CMU Professor's Rebuttal Against RIAA Propaganda

jsc writes "On Sunday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published an article by Cary Sherman, president of the RIAA, stating that university students are hijacking Internet2 to pirate copyrighted works, and schools who don't actively combat file-sharing are teaching their students bad values like "acceptance of theft". The Post-Gazette didn't let Sherman get away with it, though... Today they published a letter to the paper from Roger Dannenberg, a professor of Computer Science and Music at Carnegie Mellon University, reminding everyone how past/present behavior of the RIAA and its members is an even worse model of values..."

Comments

Re:YAIA

[j-turkey]

Shut up, Hitler.

Not flamebait. It's a play on Godwin's Law and Internet argument "rules". I thought it was pretty good.

USENET

[HD Webdev]

I still don't know why people like P2P applications so much. They are begging to get busted due to them waving a 'looky here at my copyrighted files' flag publicly.

USENET is still superior: Anonymous uploading of files can be done. Downloads are usually extremely fast & won't be noticed by the RIAA or whoever else is interested. And, reviews ("virus!", "bad sample rate", "wrong file", "goatse.cx warning", etc..) of uploaded files are there to be looked at before choosing to download them.

P2P, bah. There are plenty of USENET front-ends that make finding files much easier and faster to get.

Re:USENET

[HD Webdev]

Also millions more: People who don't want to deal w/USEnet (I'm one of them).

EXACTLY!

That's one of the major reasons why the quality/quantity of good files is better on USENET.

People who won't bother to learn how to use USENET or download an application to do it for them get filtered out. Serious traders spend an hour or so learning how to use USENET and often keep quality sets of files on-hand so that they can post 'FILEFOO (requesting: FILEBAR)' and be assured that they will get the exact file they want in return.

OTOH, P2P is full of tons of crap that people don't even realize they are sharing because they can't be bothered to RTFM. Example: Search for NOTEPAD.EXE and then browse the users and you'll see that often you're looking at their WINDOWS directory.

++Article text in case of slashdotting++

[Anonymous Coward]

... so forget your self-serve

I will not scan my own groceries. If stores want me to do that, then offer me a discount. I am doing work for them. How does this save them money when they still have an employee at the end of the self-scanning aisle packing the groceries? At Giant Eagle where I shop, the cashier also bags and does a lousy job at it. When they had a bagger and a cashier, the two of them talked so much I wondered if things were being handled correctly.

I really dislike grocery shopping and think the stores are run for the benefit of the employees and not the customer. I could go on and on about my grocery store complaints. I have complained to Giant Eagle, but it doesn't matter. One of my biggest gripes is how they pack the bags. And even if you use the self-scanning line, someone at the store packs your bags.

I find anymore that we have self-service and not customer service. I have stopped shopping at big department stores and instead favor specialty stores where I receive personal service. Try finding someone at Kaufmann's at lunch time to answer a question. The store has very few clerks per floor. And all they do is run the cash register.

KIMBERLEY BOYD
Zelienople

(rolls the dice and hopes the mods RTFA and have a sense of humour today...)

Re:Teaching their students naughty values

[NanoGator]

"They teach porn?"

Ever taken a figure drawing course?

Re:Robin Hood

[Xyrus]

I would just like to remind people that this is COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, not THEFT.

Big difference.

~X~

Re:Robin Hood

[SnowZero]

Mod parent up!

Prof. Dannenburg never said stealing was ok, he simply said he's not going to help a group that refuses to do what it claims is its mission (help artists). The RIAA isn't only saying stealing is wrong, they are saying that colleges MUST help them, for the sake of all the poor artists. The professor is responding that "If you don't help artists why should I help you?".

P.S. Carnegie Mellon is already not very P2P-friendly: Computing services warns you in several places that if you violate copyright you could get in trouble with the law. There are people on campus paid (presumably by a certain industry group) to rat out other students on the network. It looks like they have all the tools they need, so why should I help them? It's not my job to police artificially low speeding limits or badly placed stop signs.

Re:if that's the best the anti-RIAA

[nc_yori]

Heh, way to miss the point. Regardless of what you may think of Louis Armstring's music, the issue is that the RIAA is responsible for infringing on the creative process of many artists who would otherwise be well recieved by the consumer public. Continuing in this vein, the RIAA's assertion that they are a champion of manufacturer/consumer morality is...how would one put it...bullshit.

Re:Lacking Content

[renehollan]

The problem is, he wasn't writing an article, it was a letter to the editor.

Indeed.

I used to write many letters to the editor of the Financial Post (a right-wing national financial paper in Canada - I usually argued the libertarian position). I had a good record of getting them published.

Once I got a call from their letters to the editor deportment, saying, basically, "We like your letter. But, it's too long. Can you shorten it? In the next 5 minutes?"

I responded, "Just use the first and last paragraph. It'll stand on those". Silence for a few seconds, then, "Geez, thanks! That works!!" and "clik" as the line went dead.

The point is I wrote my letter to be edited. Most papers reserve that right, to edit for brevity, typos, and grammer. The desk editor was doing me a curtesy by asking, though the cut he was wanting to make was significant (about 70% of the content, most of which was backing my opening assertion).

So, yeah, letters to the editor are often statements of opinion, with little to back them up. The ones that have their substance back up often do get published in favour of those that don't, even though the supporting arguments are omitted in the final version. That this one had several of those arguments published says something of the importance the editor(s) gave it.

More about this..

[zorander]

Dannenberg, while an idealogue, is a pretty smart guy. I just completed the course he mentioned in the letter, and while the discussion he inspires among students can be biased on the borderline of predatory, he's remarkably adept at inspiring this sort of discussion without leaving the realm of fact. Though I appreciate that, I don't generally appreciate the blood-frenzy that seems to envelop the more extreme liberals in the class whenever he brings these sorts of topics up.

He has a tendency to stick some slides into the middle of his lecture that typically draw attention to some (invariably) republican inconsistency. He'd then encourage a five to ten minute discussion on the topic which spiralled progressively from merely anti-republican to borderline socialist, then finish his lecture on digital signal processing or whatever.

The point he misses is that government intervention has also helped us to get into this mess. The RIAA and MPAA and their stranglehold on media were, in large part, caused by legislation that supported that control (most recently, the DMCA). I don't think we can trust the same government which brought this to be to do something about it. It's just not in the cards.

I typically support a minimal government intervention in business, since congress is pretty much owned by business--the companies' buddies in congress will not allow a law to do any thing that hurts the bottom line for them. This pretty much guarantees that any changed to the DMCA will have a minimum positive effect for the consumer alongside a massive media impact. The spiral of lies continues.

Perhaps the government should be as separate from the concerns of business as it is the church (W aside). After all, though the government has massive powers to help business, business strives to enslave as much as the sad mixture of the Roman Catholic church and the Roman givernment ever did. While the United States can and should make a healthy environment for business, and help protect the United States economy from foreign interests (just as we'd protect a church here from a rival religious faction overseas who intended to harm them), it shouldn't be used by big business to enslave the people. By drawing a line in the sand that grows both ways, the representation of the people can only increase, and most of us would agree that this is a good thing.

RIAA History Lesson

[rtblues]

THE RIAA VERSUS THE PEOPLE WHO BUY MUSIC AND MOVIES "New developments have made piracy easy and delightful. The Recording Industry Association of America is up in arms and up in the air over these developments. They have tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce legislation prohibiting this 'unauthorized re-recording'. How ironic this is. These are the same record companies that acquiesced years ago in allowing radio stations to play their records without fees despite the inscription "not licensed for radio broadcast - for home use in phonographs" on the labels. The record companies shafted live music then and are now being hoisted by their own petard." - Charles Suber - From his regular column in Downbeat Magazine, "The First Chorus" - February 18, 1960 Yes, 1960. As most people know, the RIAA is currently staging a battle over piracy that's going all the way to the Supreme Court. What most people probably don't know is that the RIAA has been singing this same song since the advent of the radio, the tape recorder, the video tape recorder, CD-ROM burner, DVD-ROM burner, and now, especially, Peer-to-Peer software clients, or file-sharing. So, according to the RIAA, the radio was going to kill the sale of LPs. Then, when it didn't, they were certain that the tape recorder would. Now people would simply record from another old nemesis of theirs, the radio. When that didn't happen, they waited a while and then really freaked out when the video recorder came along. This was going to kill movie theaters and television. When that didn't happen, it wasn't long before the RIAA was crying about CD burners destroying the sales of CDs. When this didn't happen, they waited and are now really upset about another new development, file sharing, which will surely kill the both the music and film businesses. After all of these years one would think that these folks might finally get it right. You see, the fools missed out again. In the infancy of file sharing, the RIAA and the record and film companies should have seen what was coming and gotten ready with a viable, affordable and fair offer to consumers, offering them exactly what they wanted and what they were going to soon get for free. Incredibly, the RIAA missed the boat again. A really big boat too. Instead they are back to the same strategy they so unsuccessfully employed in 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990, which is to complain, threaten, harass and decide that your friend can't let his friend borrow some music or video that he has. Now they want the government to tell us that our friend can't borrow or music or films. Ironically, CD sales reached new levels in 2004 and leading the pack of buyers were those that routinely download music from the Internet. It has been statistically proven that people who download music buy more CDs than those that don't. Even Apple saw this one coming, and has gotten on the boat, sort of, considering the file format they are offering is not MP3, WAV, but in their own proprietary format, something they have a long history of doing. Then there's the new Napster. If you discontinue the service, meaning you stop paying them, your files that you downloaded and paid them a monthly fee for doing so, suddenly become unplayable. What are these people thinking? Doesn't the RIAA realize that it is precisely this community of people, the ones that they want to litigate, that are the same people that are leading the way and setting future trends for the industry? Downloading music and films is obviously a very preferred method of obtaining these mediums, so why didn't the RIAA see this coming, like the rest of the world did, and get involved in it early? The answer is arrogance and the audacity to put themselves and their profits above the artists who create it and the people who buy it. "The record companies shafted live music then and are now being hoisted by their own petard." - Charles Suber - 1960 - Downbeat Magazine.

Re:I agree with the professor

[stealth.c]

Precisely.

The Internet makes them irrelevant. If the RIAA ceased to exist tomorrow, the knobs that run the radio stations, VH1, etc. would be confused for about a week, then realize the replacement already exists.

More people need to realize this. Maybe somehow, someone like Napster, Apple or Microsoft can get the typical mainstream distribution channels (radio, TV) to not think of the RIAA labels as their sole source. When that happens, well, we can watch what a free market will do. The thing the RIAA labels offer to budding artists is andvertisement and connections. If web-based distribution companies find a way to offer this too, in essence becoming labels themselves, then the RIAA is sunk.

This reminds me of the story of Bill Nelson

[pyrator]

To quote

The Story of Be Bop Deluxe's Bill Nelson and How His Record Label Ripped Him Off
Some Day, Artists Will Unite and Put a Stop to This Nonsense
For many years, I've been trying to discover why I have never received any royalties from EMI records for the sales of my Be Bop Deluxe recordings. I've had neither money nor accounting from them since the 'seventies, despite constant re-issues of the product on both vinyl and CD. In the 1980's, when my business affairs were managed by Mark Rye, (expletive deleted,) I attempted to get to the bottom of my non-existent EMI royalty payments. Rye, who was himself an ex-EMI employee, supposedly checked with EMI on my behalf and came back with the answer that the Be Bop Deluxe albums had not yet recouped the advances paid by EMI to the band during the band's career in the 1970's and therefore no royalties were due. Fair enough, I thought. They're bound to recoup before too long and then, perhaps, I'll be paid something.
Time passed and any further enquiries made by me were simply brushed aside with the "not yet recouped" answer. Eventually, I parted company with the troublesome Mr. Rye, finding myself severely financially 'distressed', a situation which had contributed to the rapid deterioration of my marriage and also damaged my health. To put it simply, I ended up in 'a bit of a state.' I was generously helped by a caring friend, David Sylvian who suggested that his own management, Opium, would be prepared to look after my affairs. I had a meeting with David and Richard Chadwick, (David's manager), and Richard eventually became my new manager. Amongst several problems hanging over me at that time was the ongoing non-payment/non-accounting from EMI in connection with Be Bop Deluxe royalties. (And Red Noise too, for that matter.) Richard eventually made enquiries and came back with a similar answer, that the records hadn't recouped yet. Meanwhile, the Be Bop Deluxe catalogue was being regularly re-issued by EMI without any accounting being provided to myself.
A few years later, EMI decided that they would like to make a double 'best of' CD compilation available and contacted a friend of mine, Kevin Cann, whom they employed to oversee the design and general direction of the project. Naturally, Kevin then contacted me to get my input. I explained that I was wary of the whole thing because I was not receiving any royalties for Be Bop Deluxe product. Kevin said that he would enquire at EMI on my behalf as he had a good relationship with one of the staff there. Eventually, Kevin came back to me with the news that, apparently, the records were still unrecouped BUT, the proposed double album 'best of' compilation would tip the balance in my favour and then I would begin to see some royalty payments. In view of this, I gave the project my blessing and liased with Kevin on the development of the package which became known as 'The Air Age Anthology.' This double album duly appeared in the shops but any accounting from EMI was still not forthcoming, nor were there any royalty payments.
Sometime later, a Harvest Records box set was proposed by EMI to document the history of that label, for which many bands, including Be Bop Deluxe, had recorded in the past. EMI wanted to include some Be Bop Deluxe recordings as part of the package. They even went as far as asking me to contribute a written piece for the book that they proposed should accompany the boxed set of albums. The cover of the box featured an especially commissioned painting of many of the musicians and artists featured on the collection of recordings, myself included. I thought that this release would further assist the recouping of royalties and so I agreed to contribute a written essay on my involvement with Harvest and EMI.
Meanwhile, I had been regularly complaining to Richard about the lack of accounting from EMI and he eventually contacted a firm of music business lawyers to look into the matter. Over a period of two years, a very strange story emerge

Re:Courtney Love...

[puke76]

Wish I had some mod points.

When you look at the legal line on a CD, it says copyright 1976 Atlantic Records or copyright 1996 RCA Records. When you look at a book, though, it'll say something like copyright 1999 Susan Faludi, or David Foster Wallace. Authors own their books and license them to publishers. When the contract runs out, writers gets their books back. But record companies own our copyrights forever.

The system's set up so almost nobody gets paid.

Steve Albini's The Problem with Music is another great one.

Re: Robin Hood

[3terrabyte]

The traditional cost of media is largely distribution costs (if you believe the RIAA).

Wrong. The RIAA does not say most of their cost comes from distribution. Their cost comes from "investing" in all their artists, of which only 1 in 10 are profitable.

However, don't mistake my personaly beliefs as theirs.

Re:CMU is *totally* mp3-unfriendly!

[REggert]

That's because Computing Services routinely checks public file shares for copyrighted materials. If they find you have copyrighted movies or music in a shared folder that is not password protected or has an easily guessable password (e.g., the machine name or the folder name), they ban your computer(s) from the network for no less than one year. I know someone that this happened to, and it sure sucked for him not to be able to access email or the Internet from his room.

Of course, there's nothing stopping you from setting up a password-protected share and telling all your friends what the password is.

Then again, it's been almost two years since I graduated, so the policy might have changed since then.

Re:Internet2 for universities only

[Anonymous Coward]

It's meant for university networks only.

Not quite. It's meant for research and development collaboration between member organizations. While most members are universities, they do have corporate, affiliate, and association members also.

The full list of members and sponsers includes several non-university entities.

they're not allowed on that network in the first place.

Contrarily, Warner Bros. is listed as a corporate member of I2 and, I'm guessing, also affiliated with the RIAA.