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Record Labels Change Minds About Sharing MP3s
Mass Defect writes "While the RIAA continues to sue people for p2p file sharing, the record labels have made an about-face and given their blessing to users sharing MP3s via the social networking site imeem.com. In May this year the site was being sued by Warner for allowing users to upload photos, videos, and music to share. However to everyone's amazement, instead of being flattened, imeem.com managed to convince the label that this free promotion was a good thing. In July imeem.com signed a deal with the label. Since then the site has added Sony, BMG, EMI, and now the biggest fish of them all, Universal. Imeem now has the royal flush of record labels supporting its media-sharing service, each getting a cut of the advertising revenues generated by their catalog. Finally someone has figured out a way to do 'YouTube for MP3s' without getting sued out of existence."
"these 30 sec peview are dumb u cant even steal songs from here how is ti possible to download. plus these are intended to have em in our page we can never put dem in our ipods and such ya know. get rid of da 30 sec limit quick or da 50 cent guy below u will be right about losing alot of members"
Clipped right from a song sample page...
"You must be logged in to hear the full song. Click here to create an account."
You can listen to the entire song.. With an account. That is why there is so much Google information of how to cheat the system and download the songs. Nobody wants a bunch of 30 second clips of songs except as ringtones.
The truth shall set you free!
Wow. How amazing that the record companies agreed to this. Low quality streaming with loads of ads and a "download" button that sends you to the iTunes store or amazon. The annoying registration box that pops up after listening to 30 seconds of a song (you must register to hear the rest) is a nice touch.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Imeem's missing the point. One of the biggest positive points of P2P is that the record companies, radio conglomerates, have absolutely no say over the selection and presentation of content.
What we're seeing here is the Record Companies trying to appeal to our better judgement, while making one last effort to maintain an iron grip over their content. And it's just not going to work.
You see.... last year was arguably one of the best years on record for independent artists and labels for this very reason. The amount of *great* content being released by small labels was staggering to say the least, and I'd be pretty certain that more than a few of these artists got their "big break" via P2P.
Meanwhile, the talent on the major labels was.... crap... to say the least, and it has nothing to do with the inevitable backlash that occurs between generations. Most of the "Top-40" artists are untalented, formulaic, and absolute rubbish.
The crackdown on P2P, and the agreement with Imeem is at least in part trying to mask the fact that the RIAA's members have completely lost the ability to identify and sign new talent. On the other hand, the indie labels have gotten quite good at it.
The days of rock stars with million dollar salaries are over. The labels need to accept the fact that music is going to become increasingly diverse over the next several years, and that their old strategy of promoting a very small number number of superstar artists just isn't going to work any more.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
gee... i wonder why they agreed to drop legal action against imeem.
What I wondered is how much it costs an advertiser per page view. A bunch of kids that never buy anything could prove to be expensive to an advertiser. Remember the free Net Zero? I expect the content providers to squeeze the middle pretty hard. They overcharge for any use of their product. This will be no exception. Advertisers payments will go directly to the record companies and the website will go broke. Nobody providing RIAA content is making a lot of money and negotiations often bread down. Look at the fees they were trying to charge webcasters and the higher fees they were trying to push on iTunes. This outfit is next in line for the squeeze. They will be squeezed to the point they have to raise advertising rates to the point the advertisers demand more in your face exposure for the money or they go bye bye.
The truth shall set you free!
I checked this out earlier when CNN pointed it out. While imeem doesn't make it easy for you to download music, they are streaming standard Flash video with MP3 soundtracks, which makes it easily downloadable e.g. using DownloadHelper. The MP3 files can then be extracted using e.g. MPlayer ("mplayer -dumpaudio -dumpfile foo.mp3 foo.flv").
End result: free, often decent quality (128 kbps), legal MP3s of music from major labels (where fair use applies; the usual disclaimer about not being a lawyer also applies).
I agree that file sharing is a problem, but there are plenty of problems in the music industry and these problems have more to do with their lost revenue than file sharing itself. If the record labels had gotten off their ass and got into online music in a big way when it started, we wouldn't have this problem.
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Is this going to stop the RIAA lawsuits at all? This reads like an advertisement for the social site more than that the record companies have done an about face in policy.
Nothing changes in the P2P lawsuits. The RIAA has been solid on a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy being as good as the original copy is a bad bad thing. Making a copyable file and posting it is bad bad bad and we will sue...
This website is not P2P. It is a post and broadcast.. There is no download and pass along a copy.. well not without some google searching on how to D/L a copy in violation of the DMCA. The songs are protected by streaming flash and maybe an identifying watermark.
The site is now a web broadcaster. The site pays royalties out of the advertising revenue. There is no P2P. Copies stolen (copyright violated) may be identified for later lawsuits by watermarking or other identifiers provided at the site to prevent theft (copyright violations). This is probably why there is no listening beyond a 30 second clip without an account. With an account the info may be embeded in the clips so if they show up on Kazaa later, they know who to sue for the violation. How much personal information do you have to give to get an account? If it requires a CC number, you are pretty much a sitting duck if you D/L and post on Kazaa.
The truth shall set you free!
No, the copyright system isn't broken. Copyright has worked well for over 200 years in this country. (The patent system is another story). Now laws like the DMCA that criminalize what would otherwise be legitimate acts...that's broken.
Some would argue that the current copyright system is broken.
The original system where a copyright:- Had to be registered
- Lasted 14 years
- Provided for an additional 14 year extension if applied for
was far more sane than what we have now."They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
So, do they realy get $7500 in ad revenues per downloaded song?
From the terms of service page...
"Any audio that you upload to the imeem service will be filtered by an audio fingerprint filtering system that prevents registered audio content from being full-length streamed to any users other than the user that uploaded it. "
This is why some tracks are fully playable without an account and other tracks are 30 seconds. They also frown on uploading content that you didn't create.
"You must not upload or present any media or content in which you do not have the appropriate rights to do so. You may be in violation of copyright laws if you do not have the appropriate rights to the media or content you upload or present on imeem. imeem will not tolerate known infringements or misbehavior by its users."
Most disturbing part of the terms of service is they claim you retain your copyright when you upload, but in uploading you provide an unrevokable license to them.. This is bad.
"Member Content, you agree to and hereby do grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, imeem, its contractors, and the users of the imeem Site an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully sublicensable, fully paid up, worldwide license to use, copy, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display, and distribute such content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such Member Content on the imeem Site or Service."
Basicaly you give them a permanant license to use your content in any way they want forever including distribution. They could compile your work and then sell it worldwide and you would get jack for royalties.
The truth shall set you free!
This isn't an outbreak of anything but more crap. Who would use this service? It's like going to a news site where all they do is provide a brief, degraded version of an actual news story...
"Copyright infringement is a DIFFERENT THING."
Indeed with stealing you can get away with a mild sentence or some community service when caught. Copyright infringement, on the other hand, will probably put you in debt for the rest of your life.
Uh no, sorry. http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/firsts/copyright/ (with photographic proof) Original copyright law was 14 years, extendable one time for an additional 14 years. The original penalty for violation of the copyright law was, turn over the infringing material to the copyright holder for them to destroy, and pay 50 cents per page you had to turn over. The act was signed by George Washington and went into effect in 1790, and DID NOT CHANGE AT ALL until 1891 when copyright protections were granted to non-citizens. Currently, copyright does not expire until 70 years after the death of the creator. Research has been done to suggest that 12-14 year copyrights are optimal, as it allows the creator to get a bunch of money out of it, and then after it goes out of print due to lack of salability (NES games?), it returns to the public domain relatively quickly so anyone interested can get ahold of it. This is how it should be, but its not.
(A)bort, (R)etry, (I)gnore?_
There are two reasons for a track to be limited to 30 seconds: either you're not logged in (easily corrected; creating an account is quick and free and the personal information required is minimal) or imeem has determined that they lack the rights to distribute the track even to members (in which case only the uploader can hear the full track).
That's an entirely different argument, Dave. If someone is running a Web server on port 80 and plugged into the public internet, but doesn't have any authentication methods and just assumes that he didn't give explicit permission for anyone to access, therefore no one has access...well, that's just stupid, now, isn't it?
Yes, but accessing a Web server on port 80 plugged into the public internet without any authentication methods is legal.
Copyright infringement is not.
A better analogy would be reaching in to an open car window and removing something that doesn't belong to you: it's easy, quick, technically and physically possible. And it was made easy and quick because the window was down, and you happened to be in the area. So just because it was possible, enabled, or made easier doesn't mean it's okay.
But wait, in my analogy, someone was "deprived" of something, right? And in copyright infringement no one is "deprived" of anything (except the right to manage the music they create, own, or both, in the ways they and their duly authorized agents see fit under our current system of law, but we'll just ignore that for now).
Ok, then. What if you invent a really nifty contraption that makes it easy, practical, and quick to go into Borders and quickly photograph every page of the selected book in a very low key and unobtrusive way, and then have a mechanism that converts the content to a nicely formatted PDF, so that the final product is as desirable and functional as the original, albeit in electronic form.
Copyright infringement? Check.
Something made easy/quick by a technological improvement? Check.
No deprivation of a physical object? Check.
So how is that right, given the recognition and control that we grant to creators and owners of content (and their agents, etc.)?
That's right, but you also tend to make it sound like the record labels are totally benign and that artists get paid fairly. That's also not the case, as recording artist after recording artist has come out and said. You also make it sound like the RIAA don't try to control what gets played on the airwaves. They have rules, you know, for radio stations that says that if they want to play RIAA content, they can't play it alongside of non-RIAA content -- i.e., indie rock. Some radio stations have even expressed this view as completely ridiculous, but abide by it because they feel they have no choice. Doesn't this sound like the tactics of another big monopoly? One that starts with an 'M', ends with a 't' and has a Vista in the middle?
That's right, but you also tend to make it sound like the artists were forced into signing contracts with record labels. If they did so because they believed it was the best thing to do, that was THEIR CHOICE. There is ALWAYS a choice. And any organized framework for managing media content, distribution, and sales, will inevitably involve organizations or groups, no matter how informal or loosely organized, that act on the behalf of their artists. They'll take something for this. Whether it's "too much" is completely subjective, not to mention irrelevant to the discussion. I don't care of the label takes 99% and the artists gets 1% for the purposes of this argument: it doesn't matter, because that is the arrangement THEY entered into of their own free will, and THEY granted the right for their label and the industry trade organizations to vigorously protect the content that they essentially now legally co-own.
As a particular indie gets more popular, they'll realize they can't do it all themselves, and they'll have their own labels and proxy representation. And if someone doesn't care about how their content is distributed or shared, maybe they'll be able to find labels and trade groups who share this philosophy.
The game may change because of the digital realm. It is changing. But it's not going to happen overnight, and the persons and organization that OWN THE RIGHTS to content under the current system of laws have ever
The DMCA prevents me from bypassing DRM so that music I legally purchased on iTunes can be played on a non-Apple media player.
The list goes on. I'm sorry, but if I pay for something, I should be able to use it on any device of my choosing in the manner it was intended to be used.
My blog
Then the artists should stop signing work for hire contracts.
If the artists don't like record companies making the majority of the money then maybe they should stop agreeing to terms where the record company gets the majority of the money.
If you can find people stupid enough to sign their right over for you to make money on then that's just capitalism. The artists are most of the problem.
I find being offended by me offensive.