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Don't Stop File-Sharing, Says Former Pink Floyd Manager
Barence writes "The former manager of Pink Floyd has labelled attempts to clamp down on music file-sharing as a 'waste of time.' 'Not only are they a waste of time, they make the law offensive. They are comparable to prohibition in the US in the 1920s,' said Peter Jenner, who's now the emeritus president of the International Music Managers' Forum. 'It's absurd to expect ordinary members of the public to think about what they're allowed to do [with CDs, digital downloads, etc]... and then ask themselves whether it's legal or not.' The comments come as Britain's biggest ISP, BT, said it was confident that Britain's Digital Economy Act — which could result in file-sharers losing their internet connection — would be overturned in the courts, because it doesn't comply with European laws on privacy."
They are comparable to prohibition in the US in the 1920s
I wish a bittorrent network was anything like a speakeasy.
Filesharing may be free as in beer, but it does not deliver you free beer.
And Don't Stop Believin', says Journey (and the cast of Glee)
Summation 2
RIAA, Leave Them Kids Alone!
He is just upset that when the RIAA cracks down, some users will not have gotten a complete Floyd album.
"His name was James Damore."
... another brick in the firewall.
The recording industry can go burn for all i really care, though i'd rather artists just release their stuff in the public domain rather then the public making it their domain. I can completely support hurting the recording industry, but I'd rather do it in a way that respects artist's wishes, even if those wishes be that i should not have their material without paying an overpriced fee to a record company I as a consumer do not support. Though that is just my view on the matter, truly i believe that the ends justify the means when it comes to putting the recording industry out. Beyond that, consumer rights should be protected, and that does include the right to fair use of a purchased product.
are there any /happy/ BT customer? several yt videos and related comments make me believe that's NOT the case.. seem to be the same case of hidden monopoly like with the german telecom...
maybe the big ones have to suck to make the small ones more appealing... without the country-firewall on youtube i wouldn't even know about other sites like dai....
The Somali pirates. These are the ones extorting millions out of companies and threatening to kill people.
If you read TFA while watching an old Judy Garland flick on groovy couches with a bunch of your friends from college, you'll see that the naive interpretation of Jenner's sentiment given in the summary is way off.
Get it right next time, man.
If - like me - you asked yourself who exactly he is: Jenner has managed Pink Floyd, T Rex, Ian Dury, Roy Harper, The Clash, The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Robyn Hitchcock, Baaba Maal and Eddi Reader (Fairground Attraction). And Billy Bragg! Jenner and his wife Sumi set up Sincere Management which managed a range of artists. (from wikipedia)
In Canada we have on the extremely rare occasion had Referendums dealing with important legislation. I believe the last national one we held was in 1992? And there are provincial ones every decade or so. We had one upon the subject of Prohibition in the 20's, which I think actually ended up passing, but was repealed shortly thereafter because of its unenforceable nature. Exactly what Mr Pink up there is saying.
But I disagree when he says
It's absurd to expect ordinary members of the public to think about what they're allowed to do [with CDs, digital downloads, etc]... and then ask themselves whether it's legal or not
No, I don't think it's absurd at all - in Canada we may have still ended up voting in favour of it (51.2 for and 48.8 against) - but at least its not a crazy idea to, you know, ASK the general public.
""It's absurd to expect ordinary members of the public to think "
Really?
"They are comparable to prohibition in the US in the 1920s."
How? A ban on liquor is equated to a making music copying illegal?
hey! look what you get when you cut and paste from TFA. A little rider on the bottom...
Read more: Music chief: preventing file-sharing is a "waste of time" | News | PC Pro http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/359458/music-chief-preventing-file-sharing-is-a-waste-of-
If music, movies, software and books are freely distributed they pretty much have zero value. There will be some very talented folks that are also independently wealthy (or have gotten rich from when their music had value) that can afford to work for nothing. The rest of the world is going to do something that pays the rent and the grocery bill.
This will certainly leave the field open to whomever wants to distribute their stuff because they know thiers has value. Most of this will be like Darwin Reedy that can't imagine the world being without her talent.
Fine, if that is where we really want to go.
Probably the biggest single problem is that we have nearly 100 years of highly-compensated, highly-valued works that without copyright protection and enforcement will be grabbed up by the mega-distribution companies. Sure, you want a complete collection of Henry Fonda's movies - $5. The problem is that it cost the distribution company $0 to do this and the only ones making any money from it are the likes of Walmart and Sony. They can afford to out-distribute anyone else on the planet - no matter how many hits your warez/torrent site gets.
Another side effect here is that without copyright protection and enforcement anything that is passed around for free will also get grabbed up by the mega-distributors if is any good. So they get to make money off the artists anyway. Still. Without any hope of compensation. Quite possibly without any attribution unless it helps sales.
No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to get rid of the distribution companies. They will "make" (as in manufacture) pop stars out of whole cloth as needed just to drive sales. They will have the tools (promotion and distribution) to do this. Sure, you can get rid of the RIAA, Warner Brothers, and EMI. But they will simply be replaced by Walmart, Sony and Amazon. With less favorable terms for the artists and less favorable terms for the purchasors.
By that last sentence, I was referring to still voting for prohibition.
Exactly what Mr Pink up there is saying.
By the way, which one's Pink?
It might just be more creative accounting on their part. They can apply the costs of looking for these "pirates" against the artists earnings, and apply any money collected to their own pockets. They get to screw both the artists and the pirates, while getting more wealth.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I wish I had mod points to give you for that sir.
This ex-manager got cheated out of royalties.
...a momentary lapse of unreason.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
"If people copy this, nobody will make it anymore!"
We keep hearing this, yet new music, movies, books, and software continue to be produced. Why do people continue spouting this crap? It is as if you are praying for it to happen just so you can say, "told you so!"
Palm trees and 8
Ignorantia juris non excusat.
I sympathize, and to some extent I agree, but it's not a legal defense and it doesn't legitimize breaking copyright law. Howabout just not making copies of things you paid for? How hard is that to remember.
I'm a 2000 man.
It's funny to me that so many most of these artists and rebels like to bad-mouth the music industry after they hit it big. But, it's strange, I never once hear them complain when they're nobodies and a big studio shows up to give them a contract and a check. Oh yeah, it's easy to shoot your mouth off now that you're famous. But what about back when you were a club band? What about all those years when the studio was paying your bills before you had even hit it big, when there was a very good chance that you wouldn't even MAKE it big? The studio took a chance on your then and helped promote you, helped MAKE you big. Now it's all-too-easy to forget the risk they took on you back then and the work they did to promote you.
So now when these bands can can take their fame for granted they want to go indie, release their new albums on their website, and start saying that they don't NEED those evil studios after all. But without those evil studios, no one would even give a shit about their albums or concerts. Most of them would still be just another indie club band, like thousands of others who never got signed.
Yeah, it's easy to be generous when you're already in a mansion.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Yea right, like we're going to listen to what a former manager says. I mean, anyone stop to think why they got rid of him?
It doesn't have to be like this
All we need to do is make sure we keep talking
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He's the one who's not Mr Clock.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Mod parent +1 Cigar
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
He said the industry could adopt the model of sites such as Rapidshare, which offers paying subscribers the opportunity to get faster downloads. "If we can get £1 a month from every person on this island [Great Britain] for music... this is getting very close to the current level of revenue for recorded music," Jenner claimed.
I've been saying for years that the music industry (and movie industry) should change their business model on the Internet to sell services rather than copies. Say, "For a low monthly fee, you can have free access to our super-fast servers that have all the newest releases and a huge back catalog (every piece of music ever recorded)." Divide up the profits from that service to pay royalties.
At least speaking for myself, I'm quite sure the music industry could make more money off of me during my lifetime by offering a $X/month service of providing all-you-can-eat drm-free music downloads than... well, any other business model I can think of. Give me a bundled deal including all movies and TV shows, and I'd pay a decent monthly fee.
You probably don't even need DRM. I know, you're thinking that people will just download the whole catalog in a month and then cancel their subscription, but that's really more trouble than it's worth. You have to go through all the trouble of downloading, storing, and backing up all that data. And then your computer crashes or a file gets corrupt, and you have to do it all over again. You quit again, but then a new song comes out that you want, so you'll have to resubscribe.
Most people will may for a service that makes their lives more convenient. Make a service that makes it easy to find and enjoy the media you want. Add a good recommendation engine on top of it. Price it competitively with cableTV+Rhapsody. Watch the money roll in.
Nope, they weren't run by the russian mob. Or at least in no more way than the USA Mob ran entertainment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sinatra).
Odd you bring up RIAA accounting because AllOfMP3 had the monies owed to the artists available, but RIAA refused to take it.
Compare the rates paid to the 3c/song compulsory licensing that radio (which you can tape from for everyone in the US). The money was the same.
Jenner and his business partner King departed from Floyd when Syd was being edged out of the band. From what I've read it doesn't seem he was booted. He moved on to manage other quite successful English bands so it seems he shouldn't be written off too casually.
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By the way, which one's Pink?
This one is pink.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
"paid"
Yeah, it's Time to put a stop to all this Us and Them. These repeated lawsuits just sound like Echoes to me. It's A Great Day for Freedom.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
BTW, Peter Jenner has not been the manager for Pink Floyd since 1968! Peter Jenner stopped being the manager once Syd Barrett was ousted from the band in March of 1968. Since then, it was Steve O'Rourke, (until he died in 2003.) Not sure who to point the finger at, but it sounds like the title of "former Pink Floyd manager" was used solely to grab headlines and attention. He could have easily been referred to as the former manager of Eddi Reader, or Billy Bragg, or even Elvis Costello,... all of them would have been more recent than 40 years ago. Not to beat the horse, but it just seems like an attention grabber to say "former PF manager" when it's been more than 4 decades. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the man and his work, and have loved PF for nearly all my life, but to link Peter with PF in today's headline is merely an attention grabber. IMNSHO.
Heard of the "Loudness War"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
If the fidelity loss was why ripping tapes or LPs or radio was OK, then ripping off CDs should be OK too: they come pre-defidelitied!
Straw man argument, easily debunked by mp3. When you record from FM radio the fidelity loss is comparable to that of ripping a CD to mp3. It would take several generations of tape-to-tape copy to degrade fidelity to the point it became unacceptable to the normal ear.
Here you go.
I wish you were here
It's A Great Day for Freedom...
for several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict, perhaps.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
'It's absurd to expect ordinary members of the public to think about what they're allowed to do [with CDs, digital downloads, etc]... and then ask themselves whether it's legal or not.'
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Just call out "Hey Floyd". Pink will be the other one.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
And magically, I think he (The Pink Floyd Manager) was referring to the idea that people shouldn't have to look at a media file and ask "is this illegal?" Not, "should this be illegal?" In terms of prohibition it's like saying that people shouldn't have to grab a glass and ask themselves, "Is this legal?" When we are putting things into our own bodies the idea of having to ask that question at all is asinine and offensive, likewise if it is regarding consumption of media.
If a band is any good, it will make more money than it can spend in a lifetime from touring. ... going viral is a good thing ... ... and pay them for their art. ... sometimes twice ....
They attract more punters for the live gigs by getting their music 'out there'
I'm tired of paying top dollar for a CD with one good track on it
If I like a band - I will buy their music
As a student I borrowed Pink Floyd CD's and tapes
I listened for free
Later in life I have purchased just about everything they have released
Let people listen first... buy later....
Animals!
Yes, finally, Let There Be More Light shed into the shady practices of the RIAA, etc. We should uncover their Saucerful of Secrets. They can no longer act as a Scarecrow against filesharing. We must be Fearless and not let our vision of the future be Obscured By Clouds.
Also, Brain Damage Dogs Summer '68 !!11
It's A Great Day for Freedom.
Yes, it is, but we all need to do our part. After all, would you exchange a walk on part in the war for the lead role in a cage?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
How about the ISPs claiming money from the music industry? Why should the ISPs pay for all the bandwith, used by consumers who are just looking for the best possible way to get music online? I say the music industry failed to deliver a DRM-free, high quality and easy to use system. Someone else is doing their work to promote the artists, free of charge, all around the world and they still complain ...
Steve Buscemi, IIRC. Which I probably do not.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And by "fair use" I assume you mean "the right to copy it endlessly and distribute it for nothing around the world"?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
File-sharers are active anti-semites and deserve to die at the hands of the Mossad, like the 1972 terrorists did!
Music studio bosses and movie industry investors are 99% ethnic jews. The norwegian nazi party backed Bittorrent service aimed to undermine the financial power of jews in the media business to make Israel poorer and consequently more vulnerable to arab attacks.
P2P is predominantly antisemitic, because the askhenazi jewish people have the highest IQ on Earth and thus, they are predominantly employed in creative intellectual work, where the produce is in the form of information, meaning it is easy to digitally pirate. You cannot share a chair or a lawnmover online, physical things the average-low IQ caucasian or asian produces on the ssembly line with his hands, according to instructions compiled by high-IQ jews.
The low-IQ masses of caucasians and asians are envious of the great minds and wealth of jewish people and try to steal all from them. Jews, like John von Neumann gave the retarded masses computers and the masses of unholy goyim are now using PCs to steal as much intellectual produce from the jews as possible.
Israel should be pre-occupied with supression of P2P, rather than Iran, because P2P is more dangerous! When the world intellectual produce becomes 100%+ pirated by goyim, all 27 million jews on Earth will be forced to compete in the phyisical labour marketplace to make their daily living. That is impossible, because the large masses of unholy goyim, with their bodies made like a donkey's, will always out-toil them.
The only way to secure the continued existence of the semitic race is to secure the sanctity and financial value of intellectual (information-creating) labour. Therefore P2P must be supressed, because it destroys all information's value!
Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad!
I'm just one lost soul swimming in a beer glass, day after day
Never assume, etc. No, i mean fair use. I mean, i just said i don't support going against an artist's wishes when dealing with this issue. I thought my position was rather clear.