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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.
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).
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
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
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'.
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)
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"?
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
Yeah, that's a neat thing I found -- compressed files (zip, mp3, gif, jpg) tended to sound like steady static and uncompressed files (especially pictures) had more interesting rhythms -- if you listen to the Photoshop image, my guess is that the 3 "doings" at the end are the RGB channels, but that's just a guess...
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda