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EU Proposes Online Music System
jefu writes "According to a story in the Globe and Mail, the European Commission has proposed a unified online music licensing (and copyright) system. The article says that one of the points of doing this is to get copyright and license fees to the artists and to simplify the maze of copyright regulations that cover Europe."
This is a good idea, providing they come up with a system which can take part-time and amateur artists into account.
Currently (at least in Finland) marginal artists get next to nothing. Revamping the system would provide an opportunity to rectify this issue.
.: Max Romantschuk
As much as TFA says the system is supposed to increase revenues for artists by streamlining things, that's great. But I suspect most of what will happen is that another government-mandated program will be too slow and inflexible to allow its supposed beneficiaries to profit from a rapidly changing business world.
Chalk one up for the people who can't even get a constitution done. Do you really want them involved in your label? Software patents, anyone?
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Everyone who makes music available for listening to, should have to publish the name and address of the copyright holder and the amount of money that you need to send to that person in order to be allowed to make a single, permanent copy of that music {i.e. on a medium which cannot be prepared for re-use using generally available equipment -- to re-use a CD, you would have to melt it down} plus an indefinite number of temporary copies. The licencing fee would be the same for any party. If any money changes hands at the time the music changes hands, and the licencing fee is to be stopped out of the transaction charge, then this must also be clearly stated.
Example: I buy a CD of Lester Norton's greatest hits for £12.50. It says in the booklet that Norton owns the copyright on all his music and the licence fee is £1.50 for the album. My friend wants a copy of the album. I make a copy of the CD, and send a postal order for £1.50 to Lester Norton. He gets his money, and my friend saves the best part of £11. Everyone is happy.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
in The Netherlands for example there are 4 organisations you need to contact before you can even broadcast a CD legally
I wonder how those organisations (and those in other countries) are going to react to the prospect that most, if not all of them would become irrelevant in the face of a Europe-wide organisation?
That being said, record labels may like it at a very senior level - they could save a lot of money.
They should have true vision and start building a micropayments infrastructure for the whole of the EU and beyond.
Then not just the holy musicians can indulge in the utopia where talk is free but the beer is charged by the litre!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
All they EU is doing is facing the reality of the way technology is changing business practices and legislating appropriately which is so normal it should not be newsworthy. The old ways of doing business in the music industry are dying. You can either react to that by suing people who download music left right and center in the hope of keeping change from happening or you can do like Apple did and embrace the new way of doing business. Piracy not withstanding going into the online music business certainly does not seem to have done Apple any harm since people do seem to be prepared to pay for downloadable music even though they have the option of downloading pirated materials free of charge. I suppose you could make the argument that the law suits have actually discouraged people from consuming pirated music and thus helped online oufits like iTunes but I don't buy that argument since the chances of being caught while downloading pirated music are still very small.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Everything that can be heard can be listened. True. But a) Quality is lost b) see DRM as a 'in case you forgot the license agreement' protection scheme. It can be bypassed, sure but heck you can also bypass the store security system.
\u262D = \u5350
And, of course, because we're all trustworthy, it'll work fantastically well!
Neither I, nor my friends, would ever just copy music without paying for it. Ever. It would be morally indefensible!
Oh, and the cost of the album is more likely to be about £4. and would go to the record label, not the artist. It's them that own the rights to it, after all.
My Journal
I'm against this kind of unificated legislation. There're several reasons, one being that they will most likely try to base it on the American broad copyright.
The swedish copyright which I think is great, makes it possible for only items which reaches a "work of art" level.
This means silly stuff like cease and desist letters cant be copyrighted to keep them secret from outside parties except the legal advisor.
Now, other sources of cultural exchange such as the pirate bay would most likely also be forbidden. Where even "linking" to the source of copyright will be forbidden. I'm not against allowing artists a fair pay for their work. But there's still a thin balance between making a system which is good and a system which limits freedom to the point it's silly.
I dont want a system which allows companies to extort minors.
from the big labels. I mean, draw up a simple law which brings a level playing field? With no loopholes? Mark my words, before you know it somebody will start talking about this disgusting "fair use" thing again!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Bypassing DRM of any description is trivial. At some stage, the digital signal must be converted to a reasonably high quality, analogue signal. This can be redigitised and now contains no DRM metadata -- just a list of numbers saying how far to move the loudspeaker cones, which can then be copied indefinitely without introducing any additional loss of quality. No DRM scheme is able to know the difference between a loudspeaker and an analogue-to-digital converter; and even if someone did find out a way, they still could not be sure that there was no microphone trained on that loudspeaker.
However, there is usually a place to get in upstream of the DAC. Since the specifications of many PC sound cards are published, it would not be difficult to make a device which sits on the computer's bus and pretends to be a sound card -- but in reality is storing the raw zeros and ones fed to it. These again are just numbers saying how far to move the speaker ones. A device like this could only be defeated by declaring entire makes and models of sound card obsolete, which would not be a popular move and might well be illegal under the WEEE directive.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Now if they could just get steady pricing as well, so the Brits would stop whinging about paying more. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The whole DRM thing does not work, at all, full stop.
Suppose we are using asymmetric encryption, with encrypting key P(x) and decrypting key S(x) such that S(P(x)) = x for all reasonable x. {In this application, we don't care whether or not P(S(x)) = x. It might do, it might not. It doesn't matter.} Now the player is fed P(x) and evaluates S(P(x)) to recover x. The point is, that the function S(y) has to be stated somewhere -- either in the player or on the medium. Even if the function S(y) is hard-coded into the player, a determined hacker might well be able to determine S(y) from a sufficiently thorough inspection of the player. But since the player already evaluates S(y) by design, as long as we have P(x) then we can recover x. We don't care about determining the function P(x) {we might, if we wanted to make recordings which would play on the player; but P(x) might well be published anyway, if it is sufficiently difficult to deduce S(x) from inspection of P(x)}, only its inverse S(x) -- which we actually already know, because we have a player.
What you really need is to be able to write something on the recording medium which can be read by a legitimate player, but not by pirates. That is the ultimate solution to the problem of unauthorised copying -- but unfortunately it also happens to be impossible. Not just supremely difficult, impossible. As impossible as having two things, each of which measured the same as a third thing, but which did not measure the same as each other. And the limitation is not with present-day technology, but with the universe itself.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If they did, it'd be years late, cost millions, and not work.
The last time they tried anything with computers was when they produced a 1000 page report saying that the euro symbol should be on AltGr-e. By the time the report was published everyone was already using AltGr-4 so they'd just thrown a lot of money down the toilet for no reason.