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$5 Per Month Fee Proposed For Legal Music P2P
sneakyimp writes "Both Wired and Ars Technica have reports on Jim Griffin's proposal that ISPs charge each broadband customer $5 per month to subsidize the ailing music industry. The resulting fund would ostensibly 'compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels.'
Although no specific version of the proposal has been referenced, a number of controversies are inherent to the plan: How is the money really divided? What happens when the MPAA, the Business Software Alliance, and various other industry groups want their own surcharge added? What about the supposed majority of broadband customers who never download illegal music? Griffin discussed the plan further at SXSW . We've previously discussed a similar proposal from the Songwriters Association of Canada.
Presumes you're a criminal otherwise.
And by paying it, you admit it.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
ISPs sell different broadband packages, why not have a media package?
normal price +$5 for music downloads
maybe +$20 for tv & movies?
Its definitely a step in the right direction.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
Or the record industry could stop living in the past and have modern cost effective (fair) distribution model that makes sense to modern internet users.
...and their chics are still free.
So, if I'm charged this $5/mo fee does that mean they can no longer prosecute me if I download music? Or are they going to do that as well?
Now, if we were talking about a $5/mo (or even $10/mo) fee to be able to download and listen to, burn, copy, whatever as much high quality DRM-free music as I want.... well, suffice to say that I'd be too busy clicking links and breaking out my credit card to make this post.
$0.01 for everyone else.
...then you'd better fucking believe I'm gonna be illegally downloading some goddamn music.
ADAPT YOUR BUSINESS MODEL, you greedy fucking cockknockers! Don't keep trying to prop up the old one!
I wonder what would happen if someone figured out how to torrent a car.
Basically the same amount our northern neighbors pay (as taxes) to keep their MAFIAA on a leash? Maybe we should just copy their entire section of IP laws.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
How are the record companies going to continue to sue people if everyone and their grandma are forced to pay a $5 royalty every month?
Didn't they do this with blank CDs a few years ago? Then the indemnification ended, but the tax that's passed back to the RIAA remained.
Maybe if the $5/mo was a voluntary "add on" fee granting immunity from copyright suits it might work.
Oh, almost forgot to include the obligatory Fuck The RIAA line.
...to support illegally download music?
Who'll pay extra for iTunes if they're already paying to use P2P whether they like it or not?
This is an utterly ridiculous idea. It taxes those who don't download copyright-infringing files to pay for those who do - and who will probably continue to download much more than $5-worth of tracks, subsidised by others.
Illegal downloaders need to stop freeloading off the rest of us and pay for the things they want.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
Give everyone that doesn't download music a $5 discount? They already charge most of us up the ass and throttle d/l and u/l speeds as it is. Why should we pay anything additional?
If they assume I'm a criminal, then I feel pretty good about actually being one. That $5 would morally open the floodgates to me downloading everything my cable modem can gobble.
IT's like the "We think you are a pirate" tax on the Zune.
Treat me like a criminal and I'm much more likely to actually turn into one.
Sheldon
I see this as their new business model. They may not make mega-millions with a flat tax like this, but they will always have the bare minimum to survive.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
How is this different from taxation, and subsidising culture from public funds?
I spend considerably more than 5 bucks on music a month. If I'm paying to download music off the net, I suspect that I may be less motivated to pay more than 5 bucks a month for music.
It may sound like a noble and interesting idea to some, but there are other issues besides the fact that it will be nearly impossible to divide the money correctly.
The real issue here is the morality of the fee. Those who are pirates download content worth significantly more than $5. This fee would be no problem to a person who downloads hundreds of songs per month, but a technologically impaired senior who wants to communicate with his children who live in another state/country will also have to pay.
If such fee would pass, then I say we should pay $1 to reimburse victims of pedophilia, who were victimized over the internet. And many other types of victims, of course.
My point is obviously that the music industry should have no say in this matter, nor any other industry or company. Or we could flip the coin and make the music industry pay for the rehabilitation of all drug users who snorted coke while listening to Kurt Cobain, or small girls who cannot handle the pressure of looking like Christina Aguilera.
Full Tilt
This is outstanding. Pay the $5, dissolve the RIAA, wait a month, and drop the fee.
Great, here's a plan. Jack up my broadband costs by $5 per month to subsidize the incompetent music industry... BUT I DON'T DO P2P! I don't download music in general because MP3's suck to listen to. The only downloaded music I have is legal Dead shows, downloaded mostly in lossless formats. Every torrent application I have tried was pitifully slow, much slower than a simple download from a server, since there were usually more leechers than peers (not to mention all those Comcast users with throttled bandwidth). Who needs that bullshit?
It sort of reminds me of a few years back when I was an independent contractor and the business's worker's compensation company tried to charge me $50 a month to not be insured by them.
The idiots in the music business need to get a clue. And frankly, at this point, who the heck cares if the majors go belly up? It's not like it'd be a huge loss in terms of great art.
The "what if I don't want to" argument is a little weak in my opinion. If you are forced to pay it, I'm guessing you would end up using it (since you are already paying). If I had access to all of the songs on the iTunes Music Store, you can bet I would take advantage of it. I don't now because I don't want to pay for the tracks.
The "what about other groups" argument is fantastic. I don't know how someone could reasonably question how something like this become a precedent, causing every group under the sun to suddenly jump out and demand the same thing.
What I worry about is what happens if this goes into effect and gets challenged. I think it's safe to say that someone could mount a good challenge here in the US based on some law. So if I "take advantage" of this forced fee then it gets ruled illegal, do they get to come after me for all the music I "stole"? Do I have to give up everything I downloaded under the plan?
The "how do we divvy up the loot" question is the worst one. Do we put one group in charge (like the RIAA)? Do we really expect them to be fair to all the artists who aren't a member of their group? Or do only they get paid, thus effectively making the a de-facto monopoly? Does that mean there are "good" artists (who my fee pays for) and "bad" artists (who my fee doesn't, thus I can't download their stuff)? Should we let the government run it, thus making it an entitlement bureaucracy? Does every artist get an even share (good for little guys), or do the big artists get more (they are more popular... after all). Does the medium matter? Does my fee pay for me to have the rights to get free sheet music? Why not? If I'm an artist, can I opt out of this saying "no one downloads my music, despite the fee"?
There are so many unanswered/unanswerable questions for this. I don't know how they can push this with a straight face. I'm guessing most of their answers would be something along the lines of "don't worry about it".
The Canadian media tax doesn't seem to have helped much, or solved any of these questions. Why would the US be any different... just because it's a different medium being taxed?
They see $$$, they want in. They could build a subscription MP3 store (real MP3s), band together, and create a de facto (optional) "music tax" that people could pay and use. They don't need to force it through regulation... unless they aren't really looking out for our interests. That can't be true...
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
For anyone who's interested, I've posted my correspondence with Jim. He definitely seems to be a lobbyist of some kind. He doesn't address the issues, he just doles out some rhetoric.
If this fee is forced on you, then you are entitled to download the crap out of your connection from P2P.
Why ? Because you are charged for the music.
Even though I never burnt a song onto CD back 10 years ago in Europe, I had to pay extra for each writable CD to cover the piracy fees of the poor music industry. Well, that system was also an introduction into warez and music downloads. Even though I exclusively used CDs for backups, learning about this stupidity quickly made me discover how much stuff is available to download, and how easy it is to rip a cd or copy it.
Now the crap starts with the net then, and when it gets here I will be forced to pirate stuff to justify it.
Make a good product and it will sell. Don't charge me when I avoid your product.
They lose money from all the law suits. I'm not talking about future sales from pissed off customers. They've actually said they are taking a loss to "stop piracy" (read: scare the shit out of you, so you buy their crap)
This is genius, now they'll make free money from every internet connection while saving money by not having to pay all those legal fees. The funny thing is, they could still release every thing with DRM. Then they can just sue you for breaking the DRM (they'd have about the same amount of evidence as their current trials, a few of which they've won).
On top of that, there will be idiots that pay the fee and still buy the real CDs - because it is what they've always done.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
"Illegal downloaders need to stop freeloading off the rest of us and pay for the things they want."
Sorry, you shouldn't blame the downloaders, blame the uploaders, as they are the enablers of the whole thing.
Did you just arrive from Digg?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think we should also ask for a $5.00 tax on every copy of Turbo Tax that is sold.
Every one of those babies costs a tax preparer a client.
I pay $5 a month, and my IP address is immune from any RIAA lawsuits concerning music torrents.
I would pay that, and so would anyone I know. Somehow however I think their idea won't work like that.
Both those things are important because they guard against the slippery slope of more and more "IP-owning" organisations wanting their "cut" of the revenue. This isn't just about music, it's also movies, and software, and e-books, and ... you-name-it. The list of organisations who might want to skim money from this income stream is endless, so let the user decide who will be paid.
However, I might add that this solution is pretty much equivalent to the music industry or whoever setting up their own subscription download service, and I could join it for $5/month. If they share the files through BT and I have to be a member to talk to their tracker, the cost to the RIAA of bandwidth would be much lower.
First it was a tax on all digital recordable media (minus DAT, I think) to compensate and cover for musicians and the music industry, now there's talk of a surcharge to our network connections?
Hey, idea. Does that mean the *AA's have to pay that fee as well? If all of us have to, why shouldn't they? They're connected to the internet as well, they should be forced to pay this per month, but since they're holding large amounts of bandwidth, they should pay EXTRA. After all, their connection can download more music than my connection could. They face a greater threat of piracy within their own network!
See how my useless and nonsensical argument puts all this bullshit in it's proper light? It's ALL FUCKING STUPID.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The industry is ailing because customers are fleeing them. Ppl are tired of the fleecing. It is not because ppl are stealing the music that they claim. My bet is that RIAA and the majority of the labels will be gone within 7 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm not surprised that the proponents of the music industry would come up with concepts such as these. I'm sure they rationalize that people already subsidize shoplifters through higher prices at the store, so since broadband is used to pilfer their product, every one who uses broadband should pay. While it's true, we all pay higher costs due to shoplifters, the store has an incentive to reduce losses or the prices will become prohibitive and customers won't shop there any longer. This surcharge does nothing to cause music producers to change their ways to prevent losses, it forces the liability of bad business decisions upon non-customers.
Those who think this is a good idea should take note that nowhere in this Jim person's argument does it stipulate that the $5 per month surcharge is blanket authorization to download everything and anything. Your $5 gets you the privilege of still paying $.99 at iTunes, or a $12 per month Rhapsody account or running out to Wal-Mart and plunking down $20 for a CD. The music industry will continue to label the internet the tool of choice for music "thieves", because doing so is necessary to justify the $5 per month stipend.
I'm hopeful that the ISPs will tell these people to go get bent. There is a very real possibility of a consumer boycott over this issue, especially from the honest customers who do not download music. If my ISP proudly proclaimed they were collecting this fee, I'd go without broadband.
As far as seeking legislative relief, I don't think too many legislators are going to want to be seen with the hot potato of asking consumers to fork over $5 to help the music industry. It's an election year and a down economy, what fool would suggest...aside from Ted Stevens, Pelosi...well, maybe seeking legislative relief isn't such an idle threat. Get ready to write a lot of letters.
You levy music piracy and you will swiftly end up having to levy for movies and software.
I record my sleeptalking
The solution:
-- There should be a license that you pay for only if you're interested, and if you pay this license you're allowed to download music.
By subscribing to the license, you make a legally binding promise to follow certain simple rules that apply for this license.
-- If you also want to make music available for others to download, you indicate this when you subscribe to the license. This again involves a legally binding promise to follow rules that apply for this kind of license.
-- When you make music available for others to download, you must use software that is approved for this purpose. Getting such software approved should be very easy, because the requirements are simple.
One requirement is that this software record and report statistics about how many times each song is downloaded. The money from the license fees gets distributed to artists and music companies based on these statistics.
Another requirement on this software is that it make an automatic check that the software that requests the download displays a currently valid license.
With this scheme, regular Joes who provide music for others have no economic incentive to trick the system. That's important. It means that lots of software can be easily approved.
Music companies do have an incentive to trick the system, so as to inflate their own statistics. Checks against this will be needed. In addition, because of this, the statistics should probably be arranged in such a way that any number of downloads from the same license counts as a single download.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
From TFA:
It is subsidizing an industry that is dying because ppl do not want their crap. This would be akin to us paying a fee on our cars to support buggy whip makers. So far, nearly ALL of RIAA studies have been shown to be flawed at best, and outright lies at worst.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Why all this fascination with music? All this effort put into creating it and stealing it and breaking DRM and trying to protect it? I finally figured it out. It is to allow a very large number of people to make money by doing something that adds absolutely nothing to this world. It is all fluff and does not make anything better. It simply wastes a lot of time and effort and money that could be put to better use.
People need to realize this and just give it up.
I don't want to pay those retards $5/month for their crap. I buy CDs or iTunes downloads when there's something I want. Which isn't very often these days. Most of the crap they sell, I do not want. I do not steal. And I do not want to pay $5 that I will get nothing in return for. Besides, these guys will still go on sueing people, right? We know they will. If they're going to sue for damages, they don't deserve a tax from us honest folks, and they don't deserve to be double-dipping into the wallets of the people they will sue.
I pay my 5 bucks, and now Steve Jobs will let me download as much as I want from iTunes for free!!! Same with Amazon. Right?
Or do you expect me to pay twicT?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
If the music I wanted was freely and legally available for download from the internet in lossless un-DRMed form I'd be perfectly willing to sell out $5 per month for access to this music. I currently spend about 10 times that per month for my music acquisitions.
Now I'm expected to pay for the illegal downloaders? It's not exactly making me happy with either side since I don't download.
They've been repeatedly telling us that the minority of users use the majority of the bandwidth (for P2P). So why would they tax the majority of users then? Of course it makes no sense.
The sports rebroadcasting fee, to compensate sports networks for their broadcasts that you retransmit
:-)
The politicians opponents fee, to compensate them for money that you don't give to their campaigns
The tapped powergrid fee, because you might tap into the power grid at some point
The Emperor's club fee, because you might use the services of an illegal prostitution ring and not get caught (and not be the governor of a large state).
What? You don't do any of these things? Then why should you pay for it? Instead, you should pay a fee to ME, for no particular reason, other than I think you should give me your money whether I've given you anything in return or not!
None of the bands I listen to and download are RIAA members. How will my money get to them?
The music industry is moved by a few major labels, and those labels hate variety which is exactly what p2p provides (and for free). If people are given a free run of the artist they can listen to their choices will expand a lot, and to be competitive major labels would need to sign a wider variety of acts thus cutting in on the corporate profit. Not to mention all the other problems with how reimbursement is going to work with this system. Personally I think artist will give up trying to sell the music, and focus more on property rights, merchandise, and concerts.
I don't infringe copyright (I refuse to say "steal music"), therefore I shouldn't have to pay for those that do.
This is a totally stupid proposal, unless the understanding is that 100% of Americans *do* infringe copyrights. In which case: why is this a crime?
-J
I don't pirate music. In fact, I pay for music downloads.
Who else gets subsidized later? The MPAA? Movies cost more than music to make. Are they getting a $10 fee? What about authors? A very good PDF is about the same size as an MP3, and OCR is getting pretty good. They get $5 too? I'm sure video games are pirated. That's another $5. Who am I missing? Software companies... hey, Free Software, too! Let's double US Broadband prices in case users infringe on someone's copyrights!
Everyone who wants legal music pays $5/month, and the money is pooled, with the entire pot allocated to artists proportional to downloads. It would bring the underground P2P industry "above the radar" and the artists would get a tiny share of a huge pie instead of a big share of nothing. Honestly, I spend even LESS on music now, but $60/yr is about as much as this is worth to me.
Even by the most conservative estimates, it would produce hundreds of millions of dollars per year in royalties. Or they can maintain the status quo and get nearly nothing. If it were me, I would take the money. But what do I know?
Back when the original Napster was under attack, I suggested this as a reasonable plan. Nobody thought the music industry would accept an "all you can eat" plan at such a low price. But today's P2P reality is exactly that at a price of $0. When the music industry finished overplaying their hand, $0 was the only price left on the table. It's like playing "Deal or No Deal", turning down all the offers, holding out for the $1M prize, only to watch the entire board clear, leaving the $.01 prize. Considering where the music industry is today, $5/month from a huge population is no longer a lowball offer.
If it were ridiculously cheap, I would have no problem with throwing some coffee money into music. It would probably renew my interest in the product. As it stands today, I have an Ipod full of ripped CDs I bought over the last 20 years, and I can listen to the classics indefinitely. At $18.95 per disc, I won't be seen in the music store anytime soon.
I have never D/l any music. I have a cd collection and some iTunes. I can honestly say I've never shared online. Why do I have to pay ?
How many dollars per month for
Movies
Games
Software Applications
TV
Books
Comics
Anime
Audiobooks
Pictures
It adds up. And how are they going to determine who gets how much? Oh I guess I know the answer to that. The collector agency gets the bigger part, and the rest is distributed based on some kind of algorithm that favors the current big coorporations.
five bucks a month for an unlimited license to download movies and music and television shows?
I'm in!
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
This is actually a good idea, not an **AA scam as some have suggested. But it would have to be everyone paying it (at least for now...deep packet inspection is getting easier every day) because otherwise it's impossible to weed out the cheaters. The RIAA and other groups are starting to come around to the idea that a blanket license may be the best way to get some money out of it. It's cheaper for them (they don't need to run an iTunes-esque service, nor sue thousands of people to try and scare the rest) and easier for the public. The idea would be a negotiated license, probably with rates overseen by the DoC, between the ISPs and the rights-holders of digital media, at least music and video. They would agree not to sue for anything, and the ISPs collect extra money and hand it over. The big hold up thus far has been how to divide the money that the ISPs collect. You want to do it on a pro rata basis in order to encourage people to be new and inventive to gain popularity, but it's hard to measure. You would sample content available and content being downloaded on a variety of networks, possibly do user surveys, and need to come up with an exchange rate (e.g. a movie is worth more than a song). If you haven't downloaded music or movies before and feel like this would just be a way to cheat you out of $5, remember that you could now start downloading, safe in the knowledge that it is going to the artists (assuming we get it divided up and delivered properly, which will be nontrivial). Possibly you could opt-out, but to do that you would need to have a way of blocking transfers to those users who haven't paid the license fee. Right now, we can't do it (and given current internet architecture, it's hard to imagine how we ever could, even with DPI, unless we block all encrypted traffic or impose harsh bandwidth limits). A group (couldn't find a link now, still looking) has been trying this in China, figuring that the Chinese IP system is still developing and open to new ideas, and that a good example there could lead to change in Europe and the U.S., but the sticking point of how to divide up the collected monies has stalled it for now.
boycott all isps and internet and go back to using abaci [or at least floppy disks]
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
I don't download music. It's too much "work" for some stuff to listen to when I'm looking for mindless entertainment while driving around, etc. Instead, I pay my money to XM radio (77/yr...google forums for it).
As for having something with me when I'm not in the car? That's why I have Phil Hendrie clips on my phone and a bluetooth headset.
Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
They have failed to keep up with the world.
Now we are suppose to give them money for nothing?!!
I don't think so....
Rick B.
Hmm... I haven't spent a lot of time considering this but my initial reaction is that I don't think innocent people should have to pay a tax to the music industry just because they've spun some numbers to make it sound like they're being hurt by 'illegal' activity. I also don't think it's fair to subsidize an industry that does not accept returns. Since there is no move being made on their part to satisfy customers, I'm not inclined to give them anything. They're not entitled to have their old business model maintained by whining and legal threats.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
No f'n way will I tolerate subsidizing their stupidity and refusal to embrace new technology as it came along. I suppose free market capitalism only suits them when they're swimming around in money like Scrooge McDuck.
You say that as if duplicating your CDs was ever against the law, here or in Canada. Copyright is supposed to be a civil matter between private parties about the right to commercially publish works. Applying that to personal coppies has always been a stretch.
I recall some controversy about artists never got their cut of the digital media tax, not even RIAA signed artists, and it hurt local artists. Looks like it never got better.
I expect ISP fees to be exactly like that. In effect, they will outlaw what's already allowed and steer yet more money to an industry that has long ago ceased to perform a useful function.
No calls now, I'm
The overly expensive price gouging copies of music industry is ailing, because people by and large all over the planet realized copies should be incredibly cheap, as in pennies cheap, and some old dinosaur buggywhip interests still want to charge serious folding dollars for cheap copies.
Musicians who go out and like play music and are even half way decent have no problems making money while making music.
Aftermarket copy makers-who aren't the people who "make music"- are having problems because people don't like being price gouged, so they routed around the problem.
Way back in the olden days when making and delivering a copy of some musical performance was very expensive, they charged a decent markup and people were by and large OK with that payment. Fast forward to the digital age where making and delivering a copy can be done on any scale you want, up to the billions of copies if necessary, and delivered for chump change per copy over the internet. The *problem* is, they want like a 10,000% markup, something ridiculous like that, just like there had never been any tech advances.
That's just crazy. If any of those music industry copy-selling execs would just put down the booze bottle and put away the mirror with the peruvian marching powder for a few weeks and get their brains cleaned up a little, they would realize that. The technological world passed them by, and they want to hold on to the past, and it just won't last. Any schemes that involve serious price gouging eventually fail, as human beings hate being price gouged, and then when you manipulate laws against them and sue them and call them criminals and etc, and screw with trying to "protect" your precious overpriced copies-well, your potential customers lose all respect for you and ignore you.
The solution is simple and has been staring them in the face for years now, seriously drop per-copy charges (99 cents for a few megs of download is still a price gouge,make it *cheaper* than that by a large amount), and make the profit on huge volume sales.
Like hell. Who do they think they are to collect taxes? A government? It's just the music industry. It's not like it's anything important.
By the way, is there still a "DAT tax"? Probably time to push for repeal on that. Almost all DAT tapes hold backups of business machines.
I do use my broadband connection every day to get the news, read scientific journals, waste time on /., what-have-you.
I don't listen to RIAA music any more, much less download their crappy tracks, buy them from iTunes, or heaven forbid buy CDs, because I want nothing to do with them whatsoever.
Assessing a $5/mo. fee to every broadband user is the last thing that should happen. 10 years ago, OK, that was something we could have talked about. And did talk about. But the music industry wanted no part of it.
Now it's too late. The world and its musicians and its fans have all moved on.
Let the RIAA die, and rot.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
And sans net neutrality, they could tier your music access - $5 a month gets you classical music and show tunes. $10 a month gets you Jazz and Indie Rock. $20 a month gets you top 40. $30 a month gets you...
etcetera blah.
It's not just a bad idea, it's a trap!
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Just some clarification: I can and do pay for content, and I am far more likely to when I can get it on my terms.
Just tell me where to sign up to the MPAA-sponsored BitTorrent tracker, and I'll pay for it. Here's my wishlist:
I'm not sure how much I would be willing to pay for that service, but it's at least $5/month.
As it is, there's really no service which can quite replace The Pirate Bay.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I gotta say, I'm all in favor.
Read TFA, this really would make P2P legal. That means for $5 per month you can P2P music to your heart's content.
"The administration would be impossible!" - Bullshit. The administration of their current contracts is 1000x more difficult than this would be. This is the billboard charts in a database with a financial report stapled to the front. I could write everything but the rating mechanism in a few weeks (enterprise grade - I could get the proof of concept up in a few hours, as could many people here, I'm sure). The rating mechanism? It might seem tough at first, but once P2P became legal "again" (like it sort of was in the late 90's), a few new Napsters would appear that everyone would use. It'd be another couple weeks to make it really sing. Heck, set up a webservice API and require P2P services to send data, decentralize the P2P from the central ratings body. Don't make it onerous on the P2P services; make them feel honored to be contributing to the system that gives royalties to the artists.
"P2P MP3s suck!" - They won't once it's legal. If you want to P2P flac, go for it. Heck, P2P the wav straight from the CD. It's not illegal anymore.
The numbers work too. Assuming 100M broadband connections in the US, that's 6 billion per year just for digital, and the overhead plummets. CDs, DVDs, vinyl, concerts - those are outside the scope and are free to evolve their own efficient markets. The music industry would have more cashflow than they have today, with less overhead. That's a win in anybody's book.
Of course, you have to hamstring the shit out of the RIAA's financials weasels. No, you don't get to pay a percentage of what's left after expenses, with lots of room for creative bookkeeping. The RIAA gets X% (10? 50? whatever, let competitors bid a lower percentage to takeover the contract) of revenue and the rest must be distributed to the artists. Require the books to be 100% open. Who cares if the books are open if every artist gets the same deal and the P2P Billboard charts are already public? Any artist with a $3.00 calculator can confirm that they're getting a fair shake.
Sure, there'll still be labels prospecting on new bands, paying for studio time and headshots for a share of the digital revenue, but that's outside the digital cashflow calculations. (and CDs and concerts would be handled in their current demonic forms - so the lawyers wouldn't go hungry)
But the real reason I love it is entirely personal; I hate all the models that currently exist, and I've tried most of them. They suck. So I don't buy, nor pirate, music anymore. That sucks. I really like music, but the current hostility in the music market has driven me away.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I was considering the odds of this happening (the record industry could stop living in the past and have modern cost effective (fair) distribution model) to pigs growing wings and flying to the moon. Looks like we'll have a porcine lunar base soon much before the former.
Seven years ago, Napster offered to partner up with the music companies, charge a monthly fee, and go legit. They had a beautiful, efficient 'walled garden' infrastructure, selection surpassing the iTunes store, nearly 15 million active users, and even though there was openNap and Gnutella, these were fringe tools. Napster had no *real* competition, they were a de facto standard. The market was sewn up.
Napster offered multiple times to partner up with the RIAA labels to create a subscription-based model. If they'd have kept just 1/3 of their userbase at $10 a month (highly reasonable) and growth had remained flat (highly unlikely), they'd have pulled in $600mil in the first year, without ever having spent a dime on marketing or distribution. $600mil a year in free money with incredible growth potential, and the RIAA wouldn't have had to lift a finger.
$600mil in revenue in just the first year, for doing nothing. And they said no, shut down Napster, and unleashed the unkillable hydra of gnutella/bittorrent/FastTrack/etc.
NOW the RIAA wants a surcharge? No. You had your chance at the golden egg, and relevancy in the future of music, and you chose instead to cut the goose's throat. We're not going to subsidize you now.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
RIAA wants the government to mandate payments to them from essentially everybody?
That would be like insurance companies wanting auto insurance to be mandatory.
Or hospitals being in favor of mandatory medical insurance.
Or Microsoft insisting on Windows installed on every PC
Or sports teams wanting every citizen to subsidize their business.
or... wait... what were we talking about again?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
How about $5 for the movie industry, look how many people download movies illegally.... and $5 for software industry, $5 for videogames, $5 for scientologists
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
I love it so much that I think we should use it to support other troubled industries. For example, we could start taxing people to support the ailing horse & buggy industry. After all, there hasn't been much demand for them since those darned automopirates stared taking over the roads last century.
$15/mo to Microsoft for a Zune pass.
/bullshit/ and spits in the face of those of us who are trying to go legal.
If my cable company starts charging me too, I'm cancelling and letting MS know why. This is total
Jay | http://oldos.org
How about this: First of all, I don't think this is "fair" in any sense, but to end all the copyright nonsense these days I'd be willing to entertain this.
First of all, let's get a reasonable amount. Like, say, 25 cents a month. Maybe as much as a buck. The BSA and the MPAA can have the same. So can anybody else who feels their Imaginary Property rights are being violated. But in exchange, two conditions:
1) they accept that they can never again object to any form of private, non-commercial copyright infringement in any way, shape, or form, in any jurisdiction this side of the outer rings of Jupiter.
(2)that they are expressly prohibited from producing, distributing, or employing any form of DRM technology in any way shape or form, in any jurisdiction.
Violation of either of these two conditions will result in them having to repay the amount of money they have received from this "statutory license" (or whatever we decide to call it) X 100.
Let me repeat myself. I don't think this is 'fair', but politics, like life, is compromise. I don't think the RIAA deserves this money any more than a mobster "deserves" his protection money. But to be 100% sure that we'd never again have a single case of grandmother being sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars over a dozen top 40 tracks that'll be forgotten in 10 years, and be able to back up my box set of "Band of Brothers" that I paid $150 for, it'd be worth it.
But not at $5/month. I haven't averaged spending $5/month on CDs since about 1993.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
It looks like this might be a followup story or actual action taken upon a proposition for collective licensing of music for personal use from the Songwriters Association of Canada.
Slashdot story
SAC proposal
If I start my own band and download my own music, can I get my money back?
Pretty soon, there'll be about 100 million broadband subscribers in the US alone. Multiplying by $5/months and 12 months would make them $60 billions per year for doing nothing. Sounds like a profitable business model.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Let p2p run rampant. Don't sue anybody. Then watch and see if the music/movie industries up and die. If they do, then consider whether or not legislation is needed to revivify them. If they do not die, then admit that the legislation was never needed in the first place, and just don't bother with it.
Personally, I am tired of this zero-evidence notion that file sharing will kill the industry. Every time we have heard this line in the past (for video cassettes, cassette tapes, CD-R, etc.), it has been proven false. Let's try it and find out. Once the real evidence is in, then I will be interested in discussing responses.
I am thinking of the "Slippery Slope" that this article presents. Here we have a very eloquent speaker stating that the multi billion dollar recording industry is taking a hammering for lack of sales. So the sweetest thing, the nicest thing to do is that all of us donate money to this industry; Right? Then when this happens those people that were affected by the "Globalization" of the U.S.Economy from everything manufactured, to services rendered can now sue for monetary damages. One can argue that the flooding of manufactured goods has been handled fairly. Also one could argue that the service sector has not been hammered at all, because, well there are plenty of jobs to go around.
I am kind of confused right now, nothing is making sense. Corporations, and Narrowly defined businesses running the government does not seem to be working very well.
.. your failing business model?
The previous comments are only true, if no-one says they're wrong.
Let p2p run rampant. Don't sue anybody. Then watch and see if the music/movie industries up and die. If they do, then consider whether or not legislation is needed to revivify them. If they do not die, then admit that the legislation was never needed in the first place, and just don't bother with it.
They won't. This was the biggest year for the MPAA ever.
After all, I am strangely colored.
What if you distribute your own works via P2P? RIAA has no right to abridge your copyright by charging for access to your works.
It's not only a violation of copyright to stop someone from distributing, selling, or displaying his work, it may also be a violation
of anti-trust laws to create this kind of barrier to entry into a marketplace -- even if the marketplace is not based on conventional
economics such as cash or barter.
More people should be creating music. Even if you think your musical talent is garbage, the more people produce, the more they have
access to the same exact weapons that the RIAA uses. If they ever claim any kind of control over your works, you get to use the DMCA
and all other copyright laws against them.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Why don't they set up an all you can eat DRM free online store with subscriptions at $5 per month to show us just how well this would work?
He's proposing nothing more than legalized theft. Fuck him, the horse he rode in on, and the gay bathhouse he probagly hangs out in. I don't download music, movies, etc... He can go straight to hell.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
...and a wooden stake, I'll put it out of our misery.
Said music industry is conceptually bankrupt. Far removed from its golden years (pick your decade: 60s or 80s, [70s/90s spit!]), it has resorted to promoting Britney Spears, rap music, and the 900-year-old Mick Jagger prancing around on stage in skin-tight leathers. It doesn't deserve to exist, let alone reach into my pocket.
Let artists market their music over the internet, those with talent will do well, the others get to keep their day jobs.
"I improvise. It's my greatest talent. I prefer situations to plans..." --Wintermute, William Gibson's "Neuromancer"
I have both cable & DSL connections (I like redundancy, especially considering both are not all that reliable). So does that mean I have to pay double?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
If the music and movie industries figured out how to get out of the stone age and set up a pay per month subscription service where I can download high quality versions of music, TV shows, and movies I would gladly sign up. This proposal being put forth seems like nothing other than an indicator that the entertainment industry is still hanging on by the tips of their fingers to an industry that NEEDS to change to fit the current market and technology of the customers.
Let's go for it! Then what we all do is create our own music. It might sound like /dev/urandom piped through some FFT filters, but who cares since we won't actually listen to it. We'll just all download each other's crappy music to up our scores to get a chunk of the pie. On the internet, everyone becomes an artist :-)
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
To be serious, I don't generally pirate music. I do occasionally download an album as a "test drive," rather than borrowing a friend's copy or getting it from the library, which I did for years before downloading became easy. I do however buy less music than I did pre-Napster; I still pay for every bit of music I choose to add to my collection, but little of what is cranked out by the big labels suites my interests at all any more. So yes, I can see why music sales are down - so much of the music sucks, and the prices are not conducive to most people going to the CD store and buying a bunch of new music they aren't yet sure about.
I recently downloaded Attack and Release by The Black Keys because it doesn't come out until April 1, and I had already pre-ordered it anyway. A band like that has proven their worth to me, so I will continue to buy their albums as quickly as I can, even without hearing them. Fugazi was another who never disappointed and often sold direct and kept the prices reasonable. That, I respect. Even the folks who buy all the top-40 crap admit that the CDs they buy usually only have 1-2 good songs for $15+, so screw the RIAA and their members.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
This will only lead to more piracy globally. Everyone on the fringe who doesn't regularly download music in fear of the repercussions will surely increase their downloading/uploading habits. Additionally, each download will increase the perceived value of the "piracy tax" they've already paid so now there's another monetary incentive promoting piracy.
Those from other countries with less or no piracy laws will just have many more content sources.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
If they make the distribution of money based on which music gets downloaded the most from certain sites, you can bet lots more people will suddenly become musicians, create some really awful crap no one would even think approaches music, and get still get millions of downloads a day all thanks to their botnet.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Damnit, I already pay way more than enough for a slow IDSL line in order to even have internet access at all thanks to the phone company's having installed fiber all over our town and I'm not about to pay another US$5/month to subsidize an unrelated industry for something that nobody in our household even uses or has any great desire to use. (And before anyone even suggests it: Comcast is never going to get into our household.) And this tax would be going into a pool to be split between artists, performers, publishers, and music labels. Anyone want to wager that the proportion of the split will be heavily shaded to the end of that list of recipients?
Since it was recently revealed that the RIAA isn't even paying musicians anything they're getting from their dubious lawsuits (and probably most of the actual royalties the musicians are due), I say let them find an honest way to make money besides taxing people for things they don't use. Ooh! I've got an idea! Why don't they produce CDs that people like? Or produce CDs of music that people still like but cannot buy any more because someone at the so-called "majors" decided it's not worth enough to do so.
And can we stop calling the Megamusic publishers, "the majors"? The "majors" is for guys who can hit .320, have an ERA under 2.0, steal 50 bases, and earn Golden Gloves. The jerks associated with the RIAA are strictly "the minors".
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Besides, the artist won't get ANY of it even if something this stupid were to happen.
I'm fine with the RIAA going up in smoke due to their own pride, ignorance and arrogance.
Illegally sharing music is illegal (and I think some jail time might help people to understand the law), but I have no problem giving an artist money for their craft. I just don't like how the system works today. Just like the movies, good movies don't get the accolades or promotion... it's a good ole boy system that is totally corrupted. More power to those that are going independent, making excellent money and finding Internet music sales to be beyond their imaginations.
Actually, it will be the botnet operators that will get the cash. They will become music artists and publishers. They will generate some absolute trash and call it music. Then their botnet of millions of r3-0wn3d computers will be downloading this trash en masse. Their crap will skyrocket to the top ten. They rake in millions. On the bright side, they might give up filling our mailboxes with trash.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The *ailing* music industry??
First of all, the music industry is NOT ailing. Second, if it is, it's not because of P2P - It's because record labels are peddling crappy songs, and crappy albums that people DO NOT want to buy.
This is simply a "Sports Car Subsidy": They don't need it, but want it.
How stupid can you be to start asking the Government to compensate you for lost revenue because people do not want to buy your crappy products?
Example:
A car manufacturer produces a car nobody wants to buy that is priced far higher than it is worth, and has alot of features that consumers do not wat. Consumers start getting their cars from other sources because they are better than what the manufacturer in question is selling, have the feaures they want, and are priced what they are worth. Now, the manufacturer says that the other sources are hurting their sales, and wants the Government to subsidize their losses.
If you want profit, sell something consumers will pay money for.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
How about we allow free downloads for all the years of their cospiring to control prices.
don't forget payola.
Their fines weren't enough for those illegal criminal profits.
They won't. This was the biggest year for the MPAA evuer.
And despite most of the movies last year being complete shit, too. Boggles the mind.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
You just raised the fee $.03 within two posts!
I develop stuff to Internet! You use Internet! I want part of the $5 a month that we Internet companies should steal from you. If you don't agree to pay, there will be no content on the Internet.
Unfortunately the statement above isn't true, but it would have been "true" if we would have bought politicians for the last decades to stream money to us.
But the bought politicians thinks it's more important to feed dead musicians with money than feeding new companies like my own. They say it's "fair" stealing and you're probably voting for them! Apparently it's more important to some of the USA if he is a she or black than if they want to steal from you. I hope we'll not do the same mistake here, but we probably will do another mistake.
hmm, was there not some USA bigwig that ones stated something to the tune that no market had the right to exist for eternity?
the thing about the net and the computer is that in one box and connection one have (to go back to about the industrial age) a telegraph, a printing press and a gramophone all hooked together so that the telegraph can feed of stuff to the other ones.
at that time, with a printing press being a room sized device operated by 1 or more person as a full day job, that would be unthinkable. but today, thanks to the wonders of the microprocessor, thats not only possible, but increasingly common place.
thing is that we are still operating with industrial age laws, when the tech have moved on like no-one at that time could have foretold.
yes, riaa and the rest keeps a whole lot of people with work. but was there not cries about loss of work when the assembly line came to be, and continued on to become increasingly automated?
maybe its time we think about alternate ways of distributing resources? ways not hooked on the idea of scarcity in some form or other for other things then physical resources?
maybe the net, and all that it can contain, should be put under some kind of operation similar to a public library? only that said public library to is a creation of a age where books where a scarce resource, turning their content scarce as well. but today the physical book may be scarce, but the content of it do not have to be. the creativity of the human mind, when not directed towards creating a physical construct, have been set free like no time before.
question is, how are those creative minds supposed to live on? as is, we are so used to the physical media that we cant really imagine a world without it. but if one manage to distance oneself from that idea, then what? what alternate paths do then appear?
to re-imagine the way to launch programs in kde, the developers had to stop referring to the launcher as a menu, this because the very word was loaded with images of ordered lists of items, and one could not shake it.
so it may well be that we have to stop talking about copyright, or any other kinds of rights, as these are now loaded words. words that force our minds into preset paths.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Why should I buy something that, more likely than not, will be range-compressed shit?
For example, I once downloaded a Genesis compilation; I listened to some songs that I already knew from their 83 album, and immediately knew it wasn't the same thing. A quick comparison made it obvious: the new version was "squashed on the roof" -- much louder, muffled drums, too much bass, it sounded like something off a cassete tape.
Just a pic to compare: "Home By The Sea", original versus new version.
It was so awful that I deleted the damn thing. I still wanted to know their early stuff, but not in this defaced form. So I downloaded the whole albums; but now the sound quality was really good. Even their earliest records, done over 30 years ago, sounded nice and crystalline.
Let me say it again: for that compilation, someone took those beautiful songs and deliberately made them sound like an old cassete tape. For what purpose? To make them "loud".
There's the problem. Everyone does it! The way record companies produce music nowadays, everything sounds so awful that I wouldn't want most of it for free. Yet they expect me to pay for it? Hell no! I used to buy a lot of music, but now every CD is a gamble and my chances are too slim. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels the same.
Fuck you very much, record labels. You have ruined your own product, now reap the consequences!
Circumcision is child abuse.
Note my sig. 2/3rds of your post is redundant.
I was covering movies, also... and it looks like I screwed that up. When I said "Creators actually published", I meant "Creators actually compensated."
No such thing as cross-platform DRM, or at least, nothing remotely effective. Never will be, either -- it must, by design, be closed source, and will thus never be able to support the sheer range of hardware and software platforms that an open source system would be ported to.
Will your "cross-platform" DRM system support Android? What about a MythTV box? What if that MythTV box is actually a repurposed Powerbook (and thus PowerPC)?
Watermarks are OK, provided they don't degrade the rest. Anything more, and I'm not interested.
And that's why I mentioned S3 -- you can basically pay for Amazon to seed for you, at very reasonable rates.
Now, it's still not going to be "streaming", and no torrent will be -- it's the nature of a torrent to download in a fairly random order. What you can do is the same thing you probably already do with Pirate Bay -- download Season 2 while you watch Season 1. I guarantee you won't be able to watch it as fast as S3 can stream it -- in fact, I'll bet S3 could stream it to you over HTTP, so the BitTorrent would actually just be a cost-saving measure.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
shame shame shame.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
But ONLY if this were to cover everything that is under the RIAA banner, and not under the RIAA banner. Every piece of music from every company. It would have to be an 'all or nothing' for this to actually work.
On reflection, I think this is an excellent idea - if it was made optional.
Hell, I'd pay $50 a month never mind $5, for a service that allowed me to listen to (or watch tv series, movies) what I want, when I want, legally.
I'd even go so far as to suggest stiffer penalties for those caught uploading such content.
As a UK citizen living in Africa, for example, I pay my TV license in the UK. So as far as I'm concerned, I am legally entitled to watch anything the BBC puts out. Not being *in* the UK atm, if I need to find it online to download and watch it's fair game, no? I also subscribe to DSTV (satellite tv outfit in Africa) so I reckon if it's been aired on there, also fair game. Or at least, it *should* be fair game. On the one hand you have perfectly legal DVR's and media *encouraging* you to time shift, on the other hand they're hell bent on you *not* time shifting by any other means for absolutely no reason other than that it makes their viewing figures impossible to track therefore impacts on their advertising revenue. How many good shows have been cancelled because the "ratings" didn't come up to par? Half the problem is that they're losing track of who's watching what, and that terrifies them.
I don't think I've *ever* seen any noise about "the guy who downloaded and watched something", it's *all* about the sharing. Probably because whether it's "illegal" to download and watch something you were legally entitled (having already paid somebody, somewhere) to having watched when it aired is a pretty grey area, imho.
Get your damn content online, charge me a reasonable fee for the *option* of downloading and watching it, and stfu. That's my message to media and artists. The internet is just another avenue of content distribution, and *could* be a substantial, and fair to all, revenue stream if you get your act together. A natural progression from broadcast. Get on board or die.
downloaded any music illegally in the past 5 years, why should I get taxed?
And what about compensation for porno producers, movies and tv shows?
Bring it on - I'd quite happily pay a $5/month P2P surcharge to get rid of all the legal hassles surrounding it. I honestly don't know why it hasn't been seriously suggested at that level before. They could be getting so much good information from P2P stats, and the scope that it opens up for new artists to suddenly make it huge (along with all the other "safe" artists) must be worth something to even the big companies. Set up a board of reps from each affected industry and come to an agreement on splitting up the pie.
Do You Experiment?
I use BitTorrent and Usenet to download and listen to music that might be eof interest to me because I probably can't hear the stuff I like on the radio. If what I've downloaded is good, then I buy it. Otherwise I delete what I've downloaded because it's not even worth the storage space on the disk.
If I couldn't preview my music, then I wouldn't buy it - believe me, I've been listening to good music far too long to know that most of the stuff that's advertised or recommended is probably crap on the basis of having bought many CDs in the past without hearing them first and them turning out to be turkeys.
So if they want to start charging for P2P, then I'm more than happy to pay it *PROVIDED THAT* they refund my money when I go buy a CD. And, of course, because I'm being charged for P2P, I'll be a lot more selective in what I download, won't take any "risks" and will therefore probably end up buying a lot fewer CDs. (In other words, the music industry gains £5 from me and loses around £50 a month in CD sales - go figure!)
Incidentally, because I buy my music this way, and search for the cheapest prices before I buy anything, I consider my music at about £10 average per CD to be *GREAT VALUE FOR MONEY*. I don't own CDs with only one or two good tracks on them and considering I'll listen to a £10 music CD a lot more than I would watch a £15 DVD or play a £35 PC game, the sums work out pretty reasonable for me.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Just take a few hundred $ a year from everyone. Let the Music Industry decide how to dole it out (we trust them) and let everyone copy music to their hearts content.
Make music a public utility
Kind of like the water supply or sewage
Actually much of it is pretty much audible sewage
http://davesboat.blogspot.com/
But sometimes industries - whole structures of society - become redundant. And "die". It is not always a bad thing. A new generation of music to listeners is already being founded; why should people have to pay a $5 fee to subsidize a sinking ship of an industry? Obviously the death rattle that such money wielding corporations sound is quite powerful, but no-one should even for a second consider accepting they should have to pay this fee. That being said I think I'd be happy for the government to silently take a bit of money out of my already paid taxes to make the transition from current-to-future music industry not destroy the lives of all the employees and families who garner their income from it. I'm employed in the photography business and i've seen many corporations fall due to the advent of digital media. But at the same times alot of new businesses and corporations have been created. Change begets change.
How about another $5.00 and it will include everyone's heating bill? Even the people in Texas will have to pay it. Sorry if you don't use heat. Can we tack on my credit card bills too?
Why on earth would anyone pay a fee to an ISP, to then be paid to 'the music industry'?! I'm paying them for INTERNET SERVICE.
I don't spend 5usd on music a month even via Amazon's DRM-free system, today's music isn't worth it.
But I'd pay a fiver a month to download movies without fear of prosecution, hell it's a cheap Netflix!
Another problem is determining which song writers/performers/publishers/labels should get the money to begin with. Do they pay people more who get their music pirated more? Do they pay people as a ratio of radio air time? Do they just evenly distribute the money? Like - if that's the case - I'm going to start putting random samples into a synth that just chops them up and spits them out, use every computer controlled sequencing feature, and then demand my fuckin' cut.
If they do that, then everyone will feel (and be) justified in downloading all of their music for free. Since they are paying for it already against their will, why would anyone buy a cd, or use itunes, or amazon.com anymore? The music industry would basically slit their own throat.
It's the CRAP music that they churn out and expect everyone to buy just because they tell us it's "popular". No, they can keep their "music".
*slight crashing sound*
Well, you get 10/10 from me for saying "I can't get a record contract" in such a roundabout way.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
It's obvious those "jerks" have all the negative mod points today also - if it's any consolation, I fully agree with you.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Screw the RIAA!! These people are dangerous, thieving criminals. Seriously, they remind me of Scientologists, who will hunt their enemies down and sue them into oblivion by using their warped version of constitutional protection. The RIAA is anti-American, and frankly, a fascist organization. I'm not joking. They're almost Communistic in the way they want to use surveillance to see what everyone does with their personal media. Sick. What needs to happen is to locate every single senior executive's home in that little group of vandals, and picket the living daylights out of them. Let their neighbors know what they're up to, and how they've messed up the lives of innocent people, and cost our society FAR more money than they've been able to scam for the musicians they never cared about, anyway.
Isn't this like trying to tax drugs? Or fine people for walking past crackhouses? Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you WILL do something. I could shoplift with impunity, but I don't.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
I stopped buying from major labels and started taking the music instead when they strongarmed a tax on blank cassettes, which I had previously only used for music I created. If they succeed in making me pay for it again, I'll have to step up my efforts and share the music with everyone else. After all, I'm paying for the privilege.
make better music! today's bands and artists suck! if the recording industry wants me to give it my money it's going to need to stop focusing solely on R&B, hip hop, rap, and country. they lose a good amount of their user base - you know, the one's weened on rock, when they narrow their focus.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
Let their neighbors know what they're up
Oh yeah, the sub-prime mortgage broker living next door is really going to think the *IAA exec is a scumbag!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"hmm, was there not some USA bigwig that ones stated something to the tune that no market had the right to exist for eternity?"
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line", 1939.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
So not only are we in the UK the target of the insidious Phorm system which will gather all our surfing habits direct from the ISP whether we like it or not, they also might rape us for another $5/month for something I have no party in? FU with big hairy nobs on! I buy ALL my music in hard format direct from the metal labels and specialist metal shops, I never download movies or MP3s, ever. I tell you what, would the government and large corporations just like to come round and bend me over then cart me off to clink, as it was obviously my fault that other people can't stop murdering and stealing, let's just get it over with shall we? We all obviously did some seriously bad shit in previous lives. 'cos everyone just seems to have it in for us in this one!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
I assume your replicator will do the same thing.
That is... if replicators ever become cheap enough for Joe Public to buy/run. Which they won't. Replicated goods will be more expensive than the real thing.
No sig today...
1) Record some garbage music, put it on P2P.
2) Set up some bots to download it 24/7
3) Claim huge slice of the pie
The spammers/penis pill pushers must be cackling with glee when they see proposals like this.
No sig today...
How about the government just makes a tax for everyone that directly funds the Artists and Producers, providing free media to the public. Why would we ever need RIAA/MPAA they'd just be a middle man.
This whole concept is delicious. Let private corporations and entities tax us too. Well, i guess there is a precedent for it, Microsoft.....
I really want to start charging for all those waves, and such that are swirling around me, they are the real cause of global warming you know....
but was there not cries about loss of work when the assembly line came to be, and continued on to become increasingly automated? Yes, and it is still a problem. Go to any industrial town in the mid-west U.S. and you can see the effects.
I know, why doesn't the RIAA and the MPAA offer a P2P service with their catalogs online and charge $5/month to access it? What's this BS in applying a blacket surcharge to all ISP accounts? Stupid.
There is simply too much glass..
I know I am rare but I really don't mind paying for what I want. I don't think P2P is hurting the music industry. I think bad music is hurting the music industry. I rarely buy CDs anymore because I can not find much music that I want to listen too. I don't P2P music for the same reason. Once in a while I will buy a song from iTunes or Amazon but even then tho all that often.
While I don't think that the RIAAs tactics are moral I am also tired of all the people that think they have the right to just download anything they want.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Every year, more and more music is produced and recorded. It doesn't decay, tarnish or fade. As our economy becomes increasingly globalized, I have ever-easier access to the music product of millions of different producers from a significant dimension in time. We have a glut of music.
On the other hand, the demand for music is mostly static. Lately, it may have increased as technology and economic changes have made digital music players available to more people for longer durations but in general, listeners eventually die and they get created at a rate which is no higher than the rate at which new music gets created.
If you have a commodity whose supply increases at a rate higher than its demand, the price inevitably must decline to almost zero.
Since the demand for additional music can hardly be increased artificially, it is obvious that the RIAA and ilk must needs find a way to artificially reduce the supply of old music. Of course, that sounds insane to us now, but 30 years ago it sounded insane that the police would be allowed to stop motorists to see if they were wearing seat belts, and then search their gloveboxes for roach clips.
Perhaps he/she doesn't want a record contract. The majority of muscians/singers that sign up with record companies end up going into debt.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
With the lousy music the "industry" puts out, they should pay us $5/month to download it.
I honestly spend more on downloads from Amazon, iTunes, etc. than $5 a month anyhow... but what sort of fucked up priorities does a society have when they're being bankrupted by multi-trillion dollar imperial ambitions, their financial markets are collapsing, and they think it makes sense to socialize at a federal level all the costs of downloading music?
This is not just monstrously immoral, it is economically dubious. 8.5 million customers * $5 a month * 12 months = $510 million a year. Now... think about the dramatic decline in CD sales. Think about how it will effect Amazon/iTunes sales if P2P music is not only legal, but a service we're charged for whether we use it or not. In pretty short order, materially all of the music industry's sales, apart from concert tickets, will be a direct government handout paid for by a tax. If that's not a recipe for stifling innovation, I don't know what is.
Moreover, if this makes sense to people, why stop here? Why not charge everyone who has a cell phone $10 a month for bottled water, then just have bottled water free to take home at the library? Sure, it screws over the people who don't use bottled water, but it would provide a convenient revenue stream for the bottled water companies, and isn't that really more important than maintaining at least a semblance of market-pricing?
Are you fucking kidding me? WTF are you guys even thinking?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I currently pay $49.99 a month for my broadband access, access I'm actually quite happy with. I don't download illegal music, software or anything like that.
...you know what? Sign me up today, no question about it.
BUT...
If my bill went to $79.99, or $89.99 or even $99.99 (but probably not more than that), and in exchange I could download whatever I wanted, any song, any movie, any sofware, with no risk of prosecution at any point in time...
The chances of that happening are of course somwhere between George Bush comprehending differential equations and Stephen Hawking winning an NBA slam-dunk contest, but be that as it may, I'd go for it as a consumer.
It'd be nice if that money was fairly distributed to all artists, software manufacturers and the like, but of course it wouldn't be, we'd simply have some very rich people at the MPAA, RIAA, BSA and so on. Being as I'm a former musician and a software maker myself I certainly care about that. But if we could just be fair and work that out, it'd be great.
Ok, thank you for listening. I need to go take a nother hit from my bong obviously.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
And unlike the banking and manufacturing industries, the entertainment industry is not imperative to the national economy. I will not shed a tear if they disappear.
The MPAA can make all the long stretches of reasonings they want, but I consider this subsidy a poor waste of my tax dollars.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
Fair is fair.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
It is, in part, due to a rise in ticket prices rather than a significant rise in number of tickets sold.
That very well could be part of it, and if it is, that's really even more important of a metric because: It means that they've not surpassed the equilibrium point, where the vast majority of people are willing to pay to go to a theater/buy DVDs.
I mean, if they increase the price 10%, and it loses the theaters a 2% of their customers due to being priced out of going, they might break even. Since that hasn't happened, it's a clear indication that people like to buy a ticket or DVD far more than they like downloading torrents.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
thanks. no exactly the kind of person i had in mind but still...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
ah, yes. the "rust belt"?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I've never used P2P, but I still have to pay.
They'll collect $5 from all of us. And maybe 2 cents will actually reach an artist. In the end, they still will complain about downloading.
If they charge me $5 for P2P, then darn it, I will quit buying CDs and use P2P to make ALL my purchases. And if they sue me, I'll just look to the judge and say...hey I paid my $5 a month.
Of course, the courts will ignore that....
I am so sick of IP rights. I think I support bringing down the copyright and patent offices.
I don't even download music, I don't even buy any.
Hell the only recent "music" I have is my uncle's (SamSly) latest music CD. That's it. Everything else is radio. (I'd go internet radio but I have a bandwidth cap...)
And damn them if they think they're going to charge me for something I don't use.
P2P is only one nail in the coffin of the industriaa.Trent Reznors business model is a nine inch coffin nail. $1.6 million u.s. dollars the first week.
Added value and live performance are spendid revenues for artists.No middleman needed and you own your own work in the end.The music industriaa is a dinosaur that failed to evolve with the environment.Expect others to follow suit after contracts expire.The internet is a level playing field so the cream will rise and the crap will sink.No more industriaa to tell you whats talent based on their lazyass marketability skills.No more top 40.No more attacks on fans. No more industriaa jobs but,"don't worry Danny,the world needs ditchdiggers too.
Dunno about the movie industry and don't care either,they've fed us enough crap labeled art over the last few decades to fill an ocean.Hope they get theirs too.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
"Trent Reznors business model is a nine inch coffin nail"
Yeah, but I would argue Trent made $1.6 million on that record because he is as famous as he is. Due in large part to previous work promoted, no doubt, by industry groups like the RIAA.
Other than that, I have to agree. I think artists can and will make money just distributing their music their damn selves. They just have to figure out how to become famous enough to do it without the distribution chain of middlemen. Hopefully there will also be the side effect of loosening LA's death grip on the industry as well so people can live wherever they want and still make money creating art.
PS. kudos for the Caddyshack quote!
This is disturbing on many levels. Firstly, it subsidizes an organization which does not represent the entirety of the industry it purports to - pratically none of the Artists I listen to are in the RIAA. Secondly, such a tax does not appear to make downloading of these songs, currently labeled illegal by RIAA and associates, legal. Thirdly, it does nothing to protect the rights of users to utilize the full range of IP transport protocols without hindrance. I am talking about the Comcast's of the world trying to block P2P.
That's because the MPAA are intelegent they sell old movies at wal-mart for $5 _because they can make money doing it_ the RIAA expects you to pay $20-30 for 'old' music from a catalog store that carries 'old' music, and $14.99-$22.99 for a 'new' album... although with 99 cent pricing on itunes, they finally started selling some albums for $9.99 but still, it's crazy how the music buisiness does things... they never try to make money of 'old' recordings by selling them at discounts! and Everybody now knows how cheap movies and music can be sold for, but the greedy RIAA has no clue how to deal with people not willing to pop $20 for an album...
the movie business is run by smarter people, and even with the new ease of piracy they still did a record year, in the states and overseas.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Next up: the $10 tax for libraries, the $5.25 surcharge for porn producers, the $25 fee to newspaper outfits, and--of course--another $13 for Western Union's telegram service. I'm sure horseshoers need you to pay an extra $4000 on your car because of all the work they're not getting any more, thanks to you technologically-inclined assholes.
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
assuming that the ISPs stop cracking down on p2p, assuming that i am able to go ahead with all my p2p, then i'm fine with this idea. if they charge this fee, and hunt down the file sharers at the same time, then screw them.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They're doing mandatory medicine the wrong way here. When you enact a law that forces the poorest 25% of your nation to violate the law or die of starvation you are inviting anarchy.
Mandating medical insurance without regulating the cost does just that. There is no way the poorest 1/4 of americans can afford medical insurance at its current cost. Making it legally required does not change that fact. In Europe there are other methods in place to deal with this. Those methods are not considered in the US currently for various reasons. I do agree that some minimum level of medical care is necessary to the security of the State. I don't agree that this is the best way to go about it. To have a vast segment of the population deprived of medical care is to invite plague. An issue of this importance must not be left to the free market.
Basic medicine is already important enough that if you don't have it you will die. In the US system we nearly prohibit the provision of medicine without insurance coverage, so if you can't afford the insurance you must accept your fate, barring stuff that federally funded emergency rooms can treat. Our poor already go to Mexico or Canada if they can to get treatment for cash money that doctors here won't take for insurance reasons. For an example from my personal experience (yes, although I am not poor I have been), emergency rooms don't treat dental issues and that means if you can't afford dental insurance and you have a dental abscess, you are going to suffer horribly and die and noone will help you. Can you imagine what it's like to be so ill with an abscessed tooth you call every dentist in your city and beg them to pull the infected tooth to find the only ones who will even talk to you are willing to pencil you in for an appointment nine months in the future?
Oh, and that socialized medicine like they have in Europe is working so well for Canada that I can get medical services alacarte there for cash next week, when no US doctor would talk to me at all until I read the numbers off this medical insurance card. If you don't believe me, try it yourself: call any doctor out of the yellow pages and try to get an appointment for an urgent issue for cash, claiming not to have insurance. You can't do it in the US, but you can in Canada.
I don't know what the answer is, but I know this ain't it. Requiring people buy the products of private companies is not capitalism. It's not democracy. It doesn't manage the costs the way markets do. And once you start this nonsense you get less and less necessary companies wanting their products to be required too, like the one in this fine article.
The provision of a certain level of medical care is necessary to the security of the State. To have a vast segment of the population deprived of medical care is to invite plague.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Another major label lapdog has come up with a plan to collect a monthly fee from internet service providers and "put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels." It sounds like a good idea on the surface -- if you're a pirate or if you work for a major label. As usual, everyone else gets bent over and told to squeal like a pig.
Who Gets Fucked?
Honest People are going to be suddenly asked to pay for a service that, on the advice of the recording industry, they have refused to use for free.
The Legally Astute, who knew that sharing (distribution) was the only potential violation of the copyright law and that "illegal downloading" is smoke that the RIAA has been blowing up the public's ass for years. This includes everyone smart enough to simply uncheck the "sharing" option on their p2p software.
Borderline Computer Illiterates, who have an Internet connection, but can barely do e-mail. They're not using p2p because it's wa-a-a-y too complicated for them.
People Who Have No Use For Peer to Peer -- Maybe you're just not a big music fan. Maybe the idea of a "black market" kind of scared you away a little. Maybe you heard that the music industry was trying to sue everyone who uses p2p. Maybe you tried it once, only to get a recording of Madonna saying, "Fuck you." Or viruses, or popups, or any number of other intentionally placed annoyances.
It's no better this year, but now you get to pay for it.
Word is that there are currently 40 million p2p users in the United States. According to internetworldstats.com, there are 215 million people using the Internet in America.
That means 175 million of us have to pay up $5 a month for something we never used or want to use. This adds up to $875 million a month, or $10.5 billion a year, just from the people who don't use peer-to-peer in the first place. Add in the $2.5 billion they'd collect from the people actually using p2p and we're up to $13 billion a year, which is about twice what the entire industry grossed from wholesale sales last year.
The Down Side
Yeah, it gets worse, which is why I kept mentioning peer to peer. Payouts will be based on what gets shared on p2p. This would be similar to only paying radio broadcast royalties to songwriters that get played on Clear Channel.
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of acts that have been giving away your music on the Internet as soon as it was possible, at mp3.com, then DMusic, GarageBand, IUMA, vitaminic, mySpace or any other legal, aboveboard site that offers music, you're not on the list of songwriters and performers that will be compensated unless you have already earned enough attention that people are searching for your stuff on p2p. And finding it.
Good luck with that. As always, the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
The Ultimate Insult
If you care about music, this is the most insulting idea to come down the road in a long, long time. What is the industry going to do? Take the people they've been calling pirates for the last 7 years, accusing them repeatedly of destroying the music business, and turn them overnight into the focus group that determines who gets paid for music.
The people who thought they've been sticking it to the man are going to discover that they're really sticking money in the man's pocket, just like I've been saying all along. The peer-to-peer crowd always had the power to determine how this turns out. Still does, but I seriously doubt that the instant gratification crowd has the collective intelligence to figure it out because they've been playing the RIAA's game all along.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the lawsuits the day that no law changes but file-sharing is suddenly legal. Or will they simply sue everyone who pays the $5?
I don't download music. Never have, never will. Why should I pay some non-artist MPAA executive?
Pretty soon we'll pay for everything by just giving our money over to the government and the powers that be. Noone will produce good music because, why should they? They get their money one way or another. The fat-cat execs at MPAA will be rolling in doe and a small pitance will be passed on the artists just to make it look good. Sure sounds like theft to me.
Well, the movie industry (whoever it was) just posted record profits... so we can be pretty sure they're not in as much trouble as they would like the general public to believe.
As far as the music industry... well... I don't know about their profits, but they haven't produced anything good in quite some time, so, they can shrivel up and go away, as far as I'm concerned. Or start putting out good music. Pick one.
I can't remember which cd/dvd I was listening to/watching, but as it happens, Henry Rollins has some good ideas on the subject. Oh, and George Carlin expresses similar sentiments.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
I don't use the Internet for music. Why should I pay a $5.00 a month tax because the RIAAs business model has collapsed? That's like forcing automobile drivers to pay a $5.00 a month tax to keep buggy-whip manufacturers afloat.
Please, God, tell me April 1 has come early.
I didn't lace the idea of Trents windfall closely enough to the idea that as contracts expire others will follow as theirs do likewise.I believe that will create a big enough suction to displace L.A.s grip on most all except soundtrack work and those who desire to live there anyway.True,they are living off the publicity they paid for in blood but it's a good start to the avalanche.
The cool thing about the net is you can search for the community you have in common with your desires and you can paint your fame over an area as big as your imagination and drive allow.Artists will have to do the work previously done by the industry themselves but then most artists have a circle of friends and fans willing to help anyway.I believe as the industry wanes natural supply and demand physics will take over and this business model will occur.
Thanks for the reply.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
seriously though I would love to see how much $ the industry spent on lawsuits vs. sales losses (that arent accurate anyways since it doesn't account for crap music, boycotting and poor judgement and marketing) since there has been nearly zero $ ever recovered from p2p lawsuits since... well people that don't have the $ to buy a britney cd in the first place won't have the $ to pay judgements or settlements. Personally, I am tired of this zero-evidence notion that file sharing will kill the industry. Every time we have heard this line in the past (for video cassettes, cassette tapes, CD-R, etc.), it has been proven false. Let's try it and find out. Once the real evidence is in, then I will be interested in discussing responses. the funny thing is that this will never happen since "piracy" is such a catch all claim for the industry- all of the propaganda can be directly funneled into it. People are boycotting> piracy, slow sales> piracy, poor marketing> piracy, bad economy> piracy - most average consumers do not have the economic knowledg to understand the ebb and flow of consumables to understand that there are other factors that go into PNL reporting and will just buy into it....
Yours truly, for example. I never download music from the Internet because music I like isn't on the Internet (believe it or not) or I already have it. I would feel very robbed if this fee were forced on me and would consider a lawsuit to oppose paying it. 'Taint my fault they don't know how to code security.
Cranky educator.