Those who register their music can get a CD with special packaging; an artefact that symbolises the relationship one has with the artist and the community of fans. Perhaps the CD can contain bonus fans-only tracks, perhaps not.
And TVT was bought by Interscope (the teen-rebellion label co-founded by marketing supremo Andre "Dr. Dre" young, and co-owned by Seagram, whose CEO recently called for the abolition of anonymity), just to get their hands on Nine Inch Nails. Sucks, doesn't it?
Plan 9's position as UNIX's successor is by no means clear. Operating systems have tremendous inertia; people will use an OS if it has enough applications. Which is why Windows is so popular (surely it's not because of its elegant design and technical superiority), why its main competitors are based on UNIX, and the most successful unices are relatively unweird ones like Linux and BSD. By the time there is sufficient dissatisfaction with the classic UNIX design to warrant a move, things will have evolved so much that the alternatives will be quite different from what exists now. Perhaps one of them will be descended from, or inspired by, Plan 9; perhaps not.
While Plan 9 is technically interesting, for most uses it doesn't offer enough advantage to warrant switching from vanilla UNIX. Its distributed architecture probably won't be of use to a hobbyist surfing the web on a PC.
Copying a CD to a tape for your own use is OK (not sure if it's fair use or another doctrine). Making a mix tape is tolerated.
However, there is a BIG difference between this and making a CD available, at virtually master quality, by strangers anywhere on the Internet. It's a matter of scale.
The recordings belong to someone, who went to the trouble of creating them. The author of a work has a moral right to decide how it is to be licensed.
It's like the analogy another poster gave: if you touch someone, you'll probably kill a few of their skin cells. If you kill a few of someone's skin cells, they'll never notice; if you kill a large enough number, you'll injure or kill that person. That is analogous to the difference between lending a CD you bought to a friend and putting it online for anyone to grab it.
The most likely outcome is that there will be an out-of-court settlement, giving the RIAA control of mp3.com. Which will help them phase out unprotected MP3s as a format, marginalising it to the fringe, and later allowing them to intimidate player makers into removing MP3 support and ISPs into pulling sites hosting XMMS and LAME (using DeCSS as a precedent). De facto criminalisation of unencrypted music formats will follow, and once it's accepted by the public it will eventually be enshrined in law.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but virtually all ISPs do log dial-ins. With a subpoena, an IP number and a time it is possible to obtain the details of who was using said number at the time. This has been used to prosecute crackers, and it's only a matter of time before it's used to prosecute music pirates.
I believe Interscope (which launched Snoop Dogg's career, and specialises in sensationalist teen-rebellion music from gangsta rapcore to goth gone bad) was founded by none other than Dr. Dre. In any case, it's part of the Universal group, owned by that other recent newsmaker, Seagram.
If the music industry wants to throw the book at someone who makes copyrighted, commercially available recordings available for anonymous download, they have every right. Especially if the artists themselves are sick of having their recordings ripped off on a massive scale.
There is a difference between lending a CD to a friend and making it available to millions of strangers.
Sooner or later the RIAA or an artist will subpoena ISP logs, and some l33t mp3 p1mp will end up as Bubba's new bitch. And he'll have nothing to blame but his own stupidity for thinking that his IP address is sufficiently untraceable to commit a crime.
A working WINE would be good in that it would allow the running of MSIE, as well as Shockwave and other plug-ins. Then at last one could play SissyFight without shelling out for VMWare and the RAM required to run it.
Do you try to stop the specification from being spread, or do you attack the myriad clients that pop up?
Well, most war3z p1mpz aren't going to code their own clients from scratch just to trade the latest Britney album, so if the same personnel whose job it is to search for pirate sites and take them down add Gnutella clients to their list of targets, that will keep Gnutella from having too much of an effect. Network effects are both its strength and weakness, and the fewer people are using the system, the less powerful it is.
And if you start filtering by packets, what's to stop someone from releasing a trivial change to the packet format that makes it untraceable again?
...and breaking all existing clients. Such defensive mutation will fragment the Gnutella network to the point where there are many small, mutually incompatible networks, which sort of defeats the purpose.
An example: why didn't Microsoft rewrite the Windows API every year or so to lock out competitors? Not because they're nice guys, but because they couldn't.
The same doctrine will apply as to running FTP sites full of MP3s. Lawyers send a letter to the ISP, ISP pulls the customer's account and nukes the site/server. As long as you can get an IP number, you can get it pulled, unless a court rules that there's no ground for that.
Would you want to stand up to the RIAA's lawyers if you're running an ISP?
Within a few years, unencrypted file formats for media such as music and movies will be criminalised. It will be illegal to distribute software for encoding or decoding these formats.
The framework for criminalising MP3 encoders/players already exists in the DMCA. As soon as SDMI exists, the RIAA will be able to threaten lawsuits against ISPs which host things like xmms and LAME, much as the MPAA did against DeCSS. Companies which do not phase out MP3 playback/encoding in time with the SDMI timetable will also open themselves to prosecution.
This will also restore the RIAA's position and its control of the means of music distribution; it will be impossible to author SDMI-compliant music without it being signed (and probably hosted on a special serialising server) by a distribution authority. Chances are the authorities will be run by our old friends Seagram, Bertelsmann, AOL Time Warner and Sony.
Well, that's probably what the RIAA is hoping will happen; hopefully they won't succeed in it; though they have literally billions to spend on making this a reality, and billions to lose if they fail.
Since the 1990s, when they bought Universal Studios, MCA and (later) Polygram. These days Universal (a subsidiary of Seagram) is the largest of the Big Four recording companies, and hence the largest component of the RIAA.
It's in their interest to criminalise file sharing software and non-encrypting file formats. Otherwise it's back to peddling whiskeys for their income.
Actually, that's not quite true. One could certainly sue websites hosting (or even linking to) Gnutella, as the MPAA have done with DeCSS. Whether they'd win or not is another question, though if they stand a decent chance, the lawsuit itself can serve as an intimidation tool.
"rights" may not be the most sensible way to think of what you can do with a CD, given how difficult it is to define these things reasonably. A more sensible way to think of it is in terms of ethics and honesty; in terms of morality rather than legality. If you tape a friend's CD, or rip it to MP3s, that in itself doesn't hurt the performer; though you are morally obliged to buy a copy if you intend to make a habit of listening to it. If you own a CD, lending it to a friend is OK, but putting it online for millions of strangers to download for free is obviously quite wrong.
If it was illegal for US ISPs to connect to country B, but legal to connect to C, and C allowed connections to B one might be able to get around it. Unless we then made it illegal to connect to C (secondary boycott enforced by our gov't) or banned routing of certain IPs.
The whole point of the treaty scenario is that if C is a signatory and B is not, it will prohibit connections to B; if C is not a signatory, connections to C will be prohibited.
The only thing the gov't could do then is make the penalties so huge (20 year prison sentences) that people wouldn't do it. And many still would. And monitoring/finding everyone doing it is impossible, and any halfway effective attempt is extremely expensive.
It won't be more expensive than finding war3z sites on the web and shutting them down. And if there are a few high-profile examples (multi-million-dollar fines, lengthy prison sentences), that alone will have a persuasive effect on others.
But perhaps there's a better middle ground that we can find here, like "every time a song is downloaded, the RIAA gives $0.25 to the artist" and I pay $0.50. I can go for that.
If it's anything like the blank media tax, it's going to be a scam. Blank tapes and CDRs with the "audio" barcode on them attract a levy for "compensating artists". In truth, the levy goes only to the RIAA's Big Four record labels. Small labels never see a cent of it; they don't matter.
Aside from it being intrinsically unfair (why should the Big Four put a tax on the demo tape your garage band records?), it reinforces the oligopolistic paradigm that the only legitimate recording companies are BMG, Universal, Warner/EMI and Sony. Should these entities wield control over file swapping as well?
What if the State Department or someone issued an order requiring special dispensation to connect to a specific "pirate" state, much in the way that it is illegal to export web browsers to Libya or Iran? It would be a lot easier to enforce than export restrictions on downloadable software.
Once upon a time, it was possible to occupy unclaimed land offshore and found a sovereign nation; that's how the Principality of Sealand was founded, on an abandoned defense platform off the coast of England.
They closed this loophole in 1978 or so, though; now claims must be approved by the nearest neighbour, even if the land is in international waters.
Interesting premise, considering that the interconnectedness of the net these days makes it virtually impossible to isolate a substantial subsection of the internet.
Don't be too sure. If it becomes a problem to The Powers That Be, i.e., if servers sprout in non-WIPO countries offering MP3s and war3z, I'm sure the copyright industry will push vigorously for tying Internet connectivity to an IP treaty. Chances are countries such as Britain, Australia, the EU will quietly sign it with perhaps a few concessions; countries such as Russia won't get much in the way of choice. And if the treaty prohibits signatories from providing connectivity to non-signatories, it's unlikely that Cuba or Libya or whoever will be able to set up a data haven.
The copyright industry has enough lobbying clout that they got copyrights extended to virtually perpetual terms; if such a treaty regime is at all possible, they could get it put into place.
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Those who register their music can get a CD with special packaging; an artefact that symbolises the relationship one has with the artist and the community of fans. Perhaps the CD can contain bonus fans-only tracks, perhaps not.
And TVT was bought by Interscope (the teen-rebellion label co-founded by marketing supremo Andre "Dr. Dre" young, and co-owned by Seagram, whose CEO recently called for the abolition of anonymity), just to get their hands on Nine Inch Nails. Sucks, doesn't it?
Plan 9's position as UNIX's successor is by no means clear. Operating systems have tremendous inertia; people will use an OS if it has enough applications. Which is why Windows is so popular (surely it's not because of its elegant design and technical superiority), why its main competitors are based on UNIX, and the most successful unices are relatively unweird ones like Linux and BSD.
By the time there is sufficient dissatisfaction with the classic UNIX design to warrant a move, things will have evolved so much that the alternatives will be quite different from what exists now. Perhaps one of them will be descended from, or inspired by, Plan 9; perhaps not.
While Plan 9 is technically interesting, for most uses it doesn't offer enough advantage to warrant switching from vanilla UNIX. Its distributed architecture probably won't be of use to a hobbyist surfing the web on a PC.
You're not from the Committee for the Moral Defense of Microsoft by any chance, are you?
(Oddly enough, I don't think they were a MS astroturf op, but rather overly enthusiastic Ayn Rand cultists.)
Now that means if I posted my abstract-electronica track Metallica Ate My Napster, I'd get black-banned. Now that's progress.
Quick; someone tell Edgar Bronfman (TVT's ultimate boss)...
Copying a CD to a tape for your own use is OK (not sure if it's fair use or another doctrine). Making a mix tape is tolerated.
However, there is a BIG difference between this and making a CD available, at virtually master quality, by strangers anywhere on the Internet. It's a matter of scale.
The recordings belong to someone, who went to the trouble of creating them. The author of a work has a moral right to decide how it is to be licensed.
It's like the analogy another poster gave: if you touch someone, you'll probably kill a few of their skin cells. If you kill a few of someone's skin cells, they'll never notice; if you kill a large enough number, you'll injure or kill that person.
That is analogous to the difference between lending a CD you bought to a friend and putting it online for anyone to grab it.
Amen, brother.
The most likely outcome is that there will be an out-of-court settlement, giving the RIAA control of mp3.com. Which will help them phase out unprotected MP3s as a format, marginalising it to the fringe, and later allowing them to intimidate player makers into removing MP3 support and ISPs into pulling sites hosting XMMS and LAME (using DeCSS as a precedent). De facto criminalisation of unencrypted music formats will follow, and once it's accepted by the public it will eventually be enshrined in law.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but virtually all ISPs do log dial-ins. With a subpoena, an IP number and a time it is possible to obtain the details of who was using said number at the time. This has been used to prosecute crackers, and it's only a matter of time before it's used to prosecute music pirates.
I believe Interscope (which launched Snoop Dogg's career, and specialises in sensationalist teen-rebellion music from gangsta rapcore to goth gone bad) was founded by none other than Dr. Dre.
In any case, it's part of the Universal group, owned by that other recent newsmaker, Seagram.
Mere coincidence?
I'll probably get moderated down for this, but...
If the music industry wants to throw the book at someone who makes copyrighted, commercially available recordings available for anonymous download, they have every right. Especially if the artists themselves are sick of having their recordings ripped off on a massive scale.
There is a difference between lending a CD to a friend and making it available to millions of strangers.
Sooner or later the RIAA or an artist will subpoena ISP logs, and some l33t mp3 p1mp will end up as Bubba's new bitch. And he'll have nothing to blame but his own stupidity for thinking that his IP address is sufficiently untraceable to commit a crime.
...you can take a big box, fill it with lots of MP3s and run the world's first real pirate MP3 server...
A working WINE would be good in that it would allow the running of MSIE, as well as Shockwave and other plug-ins. Then at last one could play SissyFight without shelling out for VMWare and the RAM required to run it.
It might even be more stable than Netscape...
Do you try to stop the specification from being spread, or do you attack the myriad clients that pop up?
Well, most war3z p1mpz aren't going to code their own clients from scratch just to trade the latest Britney album, so if the same personnel whose job it is to search for pirate sites and take them down add Gnutella clients to their list of targets, that will keep Gnutella from having too much of an effect. Network effects are both its strength and weakness, and the fewer people are using the system, the less powerful it is.
And if you start filtering by packets, what's to stop someone from releasing a trivial change to the packet format that makes it untraceable again?
...and breaking all existing clients. Such defensive mutation will fragment the Gnutella network to the point where there are many small, mutually incompatible networks, which sort of defeats the purpose.
An example: why didn't Microsoft rewrite the Windows API every year or so to lock out competitors? Not because they're nice guys, but because they couldn't.
The same doctrine will apply as to running FTP sites full of MP3s. Lawyers send a letter to the ISP, ISP pulls the customer's account and nukes the site/server. As long as you can get an IP number, you can get it pulled, unless a court rules that there's no ground for that.
Would you want to stand up to the RIAA's lawyers if you're running an ISP?
Within a few years, unencrypted file formats for media such as music and movies will be criminalised. It will be illegal to distribute software for encoding or decoding these formats.
The framework for criminalising MP3 encoders/players already exists in the DMCA. As soon as SDMI exists, the RIAA will be able to threaten lawsuits against ISPs which host things like xmms and LAME, much as the MPAA did against DeCSS. Companies which do not phase out MP3 playback/encoding in time with the SDMI timetable will also open themselves to prosecution.
This will also restore the RIAA's position and its control of the means of music distribution; it will be impossible to author SDMI-compliant music without it being signed (and probably hosted on a special serialising server) by a distribution authority. Chances are the authorities will be run by our old friends Seagram, Bertelsmann, AOL Time Warner and Sony.
Well, that's probably what the RIAA is hoping will happen; hopefully they won't succeed in it; though they have literally billions to spend on making this a reality, and billions to lose if they fail.
Since the 1990s, when they bought Universal Studios, MCA and (later) Polygram. These days Universal (a subsidiary of Seagram) is the largest of the Big Four recording companies, and hence the largest component of the RIAA.
It's in their interest to criminalise file sharing software and non-encrypting file formats. Otherwise it's back to peddling whiskeys for their income.
By the same token, Noriega wasn't breaking any Panamanian laws, and shouldn't have been abducted.
Had contemporary legal doctrines prevailed in Prohibition, Sam Bronfman would have been spirited away in the dead of night to a US federal prison.
Actually, that's not quite true. One could certainly sue websites hosting (or even linking to) Gnutella, as the MPAA have done with DeCSS. Whether they'd win or not is another question, though if they stand a decent chance, the lawsuit itself can serve as an intimidation tool.
"rights" may not be the most sensible way to think of what you can do with a CD, given how difficult it is to define these things reasonably. A more sensible way to think of it is in terms of ethics and honesty; in terms of morality rather than legality. If you tape a friend's CD, or rip it to MP3s, that in itself doesn't hurt the performer; though you are morally obliged to buy a copy if you intend to make a habit of listening to it. If you own a CD, lending it to a friend is OK, but putting it online for millions of strangers to download for free is obviously quite wrong.
If it was illegal for US ISPs to connect to country B, but legal to connect to C, and C allowed connections to B one might be able to get around it. Unless we then made it illegal to connect to C (secondary boycott enforced by our gov't) or banned routing of certain IPs.
The whole point of the treaty scenario is that if C is a signatory and B is not, it will prohibit connections to B; if C is not a signatory, connections to C will be prohibited.
The only thing the gov't could do then is make the penalties so huge (20 year prison sentences) that people wouldn't do it. And many still would. And monitoring/finding everyone doing it is impossible, and any halfway effective attempt is extremely expensive.
It won't be more expensive than finding war3z sites on the web and shutting them down. And if there are a few high-profile examples (multi-million-dollar fines, lengthy prison sentences), that alone will have a persuasive effect on others.
But perhaps there's a better middle ground that we can find here, like "every time a song is downloaded, the RIAA gives $0.25 to the artist" and I pay $0.50. I can go for that.
If it's anything like the blank media tax, it's going to be a scam. Blank tapes and CDRs with the "audio" barcode on them attract a levy for "compensating artists". In truth, the levy goes only to the RIAA's Big Four record labels. Small labels never see a cent of it; they don't matter.
Aside from it being intrinsically unfair (why should the Big Four put a tax on the demo tape your garage band records?), it reinforces the oligopolistic paradigm that the only legitimate recording companies are BMG, Universal, Warner/EMI and Sony. Should these entities wield control over file swapping as well?
What if the State Department or someone issued an order requiring special dispensation to connect to a specific "pirate" state, much in the way that it is illegal to export web browsers to Libya or Iran? It would be a lot easier to enforce than export restrictions on downloadable software.
Once upon a time, it was possible to occupy unclaimed land offshore and found a sovereign nation; that's how the Principality of Sealand was founded, on an abandoned defense platform off the coast of England.
They closed this loophole in 1978 or so, though; now claims must be approved by the nearest neighbour, even if the land is in international waters.
Interesting premise, considering that the interconnectedness of the net these days makes it virtually impossible to isolate a substantial subsection of the internet.
Don't be too sure. If it becomes a problem to The Powers That Be, i.e., if servers sprout in non-WIPO countries offering MP3s and war3z, I'm sure the copyright industry will push vigorously for tying Internet connectivity to an IP treaty. Chances are countries such as Britain, Australia, the EU will quietly sign it with perhaps a few concessions; countries such as Russia won't get much in the way of choice. And if the treaty prohibits signatories from providing connectivity to non-signatories, it's unlikely that Cuba or Libya or whoever will be able to set up a data haven.
The copyright industry has enough lobbying clout that they got copyrights extended to virtually perpetual terms; if such a treaty regime is at all possible, they could get it put into place.