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Two Blanks Against the Trend
skdffff writes "German band Eisbrecher has decided to make a statement for its fans and for music consumers in general and is releasing their album ("Eisbrecher") including a bonus DVD with 2 blank CD-Rs which have the same label as the CD itself. Alexx Wesselsky (singer and head of the group): 'We are of the opinion that the music buyers are criminalized enough and have been made responsible for the wretched state in the music industry. We are giving them the chance to make 2 legal copies for private use with "official blanks".'"
this is just a publicity stunt.
remember, the USA is the country where your discontent will be sold back to you.
I remember thinking to myself... If only the artists and the consumers got together to fight the evil music oppressors, we all might start getting somewhere.
This looks like a very good start
I've never shoed a horse, but I once told a donkey to piss off!
I think it's a great idea that artists are trying to fight back against the RIAA. Sure they're German and sure they aren't that big, but it's a stand. Every journey starts with one step!
A real statement instead of pretending giving away free songs while hawking sugar water is in any way changing the system.
Well, I've never heard of this band, but I'll buy this CD. Maybe it's just a publicity stunt, and maybe I'm falling right into their trap, but I don't care. Because publicity stunt or not, maybe the RIAA will take notice if this album sells extremely well. Even if the band stands to gain from this stunt, I think we as the music buying public do as well. By buying this album we can send a message to the RIAA that we don't like being treated with contempt by them, and that we really do care about fair use.
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
The purpose of a stunt such as this is to get publicity. Perhaps the only reason they did this is to push their new album, but at the same time they are helping to bring light the situation that we have here which is about copyright laws. I think we all have moved beyond the issue of destroying the music industry. We need to move on to what we can do to fix the issue of moving our music from medium to medium (i.e. record to tape to cd to computers) Once we figure out what is acceptable and fair to music makers then we can begin to focus on what's important: making better music with better quality and therefore better entertainment.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
This doesn't work if your band is counting on millions of sales in order to recap huge ad costs -- i.e. Backstreet Boys, etc. But it works wonders if you need higher distribution, and just want exposure. What a great idea to help distribute music!
stuff |
I was unaware that the music industry had been doing much complaining about people making copies of CDs for personal use. I could have sworn they were much more upset about people either A) giving out mix CDs or B) downloading illegal files.
I don't see how this move will really effect anything. You can give out two copies to a friend, I guess (although that's illegal), and it will have the official CD logo. Or something.
Of course, the CD-R won't last as long as the real CD anyway and nothing would have prevented people from copying the CD anyway. This is just some dumb gimic to grab attention, and it seems to have worked.
If this were a band offering free MP3s for download, that might be interesting. It isn't, it's just a band saying that they don't mind people using fair use rights. (Or whatever they are in Germany and the EU, I don't know.)
I guess I don't see what the big deal is.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
I'd expect German law (and US, along with probably every Berne signatory) says "you've been given permission by the copyright holder(s) to make the two copies, so go ahead.
...if they had, it'd just be a three-for-the-price-of-two-as-we-can't-sell-all-th ese-cds-we-pressed bargain bucket release, rather than a feelgood, slashdot-friendly option that gets them a load of free publicity.
We are giving them the chance to make 2 legal copies for private use with "official blanks".
How is this more 'helpful' than, say, simply enclosing two additional CDs with the album already recorded onto it, thereby saving their fans the trouble of duping the CD when the CD-R already has the album's label glued onto it?
This is a nice way of saying "Giving away copies of our work can be good for us, too".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I'd be more impressed if it came with MP3s for your MP3 player or something, copying CDs hasn't been as big an issue for quite a while. (Of course, if I ever get a new CD, I usually burn a copy immediately for my car. I'm not going to subject the original to the temperature changes my car experiences, I'll let the CD-R last as long as it can going from -10 degrees in the winter to 120 degrees in the summer. Except I haven't gotten a new CD in ages, mostly because I don't actually want any of the crap that's widely available. I think the last new CD I bought was an anime soundtrack, and that was a year (or more) ago.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
but why don't they just give you two extra copies of album instead of CD-Rs?
Maybe because they're trying to give just enough to keep people happy, but keep the level low enough that no real damage is done. Maybe because if they say that two copies are OK, people will feel guilty about making more. (cf zero tolerance policies, which are frequently ignored, often ridiculed, and -- with the exception of grade schools and underage DUI laws -- rarely enforced) </conspiracy>
Seriously though. Could they be trying to throw us just enough bones to keep us from starting a full-out revolt? People will start with "what do you mean we've lost fair use? We can make *two* whole copies!" And then the people who know what's going on will look like cheapskates and theives to everybody else.
It's hard enough as it is convincing people that I want to be able to copy my iTunes downloads for legitimate reasons, not just to give to my friends (though iPods and car CD players and whatnot have started making it a more mainstream consideration). We don't need some sort of industry-sanctioned amount of copying (artists are a part of the industry as a whole, no?). This whole idea reeks, IMHO.
I don't think this record company constitutes as a monopoly.
We do this because we're a bar band. We're not with a major label. We have no distribution besides selling our recordings by hand at our gigs and maybe garnishing a wee bit of counter space at a local Mom&Pop coffee shop or two (not to mention, of course, giving them away as presents and sharing online via P2P). We do this because we figure the more our music gets out there, the more of chance that somebody from a label will hear us and like us and we'll finally be able to just do what we really love for a living - making music.
Now, let's assume that our dreams come true. We makes lots of cash solely by making music. Well, we've all agreed that as soon as our first contract expires, we would only sign another one that allows people to distribute our music freely. Why? Simply put, we've already started making a living at what we love, and we know that people will continue to buy our CD's, whether or not they can get our music for free! This is a proven fact!!!
Sure, we might not end up being as filthy rich as other music stars, but who cares? Greed sucks. Allowing the most amount of people as possible on this planet to enjoy what we, too, enjoy more than almost anything else (sound familiar to any of you Linux programmers?) - now THAT would be AWESOME!
-A witty .sig proves nothing.
Basically, they said you could, so you can make 2 copies, legally. You could do it in front of a judge, and he'd just have to sit there, grooving on it.
A few posters seem to be criticising this thing as if it were supposed to be practical. Of course, as anyone can see, this is not supposed to be practical.
The CDs are blank, probably to avoid extra payments to copyright holders. Although the CDs are empty, they've been printed on, and therefore earmarked for this particular purpose. Of course this is impractical, but it's supposed to be. It's just a statement, and a good one too.
This way, they are allowing their fans to actively replicate the CD themselves, which is usually illegal, and pisses off the RIAA something chronic. It's a slap in the face to the RIAA. It's a bit out of date, though - the real deal would be to release the album on Kazaa/edonkey. If there was more legal music on P2P networks, their argument holds less water.
You seem to be missing a crucial point here. All of the instances that you cited were of the general populace trying to weasel through loop holes in copyright law, and the laws were rightly changed to accomodate for this. The instance we're discussing here is a band who is distributing two blanks with their own cd, which one would assume is to encourage people buying the cd to share a copy with a couple friends. This is NOT the same as finding loop holes in the law. They are extending the basic provisions of copyright law the same way as someone releasing code under the GPL is. I would seriously doubt that any sane judge is going to tell you that you can't make extensions like this on materials that you own the copyright to.
do not read this line twice.
You cited cases where people are not actually breaking the law "as written" but they are breaking the "spirit" in which it was written.
Thankfully, I have not found this tendency among the various High Court and Supreme Court Judges. They do seem to fully understand the spirit of the law and will perobably take the appropriate actions to maintain that spirit.
By the way, I also see the opposite happen i.e. people trying to live up to the law too much. For example, in my company, there are rules regarding Software Development such as requirements to produce various types of documentation. Sometimes I see clueless Project Managers going overboard with obsessively following these rules. They insist on a trivial 2-minute bug-fix going through 2 weeks of approvals and reviews and another 3-weeks of documentation changes. Instead of streamlining the process, the too literal interpretation of the rules ends up wrapping the whole process in red-tape.
Anyway.. Intelligent post. You didn't have to post as AC.
With the relatively high demand for portability, I wonder if a band would be willing to pre-RIP their songs into MP3s or AAC or whatever format directly onto their CDs for personal use... just a thought on similar lines.
One Can Never Own Enough Musical Instruments...
On /. I hear a lot about fair use and what that implies. This system allows you to do things that a straight 2nd copy wouldn't. So, if you want to scramble the order of the tracks, or maybe do a mix of your own karaoke over the originals, then you can. This system allows you to own the music and do what you want with it in a new way.
It's almost like the linux router that didn't release the source code. Once it had, hackers converted it to a super-router with loads of hacks to do what the owners want to.
Sorry...
I disagree with you. I believe society can now handle a "patentless/copyrightless" society.
I do NOT believe they are beneficial in their current form. Most artists and inventers receive next to nothing in compensation when corporations and associations gain all th economic benefits.
And at the same time, these rights have been so extended (both in time and in scope) as to be unconstitutional...
Frankly, I think it's time some damage is done. However, I believe said damage should a) not harm life or limb, b) not harm non-combatants (such as myDoom virus)
While I applaud the sentiment, and I'm sure they have the noblest of intentions (beyond the desire for publicity/hype/sales), I see the possibility that this could lead to something bad.
Ok, they've given the consumer two "official" blanks. If this becomes an accepted practice and considered a de facto license to make two copies of the album the blanks were distributed with, does that mean that NOT bundling "official" blanks is considered a prohibition against making ANY copies? "If we want you to make copies, we'll give you the blanks to do it with." Could this be twisted into a back-door attack on fair-use copying/archiving in general?
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Morality doesn't enter into it;
That's certainly true.
Some German rap is very good. Remember, hip-hop is urban culture, and Germany has plenty of urban areas. So do France and Great Britain, both of which also have hot hip-hop scenes. And what's great is that each area is adding its own influence to the genre, not just reiterating Reverend Run rhymes in low German. Although, the band mentioned in this topic is just noise, some of it is really good.
It's the integration and unity of races that is growing in modern urban areas that increases the angular velocity of Herr Adolf. The fact that there's some modern clicks and whistles coming out of their Blaupunkt speakers would probably not increase this outrage.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
A local Portland Oregon folk artist, Lew Jones, released a new album several years ago with most of his older work included on the CD in MP3 form.
This was a mixed-mode CD where the audio came first and then the data. Placing the CD in an audio player gives the sound, so there is no blast of noise when the data is placed on the CD first.
Also there were a few selections of other artists from the same small label on the CD in MP3 form.
This is pretty neat and is an example of the RIAA companies should be doing to address this issue. It's too bad that these companies are all run by bozos who have let all the cocaine, limos, bimbos, and rock-star celebrity cloud their business sense.
Another idea would be is to have the original mix tracks on the CD in MP3 form along with a program that allows the buyers to remix to songs differently. Remove that irritating guitar solo, add more reverb on the bass, things like this.
Early hiphop was heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, esp. "Trans-Europe Express". That the birds come home to roost surprises me very little.
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work.
The giant media corporations have destroyed the idea of copyright themselves by bribing legislators in the USA to change the copyright time period from limited to indefinite. Since they refuse to release copyrighted material into public domain (by permanently extending the copyright period), the consumers refuse to acknowledge their ownership of the copyright by using new digital technology to make extensive and widespread copies.
Corporations don't understand the idea of 'social compact' and never will. In the long run, they will dissolve themselves due to inability to control digital copyright, but they will send many random people to prison to set examples and will destroy many works by encrypting them and refusing to release the decryption keys or allowing the sale of the product.
Did you mean "social contract"?
The difference between plain copying and plagiarism is with plagiarism, lying/deception/fraud is involved.
Most of the people who infringe on copyrights aren't plagiarizing because they don't falsely claim "I wrote this song, I wrote this program".
However I'm not sure if this can be considered plagiarism or not given that it is posted under an "anonymous coward" account. It doesn't attribute the original author tho.