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International Music Industry Amps Up Anti-P2P War
newtley writes to mention a BBC article discussing a new initiative against file-sharers by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. This international version of the MPAA is breathing down the necks of 8,000 users of file-sharing software. From the article: "The new cases cover file sharers in 17 different countries who have been allegedly using sites including BitTorrent, eDonkey, SoulSeek and WinMX. For the first time legal action is being taken in Brazil, Mexico and Poland. The IFPI said the actions affect a wide-variety of people: a laboratory assistant has been charged in Finland, while a parson has been served with action in Germany."
In other news today, several socialist countries have launched The Pro-P2P International Socialist Society (PISS).
... Yarrr. Perhaps ye government could subsidize ye artists and let the people get jigs & tunes for free?"
This international version of 'everybody but the MPAA' is opening new cases against people & their sites that are allegedly attempting to sell digital copies of music that they themselves did not write or perform. The chair and spokesman of PISS, Mr. Blackbeard, said, "Aye, PISS is pissed. Digital music should be provided on the cheap--a utility the likes of water or that magic electricity
These lawsuits will affect a wide-variety of people: a programmer who coded a few lines of the Windows DRM algorithm, while Steve Jobs is facing seven life sentences in the gulags and is considered to be armed and advertising.
My work here is dung.
Whoa! Am I the only one that read: the International Federation of the Pornographic Industry and did a double take?
And this is why I don't buy music anymore (No I don't pirate it either).
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
The IFPI is the international counterpart of the RIAA not MPAA. The MPAA is movies, the RIAA is music, the IFPI is music.
Can't wait to see the first Canadian sued, then him/her countersuing this group and/or the SOCAN for their levies since copying is legal for personnal usage in Canada.
Pardon me, but in some countries it just might be legal to download for your own use. Like it used to be in Finland, before Tanja ex-Karpela now-Saarela, Jukka Liedes and the Gramex mafia sold out to the media biz.
And all those trained monkeys in the Parliament just keep on pushing the button as they are told by the party.
We might as well replace the "elected representatives" with remote-controlled robots. I bet they would be cheaper, too.
Yes, nowadays you can buy and download legally, IF the record label or rights holder in question has authorized your country to be the one who can download that specific track you want.
In other news, whale songs are being investigated in the ocean. The ocean, itself -- being a great conductor of sound waves, could be the largest p2p network on earth, and if lawyers can piece together three consecutive notes of any copyrighted materials, whales could be served with papers ... or harpoons....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Let's pass that along to our kids, too. Instead of paying record labels, patronize podsafe music or amateur bands (most of whom sound better than record label pap).
Or make your own music. That's the best of all.
Since the RIAA began their suicidal jihad, I taught myself to play the guitar. I'm no virtuoso or even very good by any objective measure, but there's about 100 times the satisfaction and enjoyment in playing the 10 tunes I know than in just listening to any song I've ever heard.
So, in a way, thank you RIAA for showing me that doing my own thing is far more amazing than giving you money for the garbage you laughingly, mockingly call 'art.'
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
"a laboratory assistant has been charged in Finland"
Oh my god! Our safe haven is compromised! *flees to sweden*
the more star systems will slip through your fingers....
A parson has been served with action? Who knew the clergy were itchin' for the latest Snoop Dogg so bad they couldn't wait for it to ship!
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
But the owners of commercial content ... Star Wars DVDs, if you like ... are going round intimidating people away from doing things that they have a perfect right to do, such as putting recordings of them singing songs they have written themselves on their own web sites for distribution to anyone in the world who cares to take them.
There should be some sanction against a cartel intimidaring someone into paying when no money is due. Is there any such sanction ? Jail time for fraud, maybe ?
Actually, you can get a high-end turntable these days with a USB port. I just use line-out to my nforce2 audio in, and sample at about double CD quality; that ALMOST gets all the sound that is on vinyl that a CD misses.
As for P2P, I can't use it anymore. My ISP politely asked me to stop, as it was really killing their ability to service their other customers.
I'm serious; they didn't threaten to throttle me, kick me off, or sue me, they very politely requested that I cut back as much as possible.
Which sucks, in a way. if they were assholes, i would have just circumvented whatever they tried. Now I have to play nice.
Grrr.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Someday, maybe soon, the most popular peer-to-peer networks will have TOR or something similar built in and turned on by default, with the seed- and data-carrying nodes hidden behind .onion. Yeah the speed sucks but subpeonas suck worse.
I'd love to see the RIAA try to shut down a beowulf cluster of those babies.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You bring home a point about the entertainment industry that most people seem to forget. This is all about entertainment. The RIAA et al are up in arms because for them the whole piracy thing is about money, their bread and butter. It's show-biz.
/. threads), the huge amount of piracy which occurs only proves to the entertainment industry that demand is there. If you have never visited an Asian country, you have no idea how pervasive piracy of entertainment and software is throughout the world. It is huge.
However, the arguments which come out of anti-DRM people et al really come across as being pathetic at times. There is a pervading sense that fundamental human rights are being trampled on, when we are talking about entertainment product. Nobody needs the latest hit singles. Nobody needs box sets, DVD extras, or music libraries of 10,000 songs. We want them.
The entertainment industry, as in any other area of business, relies on supply and demand, and (as I have commented on before in
Anyone who argues against DRM or says the entertainment industry is somehow ripping off "the people", yet fights this through anti-DRM software, or some sort of piracy, or other means of getting the industry product they want on their own terms, they lose some respect from me.
I say, put up or shut up. If you don't like what the RIAA does, if you think labels only offer music that sucks, if DVDs are overpriced or you don't like the "new release-newer release with extras" cycle, don't respond by taking their product on your own terms. That just says that you do indeed value that product and are willing to pay for it, just not in upfront cash - you are confirming the demand for the product.
If you really mean what you say, respond by not accepting their product on any terms. Remove the demand entirely, and the market will react.
Buy a guitar, a piano, an accordian or whatever, and learn how to play it. Go see a play in a local theatre instead of a major corporate Broadway tour. Don't initiate your kids into the corporate entertainment addiction by buying them cross-branded toys. Stop feeding the monkey on your back and turn off your fricking television. Entertain yourself and those around you instead of relying on someone else (corporations) to provide your escapism for you. You will probably find yourself living a more rewarding life.
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Since when do they go hand-in-hand?
Music is not a commodity, it is an art. It is not meant to be sold, it is meant to be heard and played. It is meant to be shared and it will be. Try as it may, the corporate music industry cannot stop this movement. I look forward to its rapture.
Anything can, could, and will happen.
I'm pretty sure that is the whole of it, instead of just a lot.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
I'll quote Eben Moglen of FSF fame:
"If I can provide to everyone all goods of intellectual value or beauty, for the same price that I can provide the first copy of those works to anyone, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything? If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay?"
I agree wholeheartedly. The record industry is struggling to keep alive a system that is artificial and long past due to be replaced. We as humans need to decide for ourselves how we will partake of human culture. The record industry will either adapt or die. Vilifying the masses of poor and unprivileged as "pirate" (someone who robs at sea or plunders the land from the sea without having a commission from any sovereign nation; murderers and rapists) for the "crime" of participating in human culture without paying to current powers is merely propaganda.
The inherent inequity in the current system which awards very few at the expense of many, and excludes artificially the majority of the human race from its own culture is wrong, and must be fought by any means. I not only take the position that is is not immoral to file share, but that it is our duty to file share. Just as it was our fore-father's duty to fight the tyranny of distant royalty which usurped our human liberties, it is our duty to stand opposed to the immoral laws of our nation that remove our liberties to share with our fellow man.
The fact that there are big winners with our currently system is overshadowed by the fact that there are a vast majority of losers.
w2^7me out.
I own a small record label myself (see my link). Personally, I found it amusing that one of our bands actually made it on Piratebay. Heck... We are getting free publicity.
We are putting together a MP3 website to sell songs through PayPal just because otherwise we'd hav eto deal with Apple's DRM and most of don't like the idea of giving Newscorporation any money through Myspace.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
This, my friend, is bullshit.
Do you think that producers work for free? Do you think CD duplication plants duplicate CDs for free? Do you seriously think that it's the "poor and underprivileged" who download, considering that one of the requirements for downloading music is a broadband connection and PC, and that people who aren't poor and underprivileged are very likely to download as well? Do you really think you're making any kind of useful point, playing the pirate-semantics game, like always happens when someone uses the dreaded P-word, which has been in common use for centuries?
You sir, are extremely deluded. If you download, or indeed buy and listen to, music, you are not participating in human culture, you are partaking of it. It is the artists who are participating in it, and it is they, those who ask for money in return for their work, who get screwed over the most when people gleefully take their work for free. Downloading devalues culture, if anything, and almost certainly depersonifies music. It presents music as nothing more than a stream of 0s and 1s that can be deleted or created at will and on demand, rather than a work of art which someone created using their own time, skill and effort.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Well, they'd like everyone to be on wax spools, but they'd like you to buy a new copy every few years when the old one wears out. Actually, what they'd really like is if each recording was a one-shot, somehow destroyed in the playback process. That would be just teriffic.
It's the electronics industry, not the music industry, that has driven new formats. The music industries go along with it because they make a lot of money in the short term, but they're rarely the drivers of new formats. In fact they tend to discourage their adoption more than anything else.
The music industry has been okay with the last few format transitions and hasn't fought the electronics companies too hard, because they've occured more rapidly than the old medium would have worn out. Thus, they made more money off of getting people to "buy up" to CDs than if they had waited around for vinyl records to all wear out and need replacement. Only now, they're starting to realize that they may have eaten the goose that could have laid a lot of golden eggs -- by forcing an 'upgrade' to CDs from vinyl, they made a lot of money in the short term, but they also gave people a format that doesn't wear out and is easily transferable to computers, where it can be replicated losslessly and endlessly, forever.
I'm betting they wished they had stuck with wax.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Let me remind you of what the spirit of copyright is according to the US Constitution
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
I'm all for copyright and paying Authors and creators their due, but DRM violates the spirit of copyright because it has no time limitation.
If DRM expired in Author's life span + 99 years then I'm ok with it, but it technologically impossible. Therefore it violates the principal of public domain and the constitutions authors goal of seeing that authors get their due, but society and culture benefit from their works.
When you throw DRM into the equation it removes this part of the bargain. If someone violates your intellectual property... Then take them to court in accordance to the law. DRM simply takes the law and culture into their own hands and give nothing back to society.
This is the real problem with DRM.
All we can do now is hope our ancestors can legally and have the technical means to remove copyrights in a century or two with public domain works.
On a side note, DRM also restricts independent artists and authors who are locked out of certain medium devices without being having their material approved by some central source. Luckily, most devices today still allow content creation using non-signed material.
Otherwise, we'd have centralized groups telling who is going to get their DRM certificate and who is denied based on if their content is approved or not.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
"In each of the 17 countries involved in today's actions there are legal music services available to consumers. There is no excuse."
How 'bout providing some legal alternatives that HAVEN"T been crippled with the infestation known as DRM (I call it the Devil's Recording Medium)
This I CAN agree with:
"Critics of the IFPI's policy argue that the music industry is targetting its natural audience and that the real causes of CD sales declining are DVD sales, computer games sales and pricing."
Another reason I can think of is DRM itself (Sony BMG anybody?)... AND the lawsuits. Would you be willing to buy products from a company that is suing you and your friends?
Getting a little melodramatic aren't we? I've heard this so many times now, and I just feel this needs to be said: The only musicians starving are those who choose to be musicians regardless of whether they're starving or not. We don't see starving whip and buggy producers asking for handouts, those people have found other work. In the big picture we adjust supply to match actual demand, not some theoretical construct of what the demand could have been. People might have put blood, sweat and tears into making an überleet character in WoW, but that doesn't mean it has a natural right to be a viable source of income. Maybe those musicians have to become taxi drivers or burger flippers (or go on tour!) rather than doing what they want all the time, but that is how it is for most people. Most of them would have to do that regardless of piracy, very few can make a living on their hobby. Yes, it's quite unfair for the small group who should have been able to make a living, but where piracy is the dealbreaker but that hardly makes them anything like the poor people we see really starving in third world countries.
I'm not concerned that there's a burger flipper out there who wanted to be a musician any more than someone what wanted to be a pro football player. I'm concerned that society might miss the next Elvis because he's flipping burgers instead. Likewise I'm not concerned about whether people are doing programming or plumbing, but rather what kinds of great new software products we as a society might have missed. People won't put up with crap income and career potential, but they will adapt. Society on the other hand would stagnate. But if you're telling me that some artist's kids go hungry tonight because of piracy, I'd tell him to get a salaried job and suck it up like the rest of us. It might not be the life that he wants, but it's not that hard to make *a* living. It's quite simnply realpolitik - how the world is and not how it should be.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And you sir, are short sighted. The ethereal presentation of music as you describe (stream of 0s and 1s that can be deleted or created at will and on demand) is actually more traditional and ancient than its current digital manifestation, my insulting friend. Throughout all human history, with the exception of the dawn of the industrial revolution and its novel method of encapsulating sensory (auditory in this case) information to physical media (a short period indeed relative to human history), the temporal "existence" of music was fleeting. One had to be present to hear it, whether it be around a campfire, in a pub, a church, or in a concert hall. In that way, it was accessible to all walks of life, both as "partaker" and "participant", and wasn't artificially presented as being anyone's personal property. It was sound and inherently free.
As to whether or not I'm deluded or not, I think it is fair to say you are not in the position to judge, particularly based on such a short (and one way) discourse. I will say I disagree with you. Listening to music is an engaging activity for myself, and others. You are partaking yes, but *also* participating. You are participating by experiencing our world and incorporating those experiences into your being and spirit, and sharing those experiences with those around us. That is a fundamental part and reason for liberty.
Do I believe artists should be able to make a living from their craft? Certainly, I do. Do I think that should be accomplished by creating a legal toll-booth that all have to pass to experience culture? Hell fucking no.
I think there are other means of rewarding artists. I also think that this is a demonstratable fact. I need not mention how many countless people have pointing out that they have both downloaded to sample music before purchase, and they have paid to attend concerts of their favorite artists, as well as to download and experience music which they otherwise would not have given the time of day, let alone "pay" for. This gives not only popular artists a fair chance of compensation for their work, but also exposes us to artists who are not getting marketing exposier from the recording industry juggernauts.
As for your point on being "poor and underprivileged" is invalidated by the ownership of a personal computer and access to broadband internet access, are you kidding? Certainly any American, even a hobo on the street could be demonstrated to be wealthy when compared to the poorest of the world. The same could be said for any individual of any western nation. But the disparity between any common American that is file sharing, and the wealthiest pop star or record industry executive makes that relativity irrelevant. The power, political influence, and access to elements of human culture of those powerful individuals and organizations is artificial.
If we have the technical means for all the world to experience human culture at zero marginal cost, I think it is immoral to withhold it. To suggest that the world would then let its most cherished and famous artist starve as reward for their work is deluded as well, as you say. No famous artist is, or ever will be excluded from wealth and privelege, regardless of the particular system we use to compensate them. For me, at least, the current one is outdated and immoral given our technical capabilities.
I say we let it burn and see what arises from its ashes.
w2^7me out.
Actually I can think of a few excuses:
Some of them may be less acceptable than others, but the notion that the simple existence of a legal music service in a country means that there isn't any excuse for downloading music there is, in my opinion, extremely short-sighted.
He's not a valuable customer. The valuable customers are ones who use a very small amount of bandwidth, so the ISP doesn't have to pay for external (or, worse, international) bandwidth. Customers who use more than the bandwidth that an ISP's under-provisioning allocates are expensive, and are better palmed off on a competitor.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Instead of bitching about DRM, let your wallet do the talking and sign up with eMusic. I found out that given how much I hate DRM, I just had to sign up with eMusic, it seems to be the best way of influencing the business. BTW, their catalog is much better than I expected. If you are not a Britney Spears fan, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.