Slashdot Mirror
Obtaining Legal MP3s Outside of the U.S.?
frankkubiak asks: "I recently bought the new iPod with 40GB. I understand the arguments of the record industry, that I should buy the music I want to hear. Alright. So I don't want to get MP3 files by file-sharing. But here is my problem: I live outside the U.S., in Germany to be exact. iTunes only offers service to those inside the U.S. (see this related Slashdot article). I don't want a CD, vinyl record, tape or minidisc. I simply want to listen to the music. Even if I decide to buy a legacy audio CD, it is often copy-protected and won't load in my PC. So, strictly speaking, it is not even an audio-CD. Heise keeps a database of those un-CDs (German language. English speakers can use this fish-translated page). It sounds incredible, but even after hours of research on the web, I don't see a legal way to use this device with new songs. The only way I see to use this device is to buy a CD, and if I can't rip it, I'll have to [break the law and] download the MP3-file via file-sharing. I believe there are more people like me out there who want to listen to their music, without feeling guilty. Why is there no one meeting this demand? How does Slashdot feel about this?" Before you mention Napster, let's note that it has similar restrictions (see the "International Considerations" section). So where can non-U.S. internet users go to download the legal MP3s that they want?
the music is owned by its copyright holder. if they don't want to offer it to you, you can't get it legally.
them's the ropes, and our just desserts for allowing the hegemony of major labels to monopolise music for so long.
MORTAR COMBAT!
... wonders why people are drawn to illegal file sharing...
When you download music. Illegal is not immoral. Better music than the dross the record companies push is available on www.iuma.com all nice and legal anyway.
I do find it ironic that people masquerading as capitalists come out with the ultra-socialist "it's important that creators are guaranteed compensation" when I"P" is discussed.
That is theoretically true in America, but IP and fair-use laws are different in Europe. It's a pretty bad situation to be in, but hopefully somebody here will know how to handle it.
Situations like this is why you shouldn't feel guilty about downloading "illegal" music.
It seems like there's hardly a mode of copy protection that hasn't been broken - whether via sharpie or shift key, there's usually a way around these things.
But this would be indirectly supporting the recording industry's CD copy protection scheme.
It would counter-productive to the whole spirit of his intent.
i get a bit tired of listenting to all the holier than thou itunes mess Ya just gotta learn to quit caring and savor the current internet for all you can....... usem while ya gottem.
Any answer there is to this question will be at the best unobvious and at the worst massively convoluted. If the average consumer wants to use their digital technology effectively, they have no choice but to break the law. The lack of insight that has brought about this situation is the primary reason that the music industry is seeing such a massive downturn: it's the financial results of a cultural backlash against narrow-minded profiteering.
I seriously wonder what they would say.
You have a device and nothing to fill it with. You ask them for songs and they tell you...what? Encourage you to break the law?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
100% legal MP3s, but you'd better like the music on the Warp (as it only sells that label's catalogue).
I think stating that while it may be said that it is legal to download music you have not paid for, that is reading the letter of the law rather than the word of the law.
And more importantly I see no ethical standing for stating that downloading someone elses work for free is fine.
paul reinheimer
Ok....so nobody is meeting this demand. I have two suggestions. Either try to start such a service that DOES meet those demands, and hopefully profit off it while you get your music fix, or just go ahead and break some laws. How can you feel guilty if they offer you no legal option for getting your music this way? You really have no alternative, so there is no reason to feel guilty, especially after you have decided you want to do things legally, and they have failed to provide you with a way to do so.
Before I get people giving me arguments about things like "well, I wanted them to give me a way to smoke pot legally, but they failed to provide me a way to do so", I would just like to state that this isn't an issue about whether you can use something or not, this is a format issue and a license issue, which is quite different.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
I don't know about germany but in holland it is a legal right to make a copy. Copy protection denies that right so again it is the music industry that is acting against the law.
So why should I feel guilty when I download music?
Asnswer I don't. Poor musicians starving to death? Awh, best artists in history were poor. I am doing art a favor. I didn't see music artist protest when changing technology made miners unemployed or when thousands of factory workers lost their jobs to robots.
For years people have been making suggestions of how the music industry could easily sell its entire catalog without the expense of keeping cd's in stock by burning on demand. They didn't want it. Voting with your wallet is the only thing that works. Any who buy copyrighted cd's and then jump through hoops to get it to work on their player are pawns. You are sending the message that the current business model is fine with you.
Since in holland you pay a tax on dvd's and cassetes anyway that goes to the music industry I see that as my payment. No more wrong then them getting money for my linux install cd's.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
One of my favorite sites is Epitonic.com. I've found so many great artists there...
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
No. Don't. I don't care if it is legal in your area, but don't do this. This has two effects: You give money to the record label, and you bump up their 'piracy' rate. Given their unlogic on the issue, that will just make them put DRM on more of their CDs.
It sounds like your best bet is to check with that list before you buy the CD. (And sorry, you'll have to buy the CDs.) If there is a CD on the list that you want, sorry. Send the record label a copy of your question, and tell them it is why you didn't buy the CD.
If this is too much work, or you just can't get enough music to be worth it, sell the iPod (or return it if you can...), and tell Apple why. At that point you are an unsatisfied customer, who will tell others, for something that is not their fault. They may have the influence to fix it, even if you don't.
Just don't hurt yourself. Support those who support you; the labels and artists who let you do what you want. Tell the rest why you don't support them. Maybe they'll listen. After all, it is their profit you're talking about.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Yes, it's fair use, but the SNR of normal FM transmissions is less than 50 ...
The Raven
I can't believe the propensity of people here to equate "copyright infringement" with "stealing," considering they aren't even in the same class of crimes, carry significantly differently penalties, are prosecuted at different levels of the court system, etc...
Downloading music is never technically "stealing", its copying. The words "theft" and "stealing" have only been introduced into the MP3 debate by the RIAA and the uninformed media.
>> Why do people like iTunes and Napster restrict
>> service like that?
Do you think for a moment that either of these companies wouldn't jump in to an otherwise untapped market for their product if they could?
Both companies have publically acknowledged they're fighting to launch in Europe
More Info!
Piracy is not a crime that requires two or more people. You can legally download a file while the person uploading it to you can be breaking the law. The fact that they (not you) are doing something illegal does not make you an accessory to the crime. For example, if you have sex with a 15 year old, you are guilty of statutory rape but the 15 year old is not an accessory to that crime, even if she initiated the sexual conduct (by flirting and saying she was over 18 and asking for you to fuck her).
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
I may be misinterepereting things, but my impression was that the problem was one of guilt rather than one of legality. The laws are different, but does that change the morality of the issue?
The RIAA lawsuits were against heavy *uploaders*. The cost of downloading a song is already established -- $0.99 at iTunes, $1--$2 if you buy a CD and rip it yourself. Downloading isn't necesarily illegal (fair use allows you to copy from someone else, not make a copy for someone else).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Considering the fact that MP3 compression is lossy and you can't get the original data back, how did they compare checksums? Of course the data is going to be different.
Sounds like BS to me. }:)
I mean.. wasting all that money on a iPod, only to figure out you don't have any method of inputting songs into it? just do what everyone else does.. rip the CD, and boycott people who use copy protection.
Remember the little old lady that the RIAA busted? She claimed she owned all the music on CD already so it didn't matter if she downloaded all the music off the net? RIAA checked the checksums of the files vs her CDs and they were different.
Bullshit. Checksums would never survive compression.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
No, no, no.
:)
He would start his own touring band, and let anyone bootleg it. When the lawyers and businesmen cornered him and asked if people should pay for copywritten music, he would answer "Give unto the laywers what is the lawyers, but live your life for others, for it is not your own but God's". After that the RIAA left outraged because he had not fallen into their trap.
hmm, that started out as a joke
I gave up and resorted to buying CDs, ripping them, then burning them.
Personally, I like having the disks around. If nothing else, they're useful as a zero-effort backup or if I want to switch audio formats. (If space is a consideration, you could invest in a vertical CD rack like I did or, alternately, put the disks and inserts into a binder and throw away the jewel cases.)
I haven't run into many DRM'd CDs that I care about yet so I don't know how that will affect my life. However, CDDA-XTractor had no trouble ripping the one I bought, although I couldn't find a way to make cdparanoia rip it correctly.
The only real problem with buying CDs is if defeating the DRM is illegal under laws like the DMCA. Canada doesn't (yet) have such a law but I don't know what Germany is like. Of course, you could just do it anyway, based on the assumption that you'll probably never get busted for it.
Well in a sense the real people to blame are the people who called intellectual property 'intellectual property'. It's a stupid name. Property is a mechanism for dealing with scarce resources by allocating them to a person called the 'owner' who then has the exclusive right to use them. IP is quite different as there is no scarcity. I guess the inventors of the concept tried to emulate the physical property situation by causing an artificial scarcity but it still seems different enough to me to warrant a different name. The moment someone called it 'property' the use of the word 'stealing' is inevitable.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Could you use an american proxy server to make your connection appear to come from here?
This doesn't solve the legal problems, I'm afraid.
There is a difference between ethics and legality. You cannot legally use MP3s in your country. You've been conditioned to think of copyright as "intellectual property," rather than a social contract between creator of content and the consumer, which associates concepts like stealing and piracy with what is, in the end, not theft but copyright violation. This brings with it the feeling of guilt. You've also been conditioned, probably by the German society, that laws were meant to be followed and that ethical people follow laws.
The reality is quite different. Laws are, at best, an attempt to codify and enforce ethics by committee. The committee is usually right, but does, on occasion, make errors. In those cases, there is sometimes no compelling reason to follow the laws. Worse, as in the case of Eastern Europe under Communism, the committee maybe corrupt, in which case, the ethical thing to do is often civil disobedience, and intentionally breaking laws. To me, this feels like one of those cases.
You should strive to follow ethics, not laws. I would argue that there is a compelling ethical argument not to give money to record companies, so they can better buy off governments to pass acts like the DMCA mandating DRM, and destroy your right to write free software capable of interacting with the mainstream world (you cannot, right now, write free legal DVD players, or players for DRMed CDs, even if they have zero uses for copying content). If this is allowed to continue, in short time, GNU/Linux computers will no longer be able to legally access music and video, followed by books and electronic texts, and eventually, mainstream documents. Once this happens, GNU/Linux and free software will have been effectively legally banned from any sort of desktop use (and quite possibly, eventually, server use).
I would sidestep the issue of benefiting personally from illegal action by making sure you do not benefit. Donate the money you would have spent on CDs to either the artists, or organizations like the FSF, the EFF and similar. Make sure you donate at least as much as you have in illegal content. Then, gather the content illegally, and use it as you see fit. I believe this is the second most ethical course of action (the most ethical being that you only boycott all mainstream music, and listen only to independent labels uninvolved in the push for DRM).
Actually, this is the same effect as using a p2p service. You're not authorized to distribute the media.
No copyright owner or agent for same has ever sued an individual in Australia for making any kind of copy for personal use. The legislation has never been tested in court. It may well fail against Common Law fair use rights.
The fact that it has never been tested must give you some idea of the Australian music and film industries' level of confidence that it would be upheld. As long as they never test it, they can continue to claim that it is illegal to tape shows off the TV, rip CDs to MP3, etc, etc.
Don't believe everything the Copyright Council says.
Politas
He never claimed that it absolved him from paying. Copyright infringment is a very different crime to stealing. If I steal something from you, you no longer have it, if I infringe your copyright you still have the copyright and the item copyrighted.
My personal opinion on copyright infringement is that copyright should not be transferable. The artist should be able at any time, regardless of contract, be able to enforce the rights given to them under copyright law. This would prevent music companies from extorting artists who have no choice but to sign over their souls if they want to be famous. It would also give them bargining position on the amount of money they receive for each sale.
Like you, I once (recently) set out on this Quixotic quest to discover a set of self-consistent rules within society, whereby one can function adequately. My conclusion that, while "society" says one thing, in reality it conspires to produce "law-breakers". Societies do not care so much about producing law-abiding citizens, their primary purpose is to produce law-breakers, who they will then punish.
Since "society" cannot realize this about itself, it often leaves most criminals unpunished. Therefore it is better to be a criminal.
You'll go insane the other way.
That is theoretically true in America, but IP and fair-use laws are different in Europe. It's a pretty bad situation to be in, but hopefully somebody here will know how to handle it.
Please explain, how are they significantly different? All countries have signed the Berne treaty.
In my (humble) experience, most european have broader definitions of 'fair-use' than the US.
Can you name a European copyright legislation which is stricter? I certainly can't.
it's actually a clever way to get near police-state powers. simply make something illegal that everyone does, and then selectively enforce it should you want to nail someone, for whatever reason.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Don't support copyright holders who want you to consume under restricted circumstances. There is plenty of free music out there.
Just put the CD into your normal CD player (not your computer)
Plug your players output into your computers input.
Record.
Granted, you loose some quality, you loose the convenient automatic retrievel of the song-titles, you may have to seperate songs by hand and ripping is only at single speed.
Convenient? Sure not! But it works. Always.
And it should be legal in Germany.
While it is illegal to circumvent a copy-protection, I would argue that you play the CD on a device that can play it and record it on a device that can record it, so you're not circumventing anything.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Because it's two separate things. Fair use allows you to make personel copies. There's no requirement that the companies make it easy for you.
In fact, thanks to the DMCA (thanks Bill Clinton, Fritz Hollings (D-Disney), and others), it became illegal to try and circumvent copy protection.
Yes, some claimed that DMCA infringes on fair use, but the fair use says you are allowed to do something... it doesn't require companies to willingly allow you to do it.
What's worse, of course, is that part of the price of CDs and DVDs is the copy protection. In other words, the people paying the penalty are the ones who buy their content legally, and they are more restricted in it's use. It's really backwards.
I'll go off on a tangent here and compare current copy prevention mechanisms to the software copy prevention mechanisms from the eighties. Who remembers things like "off disk copy protection", or disks that were purposely damaged to as to be uncopyable? Every game like that I bought I immediately went online, found the hex codes to change, and "fixed" the software. I was saavy about it, but most people weren't, and had to put up with looking up codes in manuals or long load times (because of drives choking on bad sectors). There was a backlash, and now you don't see that anymore - what you see are games where companies go way beyond simply providing you with a game to make it valuable to purchase the product legally. They might include a huge manual, maps, minatures, etc.
The music and movie industry amazingly manage to make money despite themselves. Everytime a more versatile format comes out (cassettes, VHS/Beta, CDs, DVDs, mp3s and other various file formats that can be delivered over the internet) the industry whines and complains and goes running to the governemt for protection.
They claimed, for example, VHS would destroy the industry, and then it actually revived it and opened new revenue streams.
Cassette tapes made listening to music more convenient, so people bought MORE MUSIC. Go figure.
CDs brought us amazing quality for very cheap prices, and the industry was worried that cassette copies would be of very high quality. When the discman came out, that became a moot point. Again, people bought MORE music because they were getting better quality with more convenience (skipping tracks, for example, or creating a program as compared to listening to a tape or record) with great quality. People bought MORE music!
DVDs accomplished the same thing for the movie industry. Given a format that doesn't wear out and degrade after many viewings, great quality output, less space than VHS tapes, no rewinding - and now we have things like multi disc players, not to mention the sound options with DVDs (hey, I don't care about Spanish or French, but sometimes I do get portuguese, which is great for me).
Now we have MP3s. Good quality can be had (excellent quality can be had, really), in a solid state form that's easy to store and recall, gives us many hours of music in relatively little space, easy to manage a whole collection of music - it literally takes no extra space in your house. Again we have ability to program from lists of possibly hundreds or thousands of songs. And the industry wants to make it difficult to listen to music the way you want to listen to it. They are not making friends.
I'm not going to be ignorant about the problem of piracy by claiming it's not a problem at all, it's the methods of preventing it I question... the current methods only hurt the honest consumers, not the pirates, and it's the honest consumers that ultimately have to pay for the copy prevention that is keeping them from listening to music or watching movies the way they want to. It's just so stupid. And it IS counter to fair use, but there's no laws requiring content providers to make fair use easy. And now the DMCA makes attempts at fair use illegal.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
It's a citizen's civic duty to ignore bad laws and challenge the evil within the system.
You can disagree, but you'll never see change unless somebody takes a stand. Civil disobedience gave Rosa Parks a seat on the bus just like everybody else, and, FAR MORE IMPORTANTLY, it empowered every single black person in America to do the same.
Ideas aren't property, even though the RIAA/MPAA wish to uphold the regime; copyright has its (limited) uses, but that doesn't make it morally imperative for every single citizen to follow along blindly.
It's good that you're thinking about the issue, but the fact is that downloading music isn't wrong - it might be illegal, depending on local laws (I live in Canada, different rules apply here) but it isn't wrong. That's an opinion. Follow your own best judgement.
just like the humble blood clot... turboporsche@telus.net
I would really like to know who has hearing that is so good that they would instantly know when a CD is being played and say "That sounds like crap, its not vinyl". And then there's the fact that vinyl is only better when you are playing a perfectly preserved album on an excellent turntable with a top quality stylus. One spec of dust or one little scar will make it sound like a scratchy old record.
The basic premise behind property is that if I build a house, there is one house. If you take my house, I no longer have it, and I am deprived of my property. It is, in economic terms, a scarce good.
Information, in contrast, is in economic terms a free good. If you create information, and I take it, you still have the information.
As a result, the two are fundamentally different. Information is not property (except in the legal sense -- which has a much broader definition of property than what we normally associate), and property is not information.
The concept of copyright is based on the idea that if we reward creators of information, we will have more of it. It is not based on some concept of property or control over one's creation. If you follow that path, you eventually run into contradictions. It is strictly a contract between society and the creators of information -- it is not a concept of control or ownership, but rather one of compensation for doing something that benefits society.
(One disclaimer: the economic definition of 'free good' and 'scarce good' is different than the common one, so please don't argue that point unless you're familiar with the economic definition)
In terms of Aristotle on property, I cannot see where you are coming from. Aristotle's view was that the natural way of generating property was through household management (which included managing slaves -- and he does, at length, argue for the merits of slavery), rather than one's own labor. He viewed trade as an immoral and unnatural way of aquiring wealth, and hated merchants. He viewed professions like banking as the lowest and most immoral way of aquiring wealth, since they were dealing in something abstract and non-physical. The concept of intellectual property did not exist at the time, but if it did, I cannot see him agreeing with it.
then she must have downloaded them from Kazaa or (less likely) ripped them from her CD with the exact same encoder, bitrate and options
less likely? I use my computer as my stereo, and transfer my music from CD to it. To do this I just pop in the CD, it looks up the name for me, and I press one button to encode the albumn.
bitrate... options... all default.
Now if Kazaa has a copy of the exact same song, with the exact same title and the exact same MD5 sum, Is it really that obvious that I must have downloaded it from them.
By your logic, me admitting that, "No, I encoded this file from my CD", would imply that I must have been the one to place it on Kazza... because what are the odds that someone choose the exact same encoder, bitrate, options and even named it the same name.
I hate to give a touchy-feely answer to a serious question, but it also involves a bit of human engineering. The Record was created at the turn of the century to reproduce classical recordings. From the point that music was recorded it was recorded with the intent of being played back on vinyl. Horns, violins, etc were used to tune the recording system and the recording system was used to tune the records that came out. Elvis still sounds better on vinyl.
Now, I while I can't say that modern music sounds terrible on a record (I have a disk here by Kosheen that would attest to that), most of the poppy, clippy... sharp modern recordings sound better on CD. They were recorded with CD's in mind, tuned for CD's, and released on CD. I can't guarentee that Janet sounds better on CD, but most of the modern, non-jazz or instrumental recordings I have heard recently sound much better on disk. Wayne Shorter seems better on Vinyl, but he makes for a more classical sound.
There another touchy-feely answer for you. Recordings sound best on the medium that they were styled, mixed, and recorded for, because they have been optimized for the strengths and weaknesses of that medium.
The ______ Agenda
One of the very basic parts of morality is following the laws where you live to the best of your ability. So, yes, having different local laws can have a very big affect on morality.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
A sound scientific argument - based, unfortunately, on the unproven assertion that the only part of a soundwave that's of interest to the human ear is that part composed of superimposed sinewaves with frequencies up to and including 22KHz.
Yes, it's true that humans can't 'hear' pure sinewaves at frequencies exceeding about 20KHz, but the mechanisms in the human ear that convert mechanical vibrations into electrochemical responses in the brain and then into conscious sensations or emotions are... well... not exactly trivial. Just because when you turn the frequency dial up, there's a point for every person where they say 'nope, can't hear it any more' doesn't mean there's no signal processing going on.
Case not proven, I'm afraid.
Um, no, that is completely false. Morality and legality are two entirely different issues.
/. non-sense where whatever you believe to be true is true by virtue of you expressing it regardless of whether you are expressing a learned or a lay opinion. There are several hundred books that address the issue of morality v. legality and I doubt that you have read any of them.
The whole issue of civil disobediance and immoral laws is based on the fact that morality and legality are not related to one another. Slavery, Nazi era laws against Jewish people, Jim Crow voting laws and poll taxes, etc... are all cases where the local law would often put most people into a direct conflict of their morales.
This is such typical
For those people seriously interested in this topic it generally falls under the subject of Jurisprudence or Legal Theory and the best beginner book is Ronald Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously.
You should pay particular attention to his description of rules v. principles (Riggs v. Palmer) and the difference between the LAW and the desires of man with a gun (otherwise known as the army or police force).
But please do not spout such non-sense without having read anything on the subject.
Actually, it's a bit more subtle than that.
It is *not* illegal, not even under the DMCA, to break copy protection for the purpose of making fair use, or for work with expired copyrights. The DMCA only makes breaking protection a crime when it's done with intent to break copyright law, and making fair use isn't breaking copyright law.
The *problem* however is that the DMCA still bars the distribution of *tools* for breaking copy protection, no matter what they're used for. So, yes, you *can* break the protection on that CD if it's for a fair purpose, but *only* if you do all the work of doing so yourself. This was why the "making it easy" issue came up.
One of the very basic parts of morality is following the laws where you live to the best of your ability.
Give me a break! I offer you three cases, two factual, one fictional, that completely destroy your premise:
1. 1930s-40s Germany. I don't think I really need to elaborate on this one, but here's a hint: Oscar Schindler was breaking the "law." Do you suggest that his behavior was immoral?
3. Rosa Parks was "immoral" because she sat down in the front of the bus, instead of moving to the rear.
2. Orwell's 1984. By your reasoning, the party was RIGHT in that anyone who dared engage in thoughtcrime or overt acts against Big Brother was not only a criminal, but defective and immoral.
What's legal, and what's moral are too entirely different kettles of fish. If you're too blind to see that, I feel sorry for you.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?