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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!
Could it be possible that somebody has come out of their hole and realized that they were wrong on this whole DMCA mess?? Now, how long will it be before the RIAA comes around and changes their attitude on downloading music?
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.
We may have a long way to go, but it is worthwhile to take notes on this now, so when the FTC request for public comment regarding the DMCA happens again in 2009, we will be ready.
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
An open Letter to the RIAA
.40 a song. Bill me based on bandwidth - that's 5-10 cents per MB (assuming an average of 4min songs). The only real limit to my spending at this price is the availability of good music - better go find some talented new artists fast!
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which was blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no vinyl nostalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto apartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s recession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my late 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $100 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
A reasonable service at a reasonable price. Look to the Russian sites. I select the quality and pay a reasonable price for it. The bottom line here is that I'll pay up to 4 bucks for a CD encoded at 256k VBR with no obnoxious DRM crap - no less quality and no more money.
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
Ease my conscious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s off Russian websites. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
This would keep me from downloading music "illegally" - I prom
"our Clinton administration policies didn't work out very well"
Considering that Orrin Hatch (R-Idiot-Utah) wrote the damn bill.
Republicans are best at passing the buck, they take responsibility for nothing. EVER.
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.
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.
The DMCA was written to attack the issues that lobbyist were paid to attack. I'm sure their handlers conceived of the ways it would be abused. That's WHY it was written the way it was. But the onus should have been on the lawmakers to ALSO perceive the ways it could have been abused and to make sure that couldn't happen. Of course, all to many of them (most?) are in the same pockets as the lobbyists are.
Fair use is (was) already well established doctrine. Any new law regarding any perceivable restrictions to fair use should be framed from the perspective of the end user (of the people, by the people, for the people) rather than from the perspective of the copyright holder. I BUY a DVD and it's ILLEGAL for me to rip it and put it on a server in my own home or to compress it and put it on a laptop. That's completely absurd. It's what happens when lobbyists write laws and lawmakers pass them without reading them and understanding the consequences.
We've heard what Senator Stevens has said about technology. Can you just imagine the things that get said in those committees discussing laws like the DMCA? I can't even fathom the level of stupidity that goes on when they're discussing complex technological issues.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Well, when your nation is suffering from out-and-out economic warfare on all sides, any law that damages the ability of your nation to compete is very bad. For everyone. So let's also not push the DMCA out of our consciousnesses just because there are worse laws. China is going ahead full-steam building and selling stuff, something we used to do very well, while we're using the DMCA and other such laws to keep each other from building and selling stuff. The DMCA is one of the worst laws to come out of Washington in a long, long time. I wouldn't care so much if the effects of that legislation were limited to only the music and movie industries. But they're not, they've proven to be much more far-reaching.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.
Assuming this Bruce Lehmann is the same guy who ran the USPTO under Clinton, I seriously do not trust him. If so, he's the same guy who institutionalized software patents using a panel of self-serving lawyers, and did so in a what I consider a blatant (to me) railroad of predetermined hearings. IMO, he is pure politician, claims you can have your cake and eat it too, and uses politics not to serve the public, but to serve the legal industry. IMO, he dismisses the obvious when it matters (policy making) and now is trying to feign innocence.
If this is USPTO Lehmann, then IMO he's a total joke, and a lackey for the legal industry to create law which taxes other industries to the benefit of... the legal industry.
So, he did the DMCA too? Amazing. He is "the architect of the WIPO Internet Treaties". Wow. I didn't know he also "did" the DMCA and WIPO (cast US patent law into global stone), but it makes sense. And I didn't know he was still "in business" ("who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute"). The more things change, the more they stay the same. I guess Lehmann is getting his dues from the legal industry for all the "work" he did on behalf of the legal industry.
Good to know he's still out there. Amazing to know he did the DMCA, WIPO, _and_ institutionalized software patents. What a joke.
I suggest taking anything Lehmann says with a huge grain of salt, even any apologies. He has known what he has been doing for decades, and to feign ignorance now is unconscionable IMO. I do not buy it, and it's not his style. He's more of a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of policy-maker, which is to say he'll ignore the obvious to forcefeed policy despite all public interest(s), IMO. Again, I'm not buying.
That's spelled Montr é al, FYI. Blame Québec!
Just goes to show you, all the good intentions in the world can't make a bad law work.
"There are more important things than stopping terrorism. Upholding the Constitution is one of them." - Ars Forumer.
Just because Bush the Second is a horrific ass-suck of a President who'll hopefully live long enough to WISH he was a historical footnote instead of a full, bleak chapter or three, doesn't mean that Clinton was any better than he seemed at the time. But when your successor makes people long for the relative sanity of Richard Nixon, your presidency inevitably takes on an unrealistic rosy glow it doesn't deserve. Just imagine what the DMCA would look like had it emerged in "post-9/11 America", say around 2002 or 2003. I'll take the DMCA we've got now over anything this bunch of assholes would have cooked up. Doesn't make it good, merely slightly less bad - I'd much rather take NO DMCA AT ALL over options A or B.
Friend of mine once told me that Bush and Clinton were pretty much equally likely to screw you in the ass, but at least Clinton would have the courtesy to give you a reach-around and thank you later. Bush would slap you in the face, spit on you and call you a bitch, cleaning out your wallet as he left you on the floor degraded, bloody and shamed after the deed was done, leaving you wondering why you were stupid enough to have invited him into your home in the first place, and why you didn't kick him out or call the cops once he TOLD you exactly what he was going to do to you.
Oppressing an entire population is never cheap.
--Jeckler (/. Beta IS GARBAGE!)
Yeah, the same RIAA that <A HREF="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02 /07/011217">thinks CDs ought to cost $34 a pop</A>...
Data's cheap and I ain't paying their inflated prices for it.
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Please expound on this--I've never heard this particular accusation, and I would like to know more. Since you've already been labeled troll, I need to state that I'm serious about wanting to know more. Reliable sources please.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Everyone on this site says Bush is the ultimate evil but a Clinton policy is one of the worst laws ever.
Where is the contradiction? Bush is an evil* president. Before that, Clinton tried his best to be evil**, and often succeeded, but fortunately he was stuck with a Republican Congress so he couldn't do as much damage as he might have liked. The fact that one president sucks does not exonerate the other.
*Iraq, PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo, "unlawful combatants", wiretapping, national security letters, the budget, Kyoto, stem cell research
**Clipper, DMCA, Copyright Extension Act, CDA, COPA, extraordinary renditions, bombing random countries to distract Congress, assault weapons ban
Burning a CD of songs for my friends is fucking fair use to me.
Think about that for a minute. You've got such a convenient way to rationalize this:
but that is usually stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
You sound as if you're nothing more than a spoiled child, screaming that "it's not fair" that you can't get what you want. Then you're attempting to justify it on economic (not moral or ethical) grounds. Think about how this could be abuse. Consider a philanthropist deciding that all relatives, in-laws, co-workers, and so forth are "friends" and that the entire population of Berkeley were really just extended "friends" and distributing a record to all of them, or the entire state, or perhaps even the entire country or world should be fair use. That would obviously put this person is direct competition with the labels (negating the economic affects you think you're using to justify your position) yet that person (under your ideals) has exactly zero obligation to reimburse the artists or anyone else involved in creating the work in the first place. Yet if you had your way this would be perfectly fine.
Sure, this is a "slippery slope" argument but I can only hope you'll be able to grasp the bigger picture. You're making what you see as a responsible fair use, but there's no meaningful way to codify this approach. Further, you don't know what your friends are doing with the copies you gave them. Suppose they made "fair use" copies for all their friends, and they made "fair use" copies in turn. Your morality may be offended by these scenarios, but I'm hoping to reach your rationality.
I'm guessing you'll still justify it all by saying you're "advertising" for the labels and that the lost sales are more than made up by those of your friends who actually then buy more than they would, because you exposed them to these copies.
However, the underlying problem is that you feel entitled to something for you have absolutely no rights. Fair Use never has (and never should) have anything to do with making copies for others. It has to do with satire and some academic uses. It also has to do with allowing you to make a backup (for yourself!) and arguably to time-shift, location-shift, and device-shift the content for your own personal use.
You should certainly be allowed to play these songs for your friends, and because of the shifting you can do this at your place, their place, or anywhere else. You can let them borrow the songs for a while, or even sell (or give) them to your friends. However, you can't keep your copies as well. If your friend borrows a few songs for a weekend, you have no place listening to those same songs that weekend. You've temporarily assigned your rights to another, so you can't have your cake and eat it (the backup) too.
I'm trying to keep this from being personal, but it's people like you who cause people like me to lose credibility when fighting for actual reasonable fair use. I just want at least the same rights for music that I have with physical content (think books)--plus the various shifting concepts noted above--and nothing more. Note that shifting is conceptually a "move" not a "copy" even though the practicality of convenience means you make an actual copy.
But your position is absolutely untenable, not just to the industry, but to people like me! I had DRM as much as anybody else, and perhaps more, but I would call you out as bastardizing the very concept of "fair use" (and yes, that's even if it didn't affect me at all). It's definitely not within the spirit or letter of any related laws, yet you flaunt your disregard as if waving the flag in the name of justice for all. Most of the pre-DMCA laws and doctrines (such as that of first sale) were working perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, so many of us can't make a stand for extending reasonable rights because of extremists like you (sound familiar?). I want to make a difference, so I'd simply and respectfu
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
Don't forget the No Electronic Theft Act. Another Clinton Era monstrosity. But before you go and blame the Democrats, it was the Republicans who slipped in the worst part of the NET Act at the last minute in an amendment. The part I'm referring to is where the definition of "commercial exchange" is re-defined from meaning the exchange of copyrighted material in exchange for money, ie traditional piracy, to be replaced by the absurd definition where commercial exchange now means the exchange of copyrighted material for anything of any value. This language was targeted specifically at free peer-to-peer file sharing networks which had prior to that point arguably been exempt due to their lack of commercial exchange.
How did that happen again? Any exchange of any value instantaneously became defined as commercial exchange because some bought and paid for Republican congressman tagged a little note onto a bill right before it was voted on? This completely fails the test of logic. Dozens of simple analogies can easily show that this is an absurd proposition. Any exchange of value is a commercial exchange? That is sick.
Congress is indeed evil. Perhaps not as evil as the Bush administration but just as insidious and bought off.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Have you given them back their filthy lucre?
Do you have ESP?
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.
Information control *is* thought control.
Thought control is a crime against humanity.
The PATRIOT act is horrible, but perhaps slightly less so because the contradictions that it presents with the Constitution and with American values are more obvious, thus making the act easier to challenge.
The DMCA takes information control and packages it up as if it were an exemplar of American values. It, too, presents slavery as if it were freedom, but it does it in a more subtle way.
The PATRIOT act takes an obvious frontal assault to our freedoms, whereas the DMCA sneaks in through the back door. The PATRIOT act attacks our ability to speak and act freely, whereas the DMCA attacks our ability to gain knowledge. An aware mind may find ways to operate within the chains that bind him (and even to escape them), whereas a mind starved of knowledge cannot act at all.
This would apply not only to knowledge of one's culture (necessary for one to have a sense of self which empowers him to interact effectively with his peers), but also to knowledge of how to make his computer do useful things (that is to say, software copyrights), knowledge of how to create useful items (design copyrights of all forms), and so on.
Until information is free, the human soul cannot be free.
Well, while some of Lehman's comments are interesting (and promising), and I certainly believe that a lot of this current situation is very much the fault of the RIAA, I'm seeing a pendulum effect here. Having failed to control copyright using extreme measures on one end, he's now talking about the end of copyright, which is basically the extreme on the other end. The truth, like so many truths, is somewhere inbetween.
I'm speaking as a published and agented author here - I need to know what copyright is, and how it works. My livelihood depends on it, partly when dealing with publishers (knowing what rights I'm signing away) and partly when it comes to dealing with agents (making sure that they know what rights of my work to keep from being signed away). A bad contract can nail an author to the wall, and there are very bad contracts out there. So I am very much aware of what copyright is, what it does, and how it works.
And here is the problem - most people in the grass-roots movement don't. And the fault for this lies very firmly in the hands of the RIAA. Frankly, our society needs copyright - it is the single most important tool our culture and society has to advance itself. And, I'll explain why (even though it will take a while, and probably put a few readers to sleep).
We have a society that is very unique in many ways. First of all, literacy is the norm, not the exception. Secondly, we have the technology (and have had it since about the 15th century) to efficiently reproduce the work of creative artists (first literature and visual art, now music and film). Third, we have a capitalist system where the success of an artist is based on the sales of his/her work (rather than a system of patronage). It is, broadly put, a literate meritocracy.
What this means is that there are a lot of creative people out there, and they are able to distribute what they create through a variety of means. We are drowning in content, which is good - the more content there is, the healthier our culture is, and we have a very healthy culture, make no mistake. But, how is this content to be dealt with? Many of these creative artists want to do different things with their creations. Some want to sell it, others want to share it. Some want to keep their characters to themselves, and others want to create shared worlds that anybody can write in. Even in software development, there is a disparity. And there needs to be protection for all of these creative artists, so that they can do what they need to. And that is where copyright comes in.
Copyright is the broad tool that allows the various creative artists to do what they want with their work. It really is amazing in its simplicity - if you don't believe me, look at the Berne Convention. The creative artist owns the copyright to their work until such time as they die and it runs out, or they sign it away. And that copyright simply allows them to say "this work and what is in it will be copied in X way." It provides protection for the specific implementation of an idea, but not for the idea itself. And, it requires reasonability from the creators - hence fair use and the public domain. It's this tool that allows the Creative Commons to exist, that allows the Open Source movement to fight against SCO, and that allows an author to receive royalties on his work from a publisher for copies sold. And the success of the created work is determined by the market, and nothing else.
And this is where the RIAA is so troublesome - they have spent quite a long time abusing both the letter and the spirit of copyright law, and doing it very publicly. So, while I've just described the literal truth of what copyright is, there are a lot of people who just won't believe what I've written. Why won't they? Because while copyright law is about balanced rights of the creator, the RIAA is using it to sue dead grandmothers, students, and welfare moms for copying insignificant amounts of music. And actions do speak louder than words. The irony is
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
Ummm, slavery ?
ron lussier / lenscraft / fine art giclee prints/ sausalito / ca
Hooooray! Someone gets it right for a change!
Remember who got it wrong. From the artice, the DMCA is from the Clinton Administration. Let's not do that again.
The truth shall set you free!
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
If we can just temper your penchant for high-brow verbiage, I think there may be a future for you in the US government.
The accusations are untrue. However it was a popular urban legend. A debunking of the list is available here. I never believed he killed any of those people. My only point in making the statement was I don't think Bush has ever been accused of having someone shot, except of course as a matter of war. Clinton has, although unjustly. However, accepting an urban legend as true, is better than making up some baseless accusation.
Now I could be wrong, there could have been rumors of mysterious deaths related to Bush, but I've yet to hear them.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
The original intent of patents and copyrights were to encourage more invention and artistic creation. The "limited term" monopolies were simply means to that end. If an inventor invents something, has invested significant time, money, and effort into it, and as he brings it to market, someone else simply copies it and markets it without royalties, that inventor may not have the wherewithal to invent again. He needs to recoup his costs, in order to keep inventing. To that extent the "limited term monopoly" is good, and the same applies to the artist.
But it's important to remember that the "limited term monopoly" is there to encourage continued invention and artistic creation. It's equally important to remember that "old" inventions and artistic works are supposed to go into the public domain as fodder for the future. The "limited term monopolies" are not supposed to be a revenue model, and these things are where we've lost it.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
>
Then feel free to make your own, instead of taking what someone else made, without their agreement.
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)
You don't remember the nutty conspiracy theories of a bygone era? Ah...kids these days, I swear.
i ntonbodycount.htm
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/cl
and slowly back away from the computer.
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.
Not to defend the likes of the RIAA, but big business has always tried to influence government at all levels. That's nothing new, it happens all the time, in every nation on the planet. Much of the blame (well, all of it really) can be laid at the feet of Congress for permitting the recording industry to exert undue influence upon them. Once, just once, I'd like to see a Congressperson call the cops and have a lobbyist hauled off to jail for trying to buy a law or other favor.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
There are so many whiny people here and elsewhere
Whiny is relative. It seems to me that there are so many people here and elsewhere who are more than happy to "pirate" music because it is both free and more convenient than buying it. In the grand scheme of things, it's really the music industry who's "whining" that these people don't buy music, not the other way around.
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
I don't have much of an issue what what you said other to note with amusement that anybody could describe the banning of assault weapons to be an evil act.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
"Critereon", single.
"Criteria", plural.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Wasn't it a Republican congress that passed the DMCA?
Thing with watching American politics being argued is like watching a Pepsi vs Coke argument, they're both colas and 7up never even gets mentioned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Did anyone *ever* like disko? It was definitely "in" at one point, but I never encountered anyone who actually liked it. They liked to go to dances, yes, but that's not the same thing at all. (And glitter balls definitely got WAY overdone quite quickly.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Funny, I'm an oooold person, and I love the music my teenagers listen too. Maybe because it is not mainstream crap. Lots of Indie bands; even a lot of local bands. Good stuff. Original.
"everything I see is a poor derivative of various genres that were already done"
Wow you just discovered how most music is made. Every time an artist picks a "style" of music to compose, even if it's with a twist, he is in fact borrowing from the past. The "original" music you so loved from your youth just means that you were too young to remember or notice what came before.
Musically, getting old means noticing this process.
As an aside, since music can be traced, musical genealogy is an absolutely fascinating subject. Try looking into it sometime.
I'm well aware that new music styles incorporate elements from older ones. That's not what's currently happening. What we have on the popular charts is bad rehashes of exactly the same styles and ideas that have come before without new innovations. (I wouldn't even mind if they were good rehashes.)
Also remember which grand old party controlled Congress and the Senate at the time. Both parties are complicit, denying that shows either ignorance or partisan foolishness.
This poo is cold.
The Clinton Era assault weapons ban doesn't ban assault weapons. Instead it bans some weapons that look like assault weapons. (I'm assuming both you and the original poster are writing about the Violent Crime Control and law Enforcement Act of 1994, and not the "Brady" act, which, from a weapon standpoint, was only about handguns).
While there are parts of the law that actually focus in part or even mostly on the potential of a weapon to kill large numbers, i.e. magazine capacity restrictions, the law also affects integral flash supressors and weapons designed to fit one, folding stocks, bipod mounts, and barrel shrouds (a device whose sole purpose is to prevent people from getting burned by a hot barrel). None of those things has much, if any, relation to the weapon's criminal use potential. You could argue that a flash supressor makes it harder for a police sniper to spot a well concealed assault weapon wielder, for example, but that's a real stretch. By the very same 'logic' congress used in debate, the government could have 'justified' banning weapons that don't sufficiently often blow up in the user's face! (After all, there would be fewer 'successful' Columbine imitations if there was a 1 in 4 chance of the shooter himself dieing every time he pulled the trigger).
I don't know if I would call the ban an evil act, but it's at the least a pretty incompetent piece of legislation.
Who is John Cabal?
This is a compelling theory, but for me it doesn't wash because I'm successfully finding lots of new music that I enjoy, some of which is in emerging genres. The dual catches are that most of it is not published by the RIAA, and that I'm finding it via the file sharing services they wish they could stamp out.
The independent labels are doing really well with me, I'm buying more music than I have in many years.
-josh
Yes, people loved disco but pretened they didn't. Then it got renamed to house, and the same. It's not "sophisticated" music, but it's soulful and fun. If you don't get hung up on expecting music to be a particular thing, it's much easier to enjoy.
-josh
trouble is: patents were thought and accredited to individuals, the idea of protection is sold and accepted as a means for the individual to protect itself from abuse. But: corporations are individuals, socipathic, powerful and determined legal individuals and all they want is to maximise investments at all costs.
So the critter sobbed you into buying patents to protect the hero and the lawyer took your word and spun it to help the board screw you... nail you down...
the road to hell is paved of good intentions...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I agree there's lots of good stuff that's "hard to find". That's the whole problem that the big record companies are facing. Little if any of the good stuff is mass marketed any more. They've relegated all of that to niche players. It's as if the banana growers had said: "We're only going to ship bruised bananas to supermarkets from now on. If you want good bananas, you'll have to go search for them on 2-bit websites and obscure stores near college campuses." If that happened, it would be no surprise if banana revenue went through the floor.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
It kills me that the guy who came up with the whole DMCA idea thought that the recording industry would continue to adapt after they modified their environment to keep from having to do so in the first place! Why would any organism continue to adapt when it could guarantee the environment wouldn't change?
Not yet, guys!
We still need to use the DMCA to crush the author of WoW!Glider and the associated goldfarmers! Once we've done that, then by all means have the DMCA declared as much a failure as you want...but don't ruin Blizzard's chances in court!
If you think economic concerns (DMCA/Software Patents) are more important civil rights (Patriot Act), I've got a one-way ticket to China for you.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As opposed to pop that was produced from start to finish in the 60s...
There was plenty of crap 50 years ago, and there's plenty of crap today.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
IMHO, the problem can be focused into 3 of your words, "corporations are individuals," after some rather nasty Supreme Court rulings early in the 20th century.
Also IMHO, had the Framers of the Constitution fully understood the threat that would be posed by corporations, they would have carefully delineated the rights of "assemblies of people" and how they related to individuals, the states, and the federal government. The Framers were clearly concerned about abuse of power, but to them that meant the State and the Church, and they were very careful about them. Theoretically individuals were supposed to have the greatest liberty and power, surrendering only what was necessary to the states, then to the federal government. Corporations were then let in on that level of highest power. As state and federal government have grown power has moved away from individuals, but corporations have been better at keeping their hold on it.
Money is Power. Power is Money. It's about that simple.
Furthermore IMHO, had the Framers known about the future potential for surveillance, they would have enumerated and explicit Right to Privacy. There'd be none of this "No right to privacy enumerated in the Constitution" CRAP coming out of our courts. In the Constitution it reserves all rights not explicitly stated otherwise to the people, and in the Bill of Rights it explicitly states that "this list is not complete."
I still stand that patents as provided for in the Constitution are good.
What we've done with them is frequently (usually?) bad.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
If you think economic concerns (DMCA/Software Patents) are more important civil rights (Patriot Act)
I didn't say that. I said, "So let's not push the DMCA out of our consciousnesses just because there are worse laws." And if you would like Americans to continue to have a "right" to clean drinking water, a plentiful and safe food supply, reliable electric power and everything else our industrial economy has brought us, it's best not to forget about what it takes to maintain them. If we don't take steps (big ones, and soon!) to prevent it, a major economic collapse is inevitable. It will be one that will make the Great Depression appear a mere transient blip in comparison, and when that happens civil rights will go right out the window.
Beggars can't be choosers, and they usually get the short end of the civil liberties stick.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I agree with you totally. Todays CDs are crap. They put a bunch of cute wanna be's in seductive clothes, with no talent, can't sing a note without help from tech gadgets, and call them stars. I want real talent. I have not seen any real talent for a long time except for one group. The only ones I can say that has real talent is Il Divo. They are pure talent. Watch videos of them here: regresa ami-il divo and I Believe in you-Celine Dion & Il divo A little about them...
In the United Kingdom, the Il Divo album topped Robbie Williams as number 1 in the UK charts (allegedly Williams said to them during the Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason film premiere, "Oi, you're the bastards that knocked me off!")[citation needed]. This multiplatinum-selling CD became number one in the charts in a total of 13 countries around the world, and achieved top 5 placing in 25 countries. You can read the rest about them here: Il Divo
You don't see talent like them anymore. Or anyone like them. How sad that the RIAA can blame the public when it is their fault because they want to spit out wanna be stars all the time. Get rid of the wanna be's it's time to find the real talent.
Actually, healthy young minds are no longer into RIAA-sanctioned music, like in the eras you described. The biggest movement that 'old people' can't connect with these days is the 'indie' movement. Staying 'young-at-heart' while still being into good music means clicking with the indie-hipster crowd.
That isn't quite true, there is quite a bit of cool indie stuff going on as always. The mainstream stuff tends to be garbage with a couple of good artist there to get ones optimism up high enough to dash.
But this isn't a case of failing to make profit. This is failing to recognize a new avenue of revenue. The fact is that if the RIAA and others really embraced the online marketplace, they could be making far more money than they are now. Just look at the success of Apple's iTunes Store model. They are making a killing with that, selling one song at a time.
The problem is that the RIAA has been stepping over dollars to pick up dimes this whole time. They fail to look at the true potential of the online marketplace, instead sticking with their B&M model that they have been using for 50 years. IMHO, we are talking about people who are stuck in their ways. They are the old guard, and it is likely, we won't see any sort of change with organizations like the RIAA or others until the old guard is gone.
RonB
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
True, but at least those you mentioned had some underground presence that people in the know could get excited about. Nowadays, it all comes as a shock. Yeah, maybe I'm older than I used to be (unless I just stopped!), but there doesn't really seem to be an outlet for really good groups to get through. It seems to haphazardly done.
The "reasonable market rate" is what they would have paid in the absence of the patent -- i.e., probably nothing. Market prices are determined, by definition, solely by unrestricted and unforced trade between individuals; there is no other context in which the term "market rate" has any meaning. What you are proposing is that we do away with patents altogether in favor of tax-funded subsidies. (You might not call it a "tax", but that's what the compulsory license fees are nonetheless.)
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Give me a break, I'm sure you think you have all the answers to world hunger and peace to boot.
Those artists originally were anything but mainstream. Hell, Metallica couldn't even get signed by a major label until the late 80s or early 90s.
The problem these days is there is no authoritative source of information for "good" music. There used to be these guys called DJs that would play what they wanted for a couple of hours during the late night, or their own special shows. Times that are now rudderless nationwide piped crap.
If you're not into the college scene, it makes it almost impossible to track down the local decent music, much less what's good on the west or east coast. The RIAA et al (ClearChannel, Infinity, etc) have almost succeded in killing the industry in an attempt to wring every last cent out of it.
Oh, and btw, 90% of indie bands suck rocks. It's always been that way - more pretenders and wanna-bes than people with even a modicum of talent. One of the biggest scourges to new music has been the large drain of ectasy freaking youngsters to electronic/techno crap. Basically loop 3 or 4 rhytms together and they're happy. Not music in my book.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Leeches get satiated and drop off.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I think you're confusing indie-as-a-genre with what I meant by 'indie'... You know, self-produced/small-label music made by real-life starving artists. Indie isn't a style. It's a method. True indie music spans across all genres, and these days, it really is where the good stuff is at. Maybe I misspoke when I threw in the word 'hipster'...sorry. Also, there's plenty of GREAT electronic music out there being created by absolutely brilliant musicians. You just have to know where to look. Oh, and there is an authoritative source for good music. It's called your own taste. Check out Last.fm of foosic.org. Start feeding your listening habits in and be amazed.
In addition, it's pretty easy to include the copyright or trademark registration numbers. The few times I've had send DMCA takedown notices I've sent a letter that includes this information. If the ISP wants to verify it, they can contact the appropriate government agency.
Even if they don't there is a system for contesting the takedown. The recent Slashdot story about the EFF lawyer and the NFL shows that this system works, even if some copyright owners are overzealous. The NFL should get smacked down for this so that they take a bit more care. But, really, the DMCA system works well enough without swamping the court system over every small dispute and making lawyers even richer. As a small business owner with valuable intellectual property, I actually like the DMCA because it means I haven't gone out of business paying a lawyer every time some kid posts software stolen from me up on a site.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Truer words are hard to speak (or write). What I like is definitely based on my own taste, and that's authoritative. The problm with expanding your horizons, however, is to know how to expand them. Of late, this has started to become problematic with the homogenizing of the airwaves and the music industry. And they wonder why sales are plummeting, have "they" signed acts like Futon, Kasabian, or any of the multitudes of others that are making decent music out there?
But that brings up the issue right there. Kasabian was introduced by a friend, Futon happened to be a 1 week clip on a off-beat music channel I happen to get. (FYI: if you like Iggy Pop style tunes, at least the one Futon song I have is Iggy as he might have been if he was 20 today - and that doesn't mean it's old-style either;)
I'm not a big fan of pure electronic music. I'm more "punk" as that label applied in the 70s, or true alternative before Nirvana converted the masses. Post Modern comes to mind, or New Wave as well. All have applied to the main genre I like, which are usually artists performing on their own before the industry gets its clutches into them.
I'm still a fan of NIN. Not all his work, but on the whole he delivers a decent compilation with each album, even if you need to be in the right mind set to listen to The Fragile.
Oh, and in response to some poster's comment: I happen to like Lou Bega, and I actually own his Mambo #5 CD. Yep - that's an eclectic mix, and you certainly don't normally want to have NIN's Wish followed by Lou's Mambo Mambo, but there are times that things just work.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Aha, so a conservative administration wouldn't do the same thing? Don't forget that Clinton had some pretty conservative streaks in him, and this was one of them - protecting the rights of corporations over the rights of people, and framing the whole thing as intellectual property.
The Clintons, both of them, are a part of the Democratic party that thinks that voters like conservatism, and the way for a Democrat to get elected is to be Republican-lite. So, let's not forget indeed. Clinton gave us the DMCA in a misguided attempt to be like a conservative in order to gain favor with corporate backers. If you don't get that, then you don't understand the very definitions of either conservative or liberal.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It must be nice to live in such a black and white world where it's so easy to see what is "evil" and what is not.
But hey, you're either with us or against us, good or evil, right?
I totally agree with you. If the music industry had music worth purchasing, then I would. I still get a few Cds every now and then, but only from a few artists that I keep up with. The main music industry pushes so much crap at the people they feel insulted to go and buy an album for 1-3 good songs unless they are a completist or have OCD. http://renigade.blogspot.com/
So.. before you had laws which prevented people from seeking pleasure freely (drugs), and which kept people permanently but only relatively disenfranchised (segregation, not to be confused with hate crimes).
now, we have across the board economic depression which outright thwarted the promise of the new "information age" economy.
I posit that a lot of "bad dot com ideas" would not have been so bad if it werent for the DMCA, and that dot com bubble would have met a much gentler demise.
now we have electronics which do only a fraction of what their capable for easily quadrouple the price because of requirements for DRM, clearance from the kings on the high hollywood hills, and every middleman.
think about that.. that adds to the cost of living.. we're all considerably poorer than we would be without the DMCA.. regardless of relative income bracket.
Now, it's been said economic freedom is essential to personal freedom, and I say the DMCA does qualify as the second worst law ever to hit the books (the first being the laws which in aggregate resulted in the theft of america from its native inhabitants).
now.. there were activities which went on which were not in the law books, such as lynchings, race riots, etc, but none of them have come close.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
he's apologizing for this travesty that robbed us of a completely new era of freedom (or at least turned the netizens into unwitting rebels against a virtual police state), which HE WROTE, and is expecting forgiveness when it's still there!
if i walk up and start punching you.. then start saying im sorry while taking a few more swings, i doubt you'd forgive me.
repeal section 1201 of the DMCA and THEN i, and those like me, may forgive you you schill.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A lot of people ignored the fact that there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and still supported the Iraq invasion. The polls suggest that we are now overwhelmingly sorry that we did that. I'm one of those people. Please don't get into a snit about this, because it's not just me. It's the majority of Americans now who think we really fscked up getting into that mess.
Let's see, a guy masterminded the iron rule of DRM, versus America's citizens who gave the societal nod for the quagmire that's Iraq that has resulted in the deaths of 600,000 Iraqis and 3000 of our troops... yeah, stones and glass houses indeed.
Nope, I don't see why I shouldn't forgive this guy. Sorry.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You must use Linux..
Based purely on the NIN/Lou Bega combo, you should check out Jamie Lidell. He's a bit like the artist formerly and now again known as Prince...but white...and British...and best of all nerdy.
And what would they be advertising? Music for sale perhaps?
Think about the last time you heard anything new. I remember the first time I heard The Beatles, back in 1964. I was a junior in high school at the time. That music knocked me back into my chair! The next band to do this was Rolling Stones. The next was Led Zeppelin. The common thread? Every time was a new experience for my senses. Even though the Stones and Led Zeppelin were throwing American Blues back at us, the sound was new to me and many other people at the time.
Contemporary pop stars have no real talent, they only have production values. Utter Crap!
Goddamned kids! Get off my lawn!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Bush admits to secret CIA prisons
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Well, to be fair, he does say that the Clinton Adminisration policies failed.
Their policies may have failed because of the recording industry acted with a total lack of imagination, but it doesn't change the fact that he is admitting the policy was wrong. They should have known better than to expect the industry to do creative risk taking when it is so much easier and safer to dig in their heels.
The problem with the music industry is that they're playing the same game IBM did with the PC. They're trying to contain a paradigm shift by turning it into an independent revenue stream, and that doesn't touch their existing business at that. You can see it in the ideas of electronic distribution they are most receptive to, which are uniformly inconvenient, restrictive, and priced high enough so that you're really better off buying a CD. The worst idea of all is pay per use, which holds the promise of converting one time sales into ongoing revenue streams. It's bad enough having to think about whether you want to purchase a song once. The only way people would "embrace" that idea is if they had no other choice.
In fact, the recording industry position is much tougher than IBMs in the early 80s. PCs don't really substitute for mainframes, and arguably they didn't destroy the minicomupter business so much as refocus it. They create as many or more new opportunity for IBM services as they eliminate.
In contrast, the current methods of distributing music are simply put, obsolete. There would be no reason to buy a CD if the exact same information could be purchased over the Internet without the expense of producing, shipping and storing physical media. The marginal cost of getting music from the artist to the listener should be tiny. Prices "should" drop dramatically, and consumer "should" be buying lots more music.
But asking the record companies to do something creative with the power that DMCA gives them is unrealistic, because you are asking them to participate in the annihilation of their industry. Sure the process of annihilation will create winners, both the public, artists and companies facilitating the connection between them, but nobody knows in advance who those companies will be.
DMCA is a tool that industry has been given. Like most tools, DMCA could be used different ways. It could aid the creation of a new industry, be the stick in a carrot and stick offer that consumers see as a good deal. Or the industry can take the carrot off the table, and us the stick to squeeze a few more years out of the old way of business rather than risking being a loser in the new game. Which alternative would you expect a recording industry executive to take? To be honest, which would you take in their shoes? It would take uncommon courage to torch your business so you can be part of a new industry.
The lesson of Napster is this: people will go wild for music, if they have a wide selection, convenience, and low prices. Zero is obviously not sustainable for a business, but it is possible for an industry to make a huge amount of money from quantities of value which are indistinguishable from zero by the consumer. Consider TV advertising. The unit value of a single impression is tiny, almost infintessimal. In aggregate it is huge.
The future for music is, or should be, one of nearly constant and ubiquitous consumption. I'm sitting here now typing this, not listening to music. I believe that that is much less likely to happen in the distant future. Those armies of people wearing white earbuds are a mere shadow of what might be. The total value created by music being almost everywhere, all the time will be enormous, and vast fortunes are going to be made off of this fact by somebody.
Or we'll end up with a system where the law has successfully stifled innovation, and consumers inclined to work around the moribund industry, by illegal means if necessary.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"Hungarian subtitles"
I bet your wife is hot. There are, I think, only 4 or 5 Hungarian women who are not hot, and I've never seen any of them.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
It's a fine distinction, but I disagree. Under the present system a patent holder has the option of refusing to license, in which case case they wouldn't technically be paid a subsidy (unless you consider exclusive franchise agreements and the like to be subsidies -- I don't). Under the proposed system they wouldn't have the option of a true monopoly; instead their competitors would be taxed a specific, limited amount (the compulsory license fee) to subsidize the patent holder. It would probably be better than the current system, on the whole, but I don't care much for either approach.
You won't get any argument from me.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Our allies the British have a report indicating that 655,000 Iraqis have died so far. It's been checked and considered accurate.
I hope someone you know suffers as a result of this evil war of choice.
Blar.