Here is what I reall hear every time I read an article about the RIAA complaining about pirates:
"Waaah! We're the only ones allowed to rip the artists off!
Re:they've got it all backwards
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"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 2
I would guess that a large percentage of mp3's out there come from the release groups. This would continue to happen because they are dedicated at what they do. They would find a way to rip & encode mp3's.
They could easily do it on a machine with no ethernet card. Burn it to CD-R/DVD-R, move it to their next machine, and start the releasing process.
They might even LIKE having their ID on it, since they love the notoriety, and "fame". They already release their mp3 albums with a NFO file that proudly carries their group's name.
Original ripper -> Private FTP library -> Lots of releaser FTP sites -> Other FTP sites -> IRC -> Newsgroups -> people like me -> P2P -> people like you -> your mom.
they've got it all backwards
on
"Squishy" DRM?
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· Score: 2
I don't get it. Exactly how do they stamp your "computer name" into the superMp3? What ID are they going to set up? Another Intel ID on the PCU? Would you have to register your CPU when you buy it? Would you have to get a license like when you get a gun? Have to wait 5 days for a cool-down period?
What would keep you from ripping your songs at work (with the ID similar to: BigCompany PC#2004). Then take them home, log into your favorite P2P system and sharing them with the world.
Actually the whole setup seems to be against the original ripper, but not against the 400 people later trading it. Considering most of the leaches out there in P2P-land, who download only, and hardly ever upload (or rip) it seems like it would be safe to continue trading all your BobSmith-PC#01 files, as long as your name isn't BobSmith.
...but writing the whole thing off as "CDs only cost $1 to make, so they are charging way to much and deserve to have their stuff stolen" oversimplifies the whole thing to the point of being ridiculous.
True. But so is "Buying legislation to continue the stranglehold our monopoly has enjoyed for decades"
Face it. The recording industry believes it is their god-given right to make profits. Even in a recession. Note that they didn't lose money last year...they simply didn't make the same increase in profits.
If all P2P was shut down tomorrow, I have a feeling that we would see a decline in music sales anyway. That is all this article is trying to say. Actually it went a step further saying that the losses would have been even more.
Harsh? Hardly. If I was embarressed about it, I would have posted anonymously. Besides this is slashdot--at least you responded.
--I still don't fully understand having music you'll never actually hear
As a trader, you accept things you don't really want just incase another trader wants it. I remember finding a trader who actually had some Legendary Pink Dots I wanted. (LPD is kind of rare). I was refused a trade because they were only interested in Prog-Rock, and I had none. I went to the public library and ripped a box set of Pere Ubu, and was in like flin.
As a collector, having a full collection is always the goal. Did you collect baseball cards? Did you actually look at each card? Or was getting the whole 1983 set more important?
Most hobbies involve collecting visual items so the collector
Funny thing to say about Audio. But I know where you're coming from. I actually work with other trader's lists in excel all the time, so viewing my collection in excel IS visual.
However, the best answer I think I can give to a non-collector is this:
A few years ago we used to have friends over on weekends and we'd play this game while drinking... They would mention a song they liked, but hadn't heard forever. We would then see how fast I could look it up on Napster and download it, then play it. Back when Napster was new, this was a great novelty. Now imagine doing the same, but straight from a collection on a 5TB hard drive. Instantly accessable, maybe even linked to a database that indexes it by year or genre or mood types. It's kind of like having a library in your pocket.
There is also at least one more thing going on. The recording industry has always been more interested in making ALL the money, even more so than making MORE money. There are many examples of how they could make more money, but it would have to include letting others make some of it. This is why they control all the distribution, all the marketing, hell, they even dictate to the stores HOW to sell it, and for how much. They control the radio, they control the artists, they own the songs.
Napster had brought up a whole new distribution, not just "free music". A whole new marketplace could have opened up, but they wouldn't have been in control of it. How could they live with calling themselves a monopoly with that going on?
hardly a conspiracy theory! Probably very true. CD's, Cd burners, DVD, dvd burners have all been delayed to consumers for many years due "conflicts of interest".
I have a question though. Why can't you copy data to MiniDV or Digital8? Forgive me huge ignorance on the topic. (I don't have a digital camera) but a friend was talking to me, saying he was going to store his uncompressed video that he edited back to Digital8 tapes to offload his hard drive. Couldn't that mean he could just take his mp3's, convert them to "?avi" (even though it wouldn't really be) and copy it to the tape?
That seems like a great way to store data on a small footprint. An hour of video is about how much GB? I'm guessing it doesn't work that way
I have thought about this before, and was curious-- would it have to be an external drive enclosure?
The case i have now is a full tower, and quite tall. I built it quite a while ago, so can't remember the exact number of bays available. but it's something like 8. Assuming that cable length wasn't a problem, couldn't a person just buy a few PCI ATA cards, and hook up all 8+ hard drives in one box?
A person could also set up external firewire kits, although those seem to run almost $50 a kit. (although I would hope cheaper ones could be found)
I am familiar with Shorten. I know a guy who uses FLAC, and has built scripts to encode them on the fly to mp3 for automatic streaming purposes. But besides that, I haven't dealt with them. I think that burning one or (mayyybe) 2 lossless albums on one cd-r isn't very appealing to some people, however, this should turn around when DVD-R's become more popular and 7-10 can fit on one. (Much like mp3 albums on CD-R now)
Just a hobby since 1998. (I am a collector, so collecting full album-mp3's was a logical niche) There are people who collect weirder things.
It probably took more than 55 hours, since I used to have a 2X burner back in '98.
The collection is currently at 11,600 full albums. However, there are people I know that have much, much more. There are a couple in the US that I know that have about 18,000 albums. But the ones I know about that have the biggest collections are all from Europe, with more than 30,000 albums. Managing that kind of collection can really get out of hand. You have to deal with duplicates, quality control becomes harder, so you end up with some albums missing songs, or Xing-encoded songs sneak into the collection.
Using excel lists to keep track of artists is the preferred method... So I bet they're glad the newest version of excel now can handle 65,536 rows. If anyone wants to see the excel list I use, feel free to send email address to "r a d e r 1 9 7 3 [at] yahoo . com"
It is 1/2 a meg, though, zipped up.
Some people are switching to DVD-R burners, which will help on number of discs. (My 1100 CDR's would fit onto 150 DVDR's for instance) But it'll be a time consuming task, not to mention slightly costly: $287 for burner + $150 for discs.
320GB is a nice jump. Unfortunately, the initial price is way too expensive. It seems like every time hard drives get to an affordable level, my collection of mp3's shoots past it. At the moment it's at 700GB, and they are all archived on 1100 cd-r's:(
At the moment, I'd say the best deal is 80GB hard drives at about $80. But a hobbyist can't afford 10 of those.
Another phenomenon I've noticed is that the more you have on a hard drive, the faster you can set up trades. Which just makes your collection grow even faster. Even if I had all 700 GB of mp3's on hard drives, it just means I would be able to double the collection in a month or two. Enough hard drive space is thus impossible to attain.
heheh. That's kind of funny. I can picture the next round of RIAA complaints:
File sharing is causing our customers to weed out our crap! We need new laws where a customer must buy at least 2 crappy cd's before they buy the one they like.
I don't listen to my 700GB of music, but I collect it nevertheless
Re:i don't believe the RIAA is so clueless..
on
Napster Not To Blame
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· Score: 2
If you have to infringe on their materials for their business model to fail, doesn't that imply that it would succeed without the infringement?
Did you bring this question up in general, or in response to me? I never said anything about copyright infringement. In fact, this article suggests other reasons why the Big-5 have lost money.
I believe they are grasping at straws when they blame pirates instead of the recession for their "loss" of revenue last year.
The big-5 didn't even LOSE money last year. They just didn't MAKE MORE money than the year before.
Other entertainment is fighting for our dollars. DVD's are very similar in cost to CD's, and you get much more out of it. (There was a great aticle earlier interviewing kids buying DVD's instead of CD's)
Computer game sales have also continued to rise a LOT. This extra money has to come from somewhere! (I'll tell you where my money went -- towards inflation, because I wasn't given the yearly bonus OR a raise last year)
Although I don't think you can actually measure file sharing damages to the industry, I would bet that the industry would have felt this pressure (or a very high percentage) in an alternate Slider's universe where there was no file sharing. It would be interesting to see.
And as far as their "business model" working. Most monopolies succeed quite well by just being the monopoly. They've had this luxury for decades. And they fought technology the whole time: tapes, vcr (different industry-sorry), cd's, and now digital.
And what is their business model anyway? Exploit the artists. Control all of the medium. All of the distribution. Control the airwaves (oops, that's medium too). Price fix. Buy legislation.
Re:i don't believe the RIAA is so clueless..
on
Napster Not To Blame
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· Score: 5, Interesting
You hit the nail on the head!! Their wet dream is to charge us each time we hear a song. They're not alone: software companies want to move to a application server environment where you'd pay per for each use. Cable/movie industry would probably put all content up if they could charge per-show, per-movie watched. (with commercials of cours)
Reminds me of Futurama with the commercials shoved into your dreams... Would the Music Industry throw you in jail if you hummed a song to work? Or dreamed about music?
As far as "loss of sales" last year.. give me a break. It was a recession. Some companies actually lost REAL sales. Not some made up, "wish we made 9 billion" dollar sales.
And believe it or not, some companies go out of business when their services are too expensive or simply suck ass. The music industry as a business shouldn't be immune to this.
That's a good question. I don't think the solution is to have some monopoly to continue to buy more legislation, hack people's computers, and cripple the tech industry. Control all methods of distribution. All methods of merchandising, all methods of marketing?
Maybe a real Union is required. Steel workers were being treated unfairly, and a union was formed to protect their interests.
Worker's rights have been fought for and protected by the government before. Child labor laws, minimum wage, benefits, hours.
I don't think artists should have a god given right to sign a contract that will make them a million dollars. Contracts now are practically have formulas set up to return $0. But do contracts really need to cover things such as 150 concerts a year? (with another formula just over $0) Exclusive rights to your voice that can last a decade? Exclusive rights to your music forever? The power to never re-release your old music to CD if they don't want to? Or give you the right to re-relase it either.
Even baseball stars that aren't paid enough Millions, can go on strike and negotiate. I just don't see this being a possibility in the music industry with the way it's set up now.
Of course not, but they do have a right to ask the government to enforce the existing laws--laws that are intended to protect their intellectual property rights.
Existing laws like "Fair Use" ? How about the intellectual property is open to the public after 75 years?
Disney didn't want to give up their precious Micky Mouse, so they bought some legislation that extended the 75 years. This opens the door for a lot of things (but I am not up to date on it so will not guess)
pointing weapons at the heads of budding artists and forcing them to sign horrible contracts. In case you didn't realize, no artist ever is required to sign with any record company to be an artist.
No one stuck a gun to the steel workers and truck drivers to work long hours, no overtime, and crappy pay. But Unions were formed to protect the workers from unfair business practices. The government even had to step in and make it so that if a worker joined the Union, they wouldn't get fired for it! The RIAA is the Music Companie's "Union" for the artists. Lucky artists. We never see artists picketing in front of Sony or whatever. No strikes. I wonder why? Maybe it's in their contract that they can't?
No one put a gun to 5 year-olds during the industrial revolution to make them work for pennies a week. But it was still wrong. Even if the law at the time was in favor of the industries.
Anyway, enough bad analogies.
In case you didn't realize, no artist ever is required to sign with any record company to be an artist.
I'm not an artist, so I can't really come back with a great reply. However, read some articles written by artists. They describe terrible things that can be enforced by these huge contracts. 6-record deals. You can't sing anywhere else. They can even shelve an album you make if they don't think it made them any money. How do you finish 6 albums and then go to an Indie label? They can effectively cripple an artist's future works and their options forever if they want to. ----
I reread your post, and I think your theme is that the Big-5 have their right to have government to enforce copyright infringement laws. I suppose I see the validity in that. But buying legislation so they can hack people's computers? Crippling the technology sector? The list goes on.
Whatever the government does, I'd just like them to take the time to weed out the Big-5's illegal monopoly practices while they're at it.
Ok then. So where is was the government in protecting the REAL minority, the artists, when the RIAA/Big-5 stole their intellectual property rights forever.
The fact of the matter is, the industry is playing both sides of the fence with their money. They're buying legislation so that 14 years olds don't "steal" from them. And they're buying legislation so they can steal from the artists.
As much as they like to paint the picture that WE are stealing food from the children of musicians... THEY have been doing it so well -- long before the internet was even born. Bo Diddley died a penniless man. Today's B stars are similar to indentured servants. Even some A stars.
No business should be given the god-given right to be profitible. Yet this is what they're DEMANDING from our government. They claim 5% loss last year and blame it on me? My company lost 14% due to last year's recession. 10% layoffs were our present. Oh! If only I could blame a bunch of kids and then sue them instead.
My parents are slowly going out of business due to eBay. Maybe they should sue eBay, eBay's ISP, and the users who use eBay! That's the life of businesses: competition, good business plans, make money, lose money, research, technology, customers, product.
The Big-5 have enjoyed a life of being a monopoly. Price fixing. Cheap/free labor. And more and more government protection.
There is definately something wrong here, and it doesn't begin to start with file sharing.
Other interesting topic is how the USPS is suppose to be non-profit, but it really isn't.
They're even branching out to other markets. They are trying to lock in on card board boxes, tape, protectives (Peanuts, bubble-wrap)
Sure it might seem innocent now, but all it takes is for them to be subsidized by the government, and then they can offer these products for next to nothing, running other businesses.
Here's another truth: It's illegal for anyone else to put something in your mail box. Ever wonder why you see a separate box for newspapers to go in?
(Since this is slashdot, i must clarify even further... newspapers that get "mailed" to you can go in your mail box, but papers that distributed by the paper boy on his bike can't go in)
Right, and you are reading and responding to comments on slashdot on your 386 or Atari right now, right?
Depending on how old they are, you won't even have web browser applications on those machines, and by your rules, you're not allowed up install new software on it.
Well, that's simple. The RIAA has been coming up with concrete $$ amounts they've lost every year due to p2p & pirating. You can do the same!
Here's the formula you're looking for... Figure up how much money you wish you made last year. Then subtract your actual net worth that year. This equals the $$ you lost.
Don't forget to add your god-given right for 5% profit margin increase each and every year. 6% if the economy is down.
If for some reason this formula doesn't give you the number you wish for, simply change the stats on how much money you made until you're happy with the results. For instance, maybe you didn't make ANY money last year during the time you stood on your head in the middle of the road. College kids have heads! Colleges have roads!! College kids download music.... aha!! So that must be why you didn't make any money while standing on your head in the middle of the road.
"If I'm building a box, am I going ot include a Palladium component"
Well, that sounds good until a couple years from now where your video card is getting really doggy, and the CPU's that are available are 4 times faster than what you've got, and no one is using CD-r's anymore, and the 27GB blue disc DVD's are looking nice and cheap.
If Palladium passes and they enforced making the sale of non-Palladium hardware illegal... then all the companies will start making Palladium compliant hard ware. Sure, you can find hardware form the pre-Palladium days, but every year, those will seem so slow, it won't be worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is what I reall hear every time I read an article about the RIAA complaining about pirates:
"Waaah! We're the only ones allowed to rip the artists off!
I would guess that a large percentage of mp3's out there come from the release groups. This would continue to happen because they are dedicated at what they do. They would find a way to rip & encode mp3's.
They could easily do it on a machine with no ethernet card. Burn it to CD-R/DVD-R, move it to their next machine, and start the releasing process.
They might even LIKE having their ID on it, since they love the notoriety, and "fame". They already release their mp3 albums with a NFO file that proudly carries their group's name.
Original ripper -> Private FTP library -> Lots of releaser FTP sites -> Other FTP sites -> IRC -> Newsgroups -> people like me -> P2P -> people like you -> your mom.
I don't get it. Exactly how do they stamp your "computer name" into the superMp3? What ID are they going to set up? Another Intel ID on the PCU? Would you have to register your CPU when you buy it? Would you have to get a license like when you get a gun? Have to wait 5 days for a cool-down period?
What would keep you from ripping your songs at work (with the ID similar to: BigCompany PC#2004).
Then take them home, log into your favorite P2P system and sharing them with the world.
Actually the whole setup seems to be against the original ripper, but not against the 400 people later trading it. Considering most of the leaches out there in P2P-land, who download only, and hardly ever upload (or rip) it seems like it would be safe to continue trading all your BobSmith-PC#01 files, as long as your name isn't BobSmith.
...but writing the whole thing off as "CDs only cost $1 to make, so they are charging way to much and deserve to have their stuff stolen" oversimplifies the whole thing to the point of being ridiculous.
True. But so is "Buying legislation to continue the stranglehold our monopoly has enjoyed for decades"
Face it. The recording industry believes it is their god-given right to make profits. Even in a recession. Note that they didn't lose money last year...they simply didn't make the same increase in profits.
If all P2P was shut down tomorrow, I have a feeling that we would see a decline in music sales anyway. That is all this article is trying to say. Actually it went a step further saying that the losses would have been even more.
Hey, they had to pay for air on Mars in "Total Recall"
Harsh? Hardly. If I was embarressed about it, I would have posted anonymously. Besides this is slashdot--at least you responded.
--I still don't fully understand having music you'll never actually hear
As a trader, you accept things you don't really want just incase another trader wants it. I remember finding a trader who actually had some Legendary Pink Dots I wanted. (LPD is kind of rare). I was refused a trade because they were only interested in Prog-Rock, and I had none. I went to the public library and ripped a box set of Pere Ubu, and was in like flin.
As a collector, having a full collection is always the goal. Did you collect baseball cards? Did you actually look at each card? Or was getting the whole 1983 set more important?
Most hobbies involve collecting visual items so the collector
Funny thing to say about Audio. But I know where you're coming from. I actually work with other trader's lists in excel all the time, so viewing my collection in excel IS visual.
However, the best answer I think I can give to a non-collector is this:
A few years ago we used to have friends over on weekends and we'd play this game while drinking... They would mention a song they liked, but hadn't heard forever. We would then see how fast I could look it up on Napster and download it, then play it. Back when Napster was new, this was a great novelty. Now imagine doing the same, but straight from a collection on a 5TB hard drive. Instantly accessable, maybe even linked to a database that indexes it by year or genre or mood types. It's kind of like having a library in your pocket.
100% true.
Pay per play is the future.
There is also at least one more thing going on. The recording industry has always been more interested in making ALL the money, even more so than making MORE money. There are many examples of how they could make more money, but it would have to include letting others make some of it. This is why they control all the distribution, all the marketing, hell, they even dictate to the stores HOW to sell it, and for how much. They control the radio, they control the artists, they own the songs.
Napster had brought up a whole new distribution, not just "free music". A whole new marketplace could have opened up, but they wouldn't have been in control of it. How could they live with calling themselves a monopoly with that going on?
Sounds good to me.
pictures are overrated anyways.
hardly a conspiracy theory! Probably very true. CD's, Cd burners, DVD, dvd burners have all been delayed to consumers for many years due "conflicts of interest".
I have a question though. Why can't you copy data to MiniDV or Digital8? Forgive me huge ignorance on the topic. (I don't have a digital camera) but a friend was talking to me, saying he was going to store his uncompressed video that he edited back to Digital8 tapes to offload his hard drive. Couldn't that mean he could just take his mp3's, convert them to "?avi" (even though it wouldn't really be) and copy it to the tape?
That seems like a great way to store data on a small footprint. An hour of video is about how much GB? I'm guessing it doesn't work that way
I have thought about this before, and was curious-- would it have to be an external drive enclosure?
The case i have now is a full tower, and quite tall. I built it quite a while ago, so can't remember the exact number of bays available. but it's something like 8. Assuming that cable length wasn't a problem, couldn't a person just buy a few PCI ATA cards, and hook up all 8+ hard drives in one box?
A person could also set up external firewire kits, although those seem to run almost $50 a kit. (although I would hope cheaper ones could be found)
I am familiar with Shorten. I know a guy who uses FLAC, and has built scripts to encode them on the fly to mp3 for automatic streaming purposes. But besides that, I haven't dealt with them. I think that burning one or (mayyybe) 2 lossless albums on one cd-r isn't very appealing to some people, however, this should turn around when DVD-R's become more popular and 7-10 can fit on one. (Much like mp3 albums on CD-R now)
Just a hobby since 1998. (I am a collector, so collecting full album-mp3's was a logical niche) There are people who collect weirder things.
It probably took more than 55 hours, since I used to have a 2X burner back in '98.
The collection is currently at 11,600 full albums. However, there are people I know that have much, much more. There are a couple in the US that I know that have about 18,000 albums. But the ones I know about that have the biggest collections are all from Europe, with more than 30,000 albums. Managing that kind of collection can really get out of hand. You have to deal with duplicates, quality control becomes harder, so you end up with some albums missing songs, or Xing-encoded songs sneak into the collection.
Using excel lists to keep track of artists is the preferred method... So I bet they're glad the newest version of excel now can handle 65,536 rows. If anyone wants to see the excel list I use, feel free to send email address to "r a d e r 1 9 7 3 [at] yahoo . com"
It is 1/2 a meg, though, zipped up.
Some people are switching to DVD-R burners, which will help on number of discs. (My 1100 CDR's would fit onto 150 DVDR's for instance) But it'll be a time consuming task, not to mention slightly costly: $287 for burner + $150 for discs.
Mp3's!!
:(
320GB is a nice jump. Unfortunately, the initial price is way too expensive. It seems like every time hard drives get to an affordable level, my collection of mp3's shoots past it. At the moment it's at 700GB, and they are all archived on 1100 cd-r's
At the moment, I'd say the best deal is 80GB hard drives at about $80. But a hobbyist can't afford 10 of those.
Another phenomenon I've noticed is that the more you have on a hard drive, the faster you can set up trades. Which just makes your collection grow even faster. Even if I had all 700 GB of mp3's on hard drives, it just means I would be able to double the collection in a month or two. Enough hard drive space is thus impossible to attain.
Actually I was GLAD it wasn't William Gibson, which allowed me to enjoy it for what it was. (20 minutes worth of reading instead of 2 hours)
heheh. That's kind of funny. I can picture the next round of RIAA complaints:
File sharing is causing our customers to weed out our crap! We need new laws where a customer must buy at least 2 crappy cd's before they buy the one they like.
heheheh. I might have to agree with that.
But I think it's called "Collecting"
I don't listen to my 700GB of music, but I collect it nevertheless
If you have to infringe on their materials for their business model to fail, doesn't that imply that it would succeed without the infringement?
Did you bring this question up in general, or in response to me? I never said anything about copyright infringement. In fact, this article suggests other reasons why the Big-5 have lost money.
I believe they are grasping at straws when they blame pirates instead of the recession for their "loss" of revenue last year.
The big-5 didn't even LOSE money last year. They just didn't MAKE MORE money than the year before.
Other entertainment is fighting for our dollars. DVD's are very similar in cost to CD's, and you get much more out of it. (There was a great aticle earlier interviewing kids buying DVD's instead of CD's)
Computer game sales have also continued to rise a LOT. This extra money has to come from somewhere! (I'll tell you where my money went -- towards inflation, because I wasn't given the yearly bonus OR a raise last year)
Although I don't think you can actually measure file sharing damages to the industry, I would bet that the industry would have felt this pressure (or a very high percentage) in an alternate Slider's universe where there was no file sharing. It would be interesting to see.
And as far as their "business model" working. Most monopolies succeed quite well by just being the monopoly. They've had this luxury for decades. And they fought technology the whole time: tapes, vcr (different industry-sorry), cd's, and now digital.
And what is their business model anyway? Exploit the artists. Control all of the medium. All of the distribution. Control the airwaves (oops, that's medium too). Price fix. Buy legislation.
You hit the nail on the head!! Their wet dream is to charge us each time we hear a song. They're not alone: software companies want to move to a application server environment where you'd pay per for each use. Cable/movie industry would probably put all content up if they could charge per-show, per-movie watched. (with commercials of cours)
Reminds me of Futurama with the commercials shoved into your dreams... Would the Music Industry throw you in jail if you hummed a song to work? Or dreamed about music?
As far as "loss of sales" last year.. give me a break. It was a recession. Some companies actually lost REAL sales. Not some made up, "wish we made 9 billion" dollar sales.
And believe it or not, some companies go out of business when their services are too expensive or simply suck ass. The music industry as a business shouldn't be immune to this.
So what's the solution?
That's a good question. I don't think the solution is to have some monopoly to continue to buy more legislation, hack people's computers, and cripple the tech industry. Control all methods of distribution. All methods of merchandising, all methods of marketing?
Maybe a real Union is required. Steel workers were being treated unfairly, and a union was formed to protect their interests.
Worker's rights have been fought for and protected by the government before. Child labor laws, minimum wage, benefits, hours.
I don't think artists should have a god given right to sign a contract that will make them a million dollars. Contracts now are practically have formulas set up to return $0. But do contracts really need to cover things such as 150 concerts a year? (with another formula just over $0) Exclusive rights to your voice that can last a decade? Exclusive rights to your music forever? The power to never re-release your old music to CD if they don't want to? Or give you the right to re-relase it either.
Even baseball stars that aren't paid enough Millions, can go on strike and negotiate. I just don't see this being a possibility in the music industry with the way it's set up now.
Of course not, but they do have a right to ask the government to enforce the existing laws--laws that are intended to protect their intellectual property rights.
Existing laws like "Fair Use" ?
How about the intellectual property is open to the public after 75 years?
Disney didn't want to give up their precious Micky Mouse, so they bought some legislation that extended the 75 years. This opens the door for a lot of things (but I am not up to date on it so will not guess)
pointing weapons at the heads of budding artists and forcing them to sign horrible contracts. In case you didn't realize, no artist ever is required to sign with any record company to be an artist.
No one stuck a gun to the steel workers and truck drivers to work long hours, no overtime, and crappy pay. But Unions were formed to protect the workers from unfair business practices. The government even had to step in and make it so that if a worker joined the Union, they wouldn't get fired for it! The RIAA is the Music Companie's "Union" for the artists. Lucky artists. We never see artists picketing in front of Sony or whatever. No strikes. I wonder why? Maybe it's in their contract that they can't?
No one put a gun to 5 year-olds during the industrial revolution to make them work for pennies a week. But it was still wrong. Even if the law at the time was in favor of the industries.
Anyway, enough bad analogies.
In case you didn't realize, no artist ever is required to sign with any record company to be an artist.
I'm not an artist, so I can't really come back with a great reply. However, read some articles written by artists. They describe terrible things that can be enforced by these huge contracts. 6-record deals. You can't sing anywhere else. They can even shelve an album you make if they don't think it made them any money. How do you finish 6 albums and then go to an Indie label? They can effectively cripple an artist's future works and their options forever if they want to.
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I reread your post, and I think your theme is that the Big-5 have their right to have government to enforce copyright infringement laws. I suppose I see the validity in that. But buying legislation so they can hack people's computers? Crippling the technology sector? The list goes on.
Whatever the government does, I'd just like them to take the time to weed out the Big-5's illegal monopoly practices while they're at it.
Ok then. So where is was the government in protecting the REAL minority, the artists, when the RIAA/Big-5 stole their intellectual property rights forever.
The fact of the matter is, the industry is playing both sides of the fence with their money. They're buying legislation so that 14 years olds don't "steal" from them. And they're buying legislation so they can steal from the artists.
As much as they like to paint the picture that WE are stealing food from the children of musicians... THEY have been doing it so well -- long before the internet was even born. Bo Diddley died a penniless man. Today's B stars are similar to indentured servants. Even some A stars.
No business should be given the god-given right to be profitible. Yet this is what they're DEMANDING from our government. They claim 5% loss last year and blame it on me? My company lost 14% due to last year's recession. 10% layoffs were our present. Oh! If only I could blame a bunch of kids and then sue them instead.
My parents are slowly going out of business due to eBay. Maybe they should sue eBay, eBay's ISP, and the users who use eBay! That's the life of businesses: competition, good business plans, make money, lose money, research, technology, customers, product.
The Big-5 have enjoyed a life of being a monopoly. Price fixing. Cheap/free labor. And more and more government protection.
There is definately something wrong here, and it doesn't begin to start with file sharing.
They're even branching out to other markets. They are trying to lock in on card board boxes, tape, protectives (Peanuts, bubble-wrap)
Sure it might seem innocent now, but all it takes is for them to be subsidized by the government, and then they can offer these products for next to nothing, running other businesses.
They're not pulling your leg.
Here's another truth:
It's illegal for anyone else to put something in your mail box. Ever wonder why you see a separate box for newspapers to go in?
(Since this is slashdot, i must clarify even further... newspapers that get "mailed" to you can go in your mail box, but papers that distributed by the paper boy on his bike can't go in)
Depending on how old they are, you won't even have web browser applications on those machines, and by your rules, you're not allowed up install new software on it.
The usefulness of software ages too.
Here's the formula you're looking for... Figure up how much money you wish you made last year. Then subtract your actual net worth that year. This equals the $$ you lost.
Don't forget to add your god-given right for 5% profit margin increase each and every year. 6% if the economy is down.
If for some reason this formula doesn't give you the number you wish for, simply change the stats on how much money you made until you're happy with the results. For instance, maybe you didn't make ANY money last year during the time you stood on your head in the middle of the road. College kids have heads! Colleges have roads!! College kids download music.... aha!! So that must be why you didn't make any money while standing on your head in the middle of the road.
Well, that sounds good until a couple years from now where your video card is getting really doggy, and the CPU's that are available are 4 times faster than what you've got, and no one is using CD-r's anymore, and the 27GB blue disc DVD's are looking nice and cheap.
If Palladium passes and they enforced making the sale of non-Palladium hardware illegal... then all the companies will start making Palladium compliant hard ware. Sure, you can find hardware form the pre-Palladium days, but every year, those will seem so slow, it won't be worth it.