Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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.
Perhaps it has to sound different if played backwards to be music?
Nowadays that's an outlawd technique. Decrypting satanic messages by playing tracks backwards is prohibited by the DMCA (Demonic Message Comprehension Act).
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.
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
cat /dev/sda > /dev/dsp
That's much more fun.
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
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.
I imagine if you converted Windows into music it would probably be a pirates tune with some background singers saying things like 'World Domination'.
> ...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.
That "dance artist" (I dislike that description, he's more than a generic techno musician) is in fact Aphex Twin. You can see the image through a spectrograph. Old Slashdot article here.
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.
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)
Ever hear of atonal music?
If you're being sued by the RIAA, it's 'music'.
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
Store with salt
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"?
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?
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
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"?
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.....
--
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 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
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.
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.
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