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ARIA Sells a Licence for DJs to Format Shift Music
lucas writes "The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has set up a new licence to let DJs format shift their music to use at gigs.
DJs will need to pay a licence fee to copy music they already own legally from one format to another for ease of use, and as a back-up in case originals get lost or stolen.
Criminal penalties for DJs involved in "music piracy" are up to sixty thousand dollars and 5 years imprisonment. There are also on-the-spot fines of over one thousand dollars."
Botany Bay is actually quite a nice place now. The people we really don't like get sent to Woomera, Christmas Island and Naru.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Because certain types of copies are allowed. For instance, you're allowed to have a copy of a program on your hard drive and in RAM. You can have a copy sitting in a hard drive cache. The intent behind copyright is that you purchase it for a purpose (and likely the DJs had to purchase a more expensive version that allows public performance) and you can use it for that purpose.
I've always thought the music industry should have to pick. Either they can sell you a physical media with which you can do whatever you want (public performances or personal use) or sell you a license to use the music in a certain way (private use only, but you have the right to the music in any format you want for that purpose).
With the number of DJs here, I would not expect all of them to even know of this rule or for the ARIA to suddenly take all "offenders" to court. Don't feed the hands that bite you!
-Aly.
Sounds like a fair deal, presuming DJs are free to charge a similar fee back for all that previously free advertising of ARIA's recording artists. Without their music played in venues, their sales plummet and music loses mind-share as a passtime to other forms of entertainment such as the Internet, video games, cinema tickets, etc.
Wait wait wait, how the hell does that work? Let's say a DJ works on a laptop as opposed to spinning vinyl or CDs... He buys a CD, rips it to MP3 and loads it into his software. Even if he's paying ASCAP fees for the use of the music (or whatever the equivalent organization is in Australia), he gets fined $60k unless he pays a SEPARATE fee for the ability to work from MP3s instead of the original CDs? My mind just exploded. As long as he's paying his ASCAP (or whatever) fees, who gives a shit whether he's working off a CD or an MP3?
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Because a DJ is ALREADY paying royalties to ARIA for the right to spin those songs at a gig. ARIA is proposing to make DJs pay an *additional* fee on top of what they're already paying in order to format shift their music for convenience (i.e. playing tunes as MP3s out of a laptop, or creating compilation CDs to reduce the number of CDs that need to be taken to a gig). This is wrong because it makes absolutely no difference to the listeners. They just hear music coming out of the speakers regardless of what format it's in on the DJ's side.
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They should also have to choose between legal and technological protection. If they want to use DRM to enforce policies that aren't based in copyright law (and there's no way for a piece of software to distinguish what's legal fair use), then I see no reason to grant them copyright protection. The purpose of copyright is to promote creation and enrich society. Fair use is a necessary part of that, as is the ability to use the work after the copyright period expires. They should not be allowed to renege on half of the bargain and expect the other half to continue to hold.
If they want DRM, fine. But pick one. They shouldn't be allowed to lock up our culture and expect legal assistance in doing so.
It surely seems like you don't buy a song from ITunes, and you don't buy a movie from Blockbuster, etc. At the very least they should stop using the term buy.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
> 2. Buy a license to listen to the music. Then you can media-shift all you want, as you are licensing the music. You never have to rebuy it either, if your disk breaks, just download the music, you already have a license.
They can simply say that you have the license to listen to the music on THAT media you purchased.
A recording industry association can't arbitrarily define themselves what's legal and what isn't under copyright law. They are bound by copyright law as much as everybody else.
Format shifting is not a public performance. Therefore, it should be covered under standard copyright law and not require separate licensing.
Public performance of the music can, of course, be subject to licensing fees. But the recording industry shouldn't be able to set licensing fees based on which media or equipment the DJ happens to use.
Pressing a bunch of copies of a CD and selling them/giving them away is a completely different matter than format shifting music for your own personal convenience and not giving anything away except as part of a performance for which you are paying royalties.
You also failed to answer the question I specifically asked. Tell me why, in a fair and just world, should ARIA be allowed to charge extra for the convenience of format shifting when no sales are lost and no person hears the music except the DJ who purchased it and his audience who are covered by the peformance royalty that the DJ is paying. No copyright holder is in any way harmed by allowing DJs for format shift. Charging DJs an extra royalty harms the DJs by forcing them to haul their entire physical CD collection to gigs (and risk them getting lost, stolen, or damaged) instead of a hard drive or compilation CDs.
Your argument seems to be based on the "letter of the law." Tell me why that law should be interpreted in that way instead of in a way that allows DJs more convenience without harming copyright holders in any way.
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Ahh, I see where you're getting at. You could have made your position a little more clear. As a musician who owns a few copyrights of my own, I disagree that copyright shouldn't exist. Someone who creates a work should be allowed to have a say in how it can be distributed, and nobody should be allowed to make money off of somebody else's work without compensating them. I license my work under a Creative Commons license that allows it to be freely distributed, but if someone wants to make money off it they have to make their own licensing deal with me, which would involve compensating me. I believe that this is perfectly fair, and this could only happen with some sort of copyright law in place.
I do agree, however, that copyright law should be significantly overhauled. For starters, durations should be shortened (20 years or less), and copyright ownership should not be transferable.
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The analogy is flawed: they block off something I have the right do do.
To extend your analogy: suppose you own property next to mine and I have legal right-of-way. Now, you're not allowed to build a gate and not give me the key, since I have the right to pass over your property to mine. That is what DRM is trying to do: they 'guard' their property in a way that also blocks my legal rights (ie fair use copying, distribution after copyright ends).
Would Lord of the Rings, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, have been made if there had been no way to recoup the costs of production? Somebody has to pay for these things to get made, and people generally don't give away millions of dollars without a way to get it back. Without at least a temporary monopoly on their work so they can earn back the cost of making it, it wouldn't get made in the first place, that is how copyright benefits society. Copyright makes it financially viable to make art for society to enjoy.
On the other hand, copyrights need to expire to encourage people to keep creating new works all the time rather than being able to sit back and cash in on one work for the rest of their lives. Copyright expiration benefits society by allowing timeless works that have become part of our culture (i.e. anything that people still remember 20 years later) to enter the public domain.
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What's with the intrusive new ugly "Reply to this" and "Parent" buttons here?
Horrible. Is there any way to go back to the old appearance?
Because sane copyright-laws have an exception where NORMAL copies that are needed for NORMAL usage of the work are exempt, as are temporary copies arising as a natural side-effect of the use.
To run a computer-program, for example, you MUST copy the bits from CD-rom to hard-disc, from hard-disc to RAM, from RAM to CPU, some parts of the program end up in CPU-cache. Parts of the artwork end up in RAM on the graphics-card. Temporary copies exist as electrical signals traveling towards screen and speakers, as soundwaves in the air and as photons of various frequencies between your screen and your eyes.
Similarily, just listening to a CD creates (more or less temporary) copies in wires, buffers, DACs and assorted cabling.
Even just reading a book creates short-lived copies. There's a continous stream of photons containing the page you're on traveling outwards in all directions from the page. Fragments of the work will stick more or less permanently in various neural structures in your head and so on.
Nevertheless, doing these things are not equivalent, in a practical sense, to COPYING the work. Rather they are nessecary and natural consequences of USING the work in the ordinary way.
As I said, in sane copyright-law, such copies are explicitly allowed. In Norway, for example, copying a CD to a different format like a mp3-player, or to a backup-tape is explicitly allowed.