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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.
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!)
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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)
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.)
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.
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
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.