers. If the file you downloaded from P2P sounds like a freeware song from some amateur artist, you can freely share it and not worry about RIAA lawsuits (the problem of extortion still remains, though). RIAA will not be able to prove that you also extracted the steganographically hidden copy of Metallica song from this MP3.
The same can be done with anything else. Take a gallery of Kournikova photos, hide child erotica/pornography into them. Share the images on P2P as a collection of Kournikova photos. After the files spread, inform others that they can download a certain file by using a certain hash-link and extract other images from there (using a key in the form of a short password).
Now if police finds the images on your computer, they have no way (if you took certain precautions) to determine whether you downloaded these files as Kournikova photos or as child porn containers. It can very well be so that most people did the former thing and, since they don't know the password, they even have no way to know whether there is any steganographic content (without doing some relatively advanced analysis of the files).
So as long as there is a way to acquire popular legit freeware content of any sort, one can distribute questionable content over P2P without exposing the downloaders and subsequent sharers to risk (and the creator can announce the existence of hidden content well after the file was initially distributed and his involvement cannot be easily proved).
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
It doesn't transform the data into music. All it does is slap a WAV
header on the beginning so that an audio player will try to play it.
Not that it will finish playing anything more than two seconds long,
because you won't let it finish, unless you're deaf. This is the
software equivalent of inadvertently putting a data CD into a CD
player that doesn't know any better than to play it. If the volume
isn't turned way down first, it physically hurts. NOBODY is going to
mistake this for music in any sense of the word "music". Noise maybe.
Most people will probably figure the speakers are broken, until you
play something else to convince them otherwise.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Ambiguation for fun *and* for profit.
<bart
copyright law does not refer to "music."
Not exactly. Copyright law refers both to "sound recordings" (what's encoded on records) and "musical works" (what's encoded on sheet music). It's easy to avoid copying a sound recording, but last time I checked, it's nearly impossible for a songwriter to affirmatively avoid copying a musical work that has been played on commercial radio.
Will I retire or break 10K?
music:
The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre.
Most of us can probably agree that "noise" isn't a rythmic sound with a melody. Noise to me is just chaotic sound, i.e. the opposite of music.
So this should answer both what counts as music and why.
Of course the encoding format shouldn't matter at all. If you can playback a JPG image and it sounds really great with a sound that matches the characteristics of music, well, then I guess it's music.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'll start applying for intellectual rights patent on basic sound forms, that i synthesize on my computer. whoever uses that waveform, in totality, or as a part of a greater "music/noise" composition;( i will Fourier transform each passage and match it with my collection), without my permission will violate the copyright. Wait folks, in a few days the sic-mu industry will be all mine! hmm.. then I'll check out RIAA.
How far can they go with their stupidity?
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Ooh, you wrote MS with a dollar sign instead of an S
I can tell you probably didn't grow up programming an 8-bit home computer. Most 8-bit home computers came with an interpreter for the Basic programming language, and the names of all string variables in these early Basic dialects ended with a dollar sign.
The modern use of M$ for Microsoft is in part a homage to Microsoft's roots as a provider of Basic interpreters for micros.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Even so, it's nearly double what it was less than 20 years ago.
Wages have increased since then, so in terms of what an hour of work can buy, it's just about the same. Compare $10 vinyl LP records of 1983 with $18 CDs of 2003, and you'll find that the real price of an album has stayed roughly the same because the value of a U.S. dollar has decreased vs. the value of labor.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What is apparent, however, is that the sound of an executable file is not music; it is noise.
Many executable files contain arrays of preinitialized data such as images and lookup tables of precalculated functions. A multidimensional array will have correlations at fixed lags, which are interpreted by the human auditory system as either pitch or rhythm depending on the frequency.
Will I retire or break 10K?
You sorta missed the point. Of course I didn't mean that judges would be deciding every fine detail. They would use their judgement to um... judge when that's appropriate.
In the cause of auto theft, no sane judge lets someone walk on grand theft auto because the thief says "I thought it was sculpture, not an auto".
I can see how you thought I was advocating for judicial decisions on all the fine points, because I focused on judges and juries; but there is a larger world where this applies. The appropriate use of judgement would result in judges tossing out frivolous attempts to collect compulsory licensing fees (as in the bit-barf example) as well as judges expediting egregious attempts to deny licensing fees (as in the example of someone who thinks a rap CD isn't music).
In other words, good judgement is a close ally of "common sense" and would not result in the kind of over litigious society we see today. In other words, I think we're just hung up on semantics and inference here; which is notoriously difficult to arbitrate no Slashdot and other online forums...
In a conversation, you could have interjected and we would have resolved this very quickly... On Slashdot, it takes a whole day and we probably still don't understand eachother completely!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
All digital content is stored as a sequence of 1s and 0s. That sequence has a particular order. A string of 1s and 0s in a particular order is simply the binary representation of a number. And numbers cannot be copyrighted, patented, or trademarked.
In other words, the entire intellectual "property" regime is a house of cards resting on an unspoken mis-truth.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Ah. And the battle of Helm's Deep from The Two Towers isn't really protected as visual art, since no one could actually stage it -- all those orcs exist only as bits and not "really".
What a goofy argument. How can you restrict music to only that which can be played in physical space on physical instruments? Do you invalidate multi-track recording, too, since no single ear can hear everything the way the disc sounds? What about instruments we haven't imagined, or that exist only as a sequence of algorithms that drive a speaker a particular way?
There is more in heavan and earth than, apparently, dreamt of in your philosophy...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Those prices are more like from 40-50 years ago.
20 years ago, $20,000 was pretty standard for a car. You could get one for less, sure, but 20k was your average car. Housing? depends on where you live. Where I live, you haven't been able to buy a shack for 50 grand for the last 100 years. Hamburgers? A Carl's Jr. Famous Super (2 patty) was 2 bucks. And Cassette tapes were 7.99 to 9.99.
Hey dude, if you're out there, at least I thought it was funny. Touche'!
Breakfast served all day!
Three notes of a musical work was deemed a violation. Three. Out of the standard twelve. Which by convention you cannot even arrange in an arbitrary manner.
Actually, Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs (the "My Sweet Lord" case you refer to) covered a correspondence of at least nine notes (specifically, ... s_ m_ r__ s l d' l d'_ d'...). However, within the context of pentatonic scale melodies such as that of "MSL," combinatorics still guarantee a significant probability of a random match.
It has been impossible to affirmatively avoid copying a musical work since before radio existed I think.
I just use radio as an example that makes the "access" requirement in a copyright infringement case moot.
What solution do you suggest for a programmer and former songwriter who just wants to put music in his video game? (The "former" came about when I learned of Bright Tunes.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
I dunno... maybe it's just me, but it seems like it isn't too hard to tell the difference between music and a picture. Sure, you can turn the image bits into audio bits, but it's hard to believe that a judge of even mediocre intelligence isn't going to say something to the effect of, "I don't care how you encode it or present it, it's still intended to be a picture and that's how we're going to treat it".
No, it doesn't. If I sent you a 24-bit image file and told you that, by lining up the last four bits (least significant) of each pixel (two pixels' data make a byte) in a serial fashion, you could find encoded data, you would have no need for the original of the image nor of the encoded file to extract what's there.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
I agree that music should not be treated differently from other content, such as videos, software, whatever. That said:
Problems with compulsory licensing for digital media:
1) Proponents say that copyright holders will get paid. Which ones will get paid, and how much? Who decides this? Everybody that writes, sings, or creates any type of content is a "copyright holder." The term is too broad, too general, and I fear there is NO WAY to distribute the money from compulsory licensing fairly.
2) The market no longer sets the prices. It's dictated by some pencil pusher in Washington who may or may not have a clue about the market.
3) Copyright holders will have even LESS control over the distribution of their work than they do now, and they will have no legal option if something happens with it that they don't like. I don't mind this, but a LOT of artists will.
4) Compulsory licensing would make payment for content MANDITORY. Even if something like the open-source movement takes off for music and film, you'll still end up paying for content that may very well be free. I personally look for free content whenever I can, just because I believe in the philosophy. People like me would end up paying for a lot of content we don't even use.
I guess what it comes down to is, "Hey! No fair!"
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog