The argument that you're 'making a copy of a copy' is asinine. The US courts have agreed that so-called 'ephemeral' copies are not generally covered in the same fashion; so long as allofmp3 removes their bit/format specific file from their servers after they've finished the transfer, it is a *transfer* and not a new copy. Without this exemption, cache copies of copyrighted data would require seperate licenses, local storage in memory as opposed to on disk would require a new license, etc, etc. Allofmp3 produces a copy, they then transfer that copy to you. This is copying covered by Russian law, exportation under Russian law, and then importation covered by US law.
Your example is not the same. Alice is not transferring a book over a wire, she is transferring voice over the wire, and Bob is producing new content at his end. Allofmp3 works differently; the end content is *exactly* what was transferred over the wire. Thus, it fits the definition of importation - object A is transported over a border via transport B to new owner C. Common sense dictates that I am not producing a copy, I am receiving a copy; do I *produce* a copy if I buy a song from iTMS? Hell no. I receive one.
I'm willing to acknowledge flaws in allofmp3. Now go read the law regarding ephemeral copies, and acknowledge the fact that your RIAA-approved statements are not gospel.
Importation is totally distinct from reproduction. However, the argument that the reproduction happens in Russia is totally legitimate.
Paid program = advertisement. That is the universal understanding in the US, where all infomercials are preceded by "This is a paid program". Nothing about advertisement, just paid.
Actually, by the idea that you select your bitrate and format, which they then create a file specifically for your needs, it would seem that they are, in fact, making the copy, which you then download (equivalent to shipping a copy they had duplicated in Russia). This once again reduces it to a case of importation of a legal (let's leave the Russian legality out of it for now, as it isn't the interesting part) copy of the song.
Russian rights holders are irrelevant when trying to exercise those rights *in the US*; however, if the rights are exercised in Russia and the end result, the copy, is then imported to the US, only importation/customs law applies, not US rights law. It's an interesting discussion, for sure, because both sides have pretty good claims to being 'right'.
It has nothing to do with the FCC or the RIAA; the radio stations are licensed via ASCAP/SESAC/BMI. The RIAA gets no say; a radio station pays its ASCAP/BMI/SESAC fees and they're covered to play any and all music covered by those three publishers (which amounts to just about everything, and the people who aren't covered via one of the three are generally not interested in receiving radio royalties). This is not an FCC policy; it's a legal issue regarding the (slightly odd, and US-specific) definition of songs being played on the radio as more akin to public performance than to distribution.
Allofmp3 has the rights to reproduce copyrighted works, via the Russian equivalent of ASCAP/BMI. This is what makes it legal.
Its also what makes it quasi-legal, as no one is really sure whether they have the right to reproduce copyrighted works *for overseas customers*. They are without question legal in Russia.
Hey, I can get near to infinity to 1 compression, losslessly, if I pick my source material... after all, a white screen compresses *very* nicely with RLE.:)
The government rarely brings civil cases. Criminal cases are "The People vs. XXXX", as the people are the ones who were harmed, and are always brought by the government.
Civil cases are always "XXX vs. YYY", and are always brought by individuals (legally, corporations are individuals, which is why I don't need to qualify that statement). The government does not bring civil suits, for the most part, except when the harm was done to them.
In return, if I like your embedded box, I can not only copy your software legally, I can take your design and build it myself. If you did anything of note in your distro, I can use it in Linux for myself, distribute it to everyone, etc.
Even if you didn't do anything worth forking back in, why should anyone care? You can legally do that right now; nothing says you have to call a Linux distro Linux, you don't even have to acknowledge the fact beyond the required distribution of a copy of the GPL, and the ability to obtain source.
Oh, I didn't say British sat systems have more than maybe 5-6 *worthwhile* channels, but they work more or less the same, and cost more or less the same, as sat or cable here in the States does.
Most of them will be doing the exact same thing they're doing now; doing whatever during the day, playing shows at night.
You act like this isn't what most musicians do already. They don't make money from selling CDs, they don't make money from selling MP3s, they make their money from people coming to see them play and from people buying swag at their shows to support them.
They write the music before anyone expressed any willingness to pay for it, for the most part, because they *like doing it*. The few people who get paid before they write a thing? I feel very, very little empathy for them; let them work for it like most musicians.
You seem to be worried about the music industry; I maintain that the system I describe would be equally good or better for the majority of musicians than the current system, and would definitely be better for the listener. The only people who lose are the music industry and the 10 or so new megastars per year, and you know what?
Embedded board doing solenoid control. Too lazy to read through the RS-232 output, so I programmed the controller to change the solenoid PWM to a frequency/drive that made them vibrate at the resonant frequency of the structure they were mounted to when a certain issue was encountered.
I could be all the way across the room, and suddenly there would be this nice clear tone, as my solenoids 'sang' to alert me of trouble.
Oh, and I'm not opposed to legal restrictions on accreditation. I have no problem with legally requiring acknowledgement, just issues with artifically restricting availability.
Distribution of content that exists solely digitally really doesn't provide an advantage for large corporations. Furthermore, the cost they would incur in aggregation of content would pretty much offset the minimal advantage they have in that realm.
Further, let's take your example. Those people standing at the street corner? Why would they bother, when they could simply stand at the corner and sell a copy of it they made for $.60? The model you're proposing pretty much gets to ignore distribution, because anyone can create the physical medium. It rewards nothing other than the time and effort of the salesman. End of story.
People that aren't Internet-savvy are a group that is steadily lowering in number. And I suspect that were something like this to be implemented, a group that would quickly and permanently drop to nearly zero.
My point is non-physical goods work differently economically than physical goods when copying them is essentially zero-cost, which is something that has only become true in the last few years, and we should adjust to that.
Now explain to me why a lack of patent, a lack of IP in the technical realm, wouldn't be just as good as what we have now. Everyone focuses on music when that's maybe 1/100th of the importance of the other side of the coin.
That model works for music, art, and the written word *because* of IP laws enforcement of scarcity on them.
Do you fucking understand a word I said? Lack of IP law != everyone has to work for charity. There are ways to make money in a non-IP world.
The musicians I know *like* being paid to perform and record. However, they acknowledge that they're probably never going to make it big. Of them, almost all of them have day jobs. This includes a band which gets paid quite well, has had their music licensed by major media companies for use on TV, etc, etc. And my friend, who writes most of their music? Still has a dayjob as tech support. He does the music because he likes it, not because he wants money. Of the others, some of them have given up on even trying to sell CDs. They give them away to promote their live shows. It works okay for them.
Go to http://www.stop-eject.com and download any 01V music that has tracks on the site. You want to learn about control theory? Track me down sometime. I just gave a presentation on the basics of digital communications theory. In another city. On my own dime. For other people's benefit. I have a patent; if it weren't for the fact that my contract prevented my doing anything other than immediately signing it over to my company, I would have happily allowed it to be used. That's the "extending of my valuable effort", as far as I'm concerned. I do it without thinking "Oh, people are going to suddenly wake up and realize IP is wrong-headed", I do it because its the right way to do things.
Have a less knee-jerk reaction. Get some imagination and think about other ways it could work. I'm honestly a) not bright enough and b) not awake enough, as I'm in the middle of packing to move, to think of a better approach that adjusts to universal content availability, but there are people who are.
IP and copyright are about more than some 15 year old kid downloading songs with Kazaa.
That's exactly my point. They're about promoting progress and the state of the art, the state of the culture, the state of the world. We've pretty much hit the point where IP laws do little to nothing to further any of the above.
Culture? The people making good, innovative music aren't the ones making millions. The people making millions are re-treading the same song formulas over and over again.
Technology? We've hit the point where 2-3 months after a product is released, it can be reverse-engineered down to the transistors in the IC and a 'close-enough' clone created. The only thing patents and copyright achieve is to sit as a tumor on the system, consuming the time of people who could be doing creative, useful things.
The world? Drug companies jack up their prices to "whatever we can charge", and generics are prevented from being introduced by patents. How exactly does that help anyone other than the drug company?
I'd rather see a system where anyone can copy my music, but *anyone* can copy my music. Where the economic benefit of being the first to market with a new product is that for those few months before clones are released people will buy it from you. Where software developers aren't worrying about the legal minefield of software patents and can genuinely try to write a better program than the current best.
And yes, I have published music (both self and by others), I've played shows for halfway decent money to halfway decent crowds. I have a patent to my name (and I'm less than a year out of school.) I suspect I have a pretty good idea what current IP law is like.
(A side note: my dislike of IP laws doesn't mean I feel accreditation is unnecessary. A law that requires that covers are labeled as "Cover of XXXX by XXXX" is fine by me. Hell, a law that requires "Clone of XXXX from XXXX Inc." is fine by me. As long as they have no right to deny others that use. Once it becomes public, it belongs to the public. You want to maintain control, guess what? Keep it internal; yourself and those you trust never to give it away. Nothing wrong with a secret.)
Fine. Look at the BSDs. They seem to do quite alright, for the most part, and their works are NOT protected by copyright from being leveraged for commercial purposes. People who do Linux work, for the most part, are doing it because they like doing it and because they like the thought that people will benefit from it. I suspect that most of them, were IP law to be suddenly abolished, could give a shit. Why? Because suddenly, while their code isn't protected from being used by other people, neither is anyone else's. Effectively, ALL code becomes instantly BSD/GPL, because there is no proprietary to copy into. Software isn't a zero-sum game, and we need to not treat it like it is.
Ectomorph. 01V. The entire We're Twins record label. Quite a few different death/metal folks. Shit, half the noise records out there are just CD-R burns or tape dubs from friend to friend to friend. Most of these people acknowledged that their audience will never make them millions (it won't, and this is true for 99.999% of all musicians - for 99.99% it won't even prevent them from needing a day job). Good music rarely makes enough money to keep the musician from needing to do other things to live. And most musicians who do make a living from it, make a living from playing live, not from their CDs.
I'm not talking about open source vs. commercial vs. quasi-open. I'm talking about the fundamentals of economics, the ridiculousness of enforcing scarcity on a resource that demands otherwise, and the need to acknowledge that.
If you don't understand, you're not thinking big enough.
Intellectual property laws existence is a violation of natural economic law itself. This law declares that when supply is infinitely greater than demand, and marginal cost per item is near-zero, the cost per item should be driven to near-zero as well.
Sound familiar?
There is a serious issue with IP law in the digital age; it's designed to prevent and deal with a whole different class of issues, ones that barely seem relevant when I can copy the entire Library of Congress's contents in a day or two. IP law is an attempt to impose an artificial scarcity on a commodity that not only doesn't need to be scarce, but by its very nature is easier to assume common.
Do you want *proof* that IP laws are quite probably unnecessary?
Look at Linux. Who would ever write a huge undertaking like an operating system only to give it away for free; to more or less mandate that it must be given away for no more than the cost of distribution? Apparently, lots of people. I know, from several years of working in the radio and music industries, more than a few musicians who could give a shit about their music being copied; as long as people are listening to it, they're happy.
As bandwidth becomes larger and cheaper, storage becomes larger and cheaper, etc, etc, we have to find a *better* way to encourage creation *and* consumption. Eventually, we'll have to do it for real objects, if we ever figure out how to do assemblers. But we need to acknowledge that our IP laws are broken in the modern era, and rather than trying to nudge and tweak and suspender up their sagging morass, we need to figure out a sensible approach.
Who cares about what worked for printing presses? Let's figure out what works for GB/s pipes and TB of disk.
But then you're comparing it to the satnets, which run roughly equivalent to cable in the US (50-60 per month gets you 100+ channels, all filled with garbage!)
The individual channels don't cost 30 pounds per month, the service package does, just like in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
The argument that you're 'making a copy of a copy' is asinine. The US courts have agreed that so-called 'ephemeral' copies are not generally covered in the same fashion; so long as allofmp3 removes their bit/format specific file from their servers after they've finished the transfer, it is a *transfer* and not a new copy. Without this exemption, cache copies of copyrighted data would require seperate licenses, local storage in memory as opposed to on disk would require a new license, etc, etc. Allofmp3 produces a copy, they then transfer that copy to you. This is copying covered by Russian law, exportation under Russian law, and then importation covered by US law.
Your example is not the same. Alice is not transferring a book over a wire, she is transferring voice over the wire, and Bob is producing new content at his end. Allofmp3 works differently; the end content is *exactly* what was transferred over the wire. Thus, it fits the definition of importation - object A is transported over a border via transport B to new owner C. Common sense dictates that I am not producing a copy, I am receiving a copy; do I *produce* a copy if I buy a song from iTMS? Hell no. I receive one.
I'm willing to acknowledge flaws in allofmp3. Now go read the law regarding ephemeral copies, and acknowledge the fact that your RIAA-approved statements are not gospel.
Importation is totally distinct from reproduction. However, the argument that the reproduction happens in Russia is totally legitimate.
Paid program = advertisement. That is the universal understanding in the US, where all infomercials are preceded by "This is a paid program". Nothing about advertisement, just paid.
No, no, no.
RMS is the most impotent voice in technology.
Actually, by the idea that you select your bitrate and format, which they then create a file specifically for your needs, it would seem that they are, in fact, making the copy, which you then download (equivalent to shipping a copy they had duplicated in Russia). This once again reduces it to a case of importation of a legal (let's leave the Russian legality out of it for now, as it isn't the interesting part) copy of the song.
Russian rights holders are irrelevant when trying to exercise those rights *in the US*; however, if the rights are exercised in Russia and the end result, the copy, is then imported to the US, only importation/customs law applies, not US rights law. It's an interesting discussion, for sure, because both sides have pretty good claims to being 'right'.
(And now we know how lawyers stay fed.)
You forgot the Educational and Corporate variants. Which are very, very nice indeed.
It has nothing to do with the FCC or the RIAA; the radio stations are licensed via ASCAP/SESAC/BMI. The RIAA gets no say; a radio station pays its ASCAP/BMI/SESAC fees and they're covered to play any and all music covered by those three publishers (which amounts to just about everything, and the people who aren't covered via one of the three are generally not interested in receiving radio royalties). This is not an FCC policy; it's a legal issue regarding the (slightly odd, and US-specific) definition of songs being played on the radio as more akin to public performance than to distribution.
Allofmp3 has the rights to reproduce copyrighted works, via the Russian equivalent of ASCAP/BMI. This is what makes it legal.
Its also what makes it quasi-legal, as no one is really sure whether they have the right to reproduce copyrighted works *for overseas customers*. They are without question legal in Russia.
Apple fans.
Apple makes a profit.
Thus, they may have both won and lost at the same time - successful company? Sure. Are they beating Wintel? Nah.
Hey, I can get near to infinity to 1 compression, losslessly, if I pick my source material... after all, a white screen compresses *very* nicely with RLE. :)
One more note:
The government rarely brings civil cases. Criminal cases are "The People vs. XXXX", as the people are the ones who were harmed, and are always brought by the government.
Civil cases are always "XXX vs. YYY", and are always brought by individuals (legally, corporations are individuals, which is why I don't need to qualify that statement). The government does not bring civil suits, for the most part, except when the harm was done to them.
And?
In return, if I like your embedded box, I can not only copy your software legally, I can take your design and build it myself. If you did anything of note in your distro, I can use it in Linux for myself, distribute it to everyone, etc.
Even if you didn't do anything worth forking back in, why should anyone care? You can legally do that right now; nothing says you have to call a Linux distro Linux, you don't even have to acknowledge the fact beyond the required distribution of a copy of the GPL, and the ability to obtain source.
Nice to see someone who gets what I'm getting at.
Oh, I didn't say British sat systems have more than maybe 5-6 *worthwhile* channels, but they work more or less the same, and cost more or less the same, as sat or cable here in the States does.
Most of them will be doing the exact same thing they're doing now; doing whatever during the day, playing shows at night.
You act like this isn't what most musicians do already. They don't make money from selling CDs, they don't make money from selling MP3s, they make their money from people coming to see them play and from people buying swag at their shows to support them.
They write the music before anyone expressed any willingness to pay for it, for the most part, because they *like doing it*. The few people who get paid before they write a thing? I feel very, very little empathy for them; let them work for it like most musicians.
You seem to be worried about the music industry; I maintain that the system I describe would be equally good or better for the majority of musicians than the current system, and would definitely be better for the listener. The only people who lose are the music industry and the 10 or so new megastars per year, and you know what?
Screw them.
Embedded board doing solenoid control. Too lazy to read through the RS-232 output, so I programmed the controller to change the solenoid PWM to a frequency/drive that made them vibrate at the resonant frequency of the structure they were mounted to when a certain issue was encountered.
I could be all the way across the room, and suddenly there would be this nice clear tone, as my solenoids 'sang' to alert me of trouble.
Oh, and I'm not opposed to legal restrictions on accreditation. I have no problem with legally requiring acknowledgement, just issues with artifically restricting availability.
Distribution of content that exists solely digitally really doesn't provide an advantage for large corporations. Furthermore, the cost they would incur in aggregation of content would pretty much offset the minimal advantage they have in that realm.
Further, let's take your example. Those people standing at the street corner? Why would they bother, when they could simply stand at the corner and sell a copy of it they made for $.60? The model you're proposing pretty much gets to ignore distribution, because anyone can create the physical medium. It rewards nothing other than the time and effort of the salesman. End of story.
People that aren't Internet-savvy are a group that is steadily lowering in number. And I suspect that were something like this to be implemented, a group that would quickly and permanently drop to nearly zero.
My point is non-physical goods work differently economically than physical goods when copying them is essentially zero-cost, which is something that has only become true in the last few years, and we should adjust to that.
Now explain to me why a lack of patent, a lack of IP in the technical realm, wouldn't be just as good as what we have now. Everyone focuses on music when that's maybe 1/100th of the importance of the other side of the coin.
That model works for music, art, and the written word *because* of IP laws enforcement of scarcity on them.
Do you fucking understand a word I said? Lack of IP law != everyone has to work for charity. There are ways to make money in a non-IP world.
The musicians I know *like* being paid to perform and record. However, they acknowledge that they're probably never going to make it big. Of them, almost all of them have day jobs. This includes a band which gets paid quite well, has had their music licensed by major media companies for use on TV, etc, etc. And my friend, who writes most of their music? Still has a dayjob as tech support. He does the music because he likes it, not because he wants money. Of the others, some of them have given up on even trying to sell CDs. They give them away to promote their live shows. It works okay for them.
Go to http://www.stop-eject.com and download any 01V music that has tracks on the site. You want to learn about control theory? Track me down sometime. I just gave a presentation on the basics of digital communications theory. In another city. On my own dime. For other people's benefit. I have a patent; if it weren't for the fact that my contract prevented my doing anything other than immediately signing it over to my company, I would have happily allowed it to be used. That's the "extending of my valuable effort", as far as I'm concerned. I do it without thinking "Oh, people are going to suddenly wake up and realize IP is wrong-headed", I do it because its the right way to do things.
Have a less knee-jerk reaction. Get some imagination and think about other ways it could work. I'm honestly a) not bright enough and b) not awake enough, as I'm in the middle of packing to move, to think of a better approach that adjusts to universal content availability, but there are people who are.
IP and copyright are about more than some 15 year old kid downloading songs with Kazaa.
That's exactly my point. They're about promoting progress and the state of the art, the state of the culture, the state of the world. We've pretty much hit the point where IP laws do little to nothing to further any of the above.
Culture? The people making good, innovative music aren't the ones making millions. The people making millions are re-treading the same song formulas over and over again.
Technology? We've hit the point where 2-3 months after a product is released, it can be reverse-engineered down to the transistors in the IC and a 'close-enough' clone created. The only thing patents and copyright achieve is to sit as a tumor on the system, consuming the time of people who could be doing creative, useful things.
The world? Drug companies jack up their prices to "whatever we can charge", and generics are prevented from being introduced by patents. How exactly does that help anyone other than the drug company?
I'd rather see a system where anyone can copy my music, but *anyone* can copy my music. Where the economic benefit of being the first to market with a new product is that for those few months before clones are released people will buy it from you. Where software developers aren't worrying about the legal minefield of software patents and can genuinely try to write a better program than the current best.
And yes, I have published music (both self and by others), I've played shows for halfway decent money to halfway decent crowds. I have a patent to my name (and I'm less than a year out of school.) I suspect I have a pretty good idea what current IP law is like.
(A side note: my dislike of IP laws doesn't mean I feel accreditation is unnecessary. A law that requires that covers are labeled as "Cover of XXXX by XXXX" is fine by me. Hell, a law that requires "Clone of XXXX from XXXX Inc." is fine by me. As long as they have no right to deny others that use. Once it becomes public, it belongs to the public. You want to maintain control, guess what? Keep it internal; yourself and those you trust never to give it away. Nothing wrong with a secret.)
Fine. Look at the BSDs. They seem to do quite alright, for the most part, and their works are NOT protected by copyright from being leveraged for commercial purposes. People who do Linux work, for the most part, are doing it because they like doing it and because they like the thought that people will benefit from it. I suspect that most of them, were IP law to be suddenly abolished, could give a shit. Why? Because suddenly, while their code isn't protected from being used by other people, neither is anyone else's. Effectively, ALL code becomes instantly BSD/GPL, because there is no proprietary to copy into. Software isn't a zero-sum game, and we need to not treat it like it is.
Ectomorph. 01V. The entire We're Twins record label. Quite a few different death/metal folks. Shit, half the noise records out there are just CD-R burns or tape dubs from friend to friend to friend. Most of these people acknowledged that their audience will never make them millions (it won't, and this is true for 99.999% of all musicians - for 99.99% it won't even prevent them from needing a day job). Good music rarely makes enough money to keep the musician from needing to do other things to live. And most musicians who do make a living from it, make a living from playing live, not from their CDs.
I'm not talking about open source vs. commercial vs. quasi-open. I'm talking about the fundamentals of economics, the ridiculousness of enforcing scarcity on a resource that demands otherwise, and the need to acknowledge that.
If you don't understand, you're not thinking big enough.
You do know that they don't really make any of those anymore, right? It was a (fortunately) brief period in Apple's history.
Currently?
iMac? White polycarb with the lampshade screen (which I personally find ridiculous, but whatever).
PowerMac? Aluminum. Nice, elegant exterior.
iBook? White polycarb. No lampshade screen.
PowerBook? Aluminum. Nice elegant exterior.
Even the godforsaken eMac is... white, polycarb plastic.
I'd rather not talk about most of the PCs I work with. Inside, they're fine, but outside, not so much.
The Maxima is a mid-size to luxury sedan.
It's a very nice car (parents have a 2001 Maxima, I've driven it when I'm home).
It is not, however, a speed demon, and souping one up ranks only slightly above souping up a Civic.
Intellectual property laws existence is a violation of natural economic law itself. This law declares that when supply is infinitely greater than demand, and marginal cost per item is near-zero, the cost per item should be driven to near-zero as well.
Sound familiar?
There is a serious issue with IP law in the digital age; it's designed to prevent and deal with a whole different class of issues, ones that barely seem relevant when I can copy the entire Library of Congress's contents in a day or two. IP law is an attempt to impose an artificial scarcity on a commodity that not only doesn't need to be scarce, but by its very nature is easier to assume common.
Do you want *proof* that IP laws are quite probably unnecessary?
Look at Linux. Who would ever write a huge undertaking like an operating system only to give it away for free; to more or less mandate that it must be given away for no more than the cost of distribution? Apparently, lots of people. I know, from several years of working in the radio and music industries, more than a few musicians who could give a shit about their music being copied; as long as people are listening to it, they're happy.
As bandwidth becomes larger and cheaper, storage becomes larger and cheaper, etc, etc, we have to find a *better* way to encourage creation *and* consumption. Eventually, we'll have to do it for real objects, if we ever figure out how to do assemblers. But we need to acknowledge that our IP laws are broken in the modern era, and rather than trying to nudge and tweak and suspender up their sagging morass, we need to figure out a sensible approach.
Who cares about what worked for printing presses? Let's figure out what works for GB/s pipes and TB of disk.
Ah, I see.
But then you're comparing it to the satnets, which run roughly equivalent to cable in the US (50-60 per month gets you 100+ channels, all filled with garbage!)
The individual channels don't cost 30 pounds per month, the service package does, just like in the US.