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EMI Says Online File Storage Is Illegal
WiglyWorm writes "MP3tunes CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicize EMI's ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren't allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service."
As a record store owner, My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the RIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
This evening, m
Sadly, in some markets, he's probably correct. I can't speak for America, though I'd assume the Fair Use doctrine would apply, but in the UK I'm fairly certain that it's still, albeit perhaps only technically, illegal (sorry, I couldn't find a more authoritative source) to copy CDs for any purpose, whether for transfer to an iPod for practical purposes or simply as an archival backup.
I'd hazard a guess, insofar as I'd want to try and infer reason in the minds of music executives, that online storage is probably perceived as being equal to distribution via p2p. I hope that, some day, a music company might at least try to employ someone familiar with IT. Presumably it'd save them a little time and money.
Man, you can't even trust the trolls on /. anymoe... this post is a dupe!
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 28 2005, @11:49AM
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Oh where are my mod points when I need them?! Well done. You really sound like a christian rock record store owner dick. 'It's nothing to do with the economy'. Brilliant!
While I'll simplify it down some, here are the two most important things you need to know about copyright.
Making copies of works that you didn't create is illegal unless you are doing it for personal use (fair use, there's a whole set up things that fall in this catagory).
Making copies of works you didn't create for the purposes earning money is illegal unless you have the copyright holders permission.
The problem is run into in the nature of the service being offered. This isn't merely storage, they are distributing the works. The way it seems to run, this isn't a common carrier thing that is being run in good faith, like say any random hosting company, this is a company that is advertising that it will distribute copies of music that you bought from someone else to you on any device you want. That changes the rules, they can't do that without a license, even if you have 5000 copies at home.
You do have the right to store it, they don't have the right to actively distribute it, especially, if my impression is correct, their goal is to make money doing this.
Burn Hollywood Burn
I submit that the most siginficant aspect of this story is that it demonstrates now the artificial market interference of the "anti-piracy" enforcers is already being used to arbitrarily restrict user freedoms in areas that are only incidentally related to the purpose of copyrights.
This kind of rippling ramification will become ever more common as the legacy duplication and distribution industries get ever more desperate in protecting their obsolote business model from technological progress.
...from EMI, or any of their ilk? They have to take this stance, no matter how inane in and of itself in this particular situation, because anything which remotely gives the consumer the overt or even tacit appearance of 'control' over music is anathema to their desire to re-vision their 'IP' as a 'pay-per-play' resource.
"Get off the cross - we need the wood" - Tori Amos
I don't even understand how they can say this. If there isn't a copyright infringement going on here (I'd understand that), then what's the problem? By saying this, they're illegalizing the entire online music business? Some holding EMI's own music, like iTunes.
Or is this about some obscure difference between online storage and online storage?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I can't find anything in the woefully short article or the summary that supports the claim of the title.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
and, all of them are legal files - video depos and pleadings.
The file-format boy to shove it.
Whether it is legal or not......
Whether it is right or wrong....
No one gives a fuck.............
âoeDo what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.â
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As a record store owner, My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
The product has become dangerous. We used to buy 12 inch LP's, cut tapes for the car, play them with slides, etc. They have gotten the word out that most of these activities are now a legal liability that can cost you thousands of dollars. My peak piracy days 30 years ago was my peak purchasing days. The average then for the population was 2 LP purchases / year per capita in the USA.
My kids have grown up with iPods and the like. The music prices haven't changed. They have 30 Gig players and you still charge dribble prices for content. If the petrolium industry sold gas like you sell music, we would be arriving with empty 16 gallon tanks and finding the stuff in pretty packages that will fit nicely in your shirt pocket. Alternative fuel is the order of the day just like alternative distribution. The players have changed. The product value has changed. Back catalog is sold at full retail. There is no exchange or upgrade path for worn media. Care to exchange some 8 track tapes and Compact Cassette tapes? I have the full license to play them, but you don't back the license to ensure I am able to enjoy it.
Why is no one buying CDs?
That one is simple. I'm supprised you had to ask, but in no paticular order...
1 The loudness war
2 High prices for little content
3 Competition for the entertainment dollar (pay TV, satelite radio, cell phones, computer games, MP3 players, and others that had no or little presense 30 years ago.)
4 Retaliation for the industry's nukes on student's finances.
5 DRM on CD's makes them incompatible and dangerous to use. I don't keep a list of safe to play CD's. The lack of the Philip's Compact Disc logo on the good bad and ugly makes shopping by the cover very difficult.
6 Free music online (not piracy)
7 Piracy (fueled by all of the above)
8 Restrictions on use... Can't leagaly do the Carson Williams light show legaly unless you buy one of the approved for use licenses from Lights-o-Rama or play it in public at a reception, etc. No weekend DJ'ing for me.
8 ?? did I miss anything?
In summary, the product is compressed, possibly won't be transferrable to the kids iPod, can't be used with a Power Point Slideshow for a wedding, can't be used for the reception dance, super expensive to keep a current library for the above, and is a very expensive legal liability if your kids post it. The product is expensive, may be defective with no recourse, and a legal liability.
"When the kids went to bed, my wife asked me, "Will we be able to keep the house, David?""
I used to work in the VCR and TV repair business. When 20 inch color TV's were $400 and VHS VCR's were $600, people would pay the rate for a couple hours it took to repair them. Now purchase prices are near what a repair used to cost. I kept my house, but found a new line of work. Your field isn't the only one hit by distribution channels providing a cheaper product.
As long as your supplier is stuck on dribbling out product and sitting on back catalog and fighting hard to keep the ASP high, the demand in going to be small. Get used to it.
If your supplier was smart, they could sell compilation CD's of high quality MP3's of back catalog. They would be iPod, Zen, Zune ready, high quality and affordable. I would pay good money for high quality collections of Chicago, Pink Floyd, Styx, Led Zepplin, etc. Toss the restrictions on use and sell collections of 50's, 60's, & 70's dance music with permission to DJ the stuff may sell a bunch more. Many DJ consoles now play MP3's instead of CD's. Make loading the MP3's on the device hard drive legal instead of a legal liability.
See any trend here. Piracy i
The truth shall set you free!
The music industry continues to endear itself to everyone.
EMI wants to gain access to copies of files that users have on their MP3tunes accounts. Now, I'm assuming that you can't just go in and browse the list of files that a user has, otherwise they'd have shot themselves in the foot by arguing on privacy grounds.
So I'm assuming that EMI came along and said, "We want all the MP3s stored in user X's account." As it's unlikely that any user has an account filled 100% with EMI music, EMI would be given access to a significant amount of music from other labels, without the consent of the copyright holders. Which seems very hypocritical, even if it's legitimised by a court order.
... of stupidy! Next stage: memory brain cells are illegal! You can store music in them!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Ironically, the parent post seems to have been ripped from the diary of "Dr Michael Hfuhruhurr" on Kuro5hin, from more than 4 years ago.
See original on Kuro5hin
Don't judge a book just by the cover
Unless you cover just another
And blind acceptance is a sign
Of stupid fools who stand in line
Like
E.M.I
E.M.I
E.M.I --Sex Pistols
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
EMI you either adapt to the internet or leave cuz when will continue to share!
Piracy isn't killing your record sales (as if anyone wants to pirate Christian Rock, are you kidding?). Legit Online stores are killing your store, just as online stores are killing most retail. Almost. Most retail has had to adjust their business model to survive, and most are successfully doing do. Your problem is that you're a whiner and a bully. Blacklist? are you fucking insane? Those kids you threw out of your store were your ticket to a better plan. What you should have done is to give them the CD and ask them to tell people where they got it. And when people come in, you should give them something else for free if they purchase. Advertising, man. Come on, 50% of the CDs on your shelves will never sell anyway, especially when you don't sell the "sick" shit. You need to adjust your model and get with the times. Piracy and online sales are doing nothing but raising the bar for good music. Everyone knows that music gets more exposure by electronic distribution, and that if someone really likes it, they go buy the CD to support the musicians. It's just the shit-ass music that gets pirated and never bought, as well it deserves. Your kids might not have nice clothes, but the even bigger problem is that your store is just clothing the record companies kids, not the musicians' kids. Your new business model (collectively) needs to eliminate the middleman.
So all this time I have been committing a crime?
My mp3's are on my lap top which is connected to the internet.
So my online storage of my MP3's is a violation
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
You assume everyone is yourself. The poster posted their gripes, that's where they're coming from. Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean the post is making it up.
Their comments are real, especially with a wealthier mature audience that's been around long enough to see what's happening.
When times were good, you were entitled to the profits. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, you own the losses as well.
Do you deserve any more consideration than a gas station owner? Competition is fierce; people switch stations to save a penny per gallon. Rising wholesale prices cut into margins, "pay at the pump" delivers most of the profit directly to credit card middlemen. As prices go up, people WILL start to buy less. When alternative energy goes online, maybe they fuel up at home!
When the prices of CDs went UP at a time when the cost of most other content (videos, etc.) went DOWN, that was a strategic blunder made on your behalf by the buffoons at the music companies.
I spend very little on music. The latest music does not appeal to me, and at these prices they can keep it.
You might have found a wannabe pirate in your store and thought you discovered the problem. The invisible problem is the customer who shops at Walmart or Amazon instead of your place. Come back and tell us about the evils of piracy when Walmart closes their CD department due to lack of sales.
Walmart killed off many local merchants, and then we discovered Walmart was frequently out of stock or didn't carry what I wanted anyway. I call it "EmptyMart". I buy a lot of things online via Amazon that I used to buy locally. But like I said, I seldom buy CDs at all.
I doubt piracy alone is causing the problem, or even a significant part of it. Walmart is probably killing you on price and Amazon is killing you on convenience. I don't have the answers, but if you wipe out piracy tomorrow, don't expect the business to get much better. The wholesale price of CDs would probably go up AGAIN, killing off whatever remained of the market.
The music industry is your business partner, and they are just not that bright. I suggest you consider re-evaluating the local market and your efforts to serve it. Just don't open a gas station. If all else fails, start a doughnut shop next to the police department.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
This is no different from any other online backup service that will copy the file contents of your hard drive (or flash drive, DVD-rom, pretty much whatever you point it at) for retrieval later. And they're all 100% legal.
If I were coding this site, complete with online backup of purchased tunes, there's no way I'd actually keep 89,227 copies of Britney Spears' latest toxic waste on my servers at 4MB (give or take) per copy. No, I'd keep a DB table of links to one master copy of the file, possibly replicated across multiple servers depending on traffic levels. This would likely be the same file that would be downloaded in the event of a purchase. Call me an old fashioned developer but despite 20 cent per gig storage, I still refuse to waste it on unneeded duplication of files.
So, almost certainly their backup service is a massive shared folder that all their backup service users have access to. Large shared folder? Multi-user access? Starting to sound a bit more like the loathed P2P the record labels love to hate, isn't it?
Funny note: CAPTCHA word for this post was "AVARICE".
I haven't bought a new CD in years. Is it because I'm "pirating"? Nope, I don't even download music anymore.
The reason: I already OWN all the good music that I want. There is NOTHING out there new that I want.
If the RIAA wants people like me to buy new music, they need to produce new music that I want. Which isn't manufactured teeny pop and whiney emo "rock". Sorry, but the days of being able to cater to teens and have them drive the adults into buying that crap are over. The US population is getting older, and if you want anyone over the age of 30 to buy your crap, you are going to have to (gasp) maybe consider releasing content that we LIKE?
Corporatism != Free Market
ask Trent Reznor or the guys from Radiohead.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Actually, the problem with that is that it assumes that everyone labels their music the same. Even with iTunes over a network, you can still see people label the same tracks differently. it also doesn't take in to account track quality
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home!
Here we go again ...
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If you buy music, you can make all the copies you want for your own use, and store them any where you want. Duh!
I will not be supprised when I see an article like, "EMI claims breathing air without paying them is illegal".
the greed of the movie and music industry, and their twisting and lying about copyright laws is just over the top.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Mixing and mastering engineers seem to be working in the "just saturate every frequency and let's go grab a beer" mode lately.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The record companies just don't like progress. They are stuck in the stone ages and can't get out. It's like any other "new invention" it will eventually cause someone to lose their jobs because of services no longer needed. But on the other hand it creates new jobs too. It's just a matter of adapting to the new way of doing things.
Tech Alpha Computer Forums
I own a cassette tape store. Cassette tape sales has drastically dropped and I'm getting this sinking feeling that the major labels aren't producing this format much anymore since they keep trying to push me to try a newer format, CD. I don't want to adapt because I think tapes will make a come back even with the problem of people making each other mixed tapes.People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
Can I bum a sig?
Did you know, incidentally, that today is World Book and Copyright Day? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_and_Copyright_Day)
The same guy who started this service was also behind MP3.com which did pretty much what you describe. I think he lost out legally on that because that actually was distribution.
I want to shoot the messenger!
In a related development, the U.S. FDIC has ruled that it is illegal to keep dollar bills of any denomination in banks. Details to follow....
Then not only are you an old-fashioned developer, you're a lousy old-fashioned developer with no knowledge of the wider world your software is operating within. Security and legal concerns (especially legal concerns) trump the $0.00078 savings, by your estimated storage price, per copy of "Toxic". This is especially true when the architecture you're discussing would cost more time and money to implement than the safer version, what with the necessity of acoustic fingerprinting or some other technology to make sure that User1's "Britney Spears - Toxic.mp3" is the same as User2's "Toxic - Britney Spears (ub3r h0t ch1ck).mp3" is the same as User3's "251 - BS - TOXIC.mp3".
Please, by all that's holy, tell me you're just over-simplifying for the masses. Actually, don't tell me that, because there's only two options here:
- 1. You're over simplifying a complicated technology, just like the idiots at EMI/SonyBMG/ do to confuse the non-technical people judging a case, or
- 2. You're not even a developer (or are someone who's written a half-dozen PHP scripts for their buddy's website and thinks they're a developer) and are just blowing smoke on this topic.
Either way, this absurd and technically inappropriate answer isn't doing anything except to muddy the waters. Please leave that to the professionals at EMI.My guess is this is coming from a computer science major at a university. Or someone who has never built a customer facing application. And certain someone who has no appreciation
This will not work, because I might want to store a 256kbps copy, somebody else might want to store a FLAC copy, others may have the radio version, others will storc a LAME encoded version, others insist on using VBR. Other people want to use the apple mp3 codes, but 320kbps. Other people might do song mash up. Other people might mispell the name Brittany Spearz
You've built a nice little app to demonstrate things. But it won't work in the real world. It would be very user hostile app.
So you would rather waste developer's time, which costs actual money, to create a system where people would get back the same music, with the same ID3 tags and the same name, and where those files were somehow created from a digital library of music and a db of what the file looked like when the user uploaded it?
Yeah, great idea. Call me old-fashioned, but complex solutions to non-problems are bad. Storage is so cheap now that it's practicaly free. Think of it as free, and stop wasting resources that are actually scarce to save space.
Mister Crowley, What went on in your head? Oh, Mister Crowley, Did you talk to the dead?
Your life style to me seemed so tragic With the thrill of it all. You fooled all the people with magic, Yeah, you waited on satan's door.
Mr. Charming, Did you think you were pure? Mr. Alarming, in nocturnal rapport; Uncovering things that were sacred Manifest on this Earth, Conceived in the eye of a secret And they scattered the afterbirth
Mr. Crowley, Won't you ride my white horse? Mr. Crowley, It's symbolic, of course. Approaching a time that is classic I hear that maiden's call. Approaching a time that is drastic, Standing with their backs to the wall.
Was it polemically sent? l want to know what you meant. I want to know, I want to know what you meant. Yeah!!!
(Lyrics by Ozzie Ozbourne. "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" is the self-styled "Beast of the Revelation" Alesteir Crowley's creed.)
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Well, there's a precedent for what these douchebags are saying. Let's not forget that they've already sued a company like that out of existence - mp3.com.
- I'd like to see them justify why they should get any period of protection under copyright law when they have deliberately and maliciously encoded it like a trade secret, so that it can't be used in the public domain at the end of their protection period. IP law exists to get trade secrets into the public domain, and out of obscure encodings & protection mechanisms.
- I'd like to see a nuisance case where one of their customers sue them for breach of their license for personal use.
- I'd like to see them get bitch slapped solidly by the WTO or some such for their pitiful attempts to disguise regional price fixing behind copyright licensing
I'd like to see them explain why they get to ignore the rules completely, but expect the most deluded and onerous interpretation of their customers obligations to be taken seriously. That I would like to see.thx e
That sounds like an awful lot of work to save a few cents on storage. And besides, how do you decide whether two files are the same? Compare checksums? You'll still end up with a separate copy of the same song for every bit rate your users have selected and each encoder or download source your customers use. On top of that, for each of those you'll end up with separate copies of each song for each variation on the file's metadata (e.g., if somebody uploads a file by "Britny Spears" you can't very well return them one by "Britney Spears"). I don't know about you, but I frequently edit my tracks' metadata and I'd be pretty irritated if a service that is just supposed to store my files were to purposely alter them. I suppose you could strip the metadata out, store it in another DB table, and reinsert it when the user demands, but then you're doing even more work, not to mention that with many files any such alteration might constitute a clear violation of the DMCA.
I find that extremely unlikely.
well then I guess they can make a suit against MS since Livemesh is now beta
You're already at +5, so I'll just thank you for the best summary of this situation I've seen recently.
The real root issue is that our justice system is chronically uninformed and attempting to deal with issues that require education in a wide variety of subjects. Think about it. A judge could be asked to hear arguments on copyright issues that include technical knowledge on everything from CD recorders to MP3 compression and storage.
The problem is that this issue is not easily fixable and is inherent in the justice system because of how it is designed to function. Most judges are older people. This is a GOOD thing. The average age of the supreme court justices is 66. According to wikipedia, the average age of US state supreme courts is 53. And therein lies the paradox. My Dad is 47. And while I think he would make a good judge, he knows virtually nothing about computers or technology. In my experience, this is typical of middle aged people and older people.
In 15-20 years, this problem will have solved itself as a new generation of judges who are more tech savvy will have replaced or begun to replace the older generation and media companies will hopefully not be able to get away with the things they do now. But once that happens, a new set of issues will be presented that relate to new technology and that the new generation of judges will know nothing about.
It is hard on a person to tour, most small bands lose money touring and you talk about bands that make millions and how hard it is on them....... but the argument is about RECORD COMPANIES. You admit that copyright is misused, you must also know record com
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without me having to pay upstream because I only bought one copy
This is the falling down point. Otherwise, there's little other than expense and preference to prevent such a system you're talking about from being used. I think it's even been tried.
I think it's even been tried. Licensing fees are the usual sticking point, not so much because you need the server to keep track of what songs sold, which is easy, but because most of the labels wanted as much per track as they'd get per CD. So their being greedy killed the business.
So it would work, just you'd have a fairly large monthly check to send to each of the recording labels, depending on the usage of the machine. In today's MP3 age, you might even be able to get them to bend on the pricing part now.
I don't read AC A human right
This is the same Michael Robertson who founded MP3.com, a company whose death knell was sounded by a lawsuit from UMG over similar issues of online file storage and intellectual property. Robertson has a long history of run-ins with the recording industry; it'll be interesting to see how this one pans out.
Should be "EMI Says Online Music File Storage Is Illegal".
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
The usual job I hear that analogy used for is the buggy whip maker instead of blacksmiths.
;)
Yeah, for the GP, there are still buggy whip makers. There's just a lot fewer of them now.
Blacksmiths, for the most part, I think have transitioned to 'machinists'.
I don't read AC A human right
Copyright law in Canada and the USA specifically makes exceptions for archival/backup uses, I bought something im allowed to make as many copies as needed to insure ill always have access to it. For most people this takes the form of burning a copy of a CD and placing the orignal in storage while using the copy, but with high speed net online storage is a reasonable option too.
On the subject of techno-illiterate executives though, I'd love to see a recording of sombody trying to explain how a RAID array works to one of these jokers.
Personally, what I think that IP product* companies and people need to concentrate less on surpressing piracy and more on attracting customers and profit.
.5% we'd have to institute 100% bag checking. This will cost X hours of employee labor at Y rate, plus cost us Z business as people stop shopping here. It's not worth that 50% reduction.
Just like a storefront business doesn't perform the measures necessary to stop 100% of shoplifting, music companies shouldn't either. Why? Because the draconian measures necessary piss of the paying customers, ultimately costing sales. So a store will go: In order to drop our shrink rate from 1% to
I suggest the music industry concentrate less on trying to stop piracy, especially with draconian DRM, and start trying to please customers. Offer me a good, convienent deal, and I'll take it.
Over 50% of my media problems have been traced to DRM. Software refusing to run, having to enter key codes, tracking down key codes to install. Media refusing I legitimately paid for refusing to play until I crack the DRM.
You might not be able to beat the pirate's price, but you can beat their quality and convenience. People are willing to pay for that.
*Such as music, movies, books, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Mr Crowley liked it, but I believe it is generic Satanism (not too sure, I'm no expert on sub-sets of Christianity). I've also read "An thou dost no harm, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" which seems a little more reasonable.
Please define online.
If I buy a CD and I put it in my PC, I will be able to access it through ssh and thus it is online. So even though nobody else can access it, it is a CD I bought I am not able to put the CD in my machine, because it is connected to the Interwebs.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Any album worth buying is available used, and that way it's cheaper and the RIAA gets nothing from the sale.
Boycott the RIAA - buy your music legally.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I read it in his "autohagiography but unfortunately it was three decades ago and my memory is short, and I was smoking Thai stick at the time.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Completely OT, and responding to Anna Merikin's journal, you have misunderstood DNA quite a bit. Comparison of human to chimp is not based on books containing mostly the same words. Genes are higher level than words; they either encode proteins (equivalent, say, to a class in OO), or they regulate (equivalent perhaps to a functional specification in a functional language.)
If we found that two programs had 98.5% of their classes almost indistinguishably similar, and 98.5% of their functions had the same behaviour and signature, any change in the order, or which classes occurred in which files, would not be a strong argument that they were different programs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Excuse me, but if they want to bring the argument down to bit-by-bit reproduction of the artwork, I don't see any difference between a backup copy and a copy done by the Operating System to load the file into memory and then play it through the media system.
If I obtained the music legally and I'm allowed the latter, why should I not be allowed the former ? Otherwise, who would be liable for this ? Surely not the user as it's the computer system (namely the OS and the player) that needs to load/copy the file from the storage in order to handle it. As you recall this was the original reason why we need a "license" to run a software on our computer, instead of simply purchasing a copy of the original...
And what happens when I want to replace my hard drive or computer or even "simply" repartition the drive in order to organise my files better ? Heck, even if I move the "My Document" folder around I'm actually making a copy (and again it's the OS that requires this, as the paper analogy doesn't apply here...)
And to those in UK, may I remind you that many stores nowadays can sell you music already in DRMless files, so there is no need to extract it from CDs, while I agree on the inverse loophole that prohibits format-shifting there. Although, if you dig deep down in the technicalities, when you legally purchase and then download a music file from one of these stores it's you actually "writing the bits" (i.e. making the copy) and not the store giving you a copy that they made...
Food for thought
NO MP3s on there.
Case closed.
You're NOT distributing it and they have no access until they can furnish the long passage of a book that you used for a key. (Complete with your own personal version of l33t-spelling.)
As far as anyone knows, the drives I use for backups, on-site and off, are mine and mine alone. Their contents are mine and mine alone. Anybody doesn't like it can go suck an egg.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Maybe I'm just a naive developer, but wouldn't they just calculate the hash of each file uploaded, and if it matches that of one already on disk, avoid a second copy?
Retrospect works exactly like that. It uses a hash of the file to determine if it is already backed up, irrespective of the path name and other normal attributes. Then it just keeps a record of "this hash key goes to this path with these attributes".
Which is handy when you copy a bunch of stuff from one node to another; you don't choke your backup server with copies, but you can still re-create each machine from a Snapshot.
Obviously, users with different ID3 tags in what started out as the same file will still result in multiple copies....
How long have Sony sold ATRAC recorders (with program to make a copy) in the UK?
DAT tapes have been sold WITH serial copy protection so that when you COPY music on, it can't be copied again. Mandated by the content industry, sold in the UK and if you can't copy music to a DAT at all, why the serial copy protection?
MP3 players have been sold for YEARS in the UK with no sniffle from the content industry (some, like Sony, are content providers).
Years of ignoring a law which, to be honest, is only civil infraction, means they are estopped in the UK from taking action now.
Unless they want to buy all the MP3 players back off us at their original retail price (with inflation costs added).
Ya, there are already filesystems (like Venti/Fossil for Plan 9) that do the hashing for each block written on hd.
9. People have better means to sample all music these days, and no longer need to deafly buy music they think maybe they might like, but actually do not like (once they play it). So now they buy only what they know they like.
I first bought music in the vinyl LP era. I could not sample the music. I had to read what was on the album to figure out if maybe I might like it. Radio played only a limited set. The record stores would not open albums to play them in the store (because they could not sell that one as new). I ended up with about 60% that I really would not have purchased had I heard it in advance. But it was the norm of the times to actually have a lot music you didn't like. That, or sell them at a used record store (which the music industry wanted to shut down because they knew that much of their sales revenue model depended on people buying music they didn't like). When CDs came along, it actually got worse because less was printed on the smaller cover.
Now I there are plenty of ways to sample the music in advance. Yup, that file sharing thing lets you do that. I'm sure many people cheat and keep their samples. But those of us that actually buy music believing it somehow supports the artists are not buying the music we decide we do not like so much.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
First and foremost EMI/RIAA/etc, we are not CONSUMERS , we are CUSTOMERS . Please correct your spelling.
We do not "consume" music, we do not "consume" goods. We are not an organism that feeds on these digital goods like a virus.
Second, once you start treating us like customers, we will then begin behaving like them.
Since the discussion seems to regard "Piracy" and DRM, rather than EMI's ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit, I'd like to chime in here. I don't choose to steal software or music. (i.e. I think I have like four old full licenses of Win98 around here somewhere.) I do believe most of my neighbors would like to buy their software from a blanket on the sidewalk. OTOH, I REALLY (RLY RLY) HATE keying in 25 digits, and having WGA phone home. I hate DRM disabling my files from legitimate use. These are my issues, oh , and making legitimate use illegal, like this EMI issue, or pretty much the whole DMCA.
Hopefully when ATX-compatible computers go obsolete FOSS will still be legal. Then I'll stick it to the man. (Got that, Bill?) I think the social issues should have social solutions. (Economic sanctions for illegal publishing of copyrighted works eh? And wottabout laws to protect artists from those tricky middlemen?)
I think most people would like to see some legitimate copyright reform. Just like the patent fiasco- Same thing, really. We sold the "Democracy" so vox populi doesn't get the new laws written. I don't know about NY, but here in the People's Republic of California, recalling judges seems to have been co-opted by the moneyed interests as well, so a bad decision in this case just might be in (someone's) best interest. Who knows?
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
That is a bit naive. ;) Google around for "acoustic fingerprint", and you'll probably find an explanation of why it's necessary to use something other than a bitwise comparison (which is what a hash or checksum would basically boil down to in this example) when comparing audio files. An actual explanation of it would get me slapped down quick for offtopicness. :D
Any album worth buying is available used
The more it's worth buying, the harder it is to find someone selling theirs used.
Now having said that, it's true that convenience and cost have higher importance to most consumers; but there are still some good butchers around and have very loyal customer bases.
i'd think that record shop owners would be in a similar situation. For instance, i would LOVE to have a local record shop that carried European metal like Luca Turilli or Nightwish. And there may be other clever ways of leveraging knowledge of expertise as well as the benefits of having a brick and mortar place to entice clients. But, yes, i will agree that it is a VERY dangerous time for record shop owners and that most will vanish in the next few years (but didn't that trend already start many years ago with the Big Boxes?)
The reason: I already OWN all the good music that I want. There is NOTHING out there new that I want.
On the other hand there are lots of us who have an album or two of artists we like and didn't buy the rest because of the price 30 years ago. We would still like to complete the collections but can't justify the package price. Get a clue. Much of the stuff on BT is the oldies but goodies. The kids are downloading the pop junk and the oldies as they find the good stuff. I have 2 teens at home. I have backed up their 30 Gig players. About half of their stuff is over 15 years old. They have everything from rap, metal, screamers, and techno to Queen, Louis Armstrong and Chubby Checker.
Not a single radio station in our area even considers playing that variety.
The truth shall set you free!
Since they know they have been beaten, and have in the past had control over the hordes of money they were making from music sales, now they are just grasping at straws. It's almost as if they have someone working for them who just sits around all day thinking of new ways to screw the mp3 downloaders. The funny thing is, that it is illegal to share out your music, but it is not illegal to download it.
Surely there wouldn't be that many encoder combinations people would use. If there are 10000 copies of the same song uploaded, I'd think you'd find several groups of files that were identical, each group corresponding to a different encoder/settings combination. Using acoustic fingerprinting seems like it would bring more legal issues, since that would be closer to redistribution, as the file served back to the user might not match what he sent; in fact, he could upload a lower quality copy (perhaps obtained from a P2P network), then get back a higher quality version.
"If we got rid of most of the dreck and the people who aren't really artists
that would not be such a bad thing."
Piracy is nothing compared to the damage THAT would do to the Labels.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
They don't hear or don't care about DRM, about the RIAA, or about the loudness war.
True, these are the people voting against me in my boycott of anything DRM. It's the only reason Apple sells any DRM music. It's just not bad enough to be totally broken. It is incompatible enough to severly slow sales, which is why they have the higher quality DRM free stuff, with a higher price. The higher price is to slow the sales to prevent killing all DRM sales. They need to keep DRM revelant to keep single vendor lock-in going. They are not letting DRM free tunes undercut the incompatible DRM interoperability with non-iPod players. Use our players and you can have the music at a discount.. Um not discount, but you don't need the higher priced music.
The truth shall set you free!
Let's take this to its logical conclusion. By EMI's reasoning, you can't legally listen to a CD at all. Pressing the disk to your ear does nothing. The only way to listen to music from a CD is to make a copy of it, format-shifting the information first from physical impressions on the disk to electronic signals and then again to sound waves. You can then listen to the sound waves (via another series of format-shifting copies within your body). Note that if anyone else hears your sound-wave copies of the original information, you are now guilty of distribution.
Much in the same way as the music bigwigs think P2P = infringement (it is a file distribution protocol, and nothing else), all mp3 files are not necessarily infringing. I could make mp3 files of my own music, sound effects I've created (or royalty-free sfx), perhaps a personal audio diary, etc., etc. Unless the file names are blatantly obvious, how would anyone know their content without downloading and listening to every one? So now they want mp3 files to be banned from remote online storage because they might be (or even probably are) copyrighted material? Where does that stop? That's like saying that since most child porn images are in JPG format, therefore storing JPGs online is illegal.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
No, no, you're right. I'm pretty sure Mr. C used the short form.
What better place to back your data up to than an internet service that has oodles of mirrors, replaces bad disks et cetera?
And what is there to back up if not your most expensive copyrighted purchases?
I'm not sure why you're attacking the parent post - his absurd and technically inappropriate answer is ONLY absurd and technically inappropriate if it doesn't actually describe what mp3tunes is doing to store these files behind the scenes.
More to the point, has mp3tunes ever come out and specifically SAID that they don't do this?
Funny note: captcha for my reply was "HONEST".
Run an md5sum on the file when it's uploaded to see if it's already in the system. If so just point your DB record to the original entry into the system. Store the filename so that it comes back to the user exactly the same.
You -might- be looking at 16 hours of development time there, probably closer to 8. Pretty much nothing in the scope of total development costs for the system.
It'd be interesting to see just how many of those md5sums would match up.
pfft.
Well, I wouldn't want to get an inferior copy of an mp3 I bought because it matched another's "acoustic fingerprint". Using hashes is a much better way to make sure that everyone is getting the file they bought, even though it wastes more space.
eg, if I bought a 192kbit mp3 from Site X, and someone else bought a 128kbit mp3 from Site Y, and they matched by some other means, I'd hate for the 128kbit one to get stored as the 'definitive' version of that song. (Note that it'd be in the parent site's interests to store the lower bitrate version too - less storage and less bandwidth fees!)
I am so sick of this whole entire issue. These days I just don't listen to anything if it isn't free of copyright or on the radio. There's a good variety of free music out there and I live in a large enough metropolitan area to have a good variety of radio available. My wife occasionally buys music but I haven't bought anything in at least several years. I used to have a decent music collection on LP, and then cassette. Of that music, I probably only upgraded around two dozen of my absolute favorite albums to CD and that was long ago. Am I missing out on anything? Not that I'm aware of, and if I'm not aware of it, then I'm obviously not missing it.
I've taken the same philosophy to my computer. I don't purchase OS or software although I do donate in some cases. When my wife's VAIO laptop gets replaced in a year or two, she'll be going Ubuntu and OpenOffice too.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
If its a private backup service ie password etc whats the problem. I anyone really going to give their user and pass out as the RIIA could delete all the files stored. In Australia AFAIK, unless the law has changed, again. Once you bought a CD you can make a backup copy, ie any format, as long as you still hold in your the original CD, BUT, ARIA ( Aust version of RIAA) has made a law that if you play music publicly not only do you have to pay a public performance license but also a media format transfer license as well for every song you have ripped/copied etc. When will these guys stop, (when everyone stopa buying music because they sure everyone who has a original copy and a backup)
Certainly UK lawmakers are not so ignorant or unimaginative. There is no way to play a CD unless you copy the music off of the CD, decode the digital signal, then eventually pipe it out analogue speakers or earphones. You can't play the CD by just looking at it -- by their nature, they are a digital source that needs to be read off by some digital reader and converted before they are useful.
CD players vary by complexity, but even portable walkman-type devices from 20 years ago had buffers that had different capacities and different abilities to keep playing after the CD had spun down. To allow copying of the CD into its computer memory would forbid features like "Skip protection", and spin-down features to save battery life and batteries. This entails less battery use and less toxic garbage to dispose of.
In fact, it might be better to only run the loading of the buffer from the CD when on house current ("the Mains"), then you could not waste battery life on running a CD motor, but could allow preserving battery power for essential operations like amplifying the music through headphones when you are away from the house. Of course, to be useful, with a small device, and rechargeable batteries you can probably get up to 10-12 hours of playback from an entirely solid state device, so you'd want to be able to buffer at least that much CD-music in the device so you could just carry it. If it's rechargeable, you might want even more CD-buffering capacity. I'd expect a computer to facilitate management of the buffer would be useful. Conceivably, with today's storage and portable power solutions, its easy to see how that buffer could hold literally 1000's of CD's.
I'm told that buffer space in a portable player can be optimized by throwing out parts of the audio signal that most people wouldn't hear on a portable player anyway. This can really optimize power consumption, since you can play the same song with as little as 10% of its normal memory-transfer requirements and still have it sound 'fine' for a portable player. These extra bits would waste more power being transferred around, and while its a very small amount, over megabytes and gigabytes of music playing, your' talking moving 10k/minute vs. 1k/minute.
Going from the most basic player, and adding energy-saving features you still need to copy the music off the CD -- I don't know of anyone who can listen to a CD by holding it against their ear or nor any blind person who can read off the vibes by touch. Just doesn't work that way. So where would they draw the line?
What players don't copy the digital CD data off in order to have it eventually turned into sound in some earbuds or speakers?
?
Perhaps you might be more productive in your comments than slinging around ad hominem attacks on people. And perhaps before you definitively state that security and legal concerns trump my $0.00078 savings you had best have a CISSP and a law degree under your belt. Oh, and the savings are a bit more than $0.00078: if we assume we'll need to scale to 500,000 users (0.2% of the adult US population) with an average of 100 tracks each (many will have more) at an average 4MB, then suddenly we are at 200TB of storage. As you are likely aware, building and maintaining a 200TB storage facility is a bit more costly than .078 cents. I would estimate the cost at $175,000 - more than 20 cents per gig due to all the support hardware and software licensing for the SAN.
Now, perhaps "shared folder" was a poor term to use. Would you prefer "shared storage area network"? Either way you still have a large chunk of storage which multiple people are accessing for the purpose of uploading and downloading mp3 files. I guess one distinction I should have made is that while we know that users will only have restricted access to the files in their own account the record companies will do their best to obfuscate this issue and imply that that is not the case - that everyone can get to everything.
Personally, I would not shed a tear if the xxAA and record labels all went bankrupt tomorrow. This whole thing is not about getting the artists what they deserve, it's about squeezing every last dollar out of their precious "IP" and feathering their own beds. If this were not the case, they wouldn't be constantly seeking to have royalty rates for artists lowered, and they would have distributed some of the proceeds from their extortion^W lawsuits to the people they allege were harmed.
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Or do you mean blacksmiths had less iron-shod wheels to fix? AFAIK that would typically be a fairly minor part of a smith's business, and buggies were becoming rubber-shod even without automobiles. BTW, I have a friend who's a farrier and he makes about double what I do (I'm a software developer) - but I don't usually get bruises from where a PC kicked me or stepped on my foot...
So, almost certainly their backup service is a massive shared folder that all their backup service users have access to. Large shared folder? Multi-user access? Starting to sound a bit more like the loathed P2P the record labels love to hate, isn't it?
No, it sounds like compression with very large variable-length codebooks and hash-based lookup tables. What's wrong with a compressed filesystem?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
All 19 hijackers were known terrorists 09-10-2001. Lack of FBI intelligence does not justify warrantless wiretaps..
Someone is trolling indeed. The AC just copy-pasted this article in both posts:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/2/103735/275
I'd guess they're trolling rather than trying to popularize the article, because they posted AC and gave no attribution.
I found it with google.
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