The record labels own the rights to the recordings. The rights may be shared with songwriters & publishers, sort of--recording rights are built off publishing rights.
The labels don't share copyrights with the artists if they have a choice. When the artists have a share of the copyrights, then the labels have to pay them more & sooner.
Audio CDs were invented in 1983, before many people were computer proficient to make perfect digitial copies of songs. It was only in 1991 or so that digital DRM was invented.
True Audio CDs have no DRM. New "CDs" that have no DVDs hidden on them should have no DRM, since no one is making pure "CD" DRM anymore. If you buy CDs from non-RIAA labels, you should never run into DRM at all.
Now, DVDs do have DRM. So the question is, how do we get manufacturers to make Laserdiscs again?
What happens if a disc using the revoked keys is placed in an HD-DVD player that no longer uses those revoked keys? As you noted, the disc cannot be changed from a distance. Does it turn into a coaster as far as all future HD-DVD players are concerned?
If so, I imagine less technical users of those discs & players will be extremely annoyed. Think of all the HDTVs that can't pick up hi-def signals because the standards changed. This'll feel like that again.
I don't know if it's valid to claim that all copyright infringement involves financial gain because every infringement saves someone the cost of buying a non-infringing copy.
I do know that this tactic has actually been used, with some success. Why else ban one color copy of a page of a color photobook at Kinko's?
Okay. You know there has been copyright infringement of work you own the copyright to. Your bank account has not changed because of this infringement. But your biz is to sell copies of that copyrighted material; therefore, if there had been no infringement, there probably would have been a change to that bank account--namely, more money rolling in from the copies that would've been bought and not, um, copied.
The big problem, if you are someone who believes in fighting copyright infringement, is that you can't prove the bank account should have changed. It may be true that the only things that were copied "improperly" were things that would never have actually been purchased or things that shouldn't have to be sold anyway.
It just doesn't seem likely.
Disclaimers: I have infringed copyright. Possibly within the last month.
I do not approve of the RIAA labels' methods of prosecuting people whom they claim infringed their copyrights.
But the fine article was speaking of fighting plagiarism.
What if someone took the pink slip, your proof of ownership, from your car and replaced your name with his? Even if all he has is an exact copy of your car and your car itself is intact and untouched, if the pink slip is in his name then everyone will think that he has the original.
Suppose then that your car is a vintage model. Your original 1933 Duesenberg is worth millions. Exact copies of that car, since they are now easy to make and considerably newer, are worth about $1000. You will be publicly humiliated, lose credibility as a car collector, or worse if everyone believes that your (genuinely) original car is a replica because someone stole and altered your pink slip.
In universities, it matters greatly whether your work is original or an exact copy. Original work is valuable. Exact copies are at best wastes of time and at worst reasons to fail you from class.
If any hacker or geek carries the possibilities of The Matrix into real life, I will be seriously tempted to slug him. This, of course, presumes that I find out about it before "real life" gets redefined for humanity.
Okay.
It is legal for the RIAA to get money from winning or settling a case against bootleggers. They're claiming to need the "pretexting" to catch those people who are actually printing fake CDs; lesser copyright infringers would simply end up as major collateral damage.
It is legal for the RIAA to make examples of people in court--ugly, but legal so far. Even prosecuting/persecuting innocent people works if the general public thinks those people are guilty.
The question is, should it be legal for the RIAA to run their own sting operations? We have feds pretending to be drug dealers or 13-year-olds on the 'Net and then arresting anyone who tries to take advantage of the not-quite-existent opportunity for drugs or extremely kinky whatever. Should it be legal for the RIAA to set up a Pirate-Bay-type site and then sue everyone who downloads from it?
These days, many mall security guards are actual cops. Policemen in America are allowed to work both for the government and for private security firms, at the same time.
Well, good can come from evil. Because an American soldier so callously shot down a British plane, Tony Blair has come up with an exit strategy for his part of the Iraq war and will tell it to his constituents. The UK could be out of Iraq by 2008--or at least half out of Iraq.
Or to put it another way--the UK might soon stop fighting "America's war."
You can buy a CD from Amazon or BN.com. It's like downloading--it just takes a few days longer.
Of course, the other problem is still a problem. Even CD singles tend to have three or four songs, at least two of which you likely don't want. And the reason CD singles failed is that, when they were seriously tried, there was too little price difference between a CD single and a CD album; it's worth spending an extra four dollars for ten extra songs if you suspect that any of them are more than filler. (That is, two CD singles cost more than one CD album.) There seemed to be two possible prices for CD singles: $10 (in a market where CD albums cost at most $18 and often $14), or $0.99.
Those systems aren't being used anymore. The only CDs with DRM on them now that I know of are the ones that are also DVDs. Since DVDs are useful, and since all commerical DVDs have DRM, not much to be done there that hasn't been done already.
Of course, music CDs with "useful" programs on them (and by useful, I mean they do something other than manage "rights"--for instance, they might play music vids on your computer) could still cause problems some places. Since they are "useful" for non-DRM-type things, record labels won't necc. count them as DRM...
Sony isn't the only RIAA corp. in the MPAA.
There are four really large record labels, and they collectively are what we usually mean when we speak of an RIAA label. (The RIAA's site claimed that ClearChannel was a member--which actually explains a lot.) Three of the big RIAA corps. are also in the MPAA. Warner Bros. and some parts of Universal/MCA actually started in the MPAA. And the primary reason EMI isn't in the MPAA, if it isn't, is that its ownership is 100% British. (It does British defense contracts, so it has to be all-British.)
Sony isn't unique because it's in the MPAA. It's unique because it still makes hardware for its content. If Sony hadn't bought Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures (which were in the RIAA and MPAA before Sony bought them), it likely would still do exasperating things, but it wouldn't have pushed DRM as hard, and it would never have sold the rootkit. I don't believe that Sony was actually hated in itself around here until the rootkit was discovered.
Maybe Playstation 3s, and Sony's attitude towards them, would've been more reasonable if Sony didn't also make them cheap BluRay players...
Sony is enemy #2 because of its RIAA membership.
If Sony were not in the music biz, then it would not have sold CDs with rootkits on them. If Sony had not sold CDs with rootkits on them, then maybe members of/. would still like them because of all the Playstations.
First, please don't compare visual artists with recording artists directly. The skills don't necc. overlap.
I believe that the Beatles' music will be remembered a century from now--hey, its still being remembered now is worth something. Likely the more iconic drawings of John Lennon will be remembered as well. I suspect Paul McCartney's paintings will be remembered, too, but I don't know if they'll be remembered as good examples.
Hey, at least one/. member has taken it on himself to remember one of the "worst" poets of the 19th century. ("What ho! The Tay Bridge has blown down!")
Yes, we moderns have a strange idea of "great." It's not that we don't appreciate Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Mozart; often, we like them, but we just don't recognize them when we hear them. There aren't as many classical music buffs as there used to be, and I am sure that 100 years ago, there were classical musicians famous then & forgotten even among most buffs now.
It's hard to know which modern artists are likely to last 100 years, because the art of recording music hasn't been around much longer than that. The art of recording it onto something that isn't a wax cylinder is likely shorter than that. But that doesn't mean none of them will last.
If the Beatles (as a group) were going to be forgotten, it would have happened before now. Same for Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Elvis, the Who, and Marvin Gaye.
I myself am depressed by the idea that the database PM Blair wants set up might contain less info than the average store card, since that means that many of these protests would be moot anyway. This will, for many people, mandate what they're already doing freely, and charge a gov. tax to cover the costs.
Then again, I seriously hope there aren't any major British stores requiring biometrics for their store cards. ("Signature and fingerprints, please--oh, and please let us gather a saliva sample.")
"They found that they have only a 3% share of the music on their own players. Zero is only a couple of percentage points away."
Well, actually, zero percent is three percentage points away from 3%.
Fortunately, your greater point is true.
"I was *this* close to falling into the classic Slashdot comment trap by using an analogy to illustrate the Norwegian response that involved Nazis, but then I thought better of it."
That's a relief.
Now, for the next minute, avoid thinking about polar bears that work for the RIAA.
If you are buying a vinyl record or a shiny plastic disc, you are buying a physical product. You own the record, CD, or pseudo-CD. It's just that the content on it is copyrighted, and so the people who own the copyright to the content have a say about how you can copy it.
Now, DRM tends to give the RIAA too much of a say...
"As long as it lets me format-shift it to any device or future device, make self-destrutable copies for a friend that blows itself up, say, 3 days after being watched (like lending a DVD), and generally stays out of my way, I'm fine with it."
You would lend your friends DVDs that explode 3 days after being watched!?
Please, don't! Think of the property damage!
Slashdot Mirror
The record labels own the rights to the recordings. The rights may be shared with songwriters & publishers, sort of--recording rights are built off publishing rights.
The labels don't share copyrights with the artists if they have a choice. When the artists have a share of the copyrights, then the labels have to pay them more & sooner.
Audio CDs were invented in 1983, before many people were computer proficient to make perfect digitial copies of songs. It was only in 1991 or so that digital DRM was invented.
True Audio CDs have no DRM. New "CDs" that have no DVDs hidden on them should have no DRM, since no one is making pure "CD" DRM anymore. If you buy CDs from non-RIAA labels, you should never run into DRM at all.
Now, DVDs do have DRM. So the question is, how do we get manufacturers to make Laserdiscs again?
What happens if a disc using the revoked keys is placed in an HD-DVD player that no longer uses those revoked keys? As you noted, the disc cannot be changed from a distance. Does it turn into a coaster as far as all future HD-DVD players are concerned?
If so, I imagine less technical users of those discs & players will be extremely annoyed. Think of all the HDTVs that can't pick up hi-def signals because the standards changed. This'll feel like that again.
Any property at all may be theft?
Just out of curiosity, who owns your computer?
I don't know if it's valid to claim that all copyright infringement involves financial gain because every infringement saves someone the cost of buying a non-infringing copy.
I do know that this tactic has actually been used, with some success. Why else ban one color copy of a page of a color photobook at Kinko's?
Okay. You know there has been copyright infringement of work you own the copyright to. Your bank account has not changed because of this infringement. But your biz is to sell copies of that copyrighted material; therefore, if there had been no infringement, there probably would have been a change to that bank account--namely, more money rolling in from the copies that would've been bought and not, um, copied.
The big problem, if you are someone who believes in fighting copyright infringement, is that you can't prove the bank account should have changed. It may be true that the only things that were copied "improperly" were things that would never have actually been purchased or things that shouldn't have to be sold anyway.
It just doesn't seem likely.
Disclaimers: I have infringed copyright. Possibly within the last month.
I do not approve of the RIAA labels' methods of prosecuting people whom they claim infringed their copyrights.
But the fine article was speaking of fighting plagiarism.
What if someone took the pink slip, your proof of ownership, from your car and replaced your name with his? Even if all he has is an exact copy of your car and your car itself is intact and untouched, if the pink slip is in his name then everyone will think that he has the original.
Suppose then that your car is a vintage model. Your original 1933 Duesenberg is worth millions. Exact copies of that car, since they are now easy to make and considerably newer, are worth about $1000. You will be publicly humiliated, lose credibility as a car collector, or worse if everyone believes that your (genuinely) original car is a replica because someone stole and altered your pink slip.
In universities, it matters greatly whether your work is original or an exact copy. Original work is valuable. Exact copies are at best wastes of time and at worst reasons to fail you from class.
If any hacker or geek carries the possibilities of The Matrix into real life, I will be seriously tempted to slug him. This, of course, presumes that I find out about it before "real life" gets redefined for humanity.
The RIAA is asking to be exempt from the law. The legislators haven't finished writing that bill...
Okay.
It is legal for the RIAA to get money from winning or settling a case against bootleggers. They're claiming to need the "pretexting" to catch those people who are actually printing fake CDs; lesser copyright infringers would simply end up as major collateral damage.
It is legal for the RIAA to make examples of people in court--ugly, but legal so far. Even prosecuting/persecuting innocent people works if the general public thinks those people are guilty.
The question is, should it be legal for the RIAA to run their own sting operations? We have feds pretending to be drug dealers or 13-year-olds on the 'Net and then arresting anyone who tries to take advantage of the not-quite-existent opportunity for drugs or extremely kinky whatever. Should it be legal for the RIAA to set up a Pirate-Bay-type site and then sue everyone who downloads from it?
These days, many mall security guards are actual cops. Policemen in America are allowed to work both for the government and for private security firms, at the same time.
Well, good can come from evil. Because an American soldier so callously shot down a British plane, Tony Blair has come up with an exit strategy for his part of the Iraq war and will tell it to his constituents. The UK could be out of Iraq by 2008--or at least half out of Iraq.
Or to put it another way--the UK might soon stop fighting "America's war."
Thank you. Yes, I should have considered that it might be just a half-truth...
You can buy a CD from Amazon or BN.com. It's like downloading--it just takes a few days longer.
Of course, the other problem is still a problem. Even CD singles tend to have three or four songs, at least two of which you likely don't want. And the reason CD singles failed is that, when they were seriously tried, there was too little price difference between a CD single and a CD album; it's worth spending an extra four dollars for ten extra songs if you suspect that any of them are more than filler. (That is, two CD singles cost more than one CD album.) There seemed to be two possible prices for CD singles: $10 (in a market where CD albums cost at most $18 and often $14), or $0.99.
Those systems aren't being used anymore. The only CDs with DRM on them now that I know of are the ones that are also DVDs. Since DVDs are useful, and since all commerical DVDs have DRM, not much to be done there that hasn't been done already.
Of course, music CDs with "useful" programs on them (and by useful, I mean they do something other than manage "rights"--for instance, they might play music vids on your computer) could still cause problems some places. Since they are "useful" for non-DRM-type things, record labels won't necc. count them as DRM...
Sony isn't the only RIAA corp. in the MPAA.
There are four really large record labels, and they collectively are what we usually mean when we speak of an RIAA label. (The RIAA's site claimed that ClearChannel was a member--which actually explains a lot.)
Three of the big RIAA corps. are also in the MPAA. Warner Bros. and some parts of Universal/MCA actually started in the MPAA. And the primary reason EMI isn't in the MPAA, if it isn't, is that its ownership is 100% British. (It does British defense contracts, so it has to be all-British.)
Sony isn't unique because it's in the MPAA. It's unique because it still makes hardware for its content. If Sony hadn't bought Columbia Records and Columbia Pictures (which were in the RIAA and MPAA before Sony bought them), it likely would still do exasperating things, but it wouldn't have pushed DRM as hard, and it would never have sold the rootkit. I don't believe that Sony was actually hated in itself around here until the rootkit was discovered.
Maybe Playstation 3s, and Sony's attitude towards them, would've been more reasonable if Sony didn't also make them cheap BluRay players...
Sony is enemy #2 because of its RIAA membership. /. would still like them because of all the Playstations.
If Sony were not in the music biz, then it would not have sold CDs with rootkits on them. If Sony had not sold CDs with rootkits on them, then maybe members of
First, please don't compare visual artists with recording artists directly. The skills don't necc. overlap. /. member has taken it on himself to remember one of the "worst" poets of the 19th century. ("What ho! The Tay Bridge has blown down!")
I believe that the Beatles' music will be remembered a century from now--hey, its still being remembered now is worth something. Likely the more iconic drawings of John Lennon will be remembered as well. I suspect Paul McCartney's paintings will be remembered, too, but I don't know if they'll be remembered as good examples.
Hey, at least one
Yes, we moderns have a strange idea of "great." It's not that we don't appreciate Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Mozart; often, we like them, but we just don't recognize them when we hear them. There aren't as many classical music buffs as there used to be, and I am sure that 100 years ago, there were classical musicians famous then & forgotten even among most buffs now.
It's hard to know which modern artists are likely to last 100 years, because the art of recording music hasn't been around much longer than that. The art of recording it onto something that isn't a wax cylinder is likely shorter than that. But that doesn't mean none of them will last.
If the Beatles (as a group) were going to be forgotten, it would have happened before now. Same for Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Elvis, the Who, and Marvin Gaye.
I myself am depressed by the idea that the database PM Blair wants set up might contain less info than the average store card, since that means that many of these protests would be moot anyway. This will, for many people, mandate what they're already doing freely, and charge a gov. tax to cover the costs.
Then again, I seriously hope there aren't any major British stores requiring biometrics for their store cards. ("Signature and fingerprints, please--oh, and please let us gather a saliva sample.")
And yet Blair isn't letting that stop him from pushing this bill.
Thank you. I shall note that. 8-)
It was sold to "shareholders." Hopefully they're all Canadian...
"They found that they have only a 3% share of the music on their own players. Zero is only a couple of percentage points away."
Well, actually, zero percent is three percentage points away from 3%.
Fortunately, your greater point is true.
"I was *this* close to falling into the classic Slashdot comment trap by using an analogy to illustrate the Norwegian response that involved Nazis, but then I thought better of it."
That's a relief.
Now, for the next minute, avoid thinking about polar bears that work for the RIAA.
If you are buying a vinyl record or a shiny plastic disc, you are buying a physical product. You own the record, CD, or pseudo-CD. It's just that the content on it is copyrighted, and so the people who own the copyright to the content have a say about how you can copy it.
Now, DRM tends to give the RIAA too much of a say...
"As long as it lets me format-shift it to any device or future device, make self-destrutable copies for a friend that blows itself up, say, 3 days after being watched (like lending a DVD), and generally stays out of my way, I'm fine with it."
You would lend your friends DVDs that explode 3 days after being watched!?
Please, don't! Think of the property damage!