If all people do is not buy music, the RIAA will blame PIRACY!!!, and the member label CEOs will go to their bosses and whine about PIRACY!!! cutting sales and demand even worse laws from the politicians they 0wN.
If people spend just as much money from independent musicians and labels and supporting their gigs, the music industry press will be giving this lots of ink... followed by the mainstream media in the context of RIAA boycott.
This will reduce the value of RIAA labels and the stock prices of the multinationals that own them.
Expect the collapse of the major labels shortly thereafter, their owners will be unloading "tainted brands" to the highest bidders before they drop in value any further.
The parents of the kids who get nailed by fileswapping grew up legally swapping analog tapes. Same thing, smaller scale. It even worked the same way as far as band promo went, ever hear of the Grateful Dead or for that matter, Metallica?
So this isn't a matter of a kid getting busted for doing something "wrong", a parent who can afford to is very likely not only to pay for lawyers, but to look for organizations that are fighting them and start them in their absence. And in the meantime, start calling the politicians they contribute to and ask them "What the fuck is going on with this?"
If the RIAA makes A Cause out of themselves in mainstream America... their bought politicians will have to cut them loose to dangle in the wind.
Note that you definitively don't have the right the share song unless you get an o.k. by the copyright holder. "Argueing" that the entertainment industry is "greedy" or "is exploiting the artists" doesn't negate the fact that you commited a crime.
Your sig claims you're a MENSA member. Explain the difference between illegal and immoral in this context.
You are repeating the RIAA argument that people don't buy CDs if they've downloaded the tracks. Every study not funded by RIAA says the opposite, that P2P is "try before you buy" of the same nature as "try before you buy" by listening to the radio is.
Certainly this is illegal... but your labeling this as a "crime" suggests it's morally wrong.
A broadcast quality MP3 is a promotional good of no commercial value outside the imagination of RIAA flacks and politicians.
But from the RIAA's point of view, this is probably the best tactics they could adopt
Well, if their intent is to persuade their own best customers that it's time to find non-RIAA music to buy, they certainly are. If I had a pipeline into the RIAA, I'd tell them to "GO FOR IT, THE PUBLIC IS BEHIND YOU 1000%."
Who goes to the trouble to make P2P server space available and pay for the bandwidth to make them available?
Only the people who are really serious about music and want people to hear the latest and coolest new sounds so they'll buy their own copies. . . that artists will be encouraged to make new music. These are the people with hundreds and thousands of legitimately purchased CDs and who go to concerts.
Also known as the RIAA's latest targets. Every one who gets a subpoena or an extortion threat from RIAA lawyers is a person who'll be putting his energy into persuading others NOT TO BUY.
But not buying just feeds into the PIRACY!!! propaganda.
Destroying the RIAA means buying exclusively from non-RIAA musicians, and spending as much or more as you usually do on music.
Why is it legal "fair use" for me to make a tape off the radio of copyrighted content and give that tape to you and ILLEGAL PIRACY!!! to do the same thing in the digital domain?
You're hearing the same bytes either way. What's the difference?
Millions of dollars of campaign contributions.
There's a difference between "illegal" and "wrong".
File swapping on P2P is simply distributing the same tracks that the record labels PAY radio stations to broadcast to the public on the dime of the public itself.
128K MP3s are promotional goods of NO commercial value outside their use in getting people to buy the real products, which are CDs and better than broadcast quality digital tracks.
no moral or ethical issues here, other than the question of "why are people giving the record labels free bandwidth and promotional exposure?" Only RIAA propaganda says their is some. You can't believe everything coming out of your TV set.
Piracy has NOTHING to do with this, otherwise the RIAA would be spending their lobbying bucks on getting Congress to pressure foriegn governments into closing down bootleg CD PRESSING PLANTS pumping out bogus RIAA member content by the millions of copies.
This is about control. It isn't that the record companies mind us paying to distribute their content. It's that you and I have the same access to P2P channels to distribute our own material that they do, and they fear that they can't play on a level playing field even with billions in budgets and exclusive control over radio and major venue concert distribution.
Illegal? Certainly. But only because they bought and paid for politicians to make it so. The law said "swap audio on analog tape = legal, swap audio as broadcast-quality digital files - go to jail."
Your parents swapped audio tapes with ultimately, the blessing of the RIAA. Tape swapping got the word out and ultimately turned the Grateful Dead and ironically, Metallica into successes.
The record industry doesn't want it to be possible for musicians to succeed outside their system.
Not that it's a bad idea to stop uploading RIAA member tracks to P2P. They don't deserve distribution help. They deserve oblivion.
You really want to hurt the RIAA member labels?
If you just stop buying, they'll blame piracy and buy worse laws. Want Palladium made compulsory?
Just take every dollar you spend on entertainment and spend it on independent musicians. Go to their gigs, buy their records.
When the CEOs of the multinationals that own the RIAA labels find that the only record labels that are increasing profits are ones not affiliated with the RIAA or their lobbyists, the whines about piracy from label CEOs will cease to be accepted as excuses.
Their next logical move is to dump the brands the major CEOs have irretreveably tainted in the public eye. Their new investors will be buying catalogues and artists contracts, why would they be picking up the contracts of the management that destroyed their own companies?
Perhaps the new "Big 5" will be Apple, HP, Microsoft, Dell, and IBM.
Does this mean that music won't be run by fuckheads? No, but at least the fuckheads running the new music industry will live in the same world the rest of us do.
That's why the advice of political activisim is: write an ORIGINAL letter on PAPER, sign it in ink, and MAIL it to your local representative.
If you hear that advice from an "activist", you know that he is full of shit, find somebody competent to get advice from.
Mail to Congressional offices in DC get sent to mail screening centers (anthrax, etc.) and will be delayed months if you're lucky. That's why every competent mass action organization uses faxes to get messages across.
If you want to deliver a check, take it in person to your local Congrescritter's office.
Perhaps they should have taken a shot at doing something workable about the spam problem instead would have been a good start.
Telling China that their/8 blocks will be blocked at the US border if they don't make their spammers vanish. We (well, unless you are Chinese) as taxpayers don't care if the Chinese government has to spend a few thousand dollars on more bullets for executing spammers.
Why hasn't it been done? Maybe Clinton isn't the only President who's been getting illegal foriegn campaign contributions.
How are the digital rights of those 600000 peoples managed by all those schemes ?
By making it dangerous to redistribute them with or without the consent of the author. Remember the bots which are filing DMCA violation complaints against various people without regard to whether the MP3s contained content owned by any member of any *AA organization? The intent of the bill is to persuade Americans that making content available for upload is too dangerous to do even if it's their own material they want to upload.
Piracy is irrelevant to the intent of the bill or the *AA organizations. If they wanted to stop piracy, the money that is being spent on politicians would be spent on stopping the plants that are pressing the billions of pirate CDs and VCDs and DVDs being sold in Asian countries which is ripping off content by any reasonable defininition of copyright.
Duplication is devaluation; while the original owner still has the bits, those bits are no longer worth what they were before. Supply has increased, and intersects with the demand curve at a lower point, which means the same bits now sell at a lower price.
The bits in a broadcast-quality (128K) MP3 are of zero retail value. A broadcast-quality MP3 is of the same retail value whether you hear it courtesy of a FM radio station or off Kazaa.
It's only commercial value is if it persuades you to buy a different set of bits packaged in a form you can pay for, i.e. the bits packaged in a higher-quality CD or now, a different and somewhat higher-quality set of bits sold via iTunes. It frequently does, which is one reason why record sales went up when alternative Internet broadcast-quality tracks were more easily available and why they went down immediately Napster closed.
The "value" placed on the broadcast-quality bits is an artificial creation pulled out of the asshole of the RIAA lobbyist who presented the Congressmen with the bill ready for introduction in the legislative process.
The only purposes of the bill has nothing to do with piracy. The reasons for the bill are:
to cut off channels that independent artists have the same access to as the major record labels
to give the RIAA something they can go to their members and say "Look, we're giving you value for your money
to give the CEOs of the major record labels something they can go to the CEOs of their parent companies with and say, "PIRACY!!! is the reason why we're losing money, and if we can get this bill through Congress, we'll start making money again.
None of these are good reasons to put a single person in jail.
Given the errors I've pointed out in the parent post, the rest of his argument is meaningless.
I don't think that anyone would claim that not a single CD sale was lost because someone got the tracks for free online.
No, but the surveys not paid for by the RIAA point unambiguously at the fact that "free tracks", whether made available by FM radio, Internet Radio, or P2P correlate rather strongly with increased sales. The musician I work with doesn't mind losing a CD sale if getting her tracks onto Kazaa results in getting 3 more. Of course, the extreme example of this was Eminem, whose entire CD album was "pre-released" onto P2P. He cried all the way to the bank, that record went straight to #1.
Why? Simple. Do you buy a record if you have no clue to what it sounds like? P2P distribution of broadcast-quality (128K) tracks gives people enough of a clue to what the music sounds like so they know whether or not to buy it. If a person hears it and doesn't like it, he won't buy. But this is only a "lost sale" in the mind of an RIAA flack.
Maybe this isn't you, but it sure is someone. Heck, it's several guys I know; the guy in the cube next to me loudly proclaims on a regular basis, "I used to spend $500-600 on CD's a year, and now I haven't bought one for 3 years since I just download my tracks."
Any musician reading this should hope he uploads as well.
Maybe CD sales as a whole do go up, but it's an "ends and means" justification (ie, the ends don't justify the means). It is not OUR place to tell copyright holders what they should do with their copyright though covert infringement;
Mandatory licensing like the one that applies to broadcasting is preferable. If Congress hadn't stepped in and TOLD the music industry what copyright holders must do with their music, there would be no broadcasting industry.
this is their right as the copyright holder to make this decision on their own.
WRONG. It is a privilege granted them by society in the public interest, and that privilege can be limited in any way Congress sees fit. The music industry knows this, even if you don't. That's why it spends so much money on campaign contributions.
We can tell them this with our wallets in other ways though, such as refusing to listen to the music of record companies with whom we do not agree.
The people who lose money due to any of these lost CD sales are the artists and record company execs, yes,
Only in the minds of an RIAA propagandist, paid or unpaid. Most musicians would rather get several sales as a result of people listening to FM radio or P2P or Internet Radio and saying "I like this" and lose an occasional sale because someone went to a lot of trouble to find copies of all the album tracks. It has to do with making money. Music that's locked away in a record company vault profits nobody.
RIAA "anti-piracy" activity is about denying non-RIAA artists access to channels where the general public can easily find them, not about stopping piracy. Otherwise, the money they spend bribing politicians would be spent on bringing copyright infringement actions in the Asian world, where their products are copied track-by-track at CD pressing plants.
but also the guys working security at the front gate, the technicians setting up the sound equipment, the guys running their email servers, the janitors
Only in imaginations stimulated by RIAA propaganda. Nice try. Have an exploding cigar.
Anybody who wants to sell physical CDs via the Web can do so without any problem at all.
SwiftCD does CD on demand. Just upload the artwork, and send them a copy of your audio CD or CD-R. They handle fulfillment including the merchant credit card side, just link your site to their order page. If you want to see how this works in practice, check the URL in the sig. The store section including band merchandise is totally outsourced.
No charge up front, but the tradeoff for using them is that for something with the look/feel of a commercial CD, you're going to have to charge what major labels do to even make a few bucks per CD.
A high price, but I think a fair one given what you don't have to do to sell CDs. The tradeoff is one-off custom production and paying for them to collect the money, make the CD, package it, and send it as opposed to doing it yourself and paying for and storing a CD inventory.
An alternative if you either had your CDs pressed at a commercial vendor or are capable of making high-quality CD-Rs including packaging is to look into CDbaby, that means you can offer CDs at much lower prices, but the tradeoff is the obvious one, you have to make the CDs yourself.
The old favourite money-maker was solar power satellites. You'll have an interesting time convincing me that the cost of building these amortized over their lifetime is less than the cost of the same amount of power generated on earth, even without considering the cost of the receiver arrays on Earth.
Sounds like you were figuring on the cost of buying and lifting the solar cells into orbit using something like the Shuttle at $4000/pound and $10/watt.
Try rerunning the numbers using the following assumption:
Solar cells fabricated in orbit using raw materials launched from the moon via railgun. Hint: growing giant semiconductor crystals in a zero-G field isn't exactly rocket science, using solar power directly to do the zone refining should be fairly easy. Remember that most of the price of a semiconductor fab is for devices to keeping contaminants out. Solar cells aren't the only things that can be made in an orbital fab.
Cheaper earth-to-LEO shipping for infrastructure. We know how to build railguns, the R&D is with respect to scaling up the StarWars demos to stuff that can lift payloads of practical size, or making them work as replacements for boosters to crank up mass ratios. The Space Elevator materials problem is only theoretically solved. Perhaps throwing a few hundred megabucks at the problem can solve it.
Expensive? Certainly.
However, you're biggest flawed assumption is that major aerospace corporations will do anything that doesn't provide a guaranteed profit with either the taxpayers to make up cost overruns or customers ready to buy.
I think that the first trillionaires will be making their fortunes in LEO and outwards. If a multi-billionaire with guts and willing to wait 10 years for a significant return on investment another 10 for real money to roll in exists, he could get started on this now.
You are also making the assumption that space power doesn't have to be done. The oil will run out sooner or later. Perhaps sooner, I'm seeing the words "peak oil" from more than one source.
We can work on replacing fossil fuels with power from orbiting power satellites now or we can wait a few years until the choice between a new power source for civilization and the end of technological society is obvious and the amount of money required to make it happen immediately is so great that the societal investment will require pushing the economically marginal into starvation.
The best use for 128K MP3s is freebie samples. The 128K MP3 track is exactly what is broadcast on the radio. Or would be if any of your customers or potential customers were able to get on FM radio. However, this comes back to the quality question... if they aren't good enough to get onto FM radio, what makes them worth.99 a track if you sell them?
I question your business model. You think sticking a bunch of obscure bands on the Web is enough to get people to show up with credit cards in hand? What's your DEAD TREE publicity budget? What zine sites are you trying to get coverage for? Tried to get any dead tree music magazines to discuss your exciting new concept.
A product that isn't the equal of CD audio quality should not be sold at a comparable price. 256K or faster.MP3 or.OGG format is probably worth paying for.
Apple is managing to sell tracks despite merely being better for broadcast quality, but they've got enough leverage to get major labels to deal with them, they are big enough to call a press conference and get the press to show up.
Just what have you got?
The guy who said don't make a major financial committment to this project is right on. I'm not saying dump this, but... figure out what the hell you're selling and who to.
For the slashdotters new to the concept, astroturf is phony grass roots political speech / action, like when a corporate PR firm hires a bunch of people to make homemade picket signs to protest some new piece of legislation in progress they don't like.
Compulsory licensing is socialism.
If it wasn't for compulsory broadcast licensing, the RIAA, either as the people paying the PR firm that signs your paychecks, or the people whose propaganda you're mindlessly parroting would not have a multibillion dollar record industry to represent.
If the record industry had been able to charge the original AM stations playing the "Tin Pan Alley" stuff in the 20s-40s 50 cents per play, there wouldn't be radio stations in every town today to accept major label payola to advertise whatever crap the major labels think they can unload on the music-oriented public. Nobody would have put that kind of money into serving an unknown market. So... no content, no millions of kids making crystal sets, no market for the first consumer electronics products (radio, not phonograph, the audio amp came out of vacuum tube technology invented for radio)...
In the purist Libertarian universe, government action is never a good idea. In the real world, we got a broadcast radio, a consumer electronics industry and later a television industry out of it and the DARPA research project that later became the Internet you're using to unload your latest droolings on.
It's a good thing that the record industry in the 1920s didn't have any political power, otherwise 21st century technology would look a lot like that found in the 1940s.
It looks now like now that the record industry has some political power, it's trying to use a combination of DRM and bad law bought from corrupt legislators to make future consumer technological development possible.
Well, you can buy a Palladium box and a Microshit OS to go with it if you want. When your box gets h4xx0rd and you can't fix it because you can't access the part of computer memory your friendly neighborhood script kiddies are using to serve up pr0n and tracks ripped off the band that's the latest new, hot teen sensation of the sort that have the Feds breathing down your neck, you probably won't be able to whine to us even if we were inclined to listen. Tour ISP will have unplugged you for filesharing. Perhaps WebTV will still be around by then which will give you a "computer" that fits your needs and an ISP who'll have you.
And quests such as not buying CDs in order to protest the RIAA only result in more justification for the RIAA to encourage cracking down.
Not necessarily. If you buy CDs from independent artists instead, the word will get around and the message that it isn't that people object to buying music, it's just that we won't buy it from scum.
Shifting our buying will give the music industry and the politicians the message we want to send. You are right that simply refusing to buy won't do it, this gives the labels the excuse to scream PIRACY!!! even louder and buy more restrictive laws from politicians.
If the RIAA labels lose even a few percent of their sales to independent musicians (which will probably double their earnings), the music press will notice. RIAA label musicians will start looking for ways out of their contracts, people who labels want to sign up will hear of the boycott and say "No thanks", and major labels will have a choice:
Loudly disassociate themselves from the RIAA and their attacks on the music community.
or
Go out of business. Even a few percentage points drop in sales will be enough to reduce the value of the major labels far enough that their parent companies will dump them, especially if it's clear the boycott isn't going away until the labels are ready to do honest business with the public and their musicians.
Basically, a boycott of the RIAA major labels with shifting entertainment dollars to their competitors is win-win for all of us, whether musicians or consumers (though of course, most musicians are music consumers, too).
Except for a minority of greedy fuckheads at the major record labels.
So if a RIAA label boycott picks up steam, make a point of buying a few CDs from non-RIAA artists (lots of indie musicians on the Web with sites where you can buy music). In fact, if you want to fuck over the major labels, you should do this even if you can't find an indie band you like.
In the event of a serious public RIAA label boycott, every dollar you spend on indie musician products is another nail in the coffin of the major labels.
Even a 1% false positive rate on recognizing individuals would tie up a ridiculous number of law enforcement personnel on tracking perfectly innocent people.
Tracking terrorists? While dozens of police cars head for the "last known" location of a target, the real terrorist can have a wonderful time planting bombs somewhere the hell else.
We're probably about 5 years away to improving any such system to the 1% level.
Re:self-preservation
on
The Big Kerplop
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
In your case, Darwin needn't worry, you'll never find a woman desperate enough to help you breed.
Given that the only difference between "fair usage" and illegal piracy as defined in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 and the DMCA is that it's OK to make audio tapes off the radio and even swap them, but making digital recordings of the same information and swapping them as files is a violation of Federal law, how do you personally rationalize trying to put people in jail over this kind of trivial difference?
Actually, there are two. They are the only two possible answers, nothing else will or can work.
One requires one or more of us to go to most members of Congress, either in person or via lobbyist with a few million dollars in campaign donations.
If Napster had spent $5M on Congresscritters instead of lawyers, Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings would be Fritz "Napster" Hollings, and we'd be enjoying Napster today.
The other is start a PAC along the lines of the NRA and AARP starting with a megabuck or so up front to set up the organizational infrastructure.It raises money from us in $5 and $20 and $100 chunks, it disburses in $5000 and $10000 and $100K chunks. They call us to deluge our congresscritters with faxes via mailing list, we do this.
Problem with this is that this needed to have been done a year ago. A lot more money might compensate for the lack of time we have before the 2004 elections... (filing election committee in 50 states and with the Feds takes time and money) but nobody with the money came forward when this should have been done and nobody with the money will do this NOW at the last possible minute.
The answer to your question is. . . got a spare megabuck or three you're willing to personally put into solving the problem? No? Sorry, you don't have the bucks to be effective in politics. Your individual vote doesn't matter even if it is counted honestly.
This problem is NOT going to be fixed and innovations in consumer electronics will be developed outside the USA from now on.
People copy video tapes, record songs off the radio, create mixed tapes etc
Of the three items you cite, ONE is illegal. Copying videotapes (you might have the right to do this for archival purposes for tapes you own) and distributing them is legal.
RECORDING AUDIO OFF THE RADIO IS EXPLICITLY LEGAL under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
Got that cite from a RIAA spokeslawyer posting.
Swapping audio tapes is legal.
What is illegal is swapping digital copies of commercial audio, even if they are only broadcast quality.
The reason for this is that the AHRA cited above was purchased from politicians explicitly to make digital recording of commercial content illegal.
Analog taping is "fair use". Digital recording is "EVIL ILLEGAL PIRACY".
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If all people do is not buy music, the RIAA will blame PIRACY!!!, and the member label CEOs will go to their bosses and whine about PIRACY!!! cutting sales and demand even worse laws from the politicians they 0wN.
If people spend just as much money from independent musicians and labels and supporting their gigs, the music industry press will be giving this lots of ink... followed by the mainstream media in the context of RIAA boycott.
This will reduce the value of RIAA labels and the stock prices of the multinationals that own them.
Expect the collapse of the major labels shortly thereafter, their owners will be unloading "tainted brands" to the highest bidders before they drop in value any further.
I think you know what you need to do.
So this isn't a matter of a kid getting busted for doing something "wrong", a parent who can afford to is very likely not only to pay for lawyers, but to look for organizations that are fighting them and start them in their absence. And in the meantime, start calling the politicians they contribute to and ask them "What the fuck is going on with this?"
If the RIAA makes A Cause out of themselves in mainstream America... their bought politicians will have to cut them loose to dangle in the wind.
Your sig claims you're a MENSA member. Explain the difference between illegal and immoral in this context.
You are repeating the RIAA argument that people don't buy CDs if they've downloaded the tracks. Every study not funded by RIAA says the opposite, that P2P is "try before you buy" of the same nature as "try before you buy" by listening to the radio is.
Certainly this is illegal... but your labeling this as a "crime" suggests it's morally wrong.
A broadcast quality MP3 is a promotional good of no commercial value outside the imagination of RIAA flacks and politicians.
Well, if their intent is to persuade their own best customers that it's time to find non-RIAA music to buy, they certainly are. If I had a pipeline into the RIAA, I'd tell them to "GO FOR IT, THE PUBLIC IS BEHIND YOU 1000%."
Who goes to the trouble to make P2P server space available and pay for the bandwidth to make them available?
Only the people who are really serious about music and want people to hear the latest and coolest new sounds so they'll buy their own copies. . . that artists will be encouraged to make new music. These are the people with hundreds and thousands of legitimately purchased CDs and who go to concerts.
Also known as the RIAA's latest targets. Every one who gets a subpoena or an extortion threat from RIAA lawyers is a person who'll be putting his energy into persuading others NOT TO BUY.
But not buying just feeds into the PIRACY!!! propaganda.
Destroying the RIAA means buying exclusively from non-RIAA musicians, and spending as much or more as you usually do on music.
You're hearing the same bytes either way. What's the difference?
Millions of dollars of campaign contributions.
There's a difference between "illegal" and "wrong".
128K MP3s are promotional goods of NO commercial value outside their use in getting people to buy the real products, which are CDs and better than broadcast quality digital tracks. no moral or ethical issues here, other than the question of "why are people giving the record labels free bandwidth and promotional exposure?" Only RIAA propaganda says their is some. You can't believe everything coming out of your TV set.
Piracy has NOTHING to do with this, otherwise the RIAA would be spending their lobbying bucks on getting Congress to pressure foriegn governments into closing down bootleg CD PRESSING PLANTS pumping out bogus RIAA member content by the millions of copies.
This is about control. It isn't that the record companies mind us paying to distribute their content. It's that you and I have the same access to P2P channels to distribute our own material that they do, and they fear that they can't play on a level playing field even with billions in budgets and exclusive control over radio and major venue concert distribution.
Illegal? Certainly. But only because they bought and paid for politicians to make it so. The law said "swap audio on analog tape = legal, swap audio as broadcast-quality digital files - go to jail."
Your parents swapped audio tapes with ultimately, the blessing of the RIAA. Tape swapping got the word out and ultimately turned the Grateful Dead and ironically, Metallica into successes.
The record industry doesn't want it to be possible for musicians to succeed outside their system.
Not that it's a bad idea to stop uploading RIAA member tracks to P2P. They don't deserve distribution help. They deserve oblivion.
You really want to hurt the RIAA member labels?
If you just stop buying, they'll blame piracy and buy worse laws. Want Palladium made compulsory?
Just take every dollar you spend on entertainment and spend it on independent musicians. Go to their gigs, buy their records.
When the CEOs of the multinationals that own the RIAA labels find that the only record labels that are increasing profits are ones not affiliated with the RIAA or their lobbyists, the whines about piracy from label CEOs will cease to be accepted as excuses.
Their next logical move is to dump the brands the major CEOs have irretreveably tainted in the public eye. Their new investors will be buying catalogues and artists contracts, why would they be picking up the contracts of the management that destroyed their own companies?
Perhaps the new "Big 5" will be Apple, HP, Microsoft, Dell, and IBM.
Does this mean that music won't be run by fuckheads? No, but at least the fuckheads running the new music industry will live in the same world the rest of us do.
Only if you assume the infrastructure will be used only for the purpose of building powersats and will be thrown away immediately afterwards.
If you hear that advice from an "activist", you know that he is full of shit, find somebody competent to get advice from.
Mail to Congressional offices in DC get sent to mail screening centers (anthrax, etc.) and will be delayed months if you're lucky. That's why every competent mass action organization uses faxes to get messages across.
If you want to deliver a check, take it in person to your local Congrescritter's office.
Telling China that their /8 blocks will be blocked at the US border if they don't make their spammers vanish. We (well, unless you are Chinese) as taxpayers don't care if the Chinese government has to spend a few thousand dollars on more bullets for executing spammers.
Why hasn't it been done? Maybe Clinton isn't the only President who's been getting illegal foriegn campaign contributions.
By making it dangerous to redistribute them with or without the consent of the author. Remember the bots which are filing DMCA violation complaints against various people without regard to whether the MP3s contained content owned by any member of any *AA organization? The intent of the bill is to persuade Americans that making content available for upload is too dangerous to do even if it's their own material they want to upload.
Piracy is irrelevant to the intent of the bill or the *AA organizations. If they wanted to stop piracy, the money that is being spent on politicians would be spent on stopping the plants that are pressing the billions of pirate CDs and VCDs and DVDs being sold in Asian countries which is ripping off content by any reasonable defininition of copyright.
If this is a recovery, where are the new jobs?
Why did we go from a $200B surplus in 2000 to a record $475B deficit this year?
The bits in a broadcast-quality (128K) MP3 are of zero retail value. A broadcast-quality MP3 is of the same retail value whether you hear it courtesy of a FM radio station or off Kazaa.
It's only commercial value is if it persuades you to buy a different set of bits packaged in a form you can pay for, i.e. the bits packaged in a higher-quality CD or now, a different and somewhat higher-quality set of bits sold via iTunes. It frequently does, which is one reason why record sales went up when alternative Internet broadcast-quality tracks were more easily available and why they went down immediately Napster closed.
The "value" placed on the broadcast-quality bits is an artificial creation pulled out of the asshole of the RIAA lobbyist who presented the Congressmen with the bill ready for introduction in the legislative process.
The only purposes of the bill has nothing to do with piracy. The reasons for the bill are:
- to cut off channels that independent artists have the same access to as the major record labels
- to give the RIAA something they can go to their members and say "Look, we're giving you value for your money
- to give the CEOs of the major record labels something they can go to the CEOs of their parent companies with and say, "PIRACY!!! is the reason why we're losing money, and if we can get this bill through Congress, we'll start making money again.
None of these are good reasons to put a single person in jail.Given the errors I've pointed out in the parent post, the rest of his argument is meaningless.
No, but the surveys not paid for by the RIAA point unambiguously at the fact that "free tracks", whether made available by FM radio, Internet Radio, or P2P correlate rather strongly with increased sales. The musician I work with doesn't mind losing a CD sale if getting her tracks onto Kazaa results in getting 3 more. Of course, the extreme example of this was Eminem, whose entire CD album was "pre-released" onto P2P. He cried all the way to the bank, that record went straight to #1.
Why? Simple. Do you buy a record if you have no clue to what it sounds like? P2P distribution of broadcast-quality (128K) tracks gives people enough of a clue to what the music sounds like so they know whether or not to buy it. If a person hears it and doesn't like it, he won't buy. But this is only a "lost sale" in the mind of an RIAA flack.
Maybe this isn't you, but it sure is someone. Heck, it's several guys I know; the guy in the cube next to me loudly proclaims on a regular basis, "I used to spend $500-600 on CD's a year, and now I haven't bought one for 3 years since I just download my tracks."
Any musician reading this should hope he uploads as well.
Maybe CD sales as a whole do go up, but it's an "ends and means" justification (ie, the ends don't justify the means). It is not OUR place to tell copyright holders what they should do with their copyright though covert infringement;
Mandatory licensing like the one that applies to broadcasting is preferable. If Congress hadn't stepped in and TOLD the music industry what copyright holders must do with their music, there would be no broadcasting industry.
this is their right as the copyright holder to make this decision on their own.
WRONG. It is a privilege granted them by society in the public interest, and that privilege can be limited in any way Congress sees fit. The music industry knows this, even if you don't. That's why it spends so much money on campaign contributions.
We can tell them this with our wallets in other ways though, such as refusing to listen to the music of record companies with whom we do not agree.
The people who lose money due to any of these lost CD sales are the artists and record company execs, yes,
Only in the minds of an RIAA propagandist, paid or unpaid. Most musicians would rather get several sales as a result of people listening to FM radio or P2P or Internet Radio and saying "I like this" and lose an occasional sale because someone went to a lot of trouble to find copies of all the album tracks. It has to do with making money. Music that's locked away in a record company vault profits nobody.
RIAA "anti-piracy" activity is about denying non-RIAA artists access to channels where the general public can easily find them, not about stopping piracy. Otherwise, the money they spend bribing politicians would be spent on bringing copyright infringement actions in the Asian world, where their products are copied track-by-track at CD pressing plants.
but also the guys working security at the front gate, the technicians setting up the sound equipment, the guys running their email servers, the janitors
Only in imaginations stimulated by RIAA propaganda. Nice try. Have an exploding cigar.
Ever hear of anonymous proxy servers?
SwiftCD does CD on demand. Just upload the artwork, and send them a copy of your audio CD or CD-R. They handle fulfillment including the merchant credit card side, just link your site to their order page. If you want to see how this works in practice, check the URL in the sig. The store section including band merchandise is totally outsourced.
No charge up front, but the tradeoff for using them is that for something with the look/feel of a commercial CD, you're going to have to charge what major labels do to even make a few bucks per CD.
A high price, but I think a fair one given what you don't have to do to sell CDs. The tradeoff is one-off custom production and paying for them to collect the money, make the CD, package it, and send it as opposed to doing it yourself and paying for and storing a CD inventory.
An alternative if you either had your CDs pressed at a commercial vendor or are capable of making high-quality CD-Rs including packaging is to look into CDbaby, that means you can offer CDs at much lower prices, but the tradeoff is the obvious one, you have to make the CDs yourself.
Sounds like you were figuring on the cost of buying and lifting the solar cells into orbit using something like the Shuttle at $4000/pound and $10/watt.
Try rerunning the numbers using the following assumption:
Expensive? Certainly.
However, you're biggest flawed assumption is that major aerospace corporations will do anything that doesn't provide a guaranteed profit with either the taxpayers to make up cost overruns or customers ready to buy.
I think that the first trillionaires will be making their fortunes in LEO and outwards. If a multi-billionaire with guts and willing to wait 10 years for a significant return on investment another 10 for real money to roll in exists, he could get started on this now.
You are also making the assumption that space power doesn't have to be done. The oil will run out sooner or later. Perhaps sooner, I'm seeing the words "peak oil" from more than one source.
We can work on replacing fossil fuels with power from orbiting power satellites now or we can wait a few years until the choice between a new power source for civilization and the end of technological society is obvious and the amount of money required to make it happen immediately is so great that the societal investment will require pushing the economically marginal into starvation.
I question your business model. You think sticking a bunch of obscure bands on the Web is enough to get people to show up with credit cards in hand? What's your DEAD TREE publicity budget? What zine sites are you trying to get coverage for? Tried to get any dead tree music magazines to discuss your exciting new concept.
A product that isn't the equal of CD audio quality should not be sold at a comparable price. 256K or faster .MP3 or .OGG format is probably worth paying for.
Apple is managing to sell tracks despite merely being better for broadcast quality, but they've got enough leverage to get major labels to deal with them, they are big enough to call a press conference and get the press to show up.
Just what have you got?
The guy who said don't make a major financial committment to this project is right on. I'm not saying dump this, but... figure out what the hell you're selling and who to.
Compulsory licensing is socialism.
If it wasn't for compulsory broadcast licensing, the RIAA, either as the people paying the PR firm that signs your paychecks, or the people whose propaganda you're mindlessly parroting would not have a multibillion dollar record industry to represent.
If the record industry had been able to charge the original AM stations playing the "Tin Pan Alley" stuff in the 20s-40s 50 cents per play, there wouldn't be radio stations in every town today to accept major label payola to advertise whatever crap the major labels think they can unload on the music-oriented public. Nobody would have put that kind of money into serving an unknown market. So... no content, no millions of kids making crystal sets, no market for the first consumer electronics products (radio, not phonograph, the audio amp came out of vacuum tube technology invented for radio)...
In the purist Libertarian universe, government action is never a good idea. In the real world, we got a broadcast radio, a consumer electronics industry and later a television industry out of it and the DARPA research project that later became the Internet you're using to unload your latest droolings on.
It's a good thing that the record industry in the 1920s didn't have any political power, otherwise 21st century technology would look a lot like that found in the 1940s.
It looks now like now that the record industry has some political power, it's trying to use a combination of DRM and bad law bought from corrupt legislators to make future consumer technological development possible.
Well, you can buy a Palladium box and a Microshit OS to go with it if you want. When your box gets h4xx0rd and you can't fix it because you can't access the part of computer memory your friendly neighborhood script kiddies are using to serve up pr0n and tracks ripped off the band that's the latest new, hot teen sensation of the sort that have the Feds breathing down your neck, you probably won't be able to whine to us even if we were inclined to listen. Tour ISP will have unplugged you for filesharing. Perhaps WebTV will still be around by then which will give you a "computer" that fits your needs and an ISP who'll have you.
Make flamebait, you're going to get flamed.
Google is your friend, I don't know which OS you run.
Not necessarily. If you buy CDs from independent artists instead, the word will get around and the message that it isn't that people object to buying music, it's just that we won't buy it from scum.
Shifting our buying will give the music industry and the politicians the message we want to send. You are right that simply refusing to buy won't do it, this gives the labels the excuse to scream PIRACY!!! even louder and buy more restrictive laws from politicians.
If the RIAA labels lose even a few percent of their sales to independent musicians (which will probably double their earnings), the music press will notice. RIAA label musicians will start looking for ways out of their contracts, people who labels want to sign up will hear of the boycott and say "No thanks", and major labels will have a choice:
Loudly disassociate themselves from the RIAA and their attacks on the music community.
or
Go out of business. Even a few percentage points drop in sales will be enough to reduce the value of the major labels far enough that their parent companies will dump them, especially if it's clear the boycott isn't going away until the labels are ready to do honest business with the public and their musicians.
Basically, a boycott of the RIAA major labels with shifting entertainment dollars to their competitors is win-win for all of us, whether musicians or consumers (though of course, most musicians are music consumers, too).
Except for a minority of greedy fuckheads at the major record labels.
So if a RIAA label boycott picks up steam, make a point of buying a few CDs from non-RIAA artists (lots of indie musicians on the Web with sites where you can buy music). In fact, if you want to fuck over the major labels, you should do this even if you can't find an indie band you like.
In the event of a serious public RIAA label boycott, every dollar you spend on indie musician products is another nail in the coffin of the major labels.
Tracking terrorists? While dozens of police cars head for the "last known" location of a target, the real terrorist can have a wonderful time planting bombs somewhere the hell else.
We're probably about 5 years away to improving any such system to the 1% level.
In your case, Darwin needn't worry, you'll never find a woman desperate enough to help you breed.
Given that the only difference between "fair usage" and illegal piracy as defined in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 and the DMCA is that it's OK to make audio tapes off the radio and even swap them, but making digital recordings of the same information and swapping them as files is a violation of Federal law, how do you personally rationalize trying to put people in jail over this kind of trivial difference?
One requires one or more of us to go to most members of Congress, either in person or via lobbyist with a few million dollars in campaign donations.
If Napster had spent $5M on Congresscritters instead of lawyers, Fritz "Hollywood" Hollings would be Fritz "Napster" Hollings, and we'd be enjoying Napster today.
The other is start a PAC along the lines of the NRA and AARP starting with a megabuck or so up front to set up the organizational infrastructure.It raises money from us in $5 and $20 and $100 chunks, it disburses in $5000 and $10000 and $100K chunks. They call us to deluge our congresscritters with faxes via mailing list, we do this.
Problem with this is that this needed to have been done a year ago. A lot more money might compensate for the lack of time we have before the 2004 elections... (filing election committee in 50 states and with the Feds takes time and money) but nobody with the money came forward when this should have been done and nobody with the money will do this NOW at the last possible minute.
The answer to your question is. . . got a spare megabuck or three you're willing to personally put into solving the problem? No? Sorry, you don't have the bucks to be effective in politics. Your individual vote doesn't matter even if it is counted honestly.
This problem is NOT going to be fixed and innovations in consumer electronics will be developed outside the USA from now on.
People copy video tapes, record songs off the radio, create mixed tapes etc
Of the three items you cite, ONE is illegal. Copying videotapes (you might have the right to do this for archival purposes for tapes you own) and distributing them is legal.
RECORDING AUDIO OFF THE RADIO IS EXPLICITLY LEGAL under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992.
Got that cite from a RIAA spokeslawyer posting.
Swapping audio tapes is legal.
What is illegal is swapping digital copies of commercial audio, even if they are only broadcast quality.
The reason for this is that the AHRA cited above was purchased from politicians explicitly to make digital recording of commercial content illegal.
Analog taping is "fair use". Digital recording is "EVIL ILLEGAL PIRACY".