Comparing music usage to video usage is specious at best. Were you ever legally allowed to make copies of VHS tapes? Even if you were, why would you? Analog copying of just about any media is like taking a hammer to it. It ALWAYS results in massive generational loss.
DVD's? They were designed with user copying not allowed in mind.
CD's came out before the massive proliferation of the personal computer and the Red Book standard made it easy for people to make byte for byte copies of the original. CD's got grandfathered into the current age of digital media as a result.
Everyone goes on and on and on about how their RIGHTS are being trampled. The simple fact is that your RIGHTS are not being trampled. This is commerce. Entertainment. This is basic free market stuff.
You don't own any of this stuff. You license a right to use it. Your rights to use it are determined by the issuer of the license. Now, if you don't agree with the terms of the license... well, you, as a consumer, have a right guaranteed by the Constitution to speak out.
Go back to the Constitution. Consumer rights are not mentioned anywhere. That is the domain of the states (though the Feds are of course tangled up in it) and it's incumbent upon educated consumers to vote with their dollars. Elevating this discussion of how you use ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA to the level of free speech, due process, etc. is plain ridiculous.
I'm tired of the/. crowd trying to intertwine entertainment with Constitutional concepts.
This is American Style Capitalism. It's flawed to it's very core, but legislating the crap out of it will only make it worse. Forcing Apple to provide DRM free music and movies, when it's not their call to make in the first place, is wrong. The underlying problem is the RIAA depending upon the protection of the Feds to uphold their oligopoly and ancient, failing business practices.
Amazon doesn't have the selection I want, nor the user experience I want. All the other digital music sites out their suffer the same failings... not putting the experience of the consumer first.
If someone doesn't like the workaround to Fairplay or simply doesn't know about it, well, deal with it. Apple would do away with DRM if they were allowed to and I look forward to a day when they are ALLOWED to do so, but for now, iTunes has the selection I want in a very easy to use way. I'm unapologetically voting with my wallet.
I, as an educated consumer, can protect myself against DRM servers going down, by simply knowing how to get around the FairPlay DRM in the first place, knowing full well, that I am not breaking the terms of my license in doing so.
That's fine, but blaming Apple for the DRM, despite that they publicly announce a way to break it is flat out wrong. The RIAA created Amazon MP3 as a bargaining tool so that they could inflate prices at iTunes.
If iTunes has what I want, I'm going to buy it there. If it doesn't, I'll but it where it is available. If that means buying a whole CD for one track... so be it. I'll be pissed about it, but that's that.
Also, going from AAC > CD is actually an upconvert in terms of sampling quality. If you bring it back into your system with a noticeable loss in quality, it's the encoding settings you chose that are at fault.
That would be an analog to digital conversion with too many variables involved to create a duplicate of even remotely the same quality.
The analogy fails.
At least with the iTunes burn to disc method, it's an all digital process involving a minimal amount of re-compression. Shooting a dvd from a television screen with a camcorder is a whole different ball of wax resulting in a VASTLY inferior product.
AAC > CD > MP3 is a minor loss of quality by comparison.
To take you example to it's logical extreme... What kind of camera are you shooting with? 1 chip? 3 chip? NTSC? PAL? 720p60? 720p50? HDV? XDCam HD? AVCHD? HDCam? MiniDV? DVCam? Red One? DigiBeta? BetaSP? VHS? 23.98 fps? 29.97fps? 25fps? 16:9? 4:3?
Does the camera have a refresh rate sync option? White and black point compensation?
Are you using a tripod or handheld?
Is the room in which you are recording all tungsten light or a mix of daylight and tungsten? All daylight? If a mix, how are you compensating for the variance in color temperature?
Fluorescents? If so, again, how are you white balancing and accounting for flicker?
Your analogy fails on many levels.
Going from AAC > CD > MP3 is a controlled and predictable environment in comparison.
Most audiophiles really aren't audiophiles at all, but technology zealots. Hearing tests have been done comparing self-proclaimed audiophiles versus average consumers, and more often than not, the audiophiles couldn't hear any difference between high bit rate MP3 and their beloved OGG format.
Not evil. Inconvenience is not evil... it's just inconvenience. Murder is evil. Genocide is evil. Rape is evil.
DRM is just a mild annoyance. Not saying it shouldn't be curbed or done away with, but I won't go so over the top as to equate it with evil.
You/. peeps need to calm down and realize that DRM is not a constitutional issue. Your freedom of speech is not being impaired... only your wallet and maybe some of your time.
This is not sinister. This is not evil. This is merely an issue of the failings of American capitalism in the modern age. Growing pains.
You obviously don't realize that Apple would drop DRM in a heartbeat if the labels would allow them to. Amazon MP3 was set up by the labels as a bargaining chip against iTunes.
If the labels won't sign a deal with Apple that allows for the sale of DRM free music, what choice does Apple have as a business?
Amazon MP3 exists only as a threat to Apple. Period.
iTunes Plus exists and they are doing everything they can to get more DRM free music in the store.
It's not Apple that sees their customers as thieves, but rather the RIAA that sees their customers as thieves.
Not buy any music from any artist on any major label? Wow. That's a bit extreme.
True, the majors sign a lot of crap that they can sell at high prices for short term profit, but they also sign bands that will survive in the long run.
Not buying from the majors means not buying Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Ramones, Motorhead, Slayer, Mr. Bungle, etc.
Support quality, not ideology.
I pity people who limit themselves based off of ideology. True, there is a ton of great music on the indies and that is the majority of where my music dollars is spent, but denying myself the greats, the legends from the past because of a deluded idea that labels are inherently bad is just plain stupid.
Vote with your dollars. Don't buy the new Britney, sure, but denying yourself Led Zeppelin's Presence, Metallica's Master of Puppets.... just plain stupid.
The problem with the/. perspective on the music industry is that the crowd here only considers the technological perspective on the industry and not the financial realities faced by artists who sign to the majors. Good bands who sign bad deals. Hell yeah I'll buy an album by a good band on a major. If they don't get that sale, chances are they will end up in major debt to the label. Believe me. Way too many of my friends have suffered from this. Psychefunkapus. Limbomaniacs. Fungo Mungo. All peers of Primus from back in the day who dreamed of big time success and wound up only with big time debt due to their lack of business experience and cock-eyed optimism.
Great albums ruined by naivete and ruthless business practices. I felt duty bound to buy their albums to help my friends and to have copies of this stuff after it was shelved by the labels.
Signing with the majors does not immediately mean the music is sub par. Many indies sign a lot of crap as well. The whole shoegazer and emo movements of the late nineties early 2000's was largely fueled by the indie labels.
Ok... I have to question your authority on this subject as you are referencing PageMaker and Freehand. Freehand hasn't been updated in over 5 years and PageMaker hasn't seen an update in over a decade!
Both are relatively obsolete programs at this point.
In page layout, the battle is between Quark XPress and Adobe inDesign. In vector illustration, the battle used to be between Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator... Illustrator was the market leader and the purchase of Macromedia by Adobe pretty much guaranteed the death of Freehand... and I can't say I'm sad to see it go.
As for modifying images IN CMYK, well, it's rather important actually. Some image manipulations will misfire on you if you do the change in RGB and then convert it to CMYK.
And no one does separations out of Photoshop. Hell, people rarely do seps out of Illustrator. Usually, you will place the Illustrator or Photoshop file on a Quark or InDesign page and output the seps from one of those apps. They are designed with color separation in mind and far superior to either Illustrator or Photoshop.
This was also one of the strengths of Freehand and Pagemaker over Quark back in their heyday; the ease with which you could do separations. Although, the industry's acceptance of Quark as the preferred dtp solution made the output itself far more reliable as back end print server apps were tuned for Quark and not the other two.
GIMP is a great open source experiment and has a place in the design world, but it is going to have a very hard road trying to compete head to head with Photoshop as Adobe spends TONS of money developing it for end users and not programmers. Programmers will gravitate to GIMP because of ideological reasons primarily and then claim it's equal in power to Photoshop... when it's not even close. GIMP today is comparable to Photoshop 4 in terms of capabilities. Photoshop 4 came out in 1996.
WoW. I have a 3 year old Dual 2.7 G5 with the stock video card and I'm a full blown WoW addict and get decent frame rates even standing in the middle of a bunch of mages going AoE crazy.
Are you trying to run the game at 1200fps or something?
Apple, Steve in particular, has been a vocal opponent of DRM'd music and is trying to get labels other than just EMI on board for selling non copy protected MP3's.
The whole Fair Play thing was implemented to placate the labels so they could get the iTunes music store up and running with their cooperation.
You can get an iPod and circumvent iTunes and the store altogether if you like. Buy from Amazon. Buy CD's and rip 'em. Use 3rd party utilities to manage your play lists. No big deal.
As to point 4... you obviously have no idea how easy it is to get music purchased from the iTunes Store to MP3 format. Easy. I've been doing it for years. They practically spell it out for you in the help documentation for iTunes.
Avoid the iPod like the plague for all I care. Just don't go around spouting off about how awful it is when you have no clue what you're talking about in regards to it's DRM and how to legally and easily get around it.
Why is the FM tuner such a big deal to people? Personally, I can't stand commercial radio. Why would I listen to it if I have access to a large portion of my own music library at hand and thousands of podcasts?
I'm actually thoroughly pleased with the fact that there is no radio tuner built into my iPod or iPhone.
If I or anyone else wants a radio tuner for their iPod, Belkin makes a whole line of 3rd party iPod addons.
What massive DRM in the iPod? You mean the DRM that is very easily cracked by burning a playlist to to an Audio CD format and reimported however you like?
The price? Come on. The market tends to disagree with you. Millions upon millions of people don't think it's too expensive. Apple is only charging what the market will let them charge. It may be your opinion that it's too expensive and you are free to buy something else. Many many people disagree with you though.
These are old arguments that have been refuted time and time again.
Posting to a site like Facebook or Flickr where it isn't necessarily going to be sold is entirely a different matter. Those are photos intended for personal use and enjoyment.
I am largely going off of what attorneys, distributors and other filmmakers/photographers who sell their work for distribution tell me.
When you sell to a newspaper or news station, they are assuming liability upon purchase so how they want to handle the issue will vary from outlet to outlet.
In the film world, it's all about covering your ass to ensure you get distribution and that when distribution is secured you aren't saddled with lawsuits that would ultimately result in your work not being seen and losing money as a result.
Yeah, due diligence when it comes to releases is a pain in the ass and a total inconvenience, but ultimately I think it's less of a hassle to deal with than say... a lawsuit.... even a baseless one. If you have a release from someone and they take you to court anyway, show the release in court. Case closed.
Getting releases isn't just needless paperwork, it's also common courtesy. I'm a camera guy and an editor. I don't want to be in front of a camera unless asked politely and I certainly don't want strangers taking photos of me and using them without my consent; even for private use.
(Not that photos of me are in high demand or anything, but it's an example.)
These codes of conduct exist for a reason and that is to avoid legal repercussions and show basic human respect.
Broadcast and print news get special consideration when it comes to using peoples' images for broadcast or print in the interest of Fair Use.
If you plan to publish for profit or just for public display and are not a news outlet, getting releases is crucial. Using someone's image without permission is a sure-fire way to having a lawsuit handed to you.
I work in the film industry and if we're filming on a location where we can't 100% control the foot traffic, we have PA's running all over the place getting releases signed.
If you are doing documentary video work, simply getting the subject to say their name and that it is alright to use their interview on tape suffices for a release.
Getting distribution REQUIRES that you have signed releases for every single cast, crew and extra as well as for locations and for music. On top of this they will require O&E insurance (Errors and omissions) in case you got a Pepsi bottle in a shot or something like that.
The amount of paperwork involved in getting something commercially distributed is incredible and for most indie filmmakers, it is also the reason they don't get their films released... they don't do their paperwork.
When I shoot music video in a club, I have to plaster the whole venue with legal verbiage just so that people know that by entering the venue they are agreeing to have their likeness video taped.
Yes, this is all a total hassle, but it's also about covering your own ass against lawsuits. Neglect your paperwork at your own risk.
IANAL but I have worked with many entertainment attorneys who will reiterate everything I just said.
Just being the biggest player in town doesn't necessarily make you an illegal monopoly. It doesn't even make you a monopoly if its trivial for someone to set up shop to compete with you. Its not like google.
True, being the biggest doesn't mean you're a monopoly until you've gathered the lion's share of your particular market. A 51% market share in a given market could be considered a monopoly, though not a particularly powerful one if there is only one other competitor at 49%.
A company can maintain a monopoly and it should still be "trivial" for someone to enter the market. That's one of the tenets of capitalism. It's when the monopoly uses it's power to curb competitors' ability to enter the market that it becomes an antitrust violation.
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Comparing music usage to video usage is specious at best. Were you ever legally allowed to make copies of VHS tapes? Even if you were, why would you? Analog copying of just about any media is like taking a hammer to it. It ALWAYS results in massive generational loss.
DVD's? They were designed with user copying not allowed in mind.
CD's came out before the massive proliferation of the personal computer and the Red Book standard made it easy for people to make byte for byte copies of the original. CD's got grandfathered into the current age of digital media as a result.
Everyone goes on and on and on about how their RIGHTS are being trampled. The simple fact is that your RIGHTS are not being trampled. This is commerce. Entertainment. This is basic free market stuff.
You don't own any of this stuff. You license a right to use it. Your rights to use it are determined by the issuer of the license. Now, if you don't agree with the terms of the license... well, you, as a consumer, have a right guaranteed by the Constitution to speak out.
Go back to the Constitution. Consumer rights are not mentioned anywhere. That is the domain of the states (though the Feds are of course tangled up in it) and it's incumbent upon educated consumers to vote with their dollars. Elevating this discussion of how you use ENTERTAINMENT MEDIA to the level of free speech, due process, etc. is plain ridiculous.
I'm tired of the /. crowd trying to intertwine entertainment with Constitutional concepts.
This is American Style Capitalism. It's flawed to it's very core, but legislating the crap out of it will only make it worse. Forcing Apple to provide DRM free music and movies, when it's not their call to make in the first place, is wrong. The underlying problem is the RIAA depending upon the protection of the Feds to uphold their oligopoly and ancient, failing business practices.
Amazon doesn't have the selection I want, nor the user experience I want. All the other digital music sites out their suffer the same failings... not putting the experience of the consumer first.
If someone doesn't like the workaround to Fairplay or simply doesn't know about it, well, deal with it. Apple would do away with DRM if they were allowed to and I look forward to a day when they are ALLOWED to do so, but for now, iTunes has the selection I want in a very easy to use way. I'm unapologetically voting with my wallet.
I, as an educated consumer, can protect myself against DRM servers going down, by simply knowing how to get around the FairPlay DRM in the first place, knowing full well, that I am not breaking the terms of my license in doing so.
This is all just so much whining.
That's fine, but blaming Apple for the DRM, despite that they publicly announce a way to break it is flat out wrong. The RIAA created Amazon MP3 as a bargaining tool so that they could inflate prices at iTunes.
If iTunes has what I want, I'm going to buy it there. If it doesn't, I'll but it where it is available. If that means buying a whole CD for one track... so be it. I'll be pissed about it, but that's that.
Also, going from AAC > CD is actually an upconvert in terms of sampling quality. If you bring it back into your system with a noticeable loss in quality, it's the encoding settings you chose that are at fault.
That would be an analog to digital conversion with too many variables involved to create a duplicate of even remotely the same quality.
The analogy fails.
At least with the iTunes burn to disc method, it's an all digital process involving a minimal amount of re-compression. Shooting a dvd from a television screen with a camcorder is a whole different ball of wax resulting in a VASTLY inferior product.
AAC > CD > MP3 is a minor loss of quality by comparison.
To take you example to it's logical extreme... What kind of camera are you shooting with? 1 chip? 3 chip? NTSC? PAL? 720p60? 720p50? HDV? XDCam HD? AVCHD? HDCam? MiniDV? DVCam? Red One? DigiBeta? BetaSP? VHS? 23.98 fps? 29.97fps? 25fps? 16:9? 4:3?
Does the camera have a refresh rate sync option? White and black point compensation?
Are you using a tripod or handheld?
Is the room in which you are recording all tungsten light or a mix of daylight and tungsten? All daylight? If a mix, how are you compensating for the variance in color temperature?
Fluorescents? If so, again, how are you white balancing and accounting for flicker?
Your analogy fails on many levels.
Going from AAC > CD > MP3 is a controlled and predictable environment in comparison.
Well, it's not like they have to be stuck in AAC forever.
Most audiophiles really aren't audiophiles at all, but technology zealots. Hearing tests have been done comparing self-proclaimed audiophiles versus average consumers, and more often than not, the audiophiles couldn't hear any difference between high bit rate MP3 and their beloved OGG format.
Funny really.
Not evil. Inconvenience is not evil... it's just inconvenience. Murder is evil. Genocide is evil. Rape is evil.
DRM is just a mild annoyance. Not saying it shouldn't be curbed or done away with, but I won't go so over the top as to equate it with evil.
You /. peeps need to calm down and realize that DRM is not a constitutional issue. Your freedom of speech is not being impaired... only your wallet and maybe some of your time.
This is not sinister. This is not evil. This is merely an issue of the failings of American capitalism in the modern age. Growing pains.
Create a playlist. Burn to CD. Re-import in the program and file format of your choice.
Done. No lock in. Period.
How hard is it for the /. crowd to get this very simple fact?
Evil? Really?
You're going to take an innocuous technological concept and elevate it to the level of murder or rape?
DRM is a financial inconvenience. Nothing else.
You obviously don't realize that Apple would drop DRM in a heartbeat if the labels would allow them to. Amazon MP3 was set up by the labels as a bargaining chip against iTunes.
If the labels won't sign a deal with Apple that allows for the sale of DRM free music, what choice does Apple have as a business?
Amazon MP3 exists only as a threat to Apple. Period.
iTunes Plus exists and they are doing everything they can to get more DRM free music in the store.
It's not Apple that sees their customers as thieves, but rather the RIAA that sees their customers as thieves.
Not buy any music from any artist on any major label? Wow. That's a bit extreme.
True, the majors sign a lot of crap that they can sell at high prices for short term profit, but they also sign bands that will survive in the long run.
Not buying from the majors means not buying Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, The Ramones, Motorhead, Slayer, Mr. Bungle, etc.
Support quality, not ideology.
I pity people who limit themselves based off of ideology. True, there is a ton of great music on the indies and that is the majority of where my music dollars is spent, but denying myself the greats, the legends from the past because of a deluded idea that labels are inherently bad is just plain stupid.
Vote with your dollars. Don't buy the new Britney, sure, but denying yourself Led Zeppelin's Presence, Metallica's Master of Puppets.... just plain stupid.
The problem with the /. perspective on the music industry is that the crowd here only considers the technological perspective on the industry and not the financial realities faced by artists who sign to the majors. Good bands who sign bad deals. Hell yeah I'll buy an album by a good band on a major. If they don't get that sale, chances are they will end up in major debt to the label. Believe me. Way too many of my friends have suffered from this. Psychefunkapus. Limbomaniacs. Fungo Mungo. All peers of Primus from back in the day who dreamed of big time success and wound up only with big time debt due to their lack of business experience and cock-eyed optimism.
Great albums ruined by naivete and ruthless business practices. I felt duty bound to buy their albums to help my friends and to have copies of this stuff after it was shelved by the labels.
Signing with the majors does not immediately mean the music is sub par. Many indies sign a lot of crap as well. The whole shoegazer and emo movements of the late nineties early 2000's was largely fueled by the indie labels.
This entire notion is based on a false premise.
Buy what is good. Period.
Ok... I have to question your authority on this subject as you are referencing PageMaker and Freehand. Freehand hasn't been updated in over 5 years and PageMaker hasn't seen an update in over a decade!
Both are relatively obsolete programs at this point.
In page layout, the battle is between Quark XPress and Adobe inDesign. In vector illustration, the battle used to be between Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator... Illustrator was the market leader and the purchase of Macromedia by Adobe pretty much guaranteed the death of Freehand... and I can't say I'm sad to see it go.
As for modifying images IN CMYK, well, it's rather important actually. Some image manipulations will misfire on you if you do the change in RGB and then convert it to CMYK.
And no one does separations out of Photoshop. Hell, people rarely do seps out of Illustrator. Usually, you will place the Illustrator or Photoshop file on a Quark or InDesign page and output the seps from one of those apps. They are designed with color separation in mind and far superior to either Illustrator or Photoshop.
This was also one of the strengths of Freehand and Pagemaker over Quark back in their heyday; the ease with which you could do separations. Although, the industry's acceptance of Quark as the preferred dtp solution made the output itself far more reliable as back end print server apps were tuned for Quark and not the other two.
GIMP is a great open source experiment and has a place in the design world, but it is going to have a very hard road trying to compete head to head with Photoshop as Adobe spends TONS of money developing it for end users and not programmers. Programmers will gravitate to GIMP because of ideological reasons primarily and then claim it's equal in power to Photoshop... when it's not even close. GIMP today is comparable to Photoshop 4 in terms of capabilities. Photoshop 4 came out in 1996.
Well, I'm not upset at anything really.
People frequently refer to Apple, the company, as Mac when Mac(intosh) is a product and not a company.
Just pointing something out.
That would be the best option but I highly doubt it as Mac seems to be becoming a little corner operation at times
just to correct a little pet peeve of mine. Mac(intosh) is a product produced by Apple, Inc; formerly Apple Computers.
Mac is not the company name, but a branded product line.
WoW. I have a 3 year old Dual 2.7 G5 with the stock video card and I'm a full blown WoW addict and get decent frame rates even standing in the middle of a bunch of mages going AoE crazy.
Are you trying to run the game at 1200fps or something?
Ah the 7x line! I wouldn't be surprised if we've been on the same bus before! Ha!
I'm insanely tired from a night of teaching, but this is fascinating!
WHile I may not agree with everything, your arguments are well thought out and articulated and I sincerely thank you for this exchange of ideas!
Interesting? Oh come on now!
Apple, Steve in particular, has been a vocal opponent of DRM'd music and is trying to get labels other than just EMI on board for selling non copy protected MP3's.
The whole Fair Play thing was implemented to placate the labels so they could get the iTunes music store up and running with their cooperation.
You can get an iPod and circumvent iTunes and the store altogether if you like. Buy from Amazon. Buy CD's and rip 'em. Use 3rd party utilities to manage your play lists. No big deal.
As to point 4... you obviously have no idea how easy it is to get music purchased from the iTunes Store to MP3 format. Easy. I've been doing it for years. They practically spell it out for you in the help documentation for iTunes.
Avoid the iPod like the plague for all I care. Just don't go around spouting off about how awful it is when you have no clue what you're talking about in regards to it's DRM and how to legally and easily get around it.
Why is the FM tuner such a big deal to people? Personally, I can't stand commercial radio. Why would I listen to it if I have access to a large portion of my own music library at hand and thousands of podcasts?
I'm actually thoroughly pleased with the fact that there is no radio tuner built into my iPod or iPhone.
If I or anyone else wants a radio tuner for their iPod, Belkin makes a whole line of 3rd party iPod addons.
What massive DRM in the iPod? You mean the DRM that is very easily cracked by burning a playlist to to an Audio CD format and reimported however you like?
The price? Come on. The market tends to disagree with you. Millions upon millions of people don't think it's too expensive. Apple is only charging what the market will let them charge. It may be your opinion that it's too expensive and you are free to buy something else. Many many people disagree with you though.
These are old arguments that have been refuted time and time again.
It's funny. I live right across the pond from The Empire. I have yet to see a single Zune anywhere in Seattle.
This is possibly the most cogent and articulate post I've seen on /. in quite some time!
(no sarcasm at all in this!)
BTW, I'm in Seattle, so I'm almost a Canadian.
Posting to a site like Facebook or Flickr where it isn't necessarily going to be sold is entirely a different matter. Those are photos intended for personal use and enjoyment.
I am largely going off of what attorneys, distributors and other filmmakers/photographers who sell their work for distribution tell me.
When you sell to a newspaper or news station, they are assuming liability upon purchase so how they want to handle the issue will vary from outlet to outlet.
In the film world, it's all about covering your ass to ensure you get distribution and that when distribution is secured you aren't saddled with lawsuits that would ultimately result in your work not being seen and losing money as a result.
Yeah, due diligence when it comes to releases is a pain in the ass and a total inconvenience, but ultimately I think it's less of a hassle to deal with than say... a lawsuit.... even a baseless one. If you have a release from someone and they take you to court anyway, show the release in court. Case closed.
Getting releases isn't just needless paperwork, it's also common courtesy. I'm a camera guy and an editor. I don't want to be in front of a camera unless asked politely and I certainly don't want strangers taking photos of me and using them without my consent; even for private use.
(Not that photos of me are in high demand or anything, but it's an example.)
These codes of conduct exist for a reason and that is to avoid legal repercussions and show basic human respect.
Why? What am I saying there that is anything less than true?
I work in the film and video industry and paperwork is crucial to secure finishing funds and distribution deals.
Broadcast and print news get special consideration when it comes to using peoples' images for broadcast or print in the interest of Fair Use.
If you plan to publish for profit or just for public display and are not a news outlet, getting releases is crucial. Using someone's image without permission is a sure-fire way to having a lawsuit handed to you.
I work in the film industry and if we're filming on a location where we can't 100% control the foot traffic, we have PA's running all over the place getting releases signed.
If you are doing documentary video work, simply getting the subject to say their name and that it is alright to use their interview on tape suffices for a release.
Getting distribution REQUIRES that you have signed releases for every single cast, crew and extra as well as for locations and for music. On top of this they will require O&E insurance (Errors and omissions) in case you got a Pepsi bottle in a shot or something like that.
The amount of paperwork involved in getting something commercially distributed is incredible and for most indie filmmakers, it is also the reason they don't get their films released... they don't do their paperwork.
When I shoot music video in a club, I have to plaster the whole venue with legal verbiage just so that people know that by entering the venue they are agreeing to have their likeness video taped.
Yes, this is all a total hassle, but it's also about covering your own ass against lawsuits. Neglect your paperwork at your own risk.
IANAL but I have worked with many entertainment attorneys who will reiterate everything I just said.
Just being the biggest player in town doesn't necessarily make you an illegal monopoly. It doesn't even make you a monopoly if its trivial for someone to set up shop to compete with you. Its not like google.
True, being the biggest doesn't mean you're a monopoly until you've gathered the lion's share of your particular market. A 51% market share in a given market could be considered a monopoly, though not a particularly powerful one if there is only one other competitor at 49%.
A company can maintain a monopoly and it should still be "trivial" for someone to enter the market. That's one of the tenets of capitalism. It's when the monopoly uses it's power to curb competitors' ability to enter the market that it becomes an antitrust violation.