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RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes?
An anonymous reader writes "George Ziemann has written the latest installment in his 'history repeats itself' series of articles regarding the record industry and the tactics utilized by their lobby, the RIAA. This time Ziemann focuses on the recent RIAA lawsuits against individuals who file-trade, and the search-and-seize missions against independent music stores. Slashdot posted his first two articles back in June."
Last I checked, Edison died a very, very obscenely rich man.
Could Edison's actions really be called "Mistakes" if they resulted in him and his company overall obtaining a massive amount of money and political clout?
Can someone post a mirror? My workplace blocks that site at the proxy...
Hitler overextended himself just like Napoleon, and historians have once again repeated that history repeats itself.
However, it doesn't really matter how this works out: history will still repeat itself. If they invade their customers, they may move the middle ground, the pirates that are only pirates due to the accessibility of illegal music, and could forget their worries of lost sales (not that piracy is the lone issue at hand). This would be an example of using extremes to collect the moderates, a move done politically all the time.
The Political Programmer
A lot of people used Napster, before it was shut down. There was sentiment against file swapping for a short while, but then Kazaa, Morpheus, and others stepped in, and file swapping increased.
After the RIAA sues a few thousand people, and the tide turns against swapping, it will slow again.
But the fact of the matter is that the RIAA members need to come up with a new business model. File sharing will always be around in some fashion, and the technology will just get more and more complex - making it easier to do truely anonymous swapping.
It's been said a million times on here already - the RIAA is just like SCO - they need to adopt a new business model if they're going to survive. Litigation alone won't support them forever.
The linux hacker
There's another writeup of this over at tubgirl tech archive
The RIAA has finally learned to evolve and change their buisness model, just like SCO.
Instead of selling goods and services, they're litigating themselves afloat.
Banaaaana!
Then they'll eventually go away and, unlike Edison, won't be remembered for actually inventing anything. After all, I look around the room, and much of what I see, Edison had a hand in shaping. What has the RIAA had a hand in? What is their redeeming quality? Britney Spears and boy bands? Edison invented modern invention, among other things; thus I can forgive his lack of business tact.
RIAA Sequentially Repeating Edison's Mistakes?
A statement like that puts an unfair association on Edison. It's like comparing apples to dog crap.
I moderate "-1, Fool"
I know this has been said over and over but the RIAA never adapted in time to the internet. They will be lucky to catch up now and stop losing revenues. P2P is the new store, just like businesses that cut costs by using e-store's instead of real store fronts. The more people the RIAA sues, the farther underground P2P will go, products like Freenet, Bit torrent and other programs will become common place and they will never find them all. What's the point in pissing off your customer base if your trying to make money. All they are doing is flogging a dead horse.
On the one hand you have Edison, a generally gregarious fellow who worked hard and built a company full of smart folks and is remembered as one of the fathers of invention. He was probably a little overboard taking credit where credit wasn't due, but as the CEO you get to do that.
On the other hand you have Tesla, a genius in every respect of the word. Smart, talented, able to make leaps of intuition where others (including Edison) muddled, and able to cause an uproar with his outrageous comments and frequently backed up his statements with serious science. He was a geek, IOW.
One died rich and went down in history as a great inventor. The other died poor and in poor standing with the scientific community and is generally regarded as a kook.
You can't seriously say that Edison was the one who made the mistakes.
I think you'll find a far less scatological write up here.
Interesting article, but I wonder why he left out the most interesting of Edison's anticompetitive actions. In Hollywood, it is legendary how Edison hired assassins to shoot his competitors movie cameras when they worked on location. He could have drawn a comparison to Orrin Hatch's proposal to make computers self-destruct when playing pirated tunes.
Is that as long as the RIAA doesn't try to invade Russia.. they're safe?
And I hate the Yankees for this exact reason.
In the exact same time frame, Automobile manufacturers had an association based on the patent for a self propelled vehicle with an internal combustion engineering. The patent was owned by a lawyer who formed an association regulating who could make cars. If you weren't a member of of the association you got sued to oblivion for manufacturing automobiles.
Funny thing is a guy name Henry Ford came along wanted to make a car that was much cheaper than what the association thought was reasonable. The association reacted predicatbly, sued ford motor. When their lawsuit against Ford didn't progress as rapidly as they would have liked they started suing people buying or driving a ford. This was their mistake. While coniderably more legitimate than SCO's threat to sue users, it had much the same effect. A PR nightmare. The general public doesn't have patents, or get to play the IP game. They do however buy things, and suing people for buying things was not a great PR move back then
Needless to say most people know who Henry Ford was, not many can name the owner or members of the patent association.
The same thing also occured in Radio.
George must live far away from NYC
Go Marlins!
Well, if the RIAA is repeating what Edison did, eventually we'll start putting criminals to death by playing some recent CDs at them until they die.
(link)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
His "steps" can be attributed to just about any business under the sun. The purpose of a business is to make money, and by controlling the market, you therefore make the most money. To just focus on the music industry is be unfair about the whole situation. What he writes is what every corporate exec knows and wants. But why does that make them evil? They need to make money. If you were in their shoes, you'd do the same.
A blog like any other.
I understand the parallels that were made between the two, but I find the discussion a bit skewed. Edison was one who had the interest of people in his mind. The reason he had the money is because he gave the people what they wanted. He helped found an electric company that gave power to houses. He invented items that have become household standards. We owe a great deal of thanks to Edison. MPAA, on the other hand, cares about nothing but profits and ways to maximize profits. Time has allowed America to become a country that can ignore the desires of the common people while searching for more profits. Such a schema would never have worked in Edison's day.
A little learning never hurt anyone.
The RIAA screws the artists.
They steal their songs, they pay them a tiny fraction of what they make from them, and they exercise creative control through the use of unfair contracts.
The RIAA screws the retailers.
This is self evident, but in case you're not observant, the CD costs the record store around 85% as much as they sell it for. They dump products on the market in the forms of "deals" in order to bump up CD sales and manipulate music charts.
The RIAA screws the public.
We buy overpriced CDs for which we have no actual legal rights. Another industry would have been hit for price fixing, but since technically the RIAA isn't a company, they technically aren't a monopoly. We get treated like criminals for violating the monopoly they technically don't have.
And we're ripping THEM off? God forbid the world evolves and this 19th century shit they're trying to pull doesn't fly anymore. 110 years ago you'd have been trying to stop Ford from building his first car, so as not to put the horse people out of business.
What's happening right now is a direct result of their exploitive business practices. People are done whining about it, and they're making their displeasure felt in the only way that counts. Now the whiners are on the other side of the fence, and we're happy to tell you all the same thing you told us: Deal with it, because there's not a fucking thing you can do about it.
Just my opinion.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I own an independent record store, my margins are in the vicinity of 100%, and I've been increasing my product line by nearly double every 2-3 weeks just by buying two CDs for every one I sell.
Of course, I don't sell Sting or Britney Spears or any of that garbage. I send those customers to Circuit City or Borders.
I move product that you can't find in stores, and you can't even get easily on the Internet. My two big Internet competitors are Interpunk and Angry, Young, and Poor. They sell the CDs for $12-$13. I sell them for $15. We both buy them for $6-$8.
I also sell T-shirts, punk pins, patches, and hats. About a 100% margin there. I move music the same way the big labels do: I play a new CD over and over and over again in my store. I carry peripheral items as well, to attract a crowd. I offer compensation for customers who bring in their friends.
I sponsor events at local shows with local bands, and sell my merch there. I give a percentage to the local band, usually more than what the venue offers them for playing. I sell the bands' music directly on consignment, and keep just 15-20%.
And guess what? I make a profit. A pretty good one. Sure, you never heard of 99% of the bands, but does it matter when I am turning over my inventory every 45-90 days? I don't sit on a CD for more than 90 days, and if I do, I move it at cost and replace it with a different one.
Let the big guys control the big bands -- there's no profit in those guys for an independent store like me. I don't have any MP3s in the store. I don't have any CD-Rs. I don't even have a CD-Recorder in my PC at the store. I block Kazaa and other apps so my employees can't get me trapped.
This is a huge conspiracy that the RIAA is walking all over guys like me -- they're not. I find a market and I dominate it and I make money.
Would I make more if I sold Sting and Bush and Avril Lavigne? Maybe. But then I'd have to work by their rules, and I won't. So I accept the fact that I can't make 7 figures a year, but I'm on track to make 6. And if I open a few more stores (with great customer service, an awesome ability to promote new bands, and a friendly atmosphere that never feels like the mall) I'll only multiply my take.
Face it -- if you think you're in a bind, controlled by a monopoly, you don't realize the big issue: you have choice on what you carry.
I can make a buck. Go try it. You can, too.
I don't really think that musicians can simply walk away from the RIAA or the major labels. It is from these sources that flow the biggest venues, and huge promotional machinery that can make or break an artist in a few weeks (which oddly enough seems to be their lifespan).
Film exploded in 1920 sure, but it's in a rather sorry state now (even the best movies of the year are pretty crappy) go, go and look at the local marquee.
The RIAA has had a good half century to solidify their machinery and all the bitching and whining on slashdot isn't going to do a single thing about it. As long as there are people that think that simply by being a rock star they will get to live a glamorous and rich life then the RIAA will sit pretty exploiting them with fees and loans and leaving them with a double platinum album and a metric ton of debt.
Tesla, on the one hand, sucked seriously, but on the other hand, still get tonnes of play on "Classic Rock" stations with "Signs". So they have to still be clocking some pretty good royalty payments, and it'd be irresponsible to call them "poor". Also, 40-something skid radio station programmers still appreciate them, although I fail to see the relevance of their standing with the scientific community.
I saw Tesla open up for Skynard once, and I can confidently that they aren't at all geeks.
In case you haven't thought this through, when you download a song off a P 2 P network NOBODY makes any money directly. Not the artist not the record label not the RIAA (Artists may get some marginal benifit from having there music "out there". Please see ll cool Js senate testomony about this.. .
The world has never had such a quick and easy way to produce copies before. This is new.. This is not someone in the basement making bootlegs one at a time on a crappy cassette player and selling them at college fairs.
One wonders why law enforcement isn't looking into piracy more and the RIAA has to defend itself.
If artists want to put there music out there for everyone to copy for free they wouldn't sign music deals, they'd set up web sight. Many do give music away for free!. Go to a show, SUPPORT BANDS YOU LIKE so they don't end up flipping burgers.
(If I recall correctly)
Who sued the pants off anyone who made anything like thier good old fashioned third reich assisting tabulator contraptions (see the book, "IBM and the holocaust" or something, assuming its caguely fact, not fiction)
Holding the rights to make the data cards, which the various governments used millions of in order to count everyone and thier donkey, was what made the m the most money but the core of the cash was owning the rights to the machines, and bumping off anyone who came up with something vaguely competitive, forcing them out of business in one way or another.
The record industry is doomed because we no longer need any industry to record data (musical or otherwise) thanks to personal computers which even using entirely free software can be better then entire recording studios few years ago. We don't need multi-million-dollar equipment, so there is no point in centralization. RIAA knows that and they are desperately trying to do anything to save their obsolete business model. They can only be safe if there is DRM everywhere and people need a license to publish their work in a way readable with most of the equipment of the future (Palladium/TCPA/etc.). In the past we needed the recording industry becuse they were the only ones who had the equipment. In the future we'll need the recording industry becuse they will be the only ones who will have the encryption keys. Thank god we have FSF, EFF and similar organizations fighting for our freedom because I'm sure as hell I don't want to live in such a future.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Compared to the situation today where all that matters is image and the finished product is an after thought
Hopefully the RIAA doesnt have any chairs with extra legs to prevent tipping... or a battery operated hammer.
I don't believe the amish are currently accepting applications.
This is what is going on here with KaZaA and other file sharing programs -- there is a model in place that allows for the product to get to the users faster and cheaper, and without the unnecessary middlemen markup that the RIAA imposes on us. The RIAA's problem with this is that it completely breaks their business model, so they do the only possible things they can -- pretend it doesn't exist, and then when that fails, villify those that use it, even for legal purposes.
The RIAA's biggest fear about this is the possibility of the use this distribution method coupled with direct compensation to the artists who create the music. At that point, musicians stop signing with the RIAA companies en masse, and the RIAA companies instantly become obsolete and die off, as happened to Edison's movie industry. In fact, I'm surprised that the RIAA hasn't also lobbied against mastering programs like CakeWalk, since that potentially affects their revenue streams as well if the artists begin to mix and master their own recordings, circumventing the need for RIAA technicians.
The bottom line is that the RIAA member companies will never embrace these technologies because they take out the overwhelming majority of the built-in cost they tag on every recording they produce, and without that cash flow, how are they going to afford their yachts and vacation homes?
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
The RIAA's legacy is that of a LIAR! When CDs first came out, LPs cost 6.98. CD prices were a full TEN DOLLARS MORE at $16.98! The RIAA claimed this was because CD's cost more to make and would come down as technology improved. Well, IT took OVER TWENTY YEARS for ONE company to lower them to twelve dollars - and this only happened as a RESULT of file sharing! The other companies still fix prices at around 16.98. Also, they killed the 45 RPM single - the way for the consumer to get the song they WANTED without having to pay for a CD 80% filled with JUNK! Along the way, they've screwed EVERYONE...the musician, songwriter, and especially the consumer! Then they lobbied Congress to make CD rentals a federal crime (ever wonder why there's movie rentals but no CD rental stores -The RIAA paid off Congress to kill them in the mid 1980's). The irony of course is that consumers STILL PAY about 10 cents per blank cassette in fees that go to the recording industry! Finally, Napster comes out...the perfect opportunity for the RIAA to 'make up' with the consumer..and make a PILE of money in the process! Who in their right mind wouldn't pay 20 bucks a month for decent quality downloads of their favorite music? It's a model that's worked for the movie industry (who make close to HALF their income on movie rentals, by the way). The RIAA's response is to sue them out of existence....BUT WAIT Hilary Rosen comes out and publicly says that the RIAA WON'T SUE individuals... Now we're to the next lie...the worst one of all... In a RECESSION, the RIAA's sales are down (poor baby - come to Montana Ave in Santa Monica, CA and see how many whitewashed store windows have sprouted in the past year). Their response is to call their customers PIRATES AND CROOKS....blaming file sharing for their sales drop - when STUDY AFTER STUDY shows that file sharers buy MORE CDs then the average person. We won't even mention that music SUCKS these days...and I'm sure that customers just LOVE being called crooks by them! Now they begin suing INDIVIDUALS...a 100% turnabout from their earlier statement! Yet still they wonder why sales keep dropping... The bottom line is this: THESE PEOPLE ARE A HERD OF CLUELESS, NASTY CROOKS AND LIARS THAT ARE 100% OUT OF TOUCH WITH THEIR CUSTOMERS!!!
You sign up with a major record label now and it'll be your death wish. I, for one, refuse to give any band who decides to sign up with a major label even after all this bullshit one second of my attention, and I'm pretty certain more and more people will do the same (if they haven't already). If you want me to listen, stay Independent, or sign up with a label who doesn't try to screw you with every breath they take, and deal with being locked out of the radio airplay (or better yet, fight it).
Creator of the popular web game Proximity
Remember how the RIAA was found guilty of price-fixing on CDs and settled?
This is a direct consequence of the settlement.
The RIAA maintained the effective price-fix by instituting a minimum advertised price rule. Stores could sell CDs for whatever price they wanted, but if the price they were advertising was above a certain threshold, the RIAA would pay for the advertising. This had the effect of keeping Wal-Mart and Best Buy from achieving a near-monopoly position in retailing (and thus being able to dictate to the RIAA in matters of content and pricing). Wal-Mart and Best Buy were planning to sell CDs at cost to lead to increased sales per square foot of the store (and generate foot traffic) and their plans would depend on being able to advertise $9 CDs (from a very limited selection; only the stuff that was new and exceptionally popular would be carried).
In order to prevent the big box retailers from taking over the retail market, the RIAA cut their legs out by giving stores that were willing to charge full price (and take a guaranteed profit) free advertising. This in turn kept the small stores and music specific chains in business.
Then Wal-Mart and Best Buy sued for price-fixing and won. The result since then has been even more more blandness in the recording business; with Wal-Mart and Best Buy accounting for greater and greater shares of the retail market, they will only carry CDs that will sell a lot of copies very quickly. Artists who only go consistently gold are getting pushed out because the retailers aren't interested.
"...They came without a notice - no warrant, no nothing. They're making up their own laws, if you ask me."
ok, so if they didnt have a warrant, why didnt you just tell them to get the hell out of your store?
Gyrate Dot Org - "Where high-tech meets low-life"
A music industry exec reads this article, turns to another, and asks "Which step number is 'profit!', again?"
Here is the link. Enjoy!
Edison actually produced something!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
This is happening somewhat in the movie industry. Independent films have been gaining market share. The majors have insulated themselves by distributing the independent films and by the fact that a movie theater needs to fill seats, which leaves the independent film without a large advertising budget or an Oscar nomination without a home.
The only thing the RIAA has is the fact that radio sells records, and they pay Clear Channel enough money to keep independent records off the radio. This is why they attacked internet radio so much. It represents the ultimate loss of control. This is why they don't want to distribute tracks over the internet. Almost no physical costs means the barriers to entry are almost non-existent. They have to do so now because people are just downloading the tracks anyway. It will be interesting to see what the restriction on the internet retailers will be.
Of course the big concert halls will be still be owned by the corporations, and the children with their innate need to fit in will still beg their parents for 50 bucks to see the teen heart throb. OTOH, the kids can be smart. I remember a few years ago when our clear channel station that played music which was only minimally offensive to the suburban parent finally had to admit defeat to the Hip Hop revolution. The kids couldn't bring themselves to change the radio station, but they could certainly pick up the phone and complain that the station was pretty much the only station that would not play 'Stan'.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Edison muscled people and companies with all of his patents, created an empire, and utterly failed. His inventions were extraordinary, but his business practices were unethical and illegal. Shit happened and his dreams for a movie empire died--as he tried harder to squeeze his competition, the more 'star systems' slipped through his fingers.
The RIAA is doing all they know how to do: stop people from using their product without paying them. Every stupid corporation does this; Edison is merely an example.
Everything in this article rehashes the same idea over and over. The RIAA is bad. People who try to dominate and extinguish like Edison and the RIAA are bad. Wow. Big deal. We all know this. Some article.
However, the way the author tries to absolve Edison in order to paint the RIAA in a dimmer light really diluted the message the author was trying to convey. Edison was a business man. In fact, he was a very poor business man. He corrupted, controlled, and muscled people around--he was a gangster with inventions and tried to corral his ideas with piles of money and threats. The RIAA act similarly in their actions to control their cash flow, yet they've invented nothing except a product flow of ooper-dooper profit. Edison is a poor analogy.
And here's another thing, Edison and his TRUST tried to extinguish those who refuse to pay for his equipment and Kodak film. Those people, (a large, ambitious Jewish community), moved far from New York to flee from Edison and his thugs: Hollywood. Eventually Edison's association was exterminated, after trying to decimate those Hollywood "indies" that this article's author likes to reference. These indies moved on and created this thing we like to call the MPAA. And you know.. they're great.
Anyway, blah blah blah.. ooga booga... i could fill up lots of crap and say the the same thing over and over but ive said enough crap all ready.
porp
Why, do you want to join them or something you cock-sucking teabagger?
RIAA stands for RIAA Is An Acronym. ( Can you think of any other good words that start with the letter "A"? I don't suppose that any come to mind at all! )
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
They can never do well, they can only achieve adequacy. The K.C. Royals had an amazing season, without even getting to the postseason, but for a team with the Yankees payroll advantage, they must win the championship or underachieve to the point of self-castration.
The Yanks were catastrophic, humiliated failures the last couple of years. Absolutely epic failures. They haven't had the #2 payroll since the mid-1990s. That was once, I think. Have they ever had two years in the bottom half in the modern age?
Their payroll was 50% higher than the Diamondbacks, who beat them in the World Series. Their payroll was double that of the Angels, who didn't even let them into the world series.
It makes me sick to read about the canny front office, or the tradition of the organization. They have a spoiled old brat (and felon) for an owner, some accomplished suck-ups in the front office, and that's about it. Let's see them do something with the median payroll. Let's see how much savy they have then. Let's see whether Mystique and Aura hang on someone else's shoulders.
And Bloomberg should STFU about Pedro tossing Zimmer, the Designated Gerbil, to the ground. In NY he'd have been arrested? How about Nelson and Garcia jacking that groundskeeper, Hell's Angels style, for waving a towel in their bullpen? Garcia:"I didn't hit him, I only shoved him. I have no idea how my nuckles got cut." Must have forgotten the brass knucks, the thug. There were cleat marks in the guy's back - that's something I don't think the Hell's Angels ever did during a stomping.
Many people do not know that Edison was a key person with regard to the early implementation of the electric chair.
In this case Edison was a proponent of DC electrical power, while Westinghouse was pushing AC power. This was not with supposed to be related to the electric chair, but instead was related to how to set up a commercial electrical grid.
However, to demonstrate the dangers related to AC power, Edison tried to show that an AC powered electric chair was more lethal than a DC powered execution device. He was wrong. Needless to say, there were some "experiments" performed.
>>However, in a somewhat more real sense, a lot of people are now being taught that contrary to what their parents might have been told, Edison was an utter bastard. That being said, I'd rather die rich and be considered evil than die poor and be considered a saint>>
Irish people prefer to be saints, not rich. After all, they are catholics (Edison included)
Offtopic but...
Many people have talked about Henry Ford in this post as if he was such a great guy. Does everybody know who was one of the most influencial people in the United States for the National Socialist Party (Nazi's)? Henry Ford was a well voiced American Nazi, most famous for his book "The International Jew".
I lived in Athens Ga. a few years ago. Many of the bands had sold more records in Europe and Japan than the U.S. If an artist directly (and digitally) sells 10,000 copies of an album globally for $5 (not unreasonable at all), they are doing better than they would pushing plastic locally or regionally in the U.S.
Sites like Magnatunetake care of bandwidth and billing for a 50% cut. They offer fans the option to buy albums on a sliding scale (pay anywhere from $5-$20. Eight bucks is recommended.) And they leave the artist free to enter into any other contract they choose (they can press their own cds or have a cool label do it.) MP3 and Ogg are available for free. Purchasing the album (i.e. supporting an artist you really enjoy) entitles you to uncompressed .wav or aiff
Weedshare.com also has an interesting idea--they pay fans to distribute music. Unfortunately, they only offer .wmv at the time and they seem open for abuse. Still, how long will it be before musicians establish something like affiliate programs. Maybe if fan sites kick over enough paying customers, they get a little cut of the moola (a la Amazon) At the very least, they could support their music habit.
These are interesting and exciting times. Independent producers are the real winners and video is right around the corner thanks to Apple&friends. Now, if only I could convince my local cable monopoly to just keep their boring channels and instead offer me a 20mbps internet connection ; )
harmonious design
I just wanted to give a shout out to our favorite Linux celebrity, Penus Torvalds. For an exciting thread discussing this fascinating man, visit here
Edison didn't "go away" really. He founded General Electric
And guess what? GE is going to be part of the RIAA and MPAA soon. Its NBC unit will soon acquire Vivendi Universal Entertainment, parent of Universal Music Group (RIAA member) and Universal Pictures (MPAA member). So I guess the Edison Records and Edison Pictures labels will soon be back after all.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Make themselves look bad and throw away the chance to put themselves in the spotlight for future employ?
Playing even though they werent getting payed was not selfless by any stretch of the imagination.
The other companies still fix prices at around 16.98
When CDs came out, they cost seventeen 1983-dollars. Now they cost seventeen 2003-dollars. I'm guessing that compared to the cost of groceries, a 2003-dollar is worth about half of a 1983-dollar.
Will I retire or break 10K?
everytime I go by MTV looking in vain for a video to be shown again and Cribs is on, I don't feel too bad for the rapper with a 10 million dollar house, a 42" plasma tv on every single wall of every single room, 25 pounds of platinum chains, and a few dozen exotic cars that are all pimped out like mad. Just doesn't seem like this rampant piracy is really hurting the record companies / artists all that much.
slashdot, news for crazed liberal socialist zealots
If you want me to listen, stay Independent
How is this possible? How can an independent singer-songwriter prove in court that the songs he claims to have written are in fact original, as opposed to being subconscious copies of an existing copyrighted work that has been played on the radio?
Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs: Read it and weep
Will I retire or break 10K?
At least here in Europe Tesla has a VERY GOOD REPUTATION in Academia. He was properly trained (had a PhD from a good German University) and had oustanding contributions not only as an inventor but also as a scientist.
If you open any book of theoretical or experimental physics you'll find the name of Tesla right away (for example, the magnetic flux density is named after him: Tesla = Weber X meter^-2)
In contrast, Edison was just an inventor, noting more. He was no scientist, had no scientific training at all and did not make any discoveries,only came up with inventions.His name is barely mentioned in any textbooks of electromagnetism or theoretical physics. Edison himself confessed that he did not have any deep understanding of electricity or other branches of physics, in particular he never understood Maxwell theory of electromagnetism. In contrast many of Tesla's inventions are based on Maxwell's theory.
Whether Tesla died rich or poor is irrelevant. His name is immortal, will be always mentioned by scientists all over the world. More importantly, unlike Edison he WILL NOT BE REMEMBERED as a greedy, selfish capitalist bastard trying to get richer and richer by screwing other people.
Scientific achievments are way much more important than money.
The EFF has taken on defense of another alleged filesharer. Here is a snippet:
Los Angeles, California - EFF today announced that it will defend Ross Plank of Playa Del Rey, California, against a wrongly filed complaint, among the 261 copyright infringement lawsuits the recording industry has filed against individuals.
The federal lawsuit filed against Plank in Los Angeles accuses him of making hundreds of Latin songs available using KaZaA filesharing software earlier this summer. Plank does not speak Spanish and does not listen to Latin music. More importantly, his computer did not even have KaZaA installed during the period when the investigation occurred.
More articles on Ross Plank and his 'wrongful accusal' at Wired, The Reg, The Inq, DSP Reports, and p2pnet.net.
My music is freely available, and distributable.
___ __ / / /_/ /> /_/ /_/_/_/ /_/\__,_/_/|_(_)
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They can't even screw up properly...
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
As Far as I can see in all my scientific carrier (physic) I heard only of Nichola Tesla. Edisson was mentionned but not really acclaimed and put on a "golden" pedestral like US people seems to puit him.
:)... ) of its own. And NO there is no Edisson unit. I never heard of Edisson so much as since I connect to slashdot.
Heck Tesla even has an UNIT (the Tesla
One can argue that Edisson might be underestimated for a reason or another, but this is usually not the way of science, which is usually not country-centrist. I am really wondering at time if Edisson is not simply an overblown legend from the US, a bit like billy the kid, or whatever.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
RIAA: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." N.B.: This is a paraphrase from the ancient Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita.
On behalf of all Americans I say to you that no one gives a damn about you and your little pissant country. The world does not revolve around you. It does, in fact, revolve around the U.S.
The only country to be referenced every day by every news agency in the world is the U.S. This is because what Americans do matters and has ramifications all around the world.
So you and your little "I'm such a worldly person, I love my science" gayboy crap can take a long walk off a short pier.
RIAA Says Future Of Music Industry Is Suing File Sharers
Somehow I doubt the RIAA is going away anytime soon. Not unless we achieve a critical mass of people challenging the status quo, the mainstream media, and the mainstream politicians.
But that doesn't mean that until then we can't listen to better music.
Lots of times when these almost daily articles about the EV1L RIAA come up someone proposes boycotting the RIAA. It is an idea. I imagine that most of the music that I would be at all interested in purchasing falls under Jazz or Classical music. (I don't know, how much of a hold does the RIAA have over classical music? I guess I mean recordings since all but modern classical is in the public domain.)
Anyway, a few days ago I wrote a journal entry about this very subject: Music I like that is not RIAA.
One of the comments I got is that if you buy albums at the concerts then the artist gets a much bigger percentage than buying it in a store. (Although I'm a big proponent of buying music from locally owned stores too.) So that is another option if you really must have music from an artist who happens to be under the thumb of the EV1L RIAA.
Warning: I like weird music
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
The land of the free? Not anymore it would seem. The American Dream: July 4th 1776 - September 11th 2001, RIP.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The public and the government will actually tolerate a benevolent monopoly for quite some time if no one complains about it. Major league baseball is a perfect example
Not. Major league baseball is an example of an entity that is exempt from the antitrust laws because it has an exemption. A trilogy of Supreme Court cases, beginning with Oliver Wendell Holmes in the twenties have sealed the deal.
I think Bill Gates has much more in common with Thomas Eddison, than the RIAA has.
The RIAA _only_ adobts (and even tops) the bad thing's from Thomas Eddision, whereas Bill Gates has some of the good things from Thomas Eddison.
I got my notice for the Britannica 2004 update last week. $25. What was a set of Britannica selling for 25 years ago -- about $1000? Music CDs came out in the late 70s. If they were about $12 then, that means a CD is worth about 30 cents now?
Info overload, man. It's a commodity like tap water. Time to price accordingly.
everything is a process. if you don't get the desired results, change the process.
what chance does unprecedented evile have of increasing it's hostage population buy use of ?pr? ?pr? scriptdead legal threats/greed/fear based power&controll freak behaviours? not much.
the eyecon0meter indicates that an edison reference should not be used when logging the process of these felonious fauxking foulcurrs. they only want more&more monIE. they never give anything back.
frequently, yOUR motives determine yOUR results.
consult with/trust in YOUR creator... get ready to see the light.
Ahh, I see. So you want to ship your money to some anonymous, probably mostly off-shore run mega warehouse online and save $2 a CD.
Or, you could spend a few bucks more, shop your local market, keep some jobs there, get GREAT service, know who you are buying from, be remembered by name by both the staff and management.
When you see how many people I have coming to my store every day, begging for a job, and I have to tell them to go get a job where they buy their CDs (mostly the Internet or the mega stores), they slowly start to realize that saving $2 but not getting the service and stability they desire isn't all that grand.
Yes, and that's even a comment you won't normally hear from a libertarian, as everyone thinks we're pro-huge corporation and pro-Internet. I believe they have a constitutional right to exist, but I'd rather support my local shops, even at a 20% surcharge, if it means I'll get better service and keep the money local.
First off: the RIAA is an association. They are an organization formed to serve the interests of the corporations that pay for their existence. How is the RIAA funded? By consumers of major label music. So if you still buy their product, quit complaining about their tactics. You sign off on what they do every time you sign the receipt at Sam Goody.
Secondly: the meat of this story is complete garbage. If these stores are selling mix tapes composed of unauthorized copies of copyrighted music then they are breaking the law and when you break the law in public the police show up. "How can it be illegal if the artist is making them for the street? They came without a notice - no warrant, no nothing. They're making up their own laws, if you ask me," says one store owner. That's the stupidest thing I ever heard. If you're buying unlicensed DJ mixes then you're buying bootlegs, if your in the music business and keeping bootlegs on your premises then you're an idiot. The police do not need to give notice or posess a warrant to enter a store, any more than anyone else does. If they, in the process, commit an illegal act of search and seizure, then the store owner should be grateful, as he has a significant legal defense of his otherwise legally indefensible behavior. Finally, who is this "they" purportedly inventing new laws? The RIAA has the same capacity as anyone else to report what they think is a crime to the police. They are not defining how the police respond to that report. If the cops are doing wrong then it is the cops who are responsible, and as I said before, the people getting busted should feel lucky if that's the case, because as I read the facts, otherwise they legally don't have a leg to stand on. The idea that the only music available to sell is major label bunk you can't make a decent profit on or bootlegs of major label bunk is so ridiculous it doesn't bear consideration.
"The only real issue is how long we have to wait." Well, as long as we fixate on how the big bad RIAA is interfering with us getting access to copyrighted music without the approval of the copyright holders, who knows? As long as we hold an attitude that the music industry is some problem that we need to wait around to be solved by someone else, who knows? You want things to change? Support the artists and labels that are different, reject product that subsidizes behavior that you don't approve of and let its producers know you're doing this. Quit whining about how other people choose to do business and stop doing business with them.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
Step 0: Buy a few strategic Senators and Congress weasels. Make sure that you get honest ones, i.e. ones that will stay bought. If you can't find any that are in need of "campaign contributions", remember that very few people will refuse the offer of a limosine full of roofied wannabe starlets and a Bargain Bucket of grade A Bolivian marching powder.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
That reminds me, what was the url for that settlement? I still haven't gotten my money.
Actually, while the major labels do own some recording and mastering studios, most of the big recording studios and mastering houses are already independently owned and run. The labels are happy with this, since the musicians have to pay for recording costs out of their advance, and the label doesn't have to pay for engineer salaries and equipment maintainence. In that way, it's not much different from the way companies like Nike outsource their manufacturing.
New independent studios aren't a threat to label dominance, anymore than the humble 4 track was 20 years ago. Labels care about distribution, not the mechanics of creation. Mind you, they'd love to make it illegal for musicians to *distribute* their work themselves.
Tools like Cakewalk aren't much of a threat to the big studios or mastering houses, either. Most of what they're selling isn't the equipment, it's the space itself (-96db silence, big rooms, active acoustic environment for live rooms, few reflections in control rooms, etc.) and the ears and skills of the engineers. The average home studio these days has more tracks and effects available than Brian Wilson or George Martin had at their disposal back in 1966, but I defy you to point to many home recordings that rival Pet Sounds or Revolver in audio quality.
-Brendan
They've uncovered most of it. It turns out stradivari's sweet sounds are due mostly to the wood treatment, which had to do more with his sloppy handling of the wood than anything else. The wood was floated down the river, and stayed in the water for sometimes extended time periods. This caused a change in the wood's structure, which resulted in the sound of the violins.
So much for artistry...
Before clicking on unknown links.
Still got the damn background image though.
FUCKER
Just wondering...
Your statement above makes two (incorrect) assumptions:
1) that the parent post advocates piracy via (illegal) file sharing or that the owner of the post engages in the same activity. I personally saw this implication nowhere in the parent post. IMO the portion of the parent post that basically says, "...Deal with it, because there's not a fucking thing you can do about it." is a reference to decreasing (CD) sales and the music industry's inability to deal with vendors, artists and consumers in a way that will cause sales to recover.
Your implied assumption (at least i think it was an assumption, and we all know how that phrase beaks down...) that the loss of CD music sales is due primarily to illegal file sharing theft has yet to be proven in a court of law, or the court of public opinion for that matter.
2) Even if the parent post owner does engage in (illegal) file sharing this in no way invalidates the (IMO) very strong arguemts that are made there. By your (implied) line of reasoning if person "A" is an uninsured driver and gets into an auto accident with person "B," a drunk driver who careened into his back end at a stoplight, the uninsured driver has "lost the moral high ground" because he, too, has knowingly broken the law.
In addition, let us all remember the various illegal activities the music industry has been proven *guilty* of in a court of law or by legal settlemnts: "payola," price-fixing, and violation of payment of royalties to artist via their legally binding contracts.
Losing the moral high-ground? Please...
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
From the article: "The kid down the street now has the capability of making a CD that sounds as good as one from Warner Music."
While DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) hardware and software prices are affordable, I don't think the kid down the street is yet capable of making a CD that sounds as good as one from Warner Music. With the exception of music created entirely with soft-synths, the kid still needs a good acoustic environment and quality microphones. Don't forget about the crucial mixing and mastering steps either.
The kid down the street can make a CD that's good enough. In the Pre-Web era, I remember listening to bands recorded on cassette 4-tracks. While the music was better than commercial radio at the time, the production left a lot to be desired. While recording with cheap Chinese-factory audio gear and a computer is an improvement over those days, I wouldn't say such a CD sounds "as good as one from Warner Music".
All material on azoz.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties, but it all seems rather pointless.
You may reprint any article on this site in whole, in part, in effigy or in ridicule. I really don't care.
Priceless.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
"I never heard of Edisson so much as since I connect to slashdot."
"One can argue that Edisson might be underestimated for a reason or another, but this is usually not the way of science, which is usually not country-centrist. I am really wondering at time if Edisson is not simply an overblown legend from the US, a bit like billy the kid, or whatever."
Perhaps the reson you've never heard of him is that you've been googling with a mis-spelled name?
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
Read a biography. Most of his businesses were owned by others and he was often close to bancruptcy. Eventually, he became quite well off, but never was he even close in wealth to someone like Rockefeller or Carnegie.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Zimmer said as much in his apology. Props to the man for that, by the way. It was dumb to go after the guy, but he was man enough to admit it. I also gotta agree with Zim that Pedro is an asshole.
The groundskeeper did not deserve a biker-gang style stomping, with or without cleats. I don't believe he's going to start a fight with a bullpen + outfield of yankees. Nelson is a thug.
And your point about the fans? Yankee fans are models of decorum. Riiiight. We could do a good job cleaning up the gene pool with a mass sterilization of the crowd at tonight's game. Bunch of eveready chuckin drunks and sociopaths.
Sox stands are full of drunks and sociopaths, too, but the yanks are worse.
Yes, that's right - is P2P really piracy? If I download an MP3 off of the net, is that *really* a lost sale?
I'm going to make the arguement that it's not. And here's why. I've downloaded quite a bit of music, most I threw away. I downloaded much I never would have considered buying. Some of what I downloaded intrigued me to the point that I downloaded more of a particular artist. I decided I liked what I heard, and I bought the CD.
That's right - downloading music actually generated CD sales.
Now, why do you ask, did I buy the CD if I already had the songs in MP3 format? Because MP3, AAC, OGG, etc, pretty much all suck when compared to the original quality on CD. It's quite similar to recording FM radio broadcasts.
For those that say there's no quality difference, you're wrong. Your playback devices may be so bad that you can't hear the difference, but there's a very noticeable difference in quality that even mid-range audio equipment reveals without effort.
What do I mean by mid-range? Heck, even my Pioneer in-dash car CD player will reveal MP3 limitations at moderate volume (hint: if your music is louder, limitations of the source show up more readily, however, if it's so loud you're delving into speaker or amp distortion, you'll no longer notice the source limitations, you're seeing the limitations of your equipment)
If you really want to see how bad the MP3 encoding mechanism is, try encoding Nine Inch Nails Broken. It's listenable at low volumes at 256 and 320 kbps, but at moderate and higher volumes the artifacts induced by the encoding become distracting to say the least. (FYI - almost no one listens to NIN at low volumes:)
So my view is that P2P is a great way to listen to artists you otherwise might never entertain, but it certainly is no substitute for the real thing. Of course, I might not buy something I downloaded but listen to occassionally, but generally that would be something I wouldn't buy anyway, so it's still not a lost sale.
Reasonably priced per song sales, now finally being introduced, is long overdue, and may convert those few songs I have that I don't own on some media to "legal" songs.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Edison's London representative Al Abadie made a copy of Georges Melies's Le Voyages Dans La Lune and Edison systematically pirated it and showed it in the States. The copies even deleted the Melies Star Films trademark from the counterfeits.
Sounds like a cool record store. Where's it located? Do you carry non-RIAA merchandise?
That is true. They would be a cartel. If they get together to fix prices, it is still just as illegal.
IMHO, the key issue is the newly rich multimedia companies who formed "vertical monopolies", buying up radio and television outlets as means to further promote their recording artists...
The RIAA is not one corporation. It consists of hundreds of labels who band together to protect common interests, mostly legal. Saying the RIAA is trying to eliminate competition is a silly statement, since RIAA members are all in competition with one another. It's this competition that lowers the profit the artist sees, not some conspiracy as the author suggests. When you have competitors, you need to evaluate risk and reward based on the number of albums you're likely to sell. New artists get "bad" contracts because they are a big risk. You hear about the ones who did well complain about how they got "shafted", but you never hear about the ones who didn't make it, and cost the label money. The author seems to completely miss the point that the aquisition of a patent is what motivated Edison to invent products in the 1st place, products that wouldn't exist without that motivation. Likewise, you remove the profit from music, as file uploaders do (note the author screwed up when he mentioned end-users are being sued, which isn't true;only those who distribute music have been sued), it won't be long before production quality slips, and radio stations are forced to find the bands themselves that are good, which costs more money, so expect more commercials.
But if you're serious about digital recording you're doing 24 bit. And I'm tired of hearing about how it doesn't matter, because it does. You may not be able to hear high frequencies directly, but I strongly believe you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging, in the timbre of woodwinds, and in the overall resonance of a piano. *subtle* but important, IMO, and it *is* My O that matters here.
I agreed with basically all you said up to this point. It is important to record in 24 bits indeed but it doesn't have anything to do with inaudible high frequencies (24 bits is all about quantization, not sampling) and even if it did, they are still inaudible in the same way as ultraviolet is invisible. Of course a painter could use ultraviolet paint because in his opinion "[y]ou may not be able to see high frequencies directly, but [he] strongly believe[s] you perceive them indirectly, such as in the subtleties of imaging..." etc.
Even if you really did "perceive" the sound in some magical way without the involvement of your ears (in the same way as deaf people would percieve them -- hint: they don't) they would still be removed by the lowpass filter used in every player to remove the high frequency noise caused by the rectangular edges in digital signal representation.
You are postulating existence of the same phenomena as Professor Collins (an amateur psychoacoustician) in this discussion from over a year ago. Please notice the answer by Monty of Xiphophorus fame (author of Ogg Project (including the famous Vorbis CODEC), CCDA Paranoia and Icecast) who systematically invalidates every single argument of Professor Collins point by point.
Now, back to the 24-bit quantization (once again, having nothing to do with sampling frequency), it is important, because you want to be able to e.g. compress or expand the recorded track without loosing the resolution of 16-bit samples. For example you can easily add 20dB do a very quiet portion of sound, still using the full 16-bit resolution of samples on a final CD (24-bit samples have 256 times higher resolution than 16-bit) but that's about it. It is like processing graphics using 48-bit RGB (or 64-bit RGBA) because you can play with gamma and contrast without the need to sacrifice the final quality.
High sampling frequency can only make sense if you want to downsample it later to play the sound few octaves lower than the original. It is used in techno but is pointless in real music because it sounds awful (low C of any given instrument sounds differently than downsampled high C).
As about the cost of DAC on the minidisc recorders (or CD players for that matter) it is actually surprisingly cheap if you use a 1-bit DAC and the only analog component needed is the lowpass filter but I totally agree with you about the intentional suboptimal quality of consumer equipment. It is exactly like slowing the graphics card in drivers, so you could sell more expensive "pro" version of the very same hardware.
By the way, the -96bB of quiet is expensive indeed, but one have to keep in mind that it is 150000 times quieter than the lowest order bit of 16-bit samples and still 600 times quieter than the lowest bit of 24-bit samples so it is very expensive and equally pointless even when you use 24-bit quantization. You'd need 33-34 bits for -96bB to make any difference but I highly doubt the interference on your wires would introduce the noise lower than that and of course such a recording would only make sense if you are planning to add few tens dB before the finall CD mastering.
Now, I hate the techno/pop/rock crap as much as the next guy and I'm really
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I don't like the way RIAA is doing things, I really do not.
But...
I get 10 emails a day with virus attachments. Last night I had someone try and buy my product with a stolen credit card and about once a week my bank calls me to check and see if someone stole mine. Every web site has to take unusual coding practices to protect against "Anonymous Cowards"...
I think that enough is enough. I think the disadvantages of anonymity have proven themselves to outweigh the advantages. We have to eliminate anonymous activity on the internet in order to save it.
This is my sig.
I thought Congress determined a couple of years ago that the prices of CD's were artificially inflated. As I recall they were supposed to bitch-slap 'em and make 'em give some of the money back. What happened to that?
and it's sooooo much worse for them to lose, because it's a failure on a massive scale. With their payroll, it's a professional embarassment to drop a game. That they missed the Series last year, ooooh my god how humiliating. That they got beat in the series the year before, oh that's bad. To a team with 2/3rds the payroll. Epic, epic fuck up. Every other team in the league has to decide who to give up. The yankees are the only ones who can upgrade everything they want.
If they win the series, big fucking deal. They have no excuse not to. They can't really achieve anything, they can only avoid underachieving. It's a bad position to be in. I pity them, in a way. I still hope Nelson's arm whithers, and that Rivera blows a game 7 save again.
And what's up with lionizing Jeffrey
Maier in the 1996 ALCS for fan interference leading to a bad call? Yankees fans should regard that with shame, but they don't care if a win is tainted. Why doesn't Steinbrenner try to bribe some Marlins into throwing the game? That would be just as cool - it would be a "win".
Boston Red Sox payroll: $100,000,000
Yankee Payroll: $152,749,814
The yankers definitely underachieved. Getting taken to the 11th inning of game 7 in the ACLS with 50% more money shows the front office sucks, and the players they got lack character and talent. They just didn't lack enough character and talent that the Sox could hold them.
seriously, until we/kids/whoever gets the data and music we love off their network and their servers onto our network of cars and our servers on laptops and transceive with mobile wireless routers in our friends and peeps tuners, we are just a target in their sights! be independent and be free! peace!
Well, no, actually that's not the case. The frequency is the time domain. But let's start from the beginning.
The digit. recorded anal. sound representation is first being sampled, i.e. the level of the recorded wave is being probed in some constant time intervals -- e.g. approximately every 22.68us for 44.1kHz sampling frequency. Nothing more has anything to do with time at all. Nothing.
The sampling frequency is important, as the highest harmonics being recorded are those of the wave length exactly twice the sampling period (multiplied by the speed of sound of course). The compact disc pulse code modulation format records harmonics way beyond the human hearing level (i.e. the ultrasounds) and when they are replayed the output from DAC (digit. to anal. converter) is piped through the lowpass filter to cut them off (to eliminate the subharmonic noise of the sampling jitter error of sounds close to the maximum recorded frequency).
Now the quantization. It has nothing to do with time, periods or frequencies, as at this point we are operating on the array of (unrelated from the quantization point of view) analog values. The quantization phase encodes them as bits. The number of bits result in the "vertical" resolution of samples values, not the "horizontal" resolution of samples intervals. There are about $2^(n-1)$ of levels up and down from the base level, where n is the number of bits, but remember about the lowpass filter we'll be piping it through at which point we have just a bunch of pure sinusoids (from the Fourieresce point of view).
The quality of playback is really impressive and it doesn't surprise me, as Philips labs' staff while developing the compact disk specs was in coopeation with Herbert von Karajan at that time (hence the 74 minutes, for the Nineth Beethoven's Symphony to fit). I am really far from the idea that I can possibly hear more than Herbert von Karajan himself.
You remind me of a friend of mine, who is a web graphics designer using 64-bit RGBA bitmaps in 60kdpi resolution when we ask him to design a web template. With such an attitude I suppose it's only a matter of time until we have 1024-bit quantization with 768MHz sampling frequency PCM audio format on "audiophile" (and then "consumer") grade equipment. And don't get me wrong, I really look forward for the day when I'm able to throw away all of the seismographs as well as ultrasound recorders in my lab. Those are expensive as hell. The same with computers. I love it when I hear that people are buying CPUs with multigigahertz timing signals to send email and fax, because it means I can buy the same hardware to do some real work instead of spending a killing on mainframes and expensive cluster nodes. I always say that the irrational overkill in consumer market is the best friend of every scientist.
Excuse my lay person question but when do you need resampling in classical music recordings unless you sample with frequency other than 44.1kHz in the first place?
I wouldn't dare to argue with you what is quiet enough for you since you obviously have better hearing than myself. I'm only saying that half a billion times quieter than the CD quality 16-bit PCM format is able to record is an overkill if the music is to be recorded on CD (and the overkill is understatement). It doesn't matter if your quiet is twice, million or billion times below the threshold, it won't be recorded anyway.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."