As for "realiz[ing] the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author," copyright under the Constitution is a recognition of natural property rights (see the references in the Betamax ruling), but merely an artificial incentive to be granted if and when it serves public ends.
That should have been "... is not a recognition of natural property rights...". Somehow I missed this typo in the preview.
you may NOT make MP3s out of your CDs... It's against the law and will be prosecuted to the maximum extent.
This is flat-out wrong. (Although I'm not too surprised you would believe this given the source of your information.)
Go to RIAA.ORG for more information. If you're going to do this make sure you obey the law.
Funny, I don't remember the Constititution giving the RIAA the power to make the law. May I suggest the Copyright Office site instead?
The RIAA also seems to like to distort history to their own ends:
Before free speech, before freedom of assembly, before freedom of religion, there was copyright protection in our Constitution. The founding fathers knew copyright protection could improve society by preserving the economic incentive for people to come up with brilliant ideas and inventions. They also realized the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author.
It's extremely disingenous of the RIAA to say that copyright came before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. The people who wrote the Constitution considered these latter freedoms to be fundamental freedoms that no human government had the right to take away. There was a debate between those who felt a Bill of Rights was not necessary (because it was implicit -- and including one might cause the Government to take away every right not enumerated), and those who felt that the basic rights must be guaranteed in writing. The people who wanted the guarantee in writing won. RIAA's assertion that copyrights came before First Amendment freedoms is wrong. But even if it were not, amendments override the parts of the Constitution that came before. So however you look at it, the First Amendment trumps copyrights, not the other way around.
As for "realiz[ing] the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author," copyright under the Constitution is a recognition of natural property rights (see the references in the Betamax ruling), but merely an artificial incentive to be granted if and when it serves public ends. On a different level, given how the major RIAA members routinely take copyrights away from artists, I would hardly think of the RIAA as an organization concerned with "granting control of the creative work to the author."
The principle that the work you created belongs to you and should be controlled by you is as timeless as it is global. For centuries, new inventions, from the printing press to the Internet, have threatened that principle. For centuries, advocates have resolutely defended it. The RIAA is just such an advocate today.
Amazing. Here the RIAA portrays themselves as being aligned with the type of "advocates" who opposed the printing press. Can you imagine where human technology and living standards would be if we still relied exclusively on hand-copied books? Need I say more?
I don't think there's any limitation to "one backup". If you need a cassette tape, a MiniDisc, a MP3 file, and a CD-quality copy of a song for a compilation CD-R -- and you own the source CD -- you should be able to copy to all the formats you use. (Note that the right to use the copies goes along with the ownership of the original; if you sell the original, you should transfer or destroy the copies to the extent feasible.)
If, on the other hand, you want to make 10,000 CD-R "backups" of an album to sell from the back of a truck, expect the authorities to pay you a visit.
MP3s that you made from your own CDs are legal, whatever the RIAA's claim of the week is.
On the other hand, MP3s made from someone else's copy of the same CD may be in a different category legally. MP3.com got shot down for commercially offering streaming MP3s (not even downloadable ones!) to people who already owned the source CDs.
GPL would let you modify the song, and redistribute the modified song, or sell it, or sell the original song -- as long as you provided the original song or a pointer to it. Most musicians wouldn't want to go that far.
On the other hand, a number of independent artists at MP3.com let you download some of their songs in MP3 form for free. You can also order CDs from the site, which is a convenience for some songs, and the only way to get others. Unfortunately, the CDs are made from 128 Kbps MP3s (boo!), but the idea is good even if their implementation has a little ways to go. (It's been improving; they now have things like cover art and spine labels!)
"It starts becoming a major world issue when record and movie companies buy laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which say that I cannot even listen to SDMI music or watch DVD movies except under their terms."
Don't buy the product if you don't like the licnese. It's morally wrong for you to tell others what they should do with thier own property.
Under the Constitution, the information content of published music, movies, or other works is not the property of the publishers, but of the people. Copyright is an arrangement where the public temporarily restricts its own rights, to a limited extent, to provide an incentive for authors to create more works that will benefit the public. It is not a recognition of any "natural property right", and your term "their own property" thus goes against the Founders' intent for copyright, and 200+ years of law.
As for copies of music, movies, or software that I purchase over the counter, those are my private property, and it is morally wrong for publishers to try to take away the rights that I have under common law and copyright law as the owner of a legitimately-acquired copy of a copyrighted item.
The problem is that if all of the copies that are in circulation are damaged goods (burdened with copy protection / encryption / access controls), it may be hard to get at the "seed".
Especially if there's some stupid law designed to criminalize breaking the copy protection / encryption / access controls without regards to the legality of the copying, or the public domain status of the materials being copied.
Actionable, perhaps, but they'd have to prove that you were doing something illegal.
The Supreme Court said in the Betamax ruling that non-commercial copying is presumptively fair. This doesn't mean that all non-commercial copying is legal, but it means that copyright holders must carry the burden of demonstrating why a use would cause future harm and should not be allowed.
I believe the appelate court in the Rio case also refused to rule that it was illegal to copy music to a hard disk. Much as the big record companies must hate the idea, extracting digital audio from your own CDs for your own personal use is legal.
Making MP3 versions of the songs available to 5000 of your closest anonymous friends on Napster is probably illegal and quite actionable. However, it's the unauthorized mass distribution and not the use of the computer or the MP3 format per se that makes you an outlaw and sets you up for the fall.
No. You've entered into no contract with the radio station, the sponsors, or the artists to listen to any commercials. On the other hand, they've caused their songs to be broadcast to everyone in the area, with full knowledge that "you" (in the generic sense) can listen to any portion of the broadcast you feel like hearing. (I'm quite sure that the advertising rates for radio stations already take into account the fact that everybody doesn't listen to all of the ads.)
You have to apply the same fundamental property rights to the digital world as you have in the physical world or else all property rights become pointless.
Not true. The Constitution does not recognize any natural property right to so-called "intellectual property," as you can see if you read the majority opinion in the Betamax case. (It quotes from the Constitution, a previous Supreme Court ruling, and a report from the House of Representatives.)
Copyright is merely an optional incentive that the Congress can offer in order to induce creators to produce more works for the public. It involves tradeoffs. Overly weak protection may reduce the incentive to create new works. Overly strong protection may reduce the ability of people to enjoy the use of copyrighted work, and to build on each other's work (nobody creates in a vacuum). And all copyright protection involves interference with the free market, inasmuch as it creates an artificial monopoly.
Congress has a great deal of latitude in setting copyright tradeoffs, but that latitude is not unlimited. Copyright laws must be designed with the public interest first and foremost; if they subordinate the public interest to the private interests of those who benefit from artificial copyright monopolies, then the laws are unConstitutional.
Computers were specifically exempted from the AHRA. That was the price that the recording industry had to pay for keeping the computer industry from lobbying heavily against their pet copy protection / recorder tax / media tax bill. The computer industry at that time wanted no part of being responsible for implementing a possibly open-ended anti-copying system. So the language in the bill may be strange, but it's not strange because the Congress was ignorant of the uses of computers for manipulating audio.
Whether the "non-commercial copying is protected from record industry lawsuits" clause applies to professional digital audio recorders and computers, I don't recall. Fair Use does exist for computers; if you extract the digital audio from one of your own CDs for your own personal use, that is legal, and so theoretically you should not need special protection from lawsuits.
Another monkey wrench in the works is the N.E.T. act, which makes it illegal to distribute copies of copyrighted materials worth more than some $$ amount even if you do not profit from it. This could be used to target those Napster users who provide most of the downloads, and possibly even to target Napster, Inc.
I believe it was passed by voice vote in the Senate -- and all but one or two of the Senators voted for it. The margin in the House may not have been quite so lopsided.
Who said logic had anything to do with it? They don't need "region code" controls to make "N" local censored versions.
The supposed reason for region codes was to keep people in other parts of the world from watching U.S. DVDs of movies that are not yet in first run in the foreign countries in question. Yet you'll notice that practially all old movies on DVD are region-coded and that there is no mechanism for the region coding on DVDs of newer films to expire.
I should add that in the MP3.com case, the record companies emphasized the copying of the music to the servers (DAE, MP3 encoding) more than the distribution. MP3.com lost the initial round of that lawsuit.
This goes to illustrate the Betamax rule that non-commercial copying is presumed to be Fair Use, while commercial copying is presumed to be infringement.
The RIAA tried a couple of stunts during the Rio case, both of which backfired. The first was to claim that computers should be subject to SCMS. The second was to claim that since computers are not subject to SCMS, it is illegal to copy music to a hard disk. The court rejected both arguments -- but for some months after the court ruling, the RIAA Web sites (RIAA, SoundByting) weren't updated to reflect the court ruling.
The judge could have found that this was Fair Use. The presumption where unauthorized commercial use is involved is that it is an infringement (exactly the opposite of the test the Supreme Court enumerated for unauthorized non-commercial use), but the unique characteristics of the service certainly could have lent themselves to a commercial Fair Use argument.
The counterargument for the labels would be that if you can make extra money streaming bits to someone who already owns them, why shouldn't that money go to the record companies rather than to the people who came up with the service? (The settlements with the other Big Five labels call for MP3.com to pay about $20 million to each label, plus a fee each time a user registers a CD that they own, plus a fee each time a user streams a song from a CD they own.)
As I recall, MP3.com's posts on their own Web site went on to the effect of how they were standing up for the consumer's Fair Use rights, so they might not have been exploring the (admittedly harder to sell) commercial Fair Use angle. However, their "we're doing this to protect your rights" talk seemed a bit at odds with their eagerness to settle with as many of the Big Five as possible when they lost the initial case. Why pick an unnecessary legal fight over principles if you're not prepared and willing to carry the fight through to appeals?
Well, whoever chose the term "ripping" for copying the digital audio data from a CD wasn't too bright (if you know what I mean).
That term suggests "ripping off", and makes it all too easy to portray all digital audio extraction as "piracy", even though there are significant legitimate uses (such as making compilation CDs or MP3s for your own personal use from your own CD collection).
Well, we do have laws against theft (I know, not exactly the same thing as copyright infringement), and they apply even if a store does something like leaving a valuable diamond necklace in an unbarred and non-alarmed window in a seedy part of town.
On the other hand, the police have no grounds to arrest a customer of a nearby hardware store and charge them with a felony just because they have happened to purchase a hammer or a glass cutter.
Can't you just picture the Incompetent Jeweler's Association of America (IJAA) demanding a law to criminalize possession of anything that somebody could use to break a glass window? And going on about how badly "the economy," and "the sanctity of store windows," would be hurt if they did not get their way?
If opposition to the appalling UCITA proposals is based on "disinformation", how come the ACM came out against UCITA, and the IEEE had serious reservations about it? These are "only" the two most important professional organizations in the computing field!
How about the 25+ state Attorney Generals who oppose this measure? Or the FTC? Or Consumers Union, publishers of Consumers Reports?
The fact is that these UCITA proposals suck, plain and simple. They exist to turn non-contracts that are legally invalid into legally binding measures, without the formalities of letting you read the "contract" at the time of purchase, or actually getting your signature. (Can't ask the buyer for a binding signature... there's always the chance they will balk at signing away their rights, and you will lose the sale!)
To the extent that they allow vendors to escape liability for even the most egregarious conduct surrounding bad software, and allow for software to create back doors onto your computer system, this makes things even worse.
Accepting SDMI is not "meeting the megacorps halfway".
Giving them limited monopolies under balanced copyright laws was "meeting them halfway". Giving them SCMS and royalty taxes in the late 1980s was meeting them more than halfway.
Accepting SCMS, DVD-Audio copy protection, Super Audio CD copy protection, and discs designed to mess up digital audio extraction -- especially in the context of the DMCA -- will be the virtual equivalent of signing away your rights, and making them dependent on industry whims rather than the laws passed by a democratic government.
Someone has a tape player with the "skip to next song" feature?
I had an Aiwa portable when I was in school that had that feature -- but I accidentally left it behind. Since then, I've noticed that cassette portables have not advanced much (no Dolby C, no Dolby S), and if anything seem to be headed down the "least common denominator" slope. I thought that feature had vanished for good!
I'd hardly call the music of the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and Fleetwood Mac "a cornucopia of crap"
"In today's plan, we will get AOL to merge with Time-Warner, the owner of ACME Labs. Then we'll use AOL's mass-mailings of CDs to install copies of 'Emperor Brain Knows Best' everywhere! After enough people run the program, they will beg me, the Brain, to rule the world!" 'That's nice... NARF!"
Back when Sony was getting ready to introduce DAT, the industry threatened DAT makers with a huge ($2 billion or so?) lawsuit, as a way to force them to cripple the machines.
First, CBS attempted to push the CopyCode system - which would have put an audible frequency notch in all prerecorded CD albums. New tape recorders (of either the analog or digital type) would be forced to check for the notch and break the RECORD button if it was detected.
That system bombed (failing a series of tests that were ordered by Congress), but somewhere along the way, Sony bought CBS/Columbia's records operation.
OK, so now that Sony had taken over control of one of the companies that was trying to make life hard for them, you'd think Sony would dictate CBS's new policy - right? Not exactly... at least not judging by the fact that we got SCMS and recorder/media taxes then, and that Sony is heavily involved in audio & video copy protection now.
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That should have been "... is not a recognition of natural property rights ...". Somehow I missed this typo in the preview.
This is flat-out wrong. (Although I'm not too surprised you would believe this given the source of your information.)
Funny, I don't remember the Constititution giving the RIAA the power to make the law. May I suggest the Copyright Office site instead?
The RIAA also seems to like to distort history to their own ends:
It's extremely disingenous of the RIAA to say that copyright came before freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. The people who wrote the Constitution considered these latter freedoms to be fundamental freedoms that no human government had the right to take away. There was a debate between those who felt a Bill of Rights was not necessary (because it was implicit -- and including one might cause the Government to take away every right not enumerated), and those who felt that the basic rights must be guaranteed in writing. The people who wanted the guarantee in writing won. RIAA's assertion that copyrights came before First Amendment freedoms is wrong. But even if it were not, amendments override the parts of the Constitution that came before. So however you look at it, the First Amendment trumps copyrights, not the other way around.
As for "realiz[ing] the fundamental fairness of granting control of the creative work to the author," copyright under the Constitution is a recognition of natural property rights (see the references in the Betamax ruling), but merely an artificial incentive to be granted if and when it serves public ends. On a different level, given how the major RIAA members routinely take copyrights away from artists, I would hardly think of the RIAA as an organization concerned with "granting control of the creative work to the author."
Amazing. Here the RIAA portrays themselves as being aligned with the type of "advocates" who opposed the printing press. Can you imagine where human technology and living standards would be if we still relied exclusively on hand-copied books? Need I say more?
If, on the other hand, you want to make 10,000 CD-R "backups" of an album to sell from the back of a truck, expect the authorities to pay you a visit.
On the other hand, MP3s made from someone else's copy of the same CD may be in a different category legally. MP3.com got shot down for commercially offering streaming MP3s (not even downloadable ones!) to people who already owned the source CDs.
On the other hand, a number of independent artists at MP3.com let you download some of their songs in MP3 form for free. You can also order CDs from the site, which is a convenience for some songs, and the only way to get others. Unfortunately, the CDs are made from 128 Kbps MP3s (boo!), but the idea is good even if their implementation has a little ways to go. (It's been improving; they now have things like cover art and spine labels!)
Apparently you're unaware that copyrights are a form of interference in the free market -- they are an artificial limited monopoly carrot.
Under the Constitution, the information content of published music, movies, or other works is not the property of the publishers, but of the people. Copyright is an arrangement where the public temporarily restricts its own rights, to a limited extent, to provide an incentive for authors to create more works that will benefit the public. It is not a recognition of any "natural property right", and your term "their own property" thus goes against the Founders' intent for copyright, and 200+ years of law.
As for copies of music, movies, or software that I purchase over the counter, those are my private property, and it is morally wrong for publishers to try to take away the rights that I have under common law and copyright law as the owner of a legitimately-acquired copy of a copyrighted item.
Especially if there's some stupid law designed to criminalize breaking the copy protection / encryption / access controls without regards to the legality of the copying, or the public domain status of the materials being copied.
The Supreme Court said in the Betamax ruling that non-commercial copying is presumptively fair. This doesn't mean that all non-commercial copying is legal, but it means that copyright holders must carry the burden of demonstrating why a use would cause future harm and should not be allowed.
I believe the appelate court in the Rio case also refused to rule that it was illegal to copy music to a hard disk. Much as the big record companies must hate the idea, extracting digital audio from your own CDs for your own personal use is legal.
Making MP3 versions of the songs available to 5000 of your closest anonymous friends on Napster is probably illegal and quite actionable. However, it's the unauthorized mass distribution and not the use of the computer or the MP3 format per se that makes you an outlaw and sets you up for the fall.
No. You've entered into no contract with the radio station, the sponsors, or the artists to listen to any commercials. On the other hand, they've caused their songs to be broadcast to everyone in the area, with full knowledge that "you" (in the generic sense) can listen to any portion of the broadcast you feel like hearing. (I'm quite sure that the advertising rates for radio stations already take into account the fact that everybody doesn't listen to all of the ads.)
Not true. The Constitution does not recognize any natural property right to so-called "intellectual property," as you can see if you read the majority opinion in the Betamax case. (It quotes from the Constitution, a previous Supreme Court ruling, and a report from the House of Representatives.)
Copyright is merely an optional incentive that the Congress can offer in order to induce creators to produce more works for the public. It involves tradeoffs. Overly weak protection may reduce the incentive to create new works. Overly strong protection may reduce the ability of people to enjoy the use of copyrighted work, and to build on each other's work (nobody creates in a vacuum). And all copyright protection involves interference with the free market, inasmuch as it creates an artificial monopoly.
Congress has a great deal of latitude in setting copyright tradeoffs, but that latitude is not unlimited. Copyright laws must be designed with the public interest first and foremost; if they subordinate the public interest to the private interests of those who benefit from artificial copyright monopolies, then the laws are unConstitutional.
Whether the "non-commercial copying is protected from record industry lawsuits" clause applies to professional digital audio recorders and computers, I don't recall. Fair Use does exist for computers; if you extract the digital audio from one of your own CDs for your own personal use, that is legal, and so theoretically you should not need special protection from lawsuits.
Another monkey wrench in the works is the N.E.T. act, which makes it illegal to distribute copies of copyrighted materials worth more than some $$ amount even if you do not profit from it. This could be used to target those Napster users who provide most of the downloads, and possibly even to target Napster, Inc.
I believe it was passed by voice vote in the Senate -- and all but one or two of the Senators voted for it. The margin in the House may not have been quite so lopsided.
The supposed reason for region codes was to keep people in other parts of the world from watching U.S. DVDs of movies that are not yet in first run in the foreign countries in question. Yet you'll notice that practially all old movies on DVD are region-coded and that there is no mechanism for the region coding on DVDs of newer films to expire.
This goes to illustrate the Betamax rule that non-commercial copying is presumed to be Fair Use, while commercial copying is presumed to be infringement.
The RIAA tried a couple of stunts during the Rio case, both of which backfired. The first was to claim that computers should be subject to SCMS. The second was to claim that since computers are not subject to SCMS, it is illegal to copy music to a hard disk. The court rejected both arguments -- but for some months after the court ruling, the RIAA Web sites (RIAA, SoundByting) weren't updated to reflect the court ruling.
The counterargument for the labels would be that if you can make extra money streaming bits to someone who already owns them, why shouldn't that money go to the record companies rather than to the people who came up with the service? (The settlements with the other Big Five labels call for MP3.com to pay about $20 million to each label, plus a fee each time a user registers a CD that they own, plus a fee each time a user streams a song from a CD they own.)
As I recall, MP3.com's posts on their own Web site went on to the effect of how they were standing up for the consumer's Fair Use rights, so they might not have been exploring the (admittedly harder to sell) commercial Fair Use angle. However, their "we're doing this to protect your rights" talk seemed a bit at odds with their eagerness to settle with as many of the Big Five as possible when they lost the initial case. Why pick an unnecessary legal fight over principles if you're not prepared and willing to carry the fight through to appeals?
That term suggests "ripping off", and makes it all too easy to portray all digital audio extraction as "piracy", even though there are significant legitimate uses (such as making compilation CDs or MP3s for your own personal use from your own CD collection).
On the other hand, the police have no grounds to arrest a customer of a nearby hardware store and charge them with a felony just because they have happened to purchase a hammer or a glass cutter.
Can't you just picture the Incompetent Jeweler's Association of America (IJAA) demanding a law to criminalize possession of anything that somebody could use to break a glass window? And going on about how badly "the economy," and "the sanctity of store windows," would be hurt if they did not get their way?
If opposition to the appalling UCITA proposals is based on "disinformation", how come the ACM came out against UCITA, and the IEEE had serious reservations about it? These are "only" the two most important professional organizations in the computing field!
How about the 25+ state Attorney Generals who oppose this measure? Or the FTC? Or Consumers Union, publishers of Consumers Reports?
The fact is that these UCITA proposals suck, plain and simple. They exist to turn non-contracts that are legally invalid into legally binding measures, without the formalities of letting you read the "contract" at the time of purchase, or actually getting your signature. (Can't ask the buyer for a binding signature ... there's always the chance they will balk at signing away their rights, and you will lose the sale!)
To the extent that they allow vendors to escape liability for even the most egregarious conduct surrounding bad software, and allow for software to create back doors onto your computer system, this makes things even worse.
Giving them limited monopolies under balanced copyright laws was "meeting them halfway". Giving them SCMS and royalty taxes in the late 1980s was meeting them more than halfway.
Accepting SCMS, DVD-Audio copy protection, Super Audio CD copy protection, and discs designed to mess up digital audio extraction -- especially in the context of the DMCA -- will be the virtual equivalent of signing away your rights, and making them dependent on industry whims rather than the laws passed by a democratic government.
I don't feel like doing that.
I had an Aiwa portable when I was in school that had that feature -- but I accidentally left it behind. Since then, I've noticed that cassette portables have not advanced much (no Dolby C, no Dolby S), and if anything seem to be headed down the "least common denominator" slope. I thought that feature had vanished for good!
If you're looking to speed up CD-to-MD recording, Sony has a dual CD/MD deck that costs about $400 (USD), and that can record MDs at up to 4x speed.
"In today's plan, we will get AOL to merge with Time-Warner, the owner of ACME Labs. Then we'll use AOL's mass-mailings of CDs to install copies of 'Emperor Brain Knows Best' everywhere! After enough people run the program, they will beg me, the Brain, to rule the world!" 'That's nice ... NARF!"
First, CBS attempted to push the CopyCode system - which would have put an audible frequency notch in all prerecorded CD albums. New tape recorders (of either the analog or digital type) would be forced to check for the notch and break the RECORD button if it was detected.
That system bombed (failing a series of tests that were ordered by Congress), but somewhere along the way, Sony bought CBS/Columbia's records operation.
OK, so now that Sony had taken over control of one of the companies that was trying to make life hard for them, you'd think Sony would dictate CBS's new policy - right? Not exactly ... at least not judging by the fact that we got SCMS and recorder/media taxes then, and that Sony is heavily involved in audio & video copy protection now.