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DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA
An anonymous reader writes "DMCA architect Bruce Lehman has admitted
that "our Clinton administration
policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright
control have not been successful". Speaking at conference in
Montreal (video
at 11:00), Lehman lay much
of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to
adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."
I most certainly forgive you.
To err is human, to apologize and publicly shoot one's own demonic brainchild in the foot is divine.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Dont hold your breath. I smell political maneuvering here, nothing more.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
one of the worst laws ever
Yeah the DMCA is bad, but one of the worst laws ever? I don't think so. How bout the Patriot Act? or drug prohibition laws? Or the race segregation laws of bygone eras? Cmon, keep things in perspective.
Lehman lay much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s.
What does this mean? Despite DRM, copying carries on regardless, and despite the copying, the recording industry is making more money than ever.
Only difference now is that when a CD doesn't sell, they can blame copying/file sharing, and not simply bad marketing practices.
That's rich. The RIAA can't make law. The RIAA aren't charged with doing what's best for the USA public. That's your job, and you failed miserably at it. You can't fuck over the public because a corporation told you to, and then blame the corporation. It's your fault for listening to them instead of the public in the first place. The RIAA could "fail to adapt" a million times over and it still wouldn't make it any less your fault for pandering to them.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Well DRM has been an unmitigated failure, there isn't a single DRM system that can't be bypassed and customer hate it. But because of the DMCA anti-circumvention people are not able to publicly challenge crappy DRM by making tools for joe sixpack to break them.
/rant
So we have the worst of all possible worlds, the makers of DRM turf around pretending that their broken DRM still works and spread fear that if a publisher releases anything without their DRM it will be instantly stolen. But their DRM is already broken!
It's turned a simple clean purchase into a complicated 'license' where the user is getting totally screwed over.
It's caused a massive loss of sales. All the sales they could have had if they hadn't gone the DRM route are lost. It's going to take them a long time to recover.
It's given the luddites in the copyright industries a means to hold back time. It only takes one shortsighted Valenti to separate an entire industry from it's VHS profits.
It's led to fake claims, a person making a DMCA takedown claim does not need to show any evidence that they are the copyright owner and because the DMCA claim is made to a third party, there is no interest in that third party ensuring the claim has even the basics of legitimacy.
Dumb shit has been slotted in as copyright clauses, like the UK's no parallel imports, so I can't import Vista from the US, even though its half the price, because it's been made an offence under a copyright statute! Now everyone if claiming copyright to block imports of their products from cheaper markets and UK consumer is getting screwed over paying inflated prices.
Sure, they screwed this up but their deregulation of the radio industry worked out so well....for a few corporations.
And the War on Drugs (read marijuana) that they kicked into gear in the 90's and has netted 750,000 pothead arrests a year since ahs worked out well. The prison lobby, police and drug testing and rehab fields are booming.
Yup, dem dems did real well for their friends.
Now tell me the story about how both parties are somehow different and are not in the pockets of lobbyists and multinationals:
I love a good fairy tale.
While I have no love for the RIAA, I also have absolutely no sympathy for the views expressed in your post. Basically your "argument" goes like this:
1) You were poor in the 1990s, buying CDs at retail price, but discovering cheaper used CD prices.
2) You soon refuse to pay higher retail prices, but are still willing to buy used CDs.
3) You, for unspecified reasons, develop a taste for software piracy.
4) Morally comfortable with piracy in general, you move on to music piracy.
5) You would be willing to pay up to $4 per CD at 256kbs VBR.
6) ???
7) The RIAA is to blame!
At no point in there did you make an argument that the RIAA has done anything wrong, except place CDs at a price point you were not comfortable with. You demand that the RIAA allow digital copies of CDs at $4, but will remain a music pirate until that day comes. You admit to being able to easily afford your monthly quota for music on CDs (from which you yourself could generate MP3s fitting your personal requirements), but yet "the labels alienated you", an assertion you never justified or backed up in your post. Am I missing something here?
Like most tools of Big Media, he just ripped off someone else's work, namely the English Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I loved the quote, " we are entering the "post-copyright" era for music"
This from the guy who is head of the International Intellectual Property Institute.
I have maintained since the late 80's that the road to the future on this issue is paying a few cents or a few dimes to verify that your copy is a good copy... and doing that direct with the labels or the bands... but some doing it with anyone they "trust."
When street "kids" can sell a terabyte of music on a corner like they used to sell crack, then my friend, copyright for this sort of thing will be dead.
There is one other "blame" besides the two headed griffen of DRM and bad Major Label Music, and that is the Sonny Bono Act and those acts that came before which have strenched out copyright protection so far into the future that let's be honest none of this stuff will ever see the light of the public domain; they killed public domain's cousin too, sweet little Fair Use (but then you knew that!!).
http://www.hawknest.com/
And they'd still be wrong! If they could pull their heads out of their overstuffed asses, they'd realize that they're not selling records because they're not making records worth spending money on. Plain and simple. I wish I could go buy a record a week, like I used to do on a teenager's allowance! Today, I could buy new records to my heart's content! But my heart's not content with the content (or lack of) they continue to spew at us.
So the Chinese head towards a european socialist route they still beat us.
Capitalism only works well when the competition is strong. you start creating monopolies even short term ones, and competition dries up. Patents, copyrights are federal backed monopolies for a set term.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
How spelled out do you need a person to make his statements for you so that you can understand a simple letter? He shouldn't have to put his thoughts into PowerPoint slides to give nerds the ability to figure them out.
1) CDs are of no greater value new at the $12-$15 price to him than they are used at the $6 price. This is the fulcrum of his entire argument. If he accepted the price of new CDs because they were set at that point to help overcome starting costs for a new medium, why should he accept it after the medium is fully adopted?
2) He found other means of getting songs and shows that he knows it isn't right but that he is also willing to spend money on them if they were delivered in a way that reflected the value he has set in his own purchasing already.
3) He proposed a reasonable system to meet his value with their product and that's a very helpful data point for any company. They try to set their prices at a place that will capture their core audience. (ignore the iPhone, Apple knows they pwnzor joo)
If you're confused as to how the RIAA could be blamed for any of the reasons he stated, implied, or possibly could have had for his decisions, you really should hand over your Slashdot account to someone who actually reads this site. It is practically the primary theme of any music-related post. Look up what a "meme" is and you're questions will all be answered. And don't worry, he does NOT need to spell out why the RIAA is at fault to the RIAA itself. Using logic is always your first mistake when dealing with hegemonic a-holes.
I was complaining to my congresspeople about the potential abuses of this law, long before it was signed into law. This jackass ignored a multitude of experts and bought the corporate line. To your hell with this guy, he's an even bigger bitch for trying to skate on his responsibility.
Blar.
And they'd still be wrong! If they could pull their heads out of their overstuffed asses, they'd realize that they're not selling records because they're not making records worth spending money on.
That's not really true, though. There are a lot of really great records coming out every year. Problem is, the ones that the record companies market are often the same-old same-old unimaginative pop crap, or the "alternative" stuff that has basically just become pop 2.0. There's still a ton of great music out there, you just have to search to find the records worth spending money on.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
FTFA: "While he says that teens have lost respect for copyright, he lays much of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."
This is the entire RIAA problem in a nutshell and I completely agree that *this* is the root of their problem *and* our problem.
They made a choice. They made this choice when Napster (the old Napster, not the castrated one) showed the world how to share, point, click, and download.
The choice was to hold on to their legacy distrobution cash cow and go screaming, kicking and clawing their way into the internet age instead of seeing the digital tsunami heading their direction.
Their problem now is that theyre loosing their brick and mortar base *and* the digital distrobution war and the only way the can maintain any semblance of their arcane business model is to sue the masses into submission, which of course will never work.
The entire DRM/DMCA/RIAA battle was lost before it began. Those who cant evolve become irrelavent and extinct sooner or later...
Note that he never actually said that he thought that the goals or methods of the DMCA were a bad idea and never apologized to the public for passing it - he simply pointed out that it failed to achieve those goals. In other words, his repeated attempts to pander to the RIAA failed because the RIAA members refused to help themselves.
In the sixties, old people didn't like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In the seventies, old people didn't like Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath or disco for that matter. In the eighties, old people didn't like Metallica or Guns n' Roses or Run DMC. In the nineties, old people didn't like Nirvana and Pearl Jam or Dr. Dre or NWA. Congratulations!!! It's 2007 and you're an old person!!!
Finding other idiots on
Now I'm only slightly older, and there is rarely anything on the mainstream music charts that is anywhere as good as any of those. I haven't changed that much in the last few years. I know what's good and what's crap. I can tell what bands are real and what bands have been prefabricated by the record companies based on focus groups.
If there were some new musical style on the pop charts that I just "didn't get", maybe you'd have a point. However, that's not the case. Most everything I see is a poor derivative of various genres that were already done better the first time around.
In fact, one of the main problems is probably that the big record companies are too conservative and stick with the same tired formulas rather than finding new music directions that alienate old people for the right reasons. As it stands, what they're doing is alienating everyone because it's just crap. It's no wonder CD sales are plummeting.
The difference is that all those groups were formed by artists to make music, and they happened to make it big. Most pop today is produced, start to finish, and boy does it show. We oldsters simply reached the limit of how much artificiality we could take.
Now you occasionally get a good dance tune out of produced groups: one of the first of these, C&C Music Factory, people are still dancing to, particularly one track of theirs. Did anyone listen to any of their other crap though? And crap it was.
Occasionally a produced popstar breaks out and does their own thing and it actually works. Christina Aguilera is actually producing interesting music now (still pop but so's Madonna)