Slashdot Mirror
Russian Music Site Offering Legal Songs By The MB
An anonymous reader writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting on a Russian Music site that is offering legal digital music by the MB. The site apparently has a license from the Russian Music authorities to legally distribute songs for a fraction of the price of what is being offered by iTunes and others. The report from SMH is here. Amazingly, the site offers files in any format and encoding you choose and rips it on the fly. Notifications by email follow when the songs are ready for download. Sounds a little to good to be true :)"
I sure hope it all isn't running on DEBIAN.... I've got no desire to overpay for the only encoding Debian can do: wavs
A 300 meg wav, doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
The files they encode from are IIRC 384kbps wav files. Pretty good sources :)
that has lost 6ood 8anners
The major issue is one of choice. Given the choice between not paying anything towards the creation of music, and paying something to an organization like the RIAA, clearly most people would rather do the former. If a non-governmental agency is to be put in charge of handing out grants to artists, it must have the ability to compell payment. There are multiple ways this can be achieved, currently we only provide a limited mechanism through copyrights. But if copyrights were to be reformed, we could institute this kind of compulsion while giving people their fair use rights back. This would suit everyone.
As you say, community values must also play a part in the creation of music, we can't allow rappers to advocate murder and receive funds that people have no choice but to pay. I would add to that the use of swearwords, and, for obvious constitutional reasons, bans on religious or speech content. These can always be funded through other means, rather than via compulsory contributions.
The real issue is getting there. Most people have no objections to such a system being instituted as long as they receive something in return, for example the free redistribution of content itself. But unless we can persuade the current content producers to accept such terms, something that cannot be done without also providing the means for them to receive money via the compulsory payment system evisaged above, they will not accept such a radical proposal.
This quagmire of artists and consumers being unable to accept a better environment for the funding of arts unless both are dealt with at the same time will not disappear by itself. Resources need to be devoted, and unless people are prepared to actually act, not just talk about it on Slashdot, nothing will ever get done. Apathy is not an option.
You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman or senator. Tell them that free and open music is important to you. Tell them that you appreciate the work being done by the libertarians to create an infrastructure that will support truly free - as in liberty - music, but that if the chicken and agg problem inherent in a sideways reform of copyright is not resolved, you will be forced to use less and less secure and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that SMP may make or break whether you can efficiently deploy OpenBSD on your workstations and servers. Explain the concerns you have about freedom, openness, and choice, and how the lack of a mechanism whereby a private company can compell people to pay money to be ridistirbuted amongst artists harms all three. Tell them you will only accept such a system as long as strict limits are placed upon the type of content that can be funded, owing to the compulsory nature of the contributions. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on their policies on private music funding.
You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.
KMSMA (WWBD?)