Ah, then pay them $40,000 a year. And require listening fees of $40,000 a year.
I'm guessing the courts would count that as a sham transaction.
Not only can you now beat the RIAA at their own game, but you can deduct $40,000 per user from your taxes (as an expense) so you don't have to deal with the taxes on that $40,000 you're getting as "profits".
Yeah but you still have to pay medicare and social security taxes, as does your "employee." And it's questionable whether or not your employee will be be able to deduct the $40,000 in fees. Perhaps it would be considered an employee business expense, but that's only useful if he's itemizing, and doesn't fall under the alternative minimum tax, and is subject to a deductable of some percentage of AGI.
However it seems that a playlist can be generated based on a user voting system (semi-generated for the user), as long as the resulting playlist conforms to the other rules (types of songs per hour, etc).
As I said, my post was a summary. It wasn't the exact rules. If you wait more than an hour before you play the request, and you don't let anyone know exactly when or what you're going to play until you play it, it might be legal. Of course at that point I'm not sure exactly what the incentive is to the person broadcasting the songs who has to pay the RIAA.
The author's original idea will have to be manipulated a bit, but it's still feasible in many ways. A bit of ingenuity can go a long ways.
I think once you've followed all the rules you'll find yourself with a radio station. Maybe a good radio station, run cheaply through volunteer DJs and volunteer bandwidth, but still just a radio station.
I have my doubts as to if the general idea could really fly in the current online world, however you never know until you try.
True, you never know until you try, but I don't think the potential benefits outweigh the difficulty of making the software. Of course, I'm not that big a fan of radio stations, even good radio stations. If I'm going to pay for digital music, I'll just use Rhapsody or something.
Here, even an answer of "looks like this song by this band but definitely not the same recording" would be useful.
I doubt the technology is anywhere near there at this point, but that's an interesting enough concept that you've just convinced me to do a search on Shawn Fanning's work.
As for the scanning program, you could certainly break it apart as you suggest, and that makes it a lot easier for techies, but I think techies are always going to be able to use illegal methods to obtain music for free. The RIAA et. al. aren't going to care until it starts getting used by the masses.
It shouldn't be too hard to automatically divide an audio stream into separate songs (or a moderate number of candidate intervals for songs) and then you could do lookups in the fingerprint database to divide the stream into actual labeled songs. From there, the rest is easy:)
As long as you can get someone to write it anonymously and release it into the public domain. Otherwise there's that whole "contributory copyright infringment" thing.
Yes, and as such the content is already licensed under a negotiated license.
Radio@Netscape Plus has CD listeing parties and some songs are on a VERY heavy rotation
Maybe they have a license. Maybe they're breaking the law. I bet if the RIAA found out about it they'd send a cease and desist.
launch.yahoo.com - Lets me view "any videos" of my choosing in their catalog.
Again, videos are not covered by the statutory license. So I'd bet that yahoo has a negotiated license with the copyright holders.
netscape or something similar also has CD listening parties.
You said that one twice, right? What is the selection like? My quick look at the site seems to suggest that it's extremely limited. If so, I'd bet they have a negotiated license. Remember, you only need to follow these rules to get the statutory license. If you get permission of the copyright holders, you can do anything you want.
Now, when you want, you can click on a handy button, provide a few details, and the service will hire you as a.... wait for it... professional DJ! They will even pay you $1 per year to make it legal.
No interactivity - Program can not be created for the user. Requested songs not played within the hour or at a specified time.
No more than 3 songs in a two hour period from the same album/CD
No more than 4 songs in a two hour period from the same artist or box set
No advance notice (published) of music, unless the format is classical and you have a history, prior to 1998 of doing it.
Archived programs must be at least 5 hours long and not available for more than 2 weeks.
Webcasters can't allow user, if feasible, from scanning for a particular song.
Webcasters can't encourage users to copy/record music. If webcasters use a system that helps to prevent recording of the webcast, webcasters must enable the copy prevention option.
There are others in the linked text, and in the law itself.
Are there any regulations about what the definition of a "station" is? Or how long something can be cached?
Yes, there are lots of them.
My media player accesses this list, and also monitors a central server that recieves information from hundreds of different webcasters about their current and upcoming playlist.
You're not allowed to advertise your upcoming playlist. I believe there are also restrictions against devices which automatically switch between stations, but I don't remember exactly what they are.
If someone else starts to play a diffent song on my list while the first one is still playing, my media player will cache the second song and start it when the first one ends.
Unless you're going to argue that it's fair use, caching itself is copying, and requires a license.
It's not hard to 'prove' people are spammers at all. Are they trying to hide their identity? Did they hijack a computer to send their spam? Do they have the slightest idea who they sent their message too, or did they purchase a list?
Those are just some of the problems that come up after you determine that the reseller was the one who sent the message in the first place. Messages can be faked, you know.
It's trivially easy to determine a message is spam, and it's trivially easy to determine what reseller ID is sent with each message. Any accounts that get complaints about spam should be immediately suspended. (With, yes, appeals for the completely hypothetical case of spammers sending malicious reseller IDs of others.)
That's fine as a policy, but the law requires due process.
However, I don't think there will be anything that qualifies as 'spam' remaining legal once the laws are done correctly.
That's a great argument until you consider how to make such laws. So far all you came up with is that knowingly inducing someone to break the law should be illegal. That's already true. Got any other great suggestions, or should I just take your word that the holy grail of spam law is out there just waiting to be passed?
The true problem is the nuisance caused by the spam.
Granted, but the best legal grounds that I see are based on ownership rights, and the ownership rights of a server owner are much much stronger than the 'ownership' rights of an email account.
Trespass to chattel laws already handle the ownership rights. They require that you actually cause real damages to be invoked, of course. Your only valid analogy so far has been the one about the bullhorn. It's not perfect, because spamming someone across the globe is so easy, and because intentionally setting up an email account gives some implied consent, but you should notice that noise disturbance laws are not based on ownership rights. And there is a much closer analogy, which would be the global mail system. But that suffers from a major flaw in that it's much cheaper to send email across the globe than it is to send postal mail. There is of course an exception to noise disturbances which are done with permission of all affected property owners, but the law is primarily not based on ownership rights. You'll also see that these laws are content neutral. There are no exceptions for political speech, or noncommercial speech, or any other type of speech. If there is any grounds for spam laws, it's based on nuisance, not on property rights.
Yes, and all that means is that your email account can be hard (For whatever level of 'hard' you are willing to make it.) to link to a RL identity.
But that logic makes everything anonymous, from credit cards to telephones to radio stations.
OK. Fine. But there's a much higher level of anonymity provided by email.
Hijacking a computer needs to be illegal, period, and prosecuted.
I disagree. There should be no regulations whatsoever which are specific to the internet. If you don't cause real life damage, then it shouldn't be a crime.
Spam will kill the internet in ten years. It will kill email in five.
If email is dead in five years, then we'd solve the spam problem, wouldn't we? Email isn't all that important. I use instant messaging for most of my conversations with friends. The only reason I really need email is to sign up for things online, and obviously if email was killed websites would drop that requirement.
Personally I think filters will kill spam in five years. The technology to eliminate the nuisance of spam is already out there. It's just a matter now of whether or not spam is annoying enough to bother stopping.
The dedicated spammers aren't the problem. They're easy to stop.
In our culture it is not acceptable to create a sexist game where men hunt down women nor is it acceptable to create a racist game where whites hunt down blacks.
Not acceptable to whom? I guarantee you both games exist. Do some people protest them? Sure. And some people will protest this game as well. Do some people play them? Sure. And some people will play this game as well. Most of us, on the other hand, will worry about things that actually matter, instead of some stupid video game.
The United States government has signed numerous treaties
Can't we just uphold the copyrights of other countries for the length required by the treaties but still lower the length for works produced here in the US?
And it hardly makes sense to claim that extending terms on existing works encourages their creation
The Constitution doesn't require it to encourage their creation, it only requires it to "promote the progress of science and useful arts." And even that is arguable, because there is a treaty which mandates the extended terms. Did you read the ruling?
However, yes, I'd make reseller programs in violation of (some) law if they knowingly profited from spamming.
Knowingly is the key word.
They'd have to immediately shut down any accounts of spammers, and possibly even cancel any orders already made that were referred from that account.
They'd only have to shut down accounts of people who are proven to be spammers. That's pretty hard to prove. And which is it, do they have to cancel orders made or not?
I think we need some more laws to stop spammers, although I certainly wouldn't phrase it as a 'law against spam'. We need some laws to punish habitual abusers of other people's computers.
So spam which is not in violation of other laws should continue to be legal?
Part of the problem is that the laws end up treating email boxes as property, instead of email servers as property.
That's because the true problem of spam is not the costs to the server. That's merely a small fraction of a penny per email, and it's a cost which is voluntarily accepted by the recipient. The true problem is the nuisance caused by the spam.
What are you talking about? Email isn't anonymous. It's directly traceable to an IP address.
An IP address is not a person. If it were, then there would be no unsolicited email. You'd just block mail from any people from whom you hadn't solicited mail.
Excapt, of course, that criminals are running around hijacking other people's computers. If that makes the email system anonymous, then the phone system is anonymous because criminals can break into other's houses and make phone calls.
There are plenty of ways to hide your identity without hijacking other's computers. Anonymous remailers, anonymous webmail accounts, etc.
And paying someone to hijack a computer to send spam out is probably illegal, too, but we could use some explict laws against it.
I don't see why.
I think anyone going around committing crimes should be tracked down by some sort of law enforcement, that's kind of the point of laws.
Well, then there shouldn't be a law, because spam isn't a big enough of a problem to enforce a law against. Should we be spending millions of dollars per community putting police on every street corner? After all, there are people breaking the speed limit laws every minute of every day. It sounds like your true identity has come out. You favor a police state.
As for the 'don't spam' clause, like I said...once you make it illegal, companies will start turning in spammers they hire after the company gets caught, which is really the point. Hell, companies will start suing spammers they hire.
I don't see why. And once you make what illegal? You said you don't want a "law against spam."
As most estimates place the number of dedicated spammers at about 200, it shouldn't take long.
The dedicated spammers aren't the problem. They're easy to stop.
I think it's kind of funny thinking of a chick winning the prize. It brings up all kinds of questions and issues, like why aren't there more chicks in open source software? Using "they" would just make me sound like a moron.
Open source software is generally written by much more than one person. Would the winner have to split her winnings with hundreds of others, or would the award go to whoever led the project?
But really, if one was to write such a super OSS program, wouldn't he be hired by a big corporation and paid at least ten times that amount?
Transmeta isn't exactly a big corporation, and considering that the Sr. VP of Worldwide Sales only makes $262K a year I'm not even sure Linus is making $100K. And that's the big guy, the supreme God of open source software. I'm sure there are lesser mortals in the OSS world making less than $100K.
According to this inane argument, if someone gave away free apples (an ISP offering standard e-mail accounts), it would be OK for the local sociopath (a spammer) to grab as many as he wanted and throw them at people's (law-abiding users') heads.
I fail to see the part which is analogous to throwing apples at people's heads. Spam is merely annoying to end-users, not dangerous.
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Ah, then pay them $40,000 a year. And require listening fees of $40,000 a year.
I'm guessing the courts would count that as a sham transaction.
Not only can you now beat the RIAA at their own game, but you can deduct $40,000 per user from your taxes (as an expense) so you don't have to deal with the taxes on that $40,000 you're getting as "profits".
Yeah but you still have to pay medicare and social security taxes, as does your "employee." And it's questionable whether or not your employee will be be able to deduct the $40,000 in fees. Perhaps it would be considered an employee business expense, but that's only useful if he's itemizing, and doesn't fall under the alternative minimum tax, and is subject to a deductable of some percentage of AGI.
You're better off just buying the CDs.
However it seems that a playlist can be generated based on a user voting system (semi-generated for the user), as long as the resulting playlist conforms to the other rules (types of songs per hour, etc).
As I said, my post was a summary. It wasn't the exact rules. If you wait more than an hour before you play the request, and you don't let anyone know exactly when or what you're going to play until you play it, it might be legal. Of course at that point I'm not sure exactly what the incentive is to the person broadcasting the songs who has to pay the RIAA.
The author's original idea will have to be manipulated a bit, but it's still feasible in many ways. A bit of ingenuity can go a long ways.
I think once you've followed all the rules you'll find yourself with a radio station. Maybe a good radio station, run cheaply through volunteer DJs and volunteer bandwidth, but still just a radio station.
I have my doubts as to if the general idea could really fly in the current online world, however you never know until you try.
True, you never know until you try, but I don't think the potential benefits outweigh the difficulty of making the software. Of course, I'm not that big a fan of radio stations, even good radio stations. If I'm going to pay for digital music, I'll just use Rhapsody or something.
Here, even an answer of "looks like this song by this band but definitely not the same recording" would be useful.
I doubt the technology is anywhere near there at this point, but that's an interesting enough concept that you've just convinced me to do a search on Shawn Fanning's work.
As for the scanning program, you could certainly break it apart as you suggest, and that makes it a lot easier for techies, but I think techies are always going to be able to use illegal methods to obtain music for free. The RIAA et. al. aren't going to care until it starts getting used by the masses.
Where can I find information about these rules?
here are the federal ones. I believe all 50 states have their own, as well. I know at least some of them do.
So, make the person the CEO/DJ.
The key is the person's actual job, not his title. Otherwise McDonalds would have already started naming its burger flippers CEOs by now.
It shouldn't be too hard to automatically divide an audio stream into separate songs (or a moderate number of candidate intervals for songs) and then you could do lookups in the fingerprint database to divide the stream into actual labeled songs. From there, the rest is easy :)
As long as you can get someone to write it anonymously and release it into the public domain. Otherwise there's that whole "contributory copyright infringment" thing.
CEOs are exempt. DJs are not.
There is MTV2's control freak. (OK this is tv)
Yes, and as such the content is already licensed under a negotiated license.
Radio@Netscape Plus has CD listeing parties and some songs are on a VERY heavy rotation
Maybe they have a license. Maybe they're breaking the law. I bet if the RIAA found out about it they'd send a cease and desist.
launch.yahoo.com - Lets me view "any videos" of my choosing in their catalog.
Again, videos are not covered by the statutory license. So I'd bet that yahoo has a negotiated license with the copyright holders.
netscape or something similar also has CD listening parties.
You said that one twice, right? What is the selection like? My quick look at the site seems to suggest that it's extremely limited. If so, I'd bet they have a negotiated license. Remember, you only need to follow these rules to get the statutory license. If you get permission of the copyright holders, you can do anything you want.
Now, when you want, you can click on a handy button, provide a few details, and the service will hire you as a .... wait for it ... professional DJ! They will even pay you $1 per year to make it legal.
Minimum wage is much more than $1 per year.
Perhaps CmdrTaco is religious, so he isn't allowed to work on Sunday. That would explain how this got through the queue.
There are others in the linked text, and in the law itself.
Are there any regulations about what the definition of a "station" is? Or how long something can be cached?
Yes, there are lots of them.
My media player accesses this list, and also monitors a central server that recieves information from hundreds of different webcasters about their current and upcoming playlist.
You're not allowed to advertise your upcoming playlist. I believe there are also restrictions against devices which automatically switch between stations, but I don't remember exactly what they are.
If someone else starts to play a diffent song on my list while the first one is still playing, my media player will cache the second song and start it when the first one ends.
Unless you're going to argue that it's fair use, caching itself is copying, and requires a license.
Actually that's what this XM station is all about.
They probably negotiated a license. And as someone else mentioned, doing it in aggregate is different.
It's not hard to 'prove' people are spammers at all. Are they trying to hide their identity? Did they hijack a computer to send their spam? Do they have the slightest idea who they sent their message too, or did they purchase a list?
Those are just some of the problems that come up after you determine that the reseller was the one who sent the message in the first place. Messages can be faked, you know.
It's trivially easy to determine a message is spam, and it's trivially easy to determine what reseller ID is sent with each message. Any accounts that get complaints about spam should be immediately suspended. (With, yes, appeals for the completely hypothetical case of spammers sending malicious reseller IDs of others.)
That's fine as a policy, but the law requires due process.
However, I don't think there will be anything that qualifies as 'spam' remaining legal once the laws are done correctly.
That's a great argument until you consider how to make such laws. So far all you came up with is that knowingly inducing someone to break the law should be illegal. That's already true. Got any other great suggestions, or should I just take your word that the holy grail of spam law is out there just waiting to be passed?
The true problem is the nuisance caused by the spam.
Granted, but the best legal grounds that I see are based on ownership rights, and the ownership rights of a server owner are much much stronger than the 'ownership' rights of an email account.
Trespass to chattel laws already handle the ownership rights. They require that you actually cause real damages to be invoked, of course. Your only valid analogy so far has been the one about the bullhorn. It's not perfect, because spamming someone across the globe is so easy, and because intentionally setting up an email account gives some implied consent, but you should notice that noise disturbance laws are not based on ownership rights. And there is a much closer analogy, which would be the global mail system. But that suffers from a major flaw in that it's much cheaper to send email across the globe than it is to send postal mail. There is of course an exception to noise disturbances which are done with permission of all affected property owners, but the law is primarily not based on ownership rights. You'll also see that these laws are content neutral. There are no exceptions for political speech, or noncommercial speech, or any other type of speech. If there is any grounds for spam laws, it's based on nuisance, not on property rights.
Yes, and all that means is that your email account can be hard (For whatever level of 'hard' you are willing to make it.) to link to a RL identity.
But that logic makes everything anonymous, from credit cards to telephones to radio stations.
OK. Fine. But there's a much higher level of anonymity provided by email.
Hijacking a computer needs to be illegal, period, and prosecuted.
I disagree. There should be no regulations whatsoever which are specific to the internet. If you don't cause real life damage, then it shouldn't be a crime.
Spam will kill the internet in ten years. It will kill email in five.
If email is dead in five years, then we'd solve the spam problem, wouldn't we? Email isn't all that important. I use instant messaging for most of my conversations with friends. The only reason I really need email is to sign up for things online, and obviously if email was killed websites would drop that requirement.
Personally I think filters will kill spam in five years. The technology to eliminate the nuisance of spam is already out there. It's just a matter now of whether or not spam is annoying enough to bother stopping.
The dedicated spammers aren't the problem. They're easy to stop.
Really? Why don't you stop them, then?
I have.
In our culture it is not acceptable to create a sexist game where men hunt down women nor is it acceptable to create a racist game where whites hunt down blacks.
Not acceptable to whom? I guarantee you both games exist. Do some people protest them? Sure. And some people will protest this game as well. Do some people play them? Sure. And some people will play this game as well. Most of us, on the other hand, will worry about things that actually matter, instead of some stupid video game.
The United States government has signed numerous treaties
Can't we just uphold the copyrights of other countries for the length required by the treaties but still lower the length for works produced here in the US?
And it hardly makes sense to claim that extending terms on existing works encourages their creation
The Constitution doesn't require it to encourage their creation, it only requires it to "promote the progress of science and useful arts." And even that is arguable, because there is a treaty which mandates the extended terms. Did you read the ruling?
Is Linus a corporate executive?
However, yes, I'd make reseller programs in violation of (some) law if they knowingly profited from spamming.
Knowingly is the key word.
They'd have to immediately shut down any accounts of spammers, and possibly even cancel any orders already made that were referred from that account.
They'd only have to shut down accounts of people who are proven to be spammers. That's pretty hard to prove. And which is it, do they have to cancel orders made or not?
I think we need some more laws to stop spammers, although I certainly wouldn't phrase it as a 'law against spam'. We need some laws to punish habitual abusers of other people's computers.
So spam which is not in violation of other laws should continue to be legal?
Part of the problem is that the laws end up treating email boxes as property, instead of email servers as property.
That's because the true problem of spam is not the costs to the server. That's merely a small fraction of a penny per email, and it's a cost which is voluntarily accepted by the recipient. The true problem is the nuisance caused by the spam.
What are you talking about? Email isn't anonymous. It's directly traceable to an IP address.
An IP address is not a person. If it were, then there would be no unsolicited email. You'd just block mail from any people from whom you hadn't solicited mail.
Excapt, of course, that criminals are running around hijacking other people's computers. If that makes the email system anonymous, then the phone system is anonymous because criminals can break into other's houses and make phone calls.
There are plenty of ways to hide your identity without hijacking other's computers. Anonymous remailers, anonymous webmail accounts, etc.
And paying someone to hijack a computer to send spam out is probably illegal, too, but we could use some explict laws against it.
I don't see why.
I think anyone going around committing crimes should be tracked down by some sort of law enforcement, that's kind of the point of laws.
Well, then there shouldn't be a law, because spam isn't a big enough of a problem to enforce a law against. Should we be spending millions of dollars per community putting police on every street corner? After all, there are people breaking the speed limit laws every minute of every day. It sounds like your true identity has come out. You favor a police state.
As for the 'don't spam' clause, like I said...once you make it illegal, companies will start turning in spammers they hire after the company gets caught, which is really the point. Hell, companies will start suing spammers they hire.
I don't see why. And once you make what illegal? You said you don't want a "law against spam."
As most estimates place the number of dedicated spammers at about 200, it shouldn't take long.
The dedicated spammers aren't the problem. They're easy to stop.
Well, most people in the world live on $2 per day.
$2/day? That's not even enough to eat around here, let alone write software.
I think it's kind of funny thinking of a chick winning the prize. It brings up all kinds of questions and issues, like why aren't there more chicks in open source software? Using "they" would just make me sound like a moron.
Open source software is generally written by much more than one person. Would the winner have to split her winnings with hundreds of others, or would the award go to whoever led the project?
But really, if one was to write such a super OSS program, wouldn't he be hired by a big corporation and paid at least ten times that amount?
Transmeta isn't exactly a big corporation, and considering that the Sr. VP of Worldwide Sales only makes $262K a year I'm not even sure Linus is making $100K. And that's the big guy, the supreme God of open source software. I'm sure there are lesser mortals in the OSS world making less than $100K.
Good point.
Let's put it this way. Does my right to free speech imply that someone must provide me with a voicebox?
According to this inane argument, if someone gave away free apples (an ISP offering standard e-mail accounts), it would be OK for the local sociopath (a spammer) to grab as many as he wanted and throw them at people's (law-abiding users') heads.
I fail to see the part which is analogous to throwing apples at people's heads. Spam is merely annoying to end-users, not dangerous.