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U2's Manager Calls For Mandatory Disconnects For Music Downloaders
sleeplesseye writes "In a speech at the Midem music industry convention in Cannes, Paul McGuinness, longtime manager of the band U2, has called on Internet service providers to immediately introduce mandatory French-style service disconnections to end music downloading, and has urged governments to force ISPs to adopt such policies. McGuinness criticized Radiohead's 'In Rainbows' pay-what-you-want business model, saying that 'the majority of downloads were through illegal P2P download services like BitTorrent and LimeWire'. He also accused ISPs, telcos, device makers, and numerous specifically named companies such as Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Oracle, and Facebook of building 'multi billion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it', and of being 'makers of burglary kits' who have made 'a thieves' charter' to steal money from the music industry. The full text of his speech has been posted on U2's website."
I'm curious what U2 has to say about this. I haven't had much reason to buy U2 music lately anyway, but until now I've been OK with their politics. Be a shame if I have to start bad mouthing them because he supports a completely assinine potition on net rights.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
There's more exciting music being made and more listened to than at any time in history. Cheap technology has made it easy to start a band and make music. This is a gathering of managers; our talented clients deserve better than the shoddy, careless and downright dishonest way they have been treated in the digital age. Yes, they deserve the shoddy, careless and downright dishonest way they have always been historically treated by their record labels and managers.
I haven't heard any artists speaking out about their royalties drying up. Maybe because they made 10 cents on the dollar before and now they make 10 cents on the quarter now since it's all digital?
Funny how he starts with "We've been used to bands who wrote their own material since the Beatles
Is he complaining that Steve Jobs pulled the $1 per song price out of his ass? No, he's pointing the finger at file sharers. This guy is losing his income and his bands are probably curious as to how they can get that $1 per song from iTunes without having to pay their manager 40 cents for
Earth to U2's Manager: take your cut of the work you actually do like arranging concerts and press coverage and then shut the hell up and let the artists do their thing and make money.
My work here is dung.
I love it when the truly retarded stand up, and for all the world to see and hear, reveal, in fact, that they are, truly retarded. Its not like I ever buy U2 albums, but I'm going to download their entire discography, just out of spite now. Its not like shaw doesn't randomly disconnect me already, and this guy wants them to sift through my downloads and disconnect me if I download *.mp3? To quote a great man: "Never trust anyone over thirty" --bono
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Don't forget... Don't move your offices to from Ireland to another country whose taxation rate is low/none-existent to save yourself money. Unless of course the savings made by doing this are going to all those poor, starving types you always wail on about. The day you give up all your money, property and worldly belongings and donate the proceeds to these starving masses, and then you live in a box on a street, better still, sod off over to africa to live, is the day I'll pay strict attention to the cause.
How much you want to bet that U2 sees the problem with this line of reasoning and it totally fucking over their fans and fires this guy? I mean does U2 really want to become the next Metallica?
U2 started using Stage Crew Services, a non union shop, back in the '90s. Seeing as how they were born working class and still tout their so-called activism, that smells of hypocrisy to me. I haven't bought a U2 album since. Funny thing, everyone is so up in U2's ass, you can't find much about it on the web. I was part of a protest against them, we got a chance to talk to them, and Bono was the biggest piece of shit ever. Basically said, "Do you know who I am, and what I've done? I'm the biggest activist in the world, who are you peons to criticize me? I'll hire whoever I like."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
[dons flame proof suit]
The principle behind what he says is correct. There is an attitude that because people can do things that they should do them and that by downloading music etc illegally for free that they are sticking it to the man.
The techology companies have paid lip service to trying to solve the problem. They offer up solutions but their heart isn't really in it. The ISPs find illegal media downloads profitable especially on capped tariffs. The hardware makers are happy to have music etc on their systems as its another reason to buy/upgrade. They want it to be as easy as possible to get stuff onto them. They will do the minimum possible to ensure that the lawmakers don't feel compelled to legislate.
Blaming the problems on a poor, or outdated, business model might work to salve people's conscience but the weasel words still don't hide the fact that what is being done is illegal. From a ethical point of view they are taking the product of fellow human beings endeavours without paying for them. Somewhat of a moral dilemma.
I fully expect people to heap derision on my simplistic view of the world but in the end the above is the truth of the matter. Anything else is just an exercise in smoke and mirrors to justify theft.
As a final thought. Its now possible to buy music, on a track by track basis, for a reasonable amount of money, without DRM. Has this made a dint in illegal filesharing?
[/removes suit][on second thoughts dons suit again, this is slashdot afterall]
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
U2 jets don't fly anymore and the band is now a shadow of its former self.
When Metallica filed the lawsuit against Napster a coworker of mine in San Jose actually organized a boycott of Metallica at the office. He offered put his entire collection of Metallica CD's on loan in the company kitchen 'for listening' and after a few months put them up for sale on Ebay.
I would change the radio station every time one of their songs came on. I figured there was no way I was going to give the radio station my ad dollars for playing the enemy. I haven't listened to a single song since 2000.
I don't know if I'll be changing radio stations because U2's music is much better, but I definitely won't be buying any more of their albums until Paul is gone.
I read the article speech, and here are a few points of contention:
1. He states that the band (U2) is making more money than ever on live shows. Why not do more live shows then? Why bitch and moan about record sales, when your bread and butter is performances?
2. He promotes a DRM-mechanism called SIMRAN, and then states that he is an investor in the company that created it. Does this not seem self-serving to anyone else?
3. He claims that the Radiohead initiative "backfired". It strikes me that Radiohead received 100% of the profit, instead of 5% of the profit, from sales of their last album. I wonder if Radiohead thinks that this backfired?
4. From TFA:
Kids don't pay $25 a month for broadband just to share their photos, do their homework and email their pals. Hrm. It strikes me that the kids aren't the ones paying for the broadband access. It also strikes me that their parents are often the ones that shell out the money for the albums they do buy, be it from iTunes or from a record store. So does this mean that the parents should stop paying for the Internet? Or does it mean that the parents should stop paying for the albums? Or does this mean that we need a revolution in the music industry, one that focuses on live performances, with record sales being the gravy?5. He argues that the ISPs that claim they should not have to police the Internet are "relying on outdated excuses from an earlier technological age" to avoid responsibility. Well, it strikes me that the police deal with Criminal offences, not civil. If we want to have anyone 'police' the Internet, should it not relate to criminal offences? The last time I checked, copyright infringement was a civil offense, not a criminal one.
6. From TFA:
A simple three strikes and you are out enforcement process will see all serial illegal uploaders who resist the law face a stark choice: change or lose your ISP subscription. Hrm. Well, how do you determine what a strike is? Is it using p2p software? Is it downloading a U2 song? Is it uploading a U2 song? How do we define a strike? For that matter, how do we determine when someone has violated these policies? With data encryption, is there any sure way to tell, aside from criminally hacking into the end user's computer to determine what files are being shared from their hard drives?7. From TFA:
To me, prosecuting the customer is counter intuitive8.
When the volume of illegal movie and music P2P activity was slowing down their network for legitimate users recently in California, Comcast were able to isolate and close down BitTorrent temporarily without difficulty. And then they got sued. 'Nuf said.9. He goes on to say that ISPs can filter content easily, citing Google blocking BMW when BMW started 'playing games'. I think this guy needs to learn the difference between a search engine and an ISP!
10. Here is my last point. From TFA:
Cheap technology has made it easy to start a band and make music. Well, that same 'cheap technology' has allowed these bands to distribute their music and get heard, which most artists are quite happy with. The money is made from the live performances, and I will happily pay to see a good band live rather than listen to a mediocre band on a CD. I will even pay double, triple, or quadruple the price of a single CD to see one live show!Well, all that being said, does anyone have any thoughts?
.sig
Unions as they exist today are a mixed bag, neither the saviors of the working poor nor the blight you make them out to be. Reform is needed, but that's been true of unions for over 100 years. I volunteered with the Industrial Workers of the World, otherwise known as the Wobblies. Most people don't know about us outside of history class, but the IWW still exists. Here's how the IWW is different: no mandatory union dues taken out of your paycheck, complete and total democracy, and only one paid (and democratically elected) position. Also, instead of seperate unions, everyone is in the same union, but a different branch. That way, when the janitors at a plant strike, the electricians do too.
I uphold that anyone should be able to hire whoever they like. But I and my friends should be able to bargain collectively, and we will point out, quite vociferously, when you as a business owner are trying to screw us over. That's free speech, and the Wobs used to read from the Constitution in town squares across the US just to make that point. That's one reason the IWW was suppressed so hard. Even to the point of being literally massacred.
We are NOT like other unions.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
From Slate http://www.slate.com/id/2152580/ A familiar paradox about leftist celebrities in the entertainment industry is that their embrace of progressivism almost never includes a wholehearted embrace of progressive taxation, i.e., the principle that the richer you get, the larger the percentage of your income you ought to pay in taxes.
Bono, the rock star and campaigner against Third World debt, is asking the Irish government to contribute more to Africa. At the same time, he's reducing tax payments that could help fund that aid.
"Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market
And relocating your business offshore in order to avoid paying taxes to the Republic of Ireland, where poverty is higher than in almost any other developed nation? Bono's hypocrisy seems even more naked when you consider that Ireland is a tax haven for artists.
Bono said in 2005, "Our publishing, which is about one third of our income, we have tax breaks on, and that's great and that's encouraged us to stay in Ireland and if that changes, it's not going to affect anything for U2."
Six months later, Ireland's finance minister announced a ceiling of $319,000 on tax-free incomes, and six months after that, U2 opened its Amsterdam office. The relocation of U2's music publishing will halve taxes on the band's songwriting royalties, which already reportedly total $286 million.
What about the artists that put their own stuff out on P2P networks? You going to kill people's ISP accounts for downloading what artists rightfully put out their? (And I'm talking about artists that fully own their stuff and don't have to worry about whether a label has rights to it.) I think both artists and people very much have a right to trade that stuff over P2P. (Yes, I plan on doing this myself. Working on setting up my own sound studio at the moment.)
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
How long before someone builds a virus that will carry the signature of a "pirated" song and infect a bunch of machines so that entire networks get shutdown by ISP's?
Oh, you must have missed the U2/Negativland debacle back in the late 80's/early 90's. U2 apparently has always been about the money, not the politics or the music. Just google "u2 negativland" and you will find more information on it than you probably care to read. Up until about 5 years ago there was no solid proof that U2 had anything to do with the lawsuit against Negativland and they claimed it was entirely Island Records until one day at an intellectual property conference at Stanford(I think, could have been Harvard or the like) where one of the members of Negativland got to talk with the road manager for REM; it was discovered that he had found their album and thought it was great work and so he forwarded a copy to U2 and within days there was a 110 page lawsuit against Negativland. No cease and desist order.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Why shouldn't U2's copyright for Joshua Tree be expired by now? Haven't they had an adequate chance to make money off of it already? Wouldn't the world be a better place if it was freely available?
Remind me again, is copyright supposed to encourage creative works, or is it supposed to create never ending money streams for work done over 20 years ago?
http://realserver.law.duke.edu/ramgen/spring04/framedafternoon2.rm On this is the video where REM's (road?) manager tells how he inadvertently caused Negativland's ruin. I don't recall where the discussion starts but it's pretty enlightening to those turds'(that's U2 for those not keeping score) attitudes.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I miss the good ol' album days. Ever listen to an album so much that when you hear one of the songs on the radio or in an mp3 playlist you expect the next song from the album to come on? I remember making a mix tape in high school and during a Pearl Jam song the tape would stick for a brief second and keep playing. Every time I hear Alive I hear that damn click in my head still. Part of the magic of albums was how one song would lead into another. The experience of listening to the whole album was never the same as just one or two hit songs from it. The album was greater than the sum of its parts.
"No one will really be free until nerd persecution ends."
I agree, what a crock. I actually left a response in the form of feedback at U2.com
My response:
Like U2 doesn't have enough #@%&ing money? You're #$%^ing kidding, right?
Instead of invading people's privacy, and infringing rules on companies that have no real responsibility to protect your "property", why not just figure out a better business model? One that encourages people to buy music? Or better yet, sell some bumper stickers.
How about RadioHead? Sure, a lot of copies went to people via P2P, but they still make bucketloads of money from other merchandise.
How about some decent artists that aren't lip syncing at every show? Or make more than 1 good song per album?
I started buying 45s when I was a kid. (For you younger folk, 45rpm record was the equivalent of CD with one song, but you had to carry a suitcase if you wanted to go portable) It wasn't very long before I figured out how to connect my record player to my tape recorder. From there, I was listening to my first "ripped" music. (Again for the younger folk, a cassette tape was like an mp3 player, but with no menus, and you couldn't skip to the next song... at least not very easily). This was in 1978.
I challenge ANY band member of U2 to say they did not do the same thing.
Now, how is sharing over the internet any different?
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
I've used this service to grab a album for $9. Seemed perfectly fair to me. When I buy albums now I get the disc, rip it, put a copy on my laptop, one on my desktop, and one on my ipod and basically just toss the CD into a pile. This is much more convenient and seems reasonably priced compared to the $14 I would expect at Best Buy. High quality, 'cheap', and a fast download, that's what I want.
It's the same reason I used to use allofmp3. I would actually be at work thinking of an album I had at home and would just go spend the $2 to download it instead of waiting to go home and rip it. To further express how lazy I have been, I've actually been at my desk at home, knew I had an album in my pile of disks that I wanted to rip but just went to allofmp3 and downloaded it for $1.50 instead. I mean, come on, that's pretty lazy. My thought process was along the lines of, "Well, by the time I find it, rip and, tag it, and get it loaded I could be listening to it AND I don't even have to get up... yah.. here is my $1.50!"
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise - William Shakespeare
It wouldn't need to be an actual virus, it only needs to be something Viral. Says some hilarious mp3 file that has the same signature as that of RIAA content on the watchlist.
Conversely, If I was an advertiser and the audio ad available for download at my website just happened to have the same signature as something blacklisted - and caused my "potential customers" to lose their internet, then I'd be looking to sue someone....
Why does this whiner have a voice that people listen to? Because he has influence.
How did he get influence? Truckloads of money flowing through the band he manages.
Where did he get his truckloads of money? You.
Lesson: Stop giving these people money and they just might go away.
Your wallet is more powerful than you might think - who you give money to determines who influences your government in the future far more than your insignificant vote ever will.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
My old professor used to say, "Those companies with unions have, in almost all cases, done something to the employees to deserve it".
And the best part is: when you go back and actually fact check that statement, he's exactly right.
You just don't see unions at places that treat their workers well. And in the converse, you almost always see unions where they don't (or at least attempts to unionize). Sometimes they intersect when the unions try to recruit new members at "good" companies but for the most part, unless the employer is just an asshat, they get rebuffed. In places where the employers are good to the employees, the unions just don't get the play that they demand.
Are these the same guys that became tax exiles so they wouldn't have to pay their fair share?
Or are they the ones that formed Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that owns interests in content and media companies?