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Recordable Media a Bigger Threat Than Filesharing?
Matilda the Hun writes "The Register is reporting on the RIAA claims that recordable media is more of a source of piracy than P2P networks. From the article: 'The RIAA's chief executive, Mitch Bainwol, last week said music fans acquire almost twice as many songs from illegally duplicated CDs as from unauthorized downloads, Associated Press reports. According to Bainwol, in turn citing figures from market watcher NPD, 29 per cent of the recorded music obtained by listeners last year came from content copied onto recordable media. Only 16 per cent came from illegal downloads.'"
When you are talking about significantly large amounts of data (hundreds of GBs to TBs) it is actually faster and cheaper to put it on a hard drive and FedEx or (insert your favorite delivery company here) and ship it. Bandwidth is not free (even for those in Universities where a portion of our indirect costs go to pay for bandwidth) and when you factor in time required to transmit GB to TB of info, it is much more efficient to use "sneakernet" or "shipnet".
This of course is leading many folks who deal with large databases to look at options such as moving the application to the data rather than pull data through the network. What does this mean for the media companies? It may eventually have an effect rendering the methodology much like that of the current TV/radio paradigm in that large repositories of media will be constantly available waiting for an application to travel to the database to query and assemble your media request.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
ASCAP was lobbying for a similar tax in the '90s on Digital Audio Tape (DAT). Propably the argument against adding it for burnable CD/DVD media is because it's so often used for data... thus the numbers... to justify their position.
Start a happiness pandemic
...the sounds of the 48" dual lawyer-guns on Battleship RIAA rotating to their new target.
What good are our fair use rights if the RIAA keeps blank media out of our hands?
Imagine a world where you have to go to the "ghetto" to pick up your black-market, vintage 32x Imation CD-Rs...
First sentence in TFA:
The Recording Industry Ass. of America has acknowledged that P2P file-sharing is less of a threat to music sales than bootleg CDs.
Anyone think this is on purpose?
100% of piracy is a result of people/companies releaseing copywrited works.
Whether it's recordable media, p2p, thumb drives, magic crystals, or something else, the cat is out of the bag, and there's no going back. Time after time after time efforts to counter the problem are thwarted very quickly. Honest people are going to be honest, (but with the try before you buy advantage) and bad people are going to be bad.
This reminds me of the story of Sisyphus. It's time to stop pushing the rock up the hill and start looking for new business models!
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
OK, I have an idea. Let's stop with the stealing of music, and let them do whatever they want to stop us from copying it. There's a simple answer - don't buy it. Instead, create and listen to free content.
:-)
Let's get behind iRATE radio, and really get it into shape (http://irate.sf.net./ As a piece of software, from the user end I must confess its user interface leaves a lot to be desired. It's unpolished, unfinished, and has a variety of major missing pieces and flaws. BUT.
I use it quite a lot, because it has something that few other programs have. CONTENT. Legal, free content. Much of it I don't care for (the same could be said of normal radio, for that matter) but the more people involved, the more attention it gets, the better a) the software will get and b) the content will get. As more people prune out the truly bad and things get more interesting, it can (maybe even will) snowball.
I think iRate, or some fork thereof, needs some major improvements, granted. They need to:
a) Update their music selection algorithms, give users a choice of algorithms and a way to indicate genra preferences, and provide a default download pack of the highest rated music to start with (don't start new users with the worst or random, start them with the best! any marketer can tell you you've gotta hook them before you can reel them in.)
b) For goodness sake make the interface modern and more useful as a music player! Model it on iTunes, or whatever other good ones are out there(Rhythmbox isn't too bad) but get off the feature starved java interface.
c) Hook in bittorrent with some kind of legal download only constraints, and give content creators the opportunity to distribute their music using this system if they license it under creative commons terms.
d) Have an elected membership which reviews songs BEFORE they go on the bittorrent network, and have them either give it a yea or nay. Then have two options - the filtered bittorrent, with music that has at least undergone minimal quality control, and the unfiltered madness
Let's show the commercial world that community spirit still exists, and can survive on its own. Open source did it for software, now let's do it for music. Sure it might be harder than for software, but who would have bet on open source 20 years ago? Let's give it an honest to goodness shot, and see if it can be made to work.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Personally, I'd like to see the RIAA get their deepest, most desperate desire of locking down all their media and making anyone who wants it pay full price. And I wish them success in offending their best customers by making criminals out of them.
Allowing them to succeed in offending their customer base in this way is the best thing that could happen to independant labels with more reasonable policies and independant artists who go alone with no label. Perhaps then we'll see a FSF/GPL of music able to take roots.
Long term, they will be looking to get a tax on blank media introduced through their pet Congresspeople, just as in Canada. Don't expect it will let you rip & burn to your heart's content though... it will be framed purely in terms of payback for all that consumer misbehavior.
-renard
Because Phillips makes CD recording equipment for consumers which allow you to pop a CD in your player and record it on another drive in the same device.
And they don't sue Philips for contributing to "piracy" because Philips as a company is bigger than the entire US music industry.
From the Philips Web Site:
Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands is one of the world's biggest electronics companies, as well as the largest in Europe, with 159,709 employees in over 60 countries and sales in 2004 of Eur 30.3 billion.
Whereas GLOBAL music sales were worth $32 billion USD in 2003.
Same reason they don't sue Sony for making the same sort of consumer devices.
Why the massively larger tech industry feels compelled to bow down before these morons is beyond me. Tell them to take a fucking hike.
The Mob certainly is telling them that.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
As much as I like finding the middle ground, it's shit like this - mis understanding the argument - that makes it harder
But the parent is correct, none the less. How often do you reply with a clarifying comment when some does use the "infringment isn't theft" red herring in order to change the topic away from the fact that they're pirating anyway? I'd love to think that you're just as adamant about shouting down pirates as you are about people who argue about the semantics of the word "theft."
From my personal observations here and in other venues, a lot of people too cheap to pay the artists they claim to like what those artists are asking for their work immediately trot this and other falacious defenses, no matter how ridiculous. They won't confront the heart of the matter, which is that they're hypocritical in the extreme. It doesn't matter what they think about where the industry is or should be heading, what matters is that the at least some musicians still prefer a business arrangement whereby they are paid for the music they sell, and if you don't like that, you're welcome to listen to them on the radio or just choose entertainers that aren't looking for income from the sale of their recordings. It doesn't matter whether or not those artists will eventually be shown to be wrong about how not charging for your work will still somehow pay the bills... for now, they've asked that you pay, and they have the law on their side. If you don't like their choice of that arrangement, then you don't like them, and of course wouldn't dirty your ears with their music. Unless of course you're a hypocrite, which surely you're not.
But a whole lot of other people are, and many of them hate to get pinned down on it. They then frequently try to change the subject to imply that, hey, it's only infringement. Besides, they wouldn't have purchased the music anyway, it's all terrible Corporate Sound anyway. Um, other than the fact that they went out looking for it and got hold of it... which means they value it in some way, and thus value the artist who created it and asked that they pay for it. They just don't value the artist enough to show them that little bit of respect, that's all.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"When asked how to deal with the issue, they said that they were going to make music more affordable, so that it cost less time and money than the time and effort to pirate it."
Although you were being sarcastic, that is indeed major part of their strategy (and more here). The record labels can indeed walk and chew gum at the same time, and they've acknowledged using -- in their own words -- a "carrot and stick" approach. This certainly makes sense -- if you owned a retail store and you noticed that you were losing a lot of money to theft, you'd certainly look into lowering your prices to reduce the impulse to shoplift, but you'd install that security system and prosecute shoplifters, too.
FWIW, in 1995, a new CD cost about $18. That would be about $22.50 in today's money -- meaning that CD prices have dropped by almost half in constant dollars.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
Outlawing (or severely restricting) recordable media is likely going to be a lot harder for the RIAA than it was for them to buy laws against online file trading.
It's easy to convince a bunch of middle aged senators that those evil computer hackers are stealing the labels' music because they typically don't have the greatest understanding of computers. But I'd be surprised to find even one US senator who has never copied an album onto a tape or received a copy from a friend. They will see that recording onto CD is the same thing, and will be a lot more reluctant to try to outlaw an activity that they know people have been doing for a long time.
Since the home tape recorder did not kill the music industry and in fact helped it, legislators will have a much harder time buying the argument that recordable CDs will kill the industry.
When we reviewed Macrovision's then state-of-the-art CDS-300 version 7 copy-protection scheme last year, while it happily imposed restrictions on Windows users, the sample tracks we were challenged to rip where easily converted from CD audio to MP3 on a PowerBook G4 running iTunes. Right now, the solution to copy-protection appears simple: buy a Mac.
What about a Linux box? Anyone having trouble ripping copy protected CD's on a Linux box?
No middle ground will be realized until both sides of this issue grow the hell up.
You could have stopped before the word "until" and been even more correct.
I stopped using CDs years ago. I now have a 200 gig external hard drive, and when that gets too small I'll buy a 500 gig one. If I want to pirate something I'm going to damn well do it, and I'll do it 30 gigs at a time while I go eat a burrito with my friend.
These clowns need to start charging much lower prices like the guys over at allofmp3.com. They don't have to match those prices, but $1/song is stupid.
I WANT TO PAY FOR MUSIC! And I'd rather have it be completely legit than have to go to some quasi-legal Russian site. But they can shove their high prices where the sun don't shine.
Well said. I've stopped buying CD's, because I don't want to give any more money to the bloated corporate entities that overcharge for music while they screw the artists. I buy my music on iTunes now. The next step is to get a direct pipe from artists to net distribution without involving the record companies at all, something that promotes new music through user reviews and ratings, and links tastes through similarity (people with your tastes also liked...) This last part would be a natural for Google.
On the other hand, people who copy music without paying anything for it are censoring themselves. The money that you spend is a vote. You can bitch all you like about Wal Mart, but if you shop there, you're supporting it. You can rave all you like about a band, but if you never buy anything they make, nobody is going to know or care what you think. There were bands in the 90's who had a strong following amongst the computer crowd who couldn't make any money because people just shared it around. If you like it, money talks. Pay for it. Otherwise you can look forward to a world where all you can get is people like Celine Dion and Britanny Spears. In other words, music for people who are too stupid to know how to copy it.
Copyright infringment is not the same crime as piracy or theft. They are different. Consider how you'd feel if you spent most of your life being a singer, and someone referred to you as a dancer.
I am not arguing that piracy is ok. But compared to actually stealing something? It's not the same thing. It's even worse when you call it 'piracy', because piracy is a much worse crime still.
Using the terms 'piracy' and 'theft' make it look as though you don't understand the issue. Their use makes it appear that you don't actually know what you're accusing these people of. Imagine, if you're arrested for breaking the speed limit, hauled into court and the judge starts handing down a sentence for manslaughter. Imagine if you start to say 'but I was only speeding' and he shouts you down with the 'but isn't it the same thing?' argument.
But I agree with the most of your post - it's not a defense to argue that the terms you are using are wrong; all it really just shows is that a) you don't truly understand the issue or b) you're not interested in using the language correctly.
i totally back you up. do you think the examplo of 6th avenue is terrible, you should come and see how piracy is here in venezuela, we have a whole boulevard in caracas (maybe 3 km long) with a guy selling either pirated software or music every two meters, everytime there is traffic on the freeway there comes a bunch of guys selling burned dvds, the biggest distribution and copying center in the city is behind the building of the supreme court of the country (isn't that ironic), and the sorry thing is that RIAA is going after the people who download music, the problem is not those who download music, but the guys at the copying center , in other context it is understandable that pirated content is such a prolific industry here in venezuela given that any original content costs twice as it would cost in the US and the minimum wage is well bellow a tenth of the minimum wage in the US, and there is nothing an education campaing would do because buying pirated content is very fixed in the culture of all the young people here, maybe what the posters of illegal content should go more underground so finding things will become harder, that way things will surely calm down, content will be more difficult to find, for the average downloader that uses kazaa, or any massive p2p network, in that same sense the riaa should trigger legal action against the ppl that run the duplication centers, that way pirated content will diminish considerably, and for those who know how to find things on the net things will stay kind of the same as they are now, they will still have access to content
"The RIAA's favoured solution appears to be copy-protected CDs"
But playing those are illegal according to the DMCA. Playing them converts the signals into audio line level, which does not contain the copy protection scheme information. Any device which removes the copy protection feature is a violation of the DMCA. Every CD player does this as a matter of course. No CD player transmits the protection scheme along with the audio signal.
It's right there in the law. Putting a copy protected CD to its intended use is against the law.
The RIAA is suggesting people break the law.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This is really more about the difference between law and ethics. Ethically, I would agree with you that the employer is stealing from you. Legally, however, the two are different. If your employer does not pay you, you can sue your (now former) employer for your pay. It is a civil and not a criminal matter. If your employer, however, breaks into your house and robs you of an equal amount of money, it is now a criminal matter and he can spend a considerable time as a guest of the state. I would see copyright in the same light. From a moral standpoint, you could argue that it is stealing, but not from a legal standpoint. (oh, and I am not a lawyer, it's just my 2 cents).
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Then maybe you should learn to put your values ahead of entertainment. Not to sound harsh, but this isn't going to work unless you stick up for what you believe is right.
In my case, I believe in the public's fair use of media and the right for someone who owns equipment (e.g. computer equipment or audio equipment) to do whatever they want with it. I will not buy crippled computer equipment, and I will not support the companies responsible for WIPO, DMCA (US), C-60 (Canada) etc.
If that were the case, they'd flood P2P with their own music. They're not.
Word of mouth is a two edged sword.
To generalize a bit, there are two main products. There's quality music. It's like good pie or a good movie--it pretty much sells itself. I suspect the labels have no problem seeing this on P2P and may even be seeding it.
The other product is the manufactured "boy band"/"Hillary Duff" crap (who, in an inexplicable but amusing bit of mistiming had her own name brand tupperware at Zellers long before anyone up here had ever heard her music). That's more like a Sausage McMuffin or Battlefield Earth. It looks tasty but once you've had a bite you'll never buy it again (apologies to SMM lovers you sick bastards). The only way they can pawn that dreck is to ensure that you don't have a chance to hear the album. They SNL one song and slap DMCA on everything else so the poor kids have no idea how badly the rest of the album reeks until they get it out of the shrink wrap.
I suppose your experience may be different from mine when it comes to optical storage versus paper. The small possible defects that seem most likely result in a change to a book which just doesn't matter to me while an error in a CD or DVD that impedes playback just about ruins the experience. One of the first DVD's I purchased was The Matrix which I found fairly entertaining. Not long ago I put it in my current DVD player and found that after a certain point it just stopped playing. Nothing visible on the disc and it had always been carefully treated and stored. It just stopped working. I've not had the end of a book disappear on me.