Actually, Metallica does mean it- the amazing thing about Metallica is that apparently they own their copyrights and master recordings. God knows how- I am astonished, and they must have an _unbelievable_ legal team, plus they must have been fighting like rabid wolverines FROM THE START to pull _that_ one off. You may detest their position on mp3s but the guts and tenacity these guys must have is just awe-inspiring.
As a result- they ended up instinctively attacking Napster like a rabid wolverine, too- it's apparently their usual approach to anything that seems threatening. If they become convinced that mp3s are truly necessary or helpful to them rather than harmful, they will quit attacking mp3s.
Dre is just a fool- I don't think _he_ owns his masters. I would guess that he begged for _lots_ of advance money from the record companies- so he's surrounded by luxury and owns none of it and is massively, insanely in debt to the record companies without a hope of recouping. It's not hard to understand why someone like that would end up being the labels' lapdog. He's their property.
A fair comment- I'd make one small correction. Your last sentence would be more accurate if it was "there's no way around them if you want to be in mainstream media". This in no way implies that you're going to be rewarded, and there have been so many platinum-selling acts filing for bankruptcy that the music industry has actually pushed to have the legislation changed, making it harder for a signed band to file for bankruptcy. You see, it can be possible for a band to be released from its contract if it's sucked so dry that the members are bankrupt and can't afford to live. The record labels would prefer to keep sucking in this event- after all, a timely suicide of a bankrupt musician might make headlines and lead to more CD sales.
...or just a complete outsider with no clue about the industry process?
granted, go on...
'of their own dollars'? What are you smoking? Read a real contract. It is _your_ dollars they spend- every penny right down to the dishes of mixed nuts in the lobby is 'recoupable', meaning that it comes out of your royalties. It is A LOAN, not a gift. Repeat, A LOAN. Is this so hard to understand? Have you ever taken out a loan? When you do, is the bank 'giving you its own dollars'? I'd say it was your future dollars they are giving you, betting that you'll be good for it. This is not even getting into the fact that you'll be damned lucky to get five grand- basically, to get this sort of loan against royalties you will need to spend about as much of your own money in building a buzz as you expect to be loaned. If you can't spend five grand looking good for the record label you're unlikely to even see five grand out of the record company. You are _very_ far from reality here, talk to some professionals and ask them how much an artist like you describe could expect to be advanced against royalties.
Ha! I suggest talking to your bank manager. Build a relationship and build credit through taking small loans and paying them back responsibly to show that you can forecast cashflow effectively. Then when you need a million dollars you've done your homework, you're talking to the _right_ people and you'll get one _hell_ of a lot better terms than you'd get off the record labels. Think of record label advances as credit cards- except the rates are significantly worse, and the terms are a bear. Credit cards don't tend to forbid you to work- label contracts will tend to forbid you to record or perform for anybody else. If the label's refusing to fund you 'cause you didn't recoup, you not only owe them vast sums and won't get paid but you have to come up with your own money just to continue working as a musician, recording and promoting the albums you're not going to be paid for. Labels do not think long term these days- except that they'll happily sign you for a ten CD contract- give you 5-10K to make and promote the first one- then if you are a monster hit, they cash in, and if you stiff, you gotta pay for the other nine albums yourself, but they will take all the proceeds until the advance is recouped. Oh what a deal:P
Hope you know a damned good lawyer. Careful- if you let the record label find you a lawyer, this is what often happens- if ever you sue the record label, you are surprised to find that your lawyer declines to help you much- but shows up bright and early in court- on the OTHER side. Yes this is conflict of interest, your point? You expected _better_ ethics than the Mafia? This really happens, be careful. If you're not really well represented, forget it- you'll never see any money. You might be famous until the next sucker comes along without a good lawyer. Why do you think so many famous music superstars, now and in the past, are _children_?
OK, now we are in pure fantasy territory. If you're really making a million you _are_ likely to want more, but that's because the kind of person capable of doing that isn't likely to stop at a million. Nobody capable of earning that much would be this dumb about the music industry- naivete does not earn a million dollars, unless you mean 'earning it for somebody else'.
Actually the batting average is hugely worse than 9 out of 10- more like 9999 out of ten thousand. And again, you're talking 5K advances mostly- the figures here are waaaay out of whack. Courtney L's term of 'sharecropping' for the situation is a lot more accurate- what gives you the idea that these labels are so indispensable? (never mind the amusing notion that they 'give you a slice of the profits'! Were you listening about the recouping?) What is with this claim of 'you cannot function as a working musician without the record labels'? It's a business, not a system of royalty. It may be that the labels so tightly control all record stores and radio that you're substantially handicapped if you try to create your own network- it's true that where once new labels sprang up in a free-market sort of way, now they mostly don't exist, they are vanity imprints of the majors. Even so, other avenues for promotion and distribution open up. The closest you'll get to a label that 'made' its artists is the heyday of Motown- and even then, they were fortunate to stumble across the right artists to mold and control.
Good: capitalism and a free market only work when there is decent information getting out. Though it took me way too long to realise that your 'you' is Courtney L. herself. Okay, so I am Courtney Love. Does that make you a fat, middle-aged record company executive? Or just a deluded fool?*
* The irony of this exchange would kill Alanis Morissette at twenty paces. I say 'it's a business, it's damn ruthless too, talk with some insiders, here are some common practices, protect yourself'. "FallLine" says, 'record labels will give you a million dollars just in case you are a star! Anyone who doubts this is an ungrateful pup being greedy and not settling for just a million dollars!'. And _I_ am supposed to be the 'sweet aroma of idealism'? This is the pot calling the _teacup_ 'black'. Do you think you could avoid talking total madness and false promises, in case there is still a musician out there somewhere in the world who might believe a word of it?:P
It's like a 'Bazaar' style music collection. It's terribly inefficient, with a lot of duplication of effort plus a lot of the work is frankly crap (incomplete files, bad rips) but since there is so much of it, anything good has a fairly high likelihood of _somebody_ 'working' on it. Anytime I look at Napster, for instance if I looked at Napster for some obscure musician, I may very easily not find what I think should be there, but I'll probably also find something I didn't even know existed. For instance, I have a tape with John Scofield's "Protocol" (Scofield's a brilliant jazz guitarist- 'Protocol' is a very strange tune:) ). I wanted that on my computer as it's a pain to rewind the tape just to listen to that one track. I have _never_ seen this track on Napster, and I did look many times. However, I've repeatedly seen a _live_ version (that I felt wasn't as good) that I didn't even know existed. I ended up recording the track off the cassette onto the computer so that I could make my own mp3 of it. Now, if I sat around on Napster all day (sorry!;) ) presumably my studio version of Protocol, with its amazing guitar melodies, would be part of the big Napster Bazaar- and thus _my_ 'itch' would end up being solved, and the next person looking for 'Protocol' might find it.
It's almost like a 'worse is better' thing- the Bazaar stuff has a hard time being more sophisticated than Cathedral stuff, but if you have the connectivity, it becomes a hell of a resource just by virtue of statistics. Things that work out really well propagate- if I was giving people my mp3 of my 'Protocol' tape, some people might be looking for jazz, or Scofield, and notice the new tune, listen, go 'woh!' like Keanu Reeves and keep the track in their own collections with great delight- the new track would propagate based directly on how great it was, and if it was no good nobody would keep it. There are spooky parallels with genetic algorithms... only when you have a lot of random noise and junk does a GA-like effect start to happen, because it defines the situation as 'looking for good stuff amid the bad stuff' and forces quality judgements to be made.
No such thing as a bug-free piece of code? Nonsense. Here:
10 GOTO 10
or if you prefer,
X = 200
This is ridiculous, a complete cop-out. What you are really trying to say is, "Above a certain (nowadays common) complexity, software is such a complicated mechanism that the human brain can't keep track of it well enough to avoid mistakes".
This is a DIFFERENT! claim than 'There's no such thing as bug-free software'. It points to obvious possible solutions (don't expect the human brain to keep track of it but assemble big software out of smaller known pieces made to interact in known ways, or alternately stick to writing software that _will_ fit within the human brain) rather than claiming no solution is possible. I would say 'There's no such thing as bug-free software' is very akin to saying 'There is a God'. You can look around and see many things that might suggest it- does that constitute proof? More relevantly, what attitude does this belief encourage? One hopes it encourages robust error checking and loads of sanity checking (when programming, it's helpful to assume the program's environment is insane- early Apple code was tested on an automated 'user from hell' program that just fed in endless random actions and was great at accidentally jockeying the victim program into 'insane' conditions that caused a crash). However, every time I see 'There is no such thing as bug-free software' my first reaction is to think it's being said by some marketroid type making excuses for why they shipped early, buggy, and don't actually plan to fix the broken bits. And thanks to the wonderful suggestibility of the human brain and the phenomenon of justification, those marketroids have heard this little mantra too and to _them_ it means 'software by definition is all screwed up and non-deterministic, so we won't even try, we'll just plan PR campaigns'. _They_ don't have the technical background to put such a remark in context. They will be taking it literally, as a license to produce untrustworthy crap without a bit of self-examination, with no attempt to do better- and it becomes their argument to ship earlier and earlier, buggier and buggier. "You're not done fixing bugs?...button it up, we ship it just as it is now!"
*sigh*
If you write software, write bug-free software.
If you can't write bug-free software, try.
If you won't try- please, quit writing the stuff.:P
It's so moving to see that there are still people doing this sort of thing... I can give you a historical reference, and a fictional one. E. E. 'Doc' Smith was just this sort of person, although more the engineer than outright inventor. He had a mastery of countless sciences, and just the same sort of 'cowboy science jockey' attitude (I love how Dean has _several_ different sorts of helicopters- it says volumes about him. Given a choice between a helicopter and a Humvee, which would you make your grand entrance in?).
E. E. 'Doc' Smith wrote some of the finest early 'space opera' science fiction. It's easily scorned by modernists as there's no fashionable cynicism in it, plus it's good and cheesy and totally overblown- but there's one point that's very important, in 'Doc' Smith novels the super-hero is always an _engineer_, often a complete scientist- yet still with a movie-star 'cool' that would look good on Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's like Arnold delivering an erudite and brilliant dissertation on how he's managed to enhance the beam intensity of his laser weapon into the terawatts- and then promptly turning around and using it in the classic tradition of the action hero. It's wildly overglamorous _science_ and _intelligence_. Contrast that, and the deification of scientists in the 40s and 50s, to the current (corporate-directed?) demonization of 'hacker' types, and the glorification of _dumb_ violence. "The Matrix" was a nice change from this (I particularly liked one small, 'Doc' Smithian detail- "Mouse", the ultra-geeky, scrawny little hacker type, is killed in a plot twist, but rather than have him perish cringing and wishing for pr0n, Mouse goes out in a blaze of glory with two blazing Thompson machine guns in his hands, veritably 'dies like a Klingon'. 'Doc' Smith would have understood that.)
The interesting part is that people of this type are not just fiction- 'Doc' Smith was real, he existed. Dean Kamen exists. And you don't have to be a Dean Kamen with zillions of dollars and machine shops and helicopters- I do this stuff, too. I am convinced that _lots_ of Slashdotters do, that there are countless geeky-type people out there who have weird ducting fan systems pointed into their overclocked computers and have oddly bent pieces of wire in their cupboards for making taco shells stand up straight and not fold up when you bake them (truth! I'm eating tacos right now made using such a bent piece of wire). When you get right down to it, LOTS OF THINGS need to exist, on a day-to-day basis, whether it's objects, devices, processes (I recently invented a workflow for scanning pictures at a print shop that goes more than six times faster than the previous top speed) and there's a type of person who'll invent them and a type of person who'll do what they're told and wait to see if anyone thinks of something.
The only thing that kinda saddens me is that this article gets between a quarter to a tenth of the attention people will give to making fun of Jon Katz:P I hope people are at least reading this stuff! Scientist hip is a quality that needs to be accepted. It _is_ cool. It sets the tone for what people are willing to aspire to. We geeky types are not simply a bunch of whiners looking to pirate mp3s from legitimate businessmen or to get script-kiddie exploits to DDS some law-abiding website. We, at our best, have the capacity to change the very terrain right out from under those record company execs and businessmens so none of the old rules apply anymore- but to really put the rubber to the road, it's gotta be _chic_. It has to be _cooler_ to look up a scrap of indie music online and be directed magically to the guy's website than it is to march off to Sam Goody's and buy what you're told to. It's got to be _hip_ to put together your own desktop movie and release it as VideoCD or DVD (no region) rather than sit there like a lump waiting on Hollywood to do something that isn't really stupid and calculating. In the 50s science was seen as _cool_ and lots of stuff ended up happening- do we really dare allow it to seem both lame and dangerous, do we dare to let it be seen as that stuff that 'evil hackers' do, creating nothing and causing destruction and damage?
Dean Kamen, for one, isn't about to let that happen without a fight. I'm with him;)
Are you genuinely more afraid of cops than muggers?
What conclusions would a normal person draw faced with someone who genuinely was more afraid of cops than muggers?
(side note- Just last week, somebody literally planted a bomb in an attempt to blow up the house back-to-back with mine. It was the cops who, wearing blast shields, went to remove it and detonate the bomb safely in a barrel in the middle of the street, which they'd blocked off. Damn thing shook the ground. It was a cop who handled it and moved it to the safe place to be harmlessly detonated. I didn't notice any muggers offering to help- or any corporations, for that matter.
It wasn't a political bomb- turns out the person whose house it was is a local businessman who, basically, pushes his luck _hard_... about as hard as you can. This isn't a cop type person, as I understand it- it's another mugger type person (with various excuses and reasons) and if government was gone, this guy would just push it even harder and there would likely be even more bombs. Government is a recourse for people to at least feel they can do something about this guy _without_ bombing his house- except there was at least one person who didn't have any faith in that, wasn't going to trust cops and government to redress his grievances, and decided to take matters into his own hands- and try to blow up the house next to mine, adjacent to a block with lots and lots of little kids constantly underfoot.
Call me a crazy madman, but I for one feel safer trusting the cops.)
It's fine to interest 'name' artists in the cause, but take special pains to interest 'nobody' artists in these issues. _All_ 'name' artists were once 'nobody' artists. _All_ 'name' artists will eventually age and become historical footnotes, in time. This is really basic networking- establish relationships with next decade's 'name' artists _before_ they are 'name' artists, and make sure they have a clue.
Long format music is an interesting area to be experimental in:) this thousand year generative music is orders of magnitude beyond anything I'd thought of. I got the idea from Pat Cadigan novels- in 'Mindplayers' there is a composing team named Coor and Lam who write very long duration pieces- such as the 24 hour long 'Full Day' and one named 'Transcontinental Elopement' that goes for weeks! The conceit of this has always appealed to me:)
There isn't any medium in common use today that would run for weeks (excepting generative stuff or some uses of MOD-type music), but there is one possibility I'd love to play with someday- streaming live music through mp3 to a CD writer. Using a basic data rate like the (borderline decent) 128K, a CD will hold over 10 hours of music- but to get really serious you have to use a DVD format, which could theoretically run for over six days! None of this would be generative at all- it would just be a hell of a long audio stream:) to record such music would take over 200 adat tapes, so the only sensible way to do the six day composition would be as one long live improvisation with teams of musicians stepping in and taking over for each other. Strings, drumheads and such things would have to be swapped out- or the whole thing could be synth-driven, avoiding the problems of physical instruments being played for six days nonstop:)
If you're willing to do generative music it's even simpler- write mod software that makes music out of raw data, give it a lot of instruments to play with and then give it 600 megs or so of data to play with, and run the program. It wouldn't be hard to make that go for 1000 years, in theory anyway;)
The neat thing about this quickie-report is the effort and attention to making a musical thing that could literally go for a thousand years. That moves into the areas of engineering art as well as experimental music. Part of the 'music' is not just the (possibly limited) tunes it plays but knowing that the song is continuing, will still be unfolding past the lives of your grandchildren. It's like conceptual art- I hope this project follows through. I'd like to hear a bit of the music it makes:)
"Sounded like an autistic kid rattling off every baseball card he had and how much it cost him. By the way, would you like to buy one?"
I started going red in the face over this, and the other post, and then I decided, F**K that, I'm not just going to take this sort of thing in dignified silence. I don't have to be abusive, exactly, but there are a couple of things I need to say. Go on and moderate them down if you want, I really don't care.
I don't _have_ any CDs. Yet. I do have a studio, because I am an audio geek. I have press clippings from the Absolute Sound magazine and many, many years of experience in hardcore high end audio hacking, and it is not a '*cough* studio'. Implying that is a sure way to tick me off, but it's a hollow critique.
It's a source of continuous amazement to me how being self serving can be a compliment or curse depending on what's most convenient to the poster. I (obviously) was typing for an hour putting down all that information on 501c3s. I'd only been reminded of it the previous night, suck it up and deal. If it is of no immediate use, excuuuuuse me. The fact is, there's a parallel to the GPL there, using incorporation against corporations by rendering them harmless. I may not have the final idea on how to use this legal loophole of the nonprofit corporation, but as it happens I know an expert on the things if someone needs to learn more.
On a personal note- surprise! I _was_ an autistic kid, back before anyone had a clue about them. I was 'high functioning' enough to avoid being a total freak but not enough to avoid a deeply 'geek' adolescence. Now I am an adult, 32, with Asperger's Syndrome. My goodness, an autistic person writing _pedantically_ and going on for a long time! _Stop_ the fscking _presses_, nobody will _believe_ this one. There's never been an _autistic_ person on slashdot before! *furrfu*
Stuff it up your untidiest port and reboot. Having asperger's is part of who I am, and this is the last freakin' place I'll put up with being hassled over it. If you want to insult me say I'm ugly and my mother dresses me funny:)
Um. Since the RIAA labels have been 'negotiating' with mp3.com, one of the results has been an alteration in the mp3.com contract. It now resembles a record company contract in that it grants perpetual rights to mp3.com even if you quit them- and it is renegotiable by mp3.com on five days posted notice whether you agree or not, or are aware of the change or not. These are significant changes, and they are the reason I'm _not_ anywhere on mp3.com now. Got my several hundred dollars and bailed, terminating my agreement with them under the previous agreement that was still in force.
Unlike what some people seem to think, you _cannot_ 'support' me by buying stuff at this time. I don't have the capacity to make CDs on my own yet. I'm trying to get it together as fast as I possibly can, and I'm even kind of excited because I know I can do it better than mp3.com did.
I am amused, in a sick way, at the several posts I've seen that attack me as a greedy self interested person. Um, leaving aside my socialist tendencies and the amount of effort I put into helping others and sharing information, I thought to be a good little slashdottenlibertarian I was _supposed_ to be greedy? Perhaps it's a case of '_I_ am a real go-getter, _you_ talk too much, _he_ is a greedy little pest'. *g*
Though frankly I guess I could be much worse off- I could support Gnome or KDE (run away! incoming flamewar!)
I don't think Napster is a useful tool to 'declaw' DMCA, though DeCSS is (to the extent that it allows DVDs to be played on Linux which is otherwise not possible).
We don't have the proper tool yet. The RIAA, MPAA will give us the proper tool in time- that tool would be further legislation that is so completely intolerable that it produces a backlash and calls the whole show into question. For instance, retroactively making all CDs owned by the record company so everyone's existing collection becomes 'leased' not owned- or outlawing all forms of media exchange, or outlawing all ripping of audio CDs. These steps are probably inevitable but they are crucial- they would plainly reveal the true situation, that media in general is very close to being a 'closed shop', like a sort of government only you can't vote for how it's run.
The key factor is that it can't simply affect what people do with RIAA property (such as the music content of CDs ripped to mp3): it has to begin to affect people's personal property (I don't own my CDs now? But they're _my_ CDs!) or their rights over their property (I'm not allowed to mp3 my song? But it's _my_ song, recorded it myself!).
Only then will the problems be clear enough to see justice done. As long as it's about copying Britney Spears CDs without her permission it's a losing argument. But it _will_ escalate until the problems are so terrible that there's no more ground to give.
I don't mind if Napster loses on the grounds that 99.999% of their content _is_ copyrighted material being exchanged. I agree that this is wrong: that Napster is a mechanism allowing music trading under fair use on an inconceivably vaster scale than anyone imagined. However, for that very reason I can see the inevitability of those rules being changed.
I do mind if Napster loses on the grounds that music file exchange is against the law. I will be dependent on music file exchange to advertise my music to listeners who might then buy a CD from me direct. You _cannot_ argue people into liking music. You have to play it for them and see if they like it... if music exchange over the net is forbidden that leaves only radio- and it's damned impossible to get on radio, even if you _are_ a major label act (but not 'doing tonnage').
I _particularly_ mind if it is made illegal to rip audio CDs under fair use. I am determined to allow people to do that with my CDs. If this is ever called into question I will unhesitatingly conspire to solicit illegal CD ripping, by encouraging people to make mp3s or whatever out of my CDs, just as I always have. I foresee a time when the RIAA wins against Napster and goes on to make all CD ripping illegal- and that's when they begin really stepping on _my_ toes.
If I was then taken to court for this, I would have intense satisfaction in testifying that I produced all the music, bought the CD blank (paying a tax to the RIAA in doing so), burned it myself, made the label which says 'noncommercial copying OKAY' on it myself, sold it to the customer with the full intention of permitting them to make as many copies as they wished- and then I would ask, what exactly is the justification for forbidding me to do this? It's my music, CD, burner and customer, and I already paid tax to something that does me no good at all and only takes money from me to give to my competition.
In a way I almost hope all this comes to pass so I have such a chance to put a common sense situation before the courts. I already dislike paying tax on CD-R media to prop up the RIAA which is trying to destroy me- the next step is clearly for them to forbid consumers from ever ripping CDs, or exchanging any sort of digital music over the net, and they _will_ escalate it and keep pushing until that state is reached- and at that point they are legally blocking my right to set DIFFERENT terms for my 'music customers', ones that I might feel are not only fair but are a damn good selling point assuming they like the music anyway.
Things are bad, but I promise, they could be _much_ worse- and I'm committed to operating as a direct-selling recording studio legally, going underground does not hold any appeal for me at all. I have a _right_ to sell my CDs and deal with their IP as I choose, they are mine and I am copyright holder and that gives me the right. I will know _exactly_ when the RIAA goes over the line, and they are treacherously close to it right now and could go unbelievably far over it, and probably will.
Again, I don't mind if Napster loses- because I am thinking of the _intent_ here, and obviously the RIAA labels have _no_ intent to share music, obviously the wishes of those copyright holders are being totally squashed. They should be respected- this makes COMPETITION and allows people (arguably more savvy people!;) ) like me to specifically allow such trading- giving us traders a big advantage, giving our music MORE VALUE because you can do more with it and you can make copies of it and put it on a server for when you travel and etc etc etc the sky's the limit.
Certain types of IP law will over-reach, not only respecting the RIAA labels' wishes, but denying the wishes of someone like me through legislative action. And _that_ is where I draw the line. Let the RIAA do _whatever_ with the stuff they own- but keep their *&&^$^@#& hands off MY property!
My question is this. What business does a web site have sending me email at all? If I want to see information from a web site I will find it on (surprise!) the web.
I have to sympathise. This query reminds me of the 'what are you doing to help the legal situation?' story (the one that references 'Suck'). That one essentially asks 'what are you doing to help the legal situation?' and this one asks 'what are you going to do when we can't change the legal situation and things become completely unbearable?'.
My own answer has been along these lines- I will create to the best of my ability and use the legal system to defend the interests of the people I'm creating for. That's sometimes meant GPLing software, when I could- my software is frankly not world-class, it's not really my area of expertise- and now it's beginning to mean that I must put together not only my recording studio, but also CD mastering and duplication, and even hosting for free audio. The studio's done and quite functional- CD mastering and even Video CD mastering is dead simple- duplication's going to cost me some serious money, I'll be taking out a bank loan when I have my ADAT paid off to get a duplicator- and hosting is beyond _my_ reach though I need it desperately.
All this is needed because I can't trust the commercial sector to handle it for me. The breakdown goes like this:
Studio: the $75 an hour I'm asking is actually very low for a studio. This part is pretty straightforward- studios are service oriented and it's more a financial question than anything else.
Mastering: mastering houses charge a _lot_ of money for what they do- the gist of it is that you can't seriously tailor the frequency range and soundstage of your CD while listening over pathetic little nearfield monitors. The need for an extra pair of ears on the project is somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that these days, mastering houses are increasingly forced to brutally compress their results until average levels are about 1 db down from peak. This sounds appalling but is louder than the competing songs on the radio;P
Duplication: currently having a burner will do- one nice thing about being a geek is ability to track down things like Mitsui CD-R media with process color surface-prints: it can cost six times what you can find cheap media for, and maybe twenty times what commercial CD materials cost, but archival quality is substantially better and honestly, there is a place for a quality argument. The point at which the commercial product is cheap crap at premium prices is the point at which the quality argument at reasonable prices starts to substantially work. The trick is you have to make all aspects _look_ professional- hence the process color media print, at 400 dpi carefully color corrected (the guy who does the CD printing called this 'overkill', to which I replied 'good!';) ) When things develop to the point that I need more duplication, it will be time to talk to my bank about the next bank loan- currently I'm paying one off for my 20-bit ADAT studio recorder, it seems reasonable to think in terms of another to get a serious CD duplicator. I'm also excited about the possibilities of producing Video CDs- which can be played in DVD players. Hooray, an accessible format for short video that can piggyback on the leverage of the stinkin' MPAA! I may get a DVD player just to test my VideoCDs on:)
Hosting: This is the killer. I don't have any way to offer _this_. I have done some research, however, into what needs to be out there.
This last one is the hardest one, and I'm not sure how to address it- and this post is about how I'm trying to address each issue personally instead of announcing that 'someone should' do this stuff:)
Basically, I see a pressing need for just plain media hosting on a massive scale. It could well be restricted to mp3 and ogg vorbis (hell, include wma). It could also be restricted to 128K on two assumptions: one, it'll be important to not have everyone doing 320K and using up two and a half times the resources for their stuff, and two, it's low enough quality to justify being giveaway stuff and high enough to basically enjoy. It will not pay musicians one cent for the downloads- on the other hand it will not _charge_ musicians a cent for the hosting. Most importantly, it will have a usage agreement that protects both parties, asks only nonexclusive rights to host the material, claims no copyrights to the material, and requires any contract changes to be explicitly signed off on by the artist. (This last one is the main thing mp3.com just lost in their contract alteration).
Instead of instantly planning to fund the thing off ad banners (aren't we all sick of that by now?) I propose the hosting service be incorporated... as a 501c3 nonprofit corporation. This is a VERY IMPORTANT point for protecting artist rights in the current climate. The 501c3 must have an explicitly spelled out mission statement that it must abide by to maintain its nonprofit status. It can seek grants- it could even solicit money from the RIAA labels, 'leeching' off them to provide its services in perfect safety. It can pay server operators a relatively decent salary for doing their jobs- you wouldn't have to go hunting for MCSEs, you could spec out a proper high-load server farm and pay to have it run properly, nonprofit doesn't mean it can't pay employees a normal wage. Finally and most importantly, a 501c3 answers to the IRS and has to follow certain rules or cease to exist. It CANNOT be bought out, either in a takeover or a merger, by a commercial corporation. It can only be bought/merged with another 501c3- and for this to happen both 501c3s must have essentially (literally?) the SAME mission statement, not differing ones- and it is so hard to change a 501c3's mission statement that you might as well disband it and start a new one. And when you disband a 501c3, all assets it has must be distributed to OTHER 501c3s covering the same basic area.
When you look closely at these things (I have a friend who is expert at framing charters for 501c3s and knows all about them and has a terrific batting average for his 501c3 proposals being approved), it's amazing- almost GPL-like- it's a form of legal incorporation that uses the meanest parts of the US government (the IRS!) to protect you against rampant corporate abuses. If you are a 501c3 no commercial corporation can touch you- they can give you money for a tax break, and that's about it. They can't buy you out. They can't shut you down- even if they for some reason got totally Mafialike and pressured all your boardmembers to disband the corporation, your resources simply get distributed to other 501c3s doing the SAME JOB. It's like the liquid metal Terminator- no amount of force can destroy you! All watched over by the IRS with gimlet eyes. You don't have to vigilantly guard against, say, major labels subverting you and making you a profit-earning subsidary. The IRS
will vigilantly guard against that:)
I'm not sure what the software sphere would need in terms of a 501c3 to develop ideas that need to remain free of corporate control. I do know the needs of my own sphere- music, media in general, video as that becomes a factor. The music sphere needs free hosting because a musician who's even slightly prolific will rapidly exceed the bounds of any personal site or typical hosting service, and it seems like most/all of the music/mp3 hosting services on the net are RIAA label controlled or copying their contractual provisions.
In order for musicians to be able to function outside the confines of RIAA ownership, they need to have the ability to own the means of production (easy: CD burners and duplicators and Internet sales) and the ability to circulate music to people who don't know the music yet. It really isn't necessary to have one recognizable site for people to _browse_ from (mp3.com is full of bands who've never been listened to- I always got most listens from mentioning what I do on Slashdot), but it is necessary to have a site with acceptable policies/contracts which won't need to be changed or moved. Wherever it is, there needs to be a fair amount of stability so that the musician can distribute CDs, posters, handouts with the URL on it. Because of mp3.com's change of contract, I have posters, CDs out there, even 24 cassette tapes that haven't even been _recorded_ yet, all with the mp3.com addy on them, which is now obsolete.
The common factor here is that it's all about giving _my_ material a base of operations that's not easily destroyable by corporate interests. I'm not attempting to, say, sample RIAA label acts and use their music as part of my composition. I am not negativland;)
A very good question would be, how important is it to pursue development on IP that corporations have claimed as their own, and how important is it to defend IP that is actually original? Most of my response has been centered on defending the ability to produce and distribute stuff (music, video) that is original, knowing that the _facilities_ for this production and distribution are under continuous attack, but my right to produce is not actually in question.
Are programmers in danger of losing their right to produce, or is the perceived threat simply that anything programmers do will be patented by corporations and taken away from them? There is a point at which this begins to seem unreasonable. Somebody at Amazon _thought_ they invented one-click ordering, which is stupid but doesn't necessarily mean Amazon set out to 'steal' stuff from the public domain. I question the wisdom of assuming, from the start, that what YOU CREATE is so doomed that it must be 'subversive' to survive. I would suggest trying to remain visible and CREATING stuff, quite openly. Use contractual tools like the GPL to protect your interests. Don't assume you're so outclassed that you must go into hiding! We're looking at an era of much legal rule-changing. Some of the rules are changing to heavily favor corporations and piracy, by them, of intellectual property and other types of property and privileges. Some of these rules will be changed BACK once the consequences are clear. Act as if the world was fair and you had rights! Behave in good faith and don't knuckle under to the appearance of oppression. Act AS IF you had rights, know what they would be if you had them. Don't act like you are a criminal just because some other entity profits by criminalising you.
The last word is this- when you create, you set the rules. My CDs will have "All commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY" at the bottom of every single one of them. If the RIAA manages to make (for instance) copying of tracks off audio CDs automatically illegal, I will happily participate in a test case: someone can rip my stuff and put it on Napster, and I will testify that I explicitly allow such noncommercial copying of MY CDs, thus no blanket rule can be made. The RIAA DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT to set MY rules, and my rules for my CDs permit noncommercial copying. I'm even spelling it out on the CD itself where it can't be missed- my wishes _will_ be respected. That's justice.
I would be very interested to know your definition of 'deities':) is gravity a deity? Is the self-organizing properties of genetic algorithms a deity? Is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (or its sentence 'g') a deity? (I think the last would make a nifty one, in all seriousness:) )
One thing you must understand is that the USA is a republic, not purely a democracy, to _safeguard_ the interests of minorities or smaller factions. You do NOT have to be the majority faction to 'matter' in the USA- traditionally.
James Madison in Federalist #10 makes this case far better than I could- it is deeply important, because there haven't been any examples of pure majority-dominated democracy that worked worth a damn, and our founding fathers _knew_ that when they made the rules and wrote all these things that have colored how American government works.
If our government is truly failing at this it will be destroyed. There is no way to blindly stomp all the little factions and get away with it- you end up with bloody revolution, and sooner rather than later. To survive as a country we NEED to be listening to those South Florida Cubans, to the computer geekocracy, to all the little factions. That doesn't mean there will be a clear answer- when the clear answer disenfranchises lots of different groups of Americans, you need to quit looking for a clear answer and go for a muddier answer that's more flexible and adaptable.
OK- good motivations, _very_ early announcement (hell, I could announce my recording studio/record label project on the same basis- at least I've laid out some money for burning equipment, and the media!;) )
I would question, however, how much this is a _technical_ problem. I can tell you what mp3.com looked like from the viewpoint of an artist earning a few hundreds of dollars on downloads and streaming- I saw a lot more straight downloads than streaming. Of course, this is colored by the fact that I _allowed_ downloads rather than just streaming: but the result is that I still got to observe thousands of song 'hits' of all different types.
Getting slashdotted was always a delight;) normal volume was much less. Either way, it tended to work out to an emphasis on downloads rather than streaming. This might be affected by the fact that my music was and is the un-easy-listening AOR 'radio station' dribble- if it was more 'lite' I might have seen more use by streaming mp3.com customers. However, I still think what I saw is reasonably representative.
The upshot is this: it'd be a big help if anyone was doing a just plain SERVER for hosting mp3 files- legit ones for the artists. Could a nonprofit organization (such as a 501c3) get past the mp3licensing.com threat of hitting up the hapless site for $15,000 and 1 cent per download minimum? I'm not confident a successful mp3 hosting site offering free downloads and earning money through ad revenue (in other words, your usual site) would be safe from this sort of attack.
I think it's probably time to bite the bullet and scrap any hope of getting musicians paid per download- my thought is, surely legal nonexclusive rights to this sort of content have a value that justifies offering the hosting space free? mp3 files add up: I was at several hundred megs of material when I left mp3.com (all now deleted off their system). iuma limits you to ten songs for presumably this reason, which is a major problem. Many sites (mp3.com, farmclub.com) have ugly contracts, or barely-hidden landmines in the contract just waiting to turn even uglier.
The situation doesn't require computer engineering, it requires social engineering. You either side with the RIAA folks (let's all exploit some artists to line our pockets! How much can we con them out of?) or you start to ask for something like what mp3.com seemed to be- a huge warehouse that hosts music files, charging no rent. It's not expected to promote the artist. It needn't even pay the artist, itself. It simply needs to have the following characteristics:
no limit on sizes- at all. I have an entire composition that needed to be split to be hosted on mp3.com- 'Extended Play'. Never again.
contract seeks only nonexclusive rights to only the materials being shared, for the purpose of doing the sharing. The site must _not_ be trying to collect IP.
If the artist terminates agreement with the site, and deletes the songs/art (if art is even required!) then that material is gone- the site does not hang onto rights to distribute that material for longer than necessary to clear the databases.
high availability, high bandwidth. The site needs to _be_ there.
That would just about do it. Seemingly appealing options might include stuff like art and fancy pages (which could be a headache, depending on how unified the site is supposed to be. Couldn't it just be a file repository, more efficiently?), or top 40 charts, or message boards. However, these might not be the best thing- on mp3.com these things simply led to griping, extensive cheating of the system and attempts to guess the workings of the system, and a burial of musician communication under 10,000 posts begging "Please download my song" or (I am not making this up) "I will download all the songs on your page if you'll just download this particular one of mine, which I'm trying to get into the charts!".
The reason mp3.com changed from what (once) was a very similar system to what I describe, is hubris- Michael Robertson has always had plenty of chutzpah but it turns to over-reaching. It made mp3.com by FAR the biggest site of its kind- no other is even close- but has also destroyed it.
When mp3.com goes down there are going to be an awful lot of musicians looking for mp3 hosting. It's potentially a great positioning for someone who wanted to simply take Really Big Bandwidth And Storage and turn it into the _next_ 'biggest site of its kind'. It's just a question of whether anyone else can execute this strategy without blowing it by overreaching- by trying to out-promise the RIAA labels (HA! Not!) and ending up hopelessly broke, moneylosing and in court.
I think what artists will need to do is give away the 'mp3' (or 'ogg' for that matter) and rather than saying 'please give me money' (will never work man- take it from me?), come up with REALLY HIGH QUALITY CDs with ritzy full color CD prints and color laser glossy inserts- just take everything to the limit and then sell it for a few bucks under what the RIAA labels want for mass produced stuff with two color labels and seriously compromised, compressed sound...
Well, it's worth a shot:) yes, I am gearing up to do just this. Some would argue the thing to do is then to turn around and sell the 'high end' handmade product for $40 or something, but I have a hard time seeing any CD as being worth that much:)
I wonder, if government went to a full-on libertarian practically-anarchist sort of approach- would the harms of obliterating social services be offset by the benefits of obliterating corporate welfare that penalises small business and forces small business people to pay taxes to their corporate competition?
Or would they just shoot all the poor and sell the bodies to Procter+Gamble?:P
Right now I am busily deleting all my stuff off mp3.com due to my refusal to accept their new (evil) contract.
Unless or until I find another good place to host that stuff (I'm batting 0 for 3 now, still with no luck at all)...
Napster is the only legal way to get my music online. And that state of affairs might persist for a while... I certainly cannot afford to do it on my own airwindows.com site, and I'm not seeing whole bunches of indie mp3 sites, much less ones that make some pretense of paying me like mp3.com did. So it's Napster or... silence...
*g* I just get a huge kick out of this for some reason. I guess it's my sick humor or something. "Oh please Judge Marilyn, don't hurt my only remaining way to legally distribute my music over the net! I beg of you!" Think that'd work? *hah!*
Contract is about agreement and permission, not technical details.
I think you make an admirable case, a sensible argument. However, I am not the one who needs to be convinced of it. The original record labels are the ones who would need to be convinced of that- BEFORE! mp3.com went around ripping all their CDs to provide a commercial service.
If they'd made this case and the labels agreed that it was 'space-shifting' and didn't affect their core business (shyyeah right- but let's pretend) then we'd have an AGREEMENT and there would be no lawsuit because mp3.com was doing stuff with content that the labels AGREED to have done.
Instead, mp3.com blew it- which I think is a great pity. They behaved as if all that stuff was public domain, just because a lot of people owned copies. They needed to ASK PERMISSION. I would even say that you could make a case that nothing more would be needed- that there would be no case for paying the labels for access to the content for the purpose of building this big database of mp3s for commercial purposes. But they did NOT ask.
I hope when Warner's or Universal come after _my_ content to make some sort of 'centralised music e-collection! Includes all the music in the world, now you need never ever look at indie music websites and hear their pathetic pleas for you to buy your CDs, because we have all the mp3s they released, right here with a Warner's ad banner on top!' website...
...that this same issue returns to bite THEM in the ass.
Look, mp3.com _was_ breaking the law. It's not a question of formats, it's a question of permission.
Would you feel the same way if Universal got to copy my 'indie' albums which I own, and broadcast them out to people, making it seem as if they are 'Universal' albums?
I concede that the my.mp3.com service is relatively innocuous- I would have a 'wait and see' attitude if even Universal tried to do something like that with my stuff (a 'timeshifting', 'spaceshifting' sort of thing). However, enough of that stuff, or the wrong sort of 'fair use' (FOR profit, IMPLYING an association that doesn't exist, WITHOUT consent of any sort) and Universal starts to look like the GATEKEEPER, and people looking for 'Rain Dragon' (currently legally available only on Napster!:) ) are led to believe they must go through Universal to get it.
That, I would object to, because I hate the major labels thoroughly. So I can't be _too_ protective of my.mp3.com: so much of what mp3.com was doing was good and legitimate. The ripping of all those major label CDs was not, and they're suffering the consequences of their choice to not attempt to communicate. They have also made the terms for any FUTURE spaceshifting site much, much worse by their actions. If they hadn't changed their artist contract I would _still_ be with them even so- but I have never felt my.mp3.com was a sensible move. The idea is good but so mishandled! You can't run around doing stuff like that without talking to the content producers. Even if it's just a bunch of corporate droids, it's _still_ wrong not to ping them about what you're doing with 'their' content.
Slashdot Mirror
As a result- they ended up instinctively attacking Napster like a rabid wolverine, too- it's apparently their usual approach to anything that seems threatening. If they become convinced that mp3s are truly necessary or helpful to them rather than harmful, they will quit attacking mp3s.
Dre is just a fool- I don't think _he_ owns his masters. I would guess that he begged for _lots_ of advance money from the record companies- so he's surrounded by luxury and owns none of it and is massively, insanely in debt to the record companies without a hope of recouping. It's not hard to understand why someone like that would end up being the labels' lapdog. He's their property.
A fair comment- I'd make one small correction. Your last sentence would be more accurate if it was "there's no way around them if you want to be in mainstream media". This in no way implies that you're going to be rewarded, and there have been so many platinum-selling acts filing for bankruptcy that the music industry has actually pushed to have the legislation changed, making it harder for a signed band to file for bankruptcy. You see, it can be possible for a band to be released from its contract if it's sucked so dry that the members are bankrupt and can't afford to live. The record labels would prefer to keep sucking in this event- after all, a timely suicide of a bankrupt musician might make headlines and lead to more CD sales.
- granted, go on...
- 'of their own dollars'? What are you smoking? Read a real contract. It is _your_ dollars they spend- every penny right down to the dishes of mixed nuts in the lobby is 'recoupable', meaning that it comes out of your royalties. It is A LOAN, not a gift. Repeat, A LOAN. Is this so hard to understand? Have you ever taken out a loan? When you do, is the bank 'giving you its own dollars'? I'd say it was your future dollars they are giving you, betting that you'll be good for it. This is not even getting into the fact that you'll be damned lucky to get five grand- basically, to get this sort of loan against royalties you will need to spend about as much of your own money in building a buzz as you expect to be loaned. If you can't spend five grand looking good for the record label you're unlikely to even see five grand out of the record company. You are _very_ far from reality here, talk to some professionals and ask them how much an artist like you describe could expect to be advanced against royalties.
- Ha! I suggest talking to your bank manager. Build a relationship and build credit through taking small loans and paying them back responsibly to show that you can forecast cashflow effectively. Then when you need a million dollars you've done your homework, you're talking to the _right_ people and you'll get one _hell_ of a lot better terms than you'd get off the record labels. Think of record label advances as credit cards- except the rates are significantly worse, and the terms are a bear. Credit cards don't tend to forbid you to work- label contracts will tend to forbid you to record or perform for anybody else. If the label's refusing to fund you 'cause you didn't recoup, you not only owe them vast sums and won't get paid but you have to come up with your own money just to continue working as a musician, recording and promoting the albums you're not going to be paid for. Labels do not think long term these days- except that they'll happily sign you for a ten CD contract- give you 5-10K to make and promote the first one- then if you are a monster hit, they cash in, and if you stiff, you gotta pay for the other nine albums yourself, but they will take all the proceeds until the advance is recouped. Oh what a deal
:P
- Hope you know a damned good lawyer. Careful- if you let the record label find you a lawyer, this is what often happens- if ever you sue the record label, you are surprised to find that your lawyer declines to help you much- but shows up bright and early in court- on the OTHER side. Yes this is conflict of interest, your point? You expected _better_ ethics than the Mafia? This really happens, be careful. If you're not really well represented, forget it- you'll never see any money. You might be famous until the next sucker comes along without a good lawyer. Why do you think so many famous music superstars, now and in the past, are _children_?
- OK, now we are in pure fantasy territory. If you're really making a million you _are_ likely to want more, but that's because the kind of person capable of doing that isn't likely to stop at a million. Nobody capable of earning that much would be this dumb about the music industry- naivete does not earn a million dollars, unless you mean 'earning it for somebody else'.
- Actually the batting average is hugely worse than 9 out of 10- more like 9999 out of ten thousand. And again, you're talking 5K advances mostly- the figures here are waaaay out of whack. Courtney L's term of 'sharecropping' for the situation is a lot more accurate- what gives you the idea that these labels are so indispensable? (never mind the amusing notion that they 'give you a slice of the profits'! Were you listening about the recouping?) What is with this claim of 'you cannot function as a working musician without the record labels'? It's a business, not a system of royalty. It may be that the labels so tightly control all record stores and radio that you're substantially handicapped if you try to create your own network- it's true that where once new labels sprang up in a free-market sort of way, now they mostly don't exist, they are vanity imprints of the majors. Even so, other avenues for promotion and distribution open up. The closest you'll get to a label that 'made' its artists is the heyday of Motown- and even then, they were fortunate to stumble across the right artists to mold and control.
- Good: capitalism and a free market only work when there is decent information getting out. Though it took me way too long to realise that your 'you' is Courtney L. herself. Okay, so I am Courtney Love. Does that make you a fat, middle-aged record company executive? Or just a deluded fool?*
* The irony of this exchange would kill Alanis Morissette at twenty paces. I say 'it's a business, it's damn ruthless too, talk with some insiders, here are some common practices, protect yourself'. "FallLine" says, 'record labels will give you a million dollars just in case you are a star! Anyone who doubts this is an ungrateful pup being greedy and not settling for just a million dollars!'. And _I_ am supposed to be the 'sweet aroma of idealism'? This is the pot calling the _teacup_ 'black'. Do you think you could avoid talking total madness and false promises, in case there is still a musician out there somewhere in the world who might believe a word of it?It's almost like a 'worse is better' thing- the Bazaar stuff has a hard time being more sophisticated than Cathedral stuff, but if you have the connectivity, it becomes a hell of a resource just by virtue of statistics. Things that work out really well propagate- if I was giving people my mp3 of my 'Protocol' tape, some people might be looking for jazz, or Scofield, and notice the new tune, listen, go 'woh!' like Keanu Reeves and keep the track in their own collections with great delight- the new track would propagate based directly on how great it was, and if it was no good nobody would keep it. There are spooky parallels with genetic algorithms... only when you have a lot of random noise and junk does a GA-like effect start to happen, because it defines the situation as 'looking for good stuff amid the bad stuff' and forces quality judgements to be made.
10 GOTO 10
or if you prefer,
X = 200
This is ridiculous, a complete cop-out. What you are really trying to say is, "Above a certain (nowadays common) complexity, software is such a complicated mechanism that the human brain can't keep track of it well enough to avoid mistakes".
This is a DIFFERENT! claim than 'There's no such thing as bug-free software'. It points to obvious possible solutions (don't expect the human brain to keep track of it but assemble big software out of smaller known pieces made to interact in known ways, or alternately stick to writing software that _will_ fit within the human brain) rather than claiming no solution is possible. I would say 'There's no such thing as bug-free software' is very akin to saying 'There is a God'. You can look around and see many things that might suggest it- does that constitute proof? More relevantly, what attitude does this belief encourage? One hopes it encourages robust error checking and loads of sanity checking (when programming, it's helpful to assume the program's environment is insane- early Apple code was tested on an automated 'user from hell' program that just fed in endless random actions and was great at accidentally jockeying the victim program into 'insane' conditions that caused a crash). However, every time I see 'There is no such thing as bug-free software' my first reaction is to think it's being said by some marketroid type making excuses for why they shipped early, buggy, and don't actually plan to fix the broken bits. And thanks to the wonderful suggestibility of the human brain and the phenomenon of justification, those marketroids have heard this little mantra too and to _them_ it means 'software by definition is all screwed up and non-deterministic, so we won't even try, we'll just plan PR campaigns'. _They_ don't have the technical background to put such a remark in context. They will be taking it literally, as a license to produce untrustworthy crap without a bit of self-examination, with no attempt to do better- and it becomes their argument to ship earlier and earlier, buggier and buggier. "You're not done fixing bugs? ...button it up, we ship it just as it is now!"
*sigh*
If you write software, write bug-free software.
If you can't write bug-free software, try.
If you won't try- please, quit writing the stuff. :P
E. E. 'Doc' Smith wrote some of the finest early 'space opera' science fiction. It's easily scorned by modernists as there's no fashionable cynicism in it, plus it's good and cheesy and totally overblown- but there's one point that's very important, in 'Doc' Smith novels the super-hero is always an _engineer_, often a complete scientist- yet still with a movie-star 'cool' that would look good on Clint Eastwood or Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's like Arnold delivering an erudite and brilliant dissertation on how he's managed to enhance the beam intensity of his laser weapon into the terawatts- and then promptly turning around and using it in the classic tradition of the action hero. It's wildly overglamorous _science_ and _intelligence_. Contrast that, and the deification of scientists in the 40s and 50s, to the current (corporate-directed?) demonization of 'hacker' types, and the glorification of _dumb_ violence. "The Matrix" was a nice change from this (I particularly liked one small, 'Doc' Smithian detail- "Mouse", the ultra-geeky, scrawny little hacker type, is killed in a plot twist, but rather than have him perish cringing and wishing for pr0n, Mouse goes out in a blaze of glory with two blazing Thompson machine guns in his hands, veritably 'dies like a Klingon'. 'Doc' Smith would have understood that.)
The interesting part is that people of this type are not just fiction- 'Doc' Smith was real, he existed. Dean Kamen exists. And you don't have to be a Dean Kamen with zillions of dollars and machine shops and helicopters- I do this stuff, too. I am convinced that _lots_ of Slashdotters do, that there are countless geeky-type people out there who have weird ducting fan systems pointed into their overclocked computers and have oddly bent pieces of wire in their cupboards for making taco shells stand up straight and not fold up when you bake them (truth! I'm eating tacos right now made using such a bent piece of wire). When you get right down to it, LOTS OF THINGS need to exist, on a day-to-day basis, whether it's objects, devices, processes (I recently invented a workflow for scanning pictures at a print shop that goes more than six times faster than the previous top speed) and there's a type of person who'll invent them and a type of person who'll do what they're told and wait to see if anyone thinks of something.
The only thing that kinda saddens me is that this article gets between a quarter to a tenth of the attention people will give to making fun of Jon Katz :P I hope people are at least reading this stuff! Scientist hip is a quality that needs to be accepted. It _is_ cool. It sets the tone for what people are willing to aspire to. We geeky types are not simply a bunch of whiners looking to pirate mp3s from legitimate businessmen or to get script-kiddie exploits to DDS some law-abiding website. We, at our best, have the capacity to change the very terrain right out from under those record company execs and businessmens so none of the old rules apply anymore- but to really put the rubber to the road, it's gotta be _chic_. It has to be _cooler_ to look up a scrap of indie music online and be directed magically to the guy's website than it is to march off to Sam Goody's and buy what you're told to. It's got to be _hip_ to put together your own desktop movie and release it as VideoCD or DVD (no region) rather than sit there like a lump waiting on Hollywood to do something that isn't really stupid and calculating. In the 50s science was seen as _cool_ and lots of stuff ended up happening- do we really dare allow it to seem both lame and dangerous, do we dare to let it be seen as that stuff that 'evil hackers' do, creating nothing and causing destruction and damage?
Dean Kamen, for one, isn't about to let that happen without a fight. I'm with him ;)
Cops, by definition, want to control what you do.
Are you genuinely more afraid of cops than muggers?
What conclusions would a normal person draw faced with someone who genuinely was more afraid of cops than muggers?
(side note- Just last week, somebody literally planted a bomb in an attempt to blow up the house back-to-back with mine. It was the cops who, wearing blast shields, went to remove it and detonate the bomb safely in a barrel in the middle of the street, which they'd blocked off. Damn thing shook the ground. It was a cop who handled it and moved it to the safe place to be harmlessly detonated. I didn't notice any muggers offering to help- or any corporations, for that matter.
It wasn't a political bomb- turns out the person whose house it was is a local businessman who, basically, pushes his luck _hard_... about as hard as you can. This isn't a cop type person, as I understand it- it's another mugger type person (with various excuses and reasons) and if government was gone, this guy would just push it even harder and there would likely be even more bombs. Government is a recourse for people to at least feel they can do something about this guy _without_ bombing his house- except there was at least one person who didn't have any faith in that, wasn't going to trust cops and government to redress his grievances, and decided to take matters into his own hands- and try to blow up the house next to mine, adjacent to a block with lots and lots of little kids constantly underfoot.
Call me a crazy madman, but I for one feel safer trusting the cops.)
It's fine to interest 'name' artists in the cause, but take special pains to interest 'nobody' artists in these issues. _All_ 'name' artists were once 'nobody' artists. _All_ 'name' artists will eventually age and become historical footnotes, in time. This is really basic networking- establish relationships with next decade's 'name' artists _before_ they are 'name' artists, and make sure they have a clue.
There isn't any medium in common use today that would run for weeks (excepting generative stuff or some uses of MOD-type music), but there is one possibility I'd love to play with someday- streaming live music through mp3 to a CD writer. Using a basic data rate like the (borderline decent) 128K, a CD will hold over 10 hours of music- but to get really serious you have to use a DVD format, which could theoretically run for over six days! None of this would be generative at all- it would just be a hell of a long audio stream :) to record such music would take over 200 adat tapes, so the only sensible way to do the six day composition would be as one long live improvisation with teams of musicians stepping in and taking over for each other. Strings, drumheads and such things would have to be swapped out- or the whole thing could be synth-driven, avoiding the problems of physical instruments being played for six days nonstop :)
If you're willing to do generative music it's even simpler- write mod software that makes music out of raw data, give it a lot of instruments to play with and then give it 600 megs or so of data to play with, and run the program. It wouldn't be hard to make that go for 1000 years, in theory anyway ;)
The neat thing about this quickie-report is the effort and attention to making a musical thing that could literally go for a thousand years. That moves into the areas of engineering art as well as experimental music. Part of the 'music' is not just the (possibly limited) tunes it plays but knowing that the song is continuing, will still be unfolding past the lives of your grandchildren. It's like conceptual art- I hope this project follows through. I'd like to hear a bit of the music it makes :)
I started going red in the face over this, and the other post, and then I decided, F**K that, I'm not just going to take this sort of thing in dignified silence. I don't have to be abusive, exactly, but there are a couple of things I need to say. Go on and moderate them down if you want, I really don't care.
I don't _have_ any CDs. Yet. I do have a studio, because I am an audio geek. I have press clippings from the Absolute Sound magazine and many, many years of experience in hardcore high end audio hacking, and it is not a '*cough* studio'. Implying that is a sure way to tick me off, but it's a hollow critique.
It's a source of continuous amazement to me how being self serving can be a compliment or curse depending on what's most convenient to the poster. I (obviously) was typing for an hour putting down all that information on 501c3s. I'd only been reminded of it the previous night, suck it up and deal. If it is of no immediate use, excuuuuuse me. The fact is, there's a parallel to the GPL there, using incorporation against corporations by rendering them harmless. I may not have the final idea on how to use this legal loophole of the nonprofit corporation, but as it happens I know an expert on the things if someone needs to learn more.
On a personal note- surprise! I _was_ an autistic kid, back before anyone had a clue about them. I was 'high functioning' enough to avoid being a total freak but not enough to avoid a deeply 'geek' adolescence. Now I am an adult, 32, with Asperger's Syndrome. My goodness, an autistic person writing _pedantically_ and going on for a long time! _Stop_ the fscking _presses_, nobody will _believe_ this one. There's never been an _autistic_ person on slashdot before! *furrfu*
Stuff it up your untidiest port and reboot. Having asperger's is part of who I am, and this is the last freakin' place I'll put up with being hassled over it. If you want to insult me say I'm ugly and my mother dresses me funny :)
Unlike what some people seem to think, you _cannot_ 'support' me by buying stuff at this time. I don't have the capacity to make CDs on my own yet. I'm trying to get it together as fast as I possibly can, and I'm even kind of excited because I know I can do it better than mp3.com did.
I am amused, in a sick way, at the several posts I've seen that attack me as a greedy self interested person. Um, leaving aside my socialist tendencies and the amount of effort I put into helping others and sharing information, I thought to be a good little slashdottenlibertarian I was _supposed_ to be greedy? Perhaps it's a case of '_I_ am a real go-getter, _you_ talk too much, _he_ is a greedy little pest'. *g*
Though frankly I guess I could be much worse off- I could support Gnome or KDE (run away! incoming flamewar!)
We don't have the proper tool yet. The RIAA, MPAA will give us the proper tool in time- that tool would be further legislation that is so completely intolerable that it produces a backlash and calls the whole show into question. For instance, retroactively making all CDs owned by the record company so everyone's existing collection becomes 'leased' not owned- or outlawing all forms of media exchange, or outlawing all ripping of audio CDs. These steps are probably inevitable but they are crucial- they would plainly reveal the true situation, that media in general is very close to being a 'closed shop', like a sort of government only you can't vote for how it's run.
The key factor is that it can't simply affect what people do with RIAA property (such as the music content of CDs ripped to mp3): it has to begin to affect people's personal property (I don't own my CDs now? But they're _my_ CDs!) or their rights over their property (I'm not allowed to mp3 my song? But it's _my_ song, recorded it myself!).
Only then will the problems be clear enough to see justice done. As long as it's about copying Britney Spears CDs without her permission it's a losing argument. But it _will_ escalate until the problems are so terrible that there's no more ground to give.
I do mind if Napster loses on the grounds that music file exchange is against the law. I will be dependent on music file exchange to advertise my music to listeners who might then buy a CD from me direct. You _cannot_ argue people into liking music. You have to play it for them and see if they like it... if music exchange over the net is forbidden that leaves only radio- and it's damned impossible to get on radio, even if you _are_ a major label act (but not 'doing tonnage').
I _particularly_ mind if it is made illegal to rip audio CDs under fair use. I am determined to allow people to do that with my CDs. If this is ever called into question I will unhesitatingly conspire to solicit illegal CD ripping, by encouraging people to make mp3s or whatever out of my CDs, just as I always have. I foresee a time when the RIAA wins against Napster and goes on to make all CD ripping illegal- and that's when they begin really stepping on _my_ toes.
If I was then taken to court for this, I would have intense satisfaction in testifying that I produced all the music, bought the CD blank (paying a tax to the RIAA in doing so), burned it myself, made the label which says 'noncommercial copying OKAY' on it myself, sold it to the customer with the full intention of permitting them to make as many copies as they wished- and then I would ask, what exactly is the justification for forbidding me to do this? It's my music, CD, burner and customer, and I already paid tax to something that does me no good at all and only takes money from me to give to my competition.
In a way I almost hope all this comes to pass so I have such a chance to put a common sense situation before the courts. I already dislike paying tax on CD-R media to prop up the RIAA which is trying to destroy me- the next step is clearly for them to forbid consumers from ever ripping CDs, or exchanging any sort of digital music over the net, and they _will_ escalate it and keep pushing until that state is reached- and at that point they are legally blocking my right to set DIFFERENT terms for my 'music customers', ones that I might feel are not only fair but are a damn good selling point assuming they like the music anyway.
Things are bad, but I promise, they could be _much_ worse- and I'm committed to operating as a direct-selling recording studio legally, going underground does not hold any appeal for me at all. I have a _right_ to sell my CDs and deal with their IP as I choose, they are mine and I am copyright holder and that gives me the right. I will know _exactly_ when the RIAA goes over the line, and they are treacherously close to it right now and could go unbelievably far over it, and probably will.
Again, I don't mind if Napster loses- because I am thinking of the _intent_ here, and obviously the RIAA labels have _no_ intent to share music, obviously the wishes of those copyright holders are being totally squashed. They should be respected- this makes COMPETITION and allows people (arguably more savvy people! ;) ) like me to specifically allow such trading- giving us traders a big advantage, giving our music MORE VALUE because you can do more with it and you can make copies of it and put it on a server for when you travel and etc etc etc the sky's the limit.
Certain types of IP law will over-reach, not only respecting the RIAA labels' wishes, but denying the wishes of someone like me through legislative action. And _that_ is where I draw the line. Let the RIAA do _whatever_ with the stuff they own- but keep their *&&^$^@#& hands off MY property!
My question is this. What business does a web site have sending me email at all? If I want to see information from a web site I will find it on (surprise!) the web.
My own answer has been along these lines- I will create to the best of my ability and use the legal system to defend the interests of the people I'm creating for. That's sometimes meant GPLing software, when I could- my software is frankly not world-class, it's not really my area of expertise- and now it's beginning to mean that I must put together not only my recording studio, but also CD mastering and duplication, and even hosting for free audio. The studio's done and quite functional- CD mastering and even Video CD mastering is dead simple- duplication's going to cost me some serious money, I'll be taking out a bank loan when I have my ADAT paid off to get a duplicator- and hosting is beyond _my_ reach though I need it desperately.
All this is needed because I can't trust the commercial sector to handle it for me. The breakdown goes like this:
- Studio: the $75 an hour I'm asking is actually very low for a studio. This part is pretty straightforward- studios are service oriented and it's more a financial question than anything else.
- Mastering: mastering houses charge a _lot_ of money for what they do- the gist of it is that you can't seriously tailor the frequency range and soundstage of your CD while listening over pathetic little nearfield monitors. The need for an extra pair of ears on the project is somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that these days, mastering houses are increasingly forced to brutally compress their results until average levels are about 1 db down from peak. This sounds appalling but is louder than the competing songs on the radio
;P
- Duplication: currently having a burner will do- one nice thing about being a geek is ability to track down things like Mitsui CD-R media with process color surface-prints: it can cost six times what you can find cheap media for, and maybe twenty times what commercial CD materials cost, but archival quality is substantially better and honestly, there is a place for a quality argument. The point at which the commercial product is cheap crap at premium prices is the point at which the quality argument at reasonable prices starts to substantially work. The trick is you have to make all aspects _look_ professional- hence the process color media print, at 400 dpi carefully color corrected (the guy who does the CD printing called this 'overkill', to which I replied 'good!'
;) ) When things develop to the point that I need more duplication, it will be time to talk to my bank about the next bank loan- currently I'm paying one off for my 20-bit ADAT studio recorder, it seems reasonable to think in terms of another to get a serious CD duplicator. I'm also excited about the possibilities of producing Video CDs- which can be played in DVD players. Hooray, an accessible format for short video that can piggyback on the leverage of the stinkin' MPAA! I may get a DVD player just to test my VideoCDs on :)
- Hosting: This is the killer. I don't have any way to offer _this_. I have done some research, however, into what needs to be out there.
This last one is the hardest one, and I'm not sure how to address it- and this post is about how I'm trying to address each issue personally instead of announcing that 'someone should' do this stuffBasically, I see a pressing need for just plain media hosting on a massive scale. It could well be restricted to mp3 and ogg vorbis (hell, include wma). It could also be restricted to 128K on two assumptions: one, it'll be important to not have everyone doing 320K and using up two and a half times the resources for their stuff, and two, it's low enough quality to justify being giveaway stuff and high enough to basically enjoy. It will not pay musicians one cent for the downloads- on the other hand it will not _charge_ musicians a cent for the hosting. Most importantly, it will have a usage agreement that protects both parties, asks only nonexclusive rights to host the material, claims no copyrights to the material, and requires any contract changes to be explicitly signed off on by the artist. (This last one is the main thing mp3.com just lost in their contract alteration).
Instead of instantly planning to fund the thing off ad banners (aren't we all sick of that by now?) I propose the hosting service be incorporated... as a 501c3 nonprofit corporation. This is a VERY IMPORTANT point for protecting artist rights in the current climate. The 501c3 must have an explicitly spelled out mission statement that it must abide by to maintain its nonprofit status. It can seek grants- it could even solicit money from the RIAA labels, 'leeching' off them to provide its services in perfect safety. It can pay server operators a relatively decent salary for doing their jobs- you wouldn't have to go hunting for MCSEs, you could spec out a proper high-load server farm and pay to have it run properly, nonprofit doesn't mean it can't pay employees a normal wage. Finally and most importantly, a 501c3 answers to the IRS and has to follow certain rules or cease to exist. It CANNOT be bought out, either in a takeover or a merger, by a commercial corporation. It can only be bought/merged with another 501c3- and for this to happen both 501c3s must have essentially (literally?) the SAME mission statement, not differing ones- and it is so hard to change a 501c3's mission statement that you might as well disband it and start a new one. And when you disband a 501c3, all assets it has must be distributed to OTHER 501c3s covering the same basic area.
When you look closely at these things (I have a friend who is expert at framing charters for 501c3s and knows all about them and has a terrific batting average for his 501c3 proposals being approved), it's amazing- almost GPL-like- it's a form of legal incorporation that uses the meanest parts of the US government (the IRS!) to protect you against rampant corporate abuses. If you are a 501c3 no commercial corporation can touch you- they can give you money for a tax break, and that's about it. They can't buy you out. They can't shut you down- even if they for some reason got totally Mafialike and pressured all your boardmembers to disband the corporation, your resources simply get distributed to other 501c3s doing the SAME JOB. It's like the liquid metal Terminator- no amount of force can destroy you! All watched over by the IRS with gimlet eyes. You don't have to vigilantly guard against, say, major labels subverting you and making you a profit-earning subsidary. The IRS will vigilantly guard against that :)
I'm not sure what the software sphere would need in terms of a 501c3 to develop ideas that need to remain free of corporate control. I do know the needs of my own sphere- music, media in general, video as that becomes a factor. The music sphere needs free hosting because a musician who's even slightly prolific will rapidly exceed the bounds of any personal site or typical hosting service, and it seems like most/all of the music/mp3 hosting services on the net are RIAA label controlled or copying their contractual provisions.
In order for musicians to be able to function outside the confines of RIAA ownership, they need to have the ability to own the means of production (easy: CD burners and duplicators and Internet sales) and the ability to circulate music to people who don't know the music yet. It really isn't necessary to have one recognizable site for people to _browse_ from (mp3.com is full of bands who've never been listened to- I always got most listens from mentioning what I do on Slashdot), but it is necessary to have a site with acceptable policies/contracts which won't need to be changed or moved. Wherever it is, there needs to be a fair amount of stability so that the musician can distribute CDs, posters, handouts with the URL on it. Because of mp3.com's change of contract, I have posters, CDs out there, even 24 cassette tapes that haven't even been _recorded_ yet, all with the mp3.com addy on them, which is now obsolete.
The common factor here is that it's all about giving _my_ material a base of operations that's not easily destroyable by corporate interests. I'm not attempting to, say, sample RIAA label acts and use their music as part of my composition. I am not negativland ;)
A very good question would be, how important is it to pursue development on IP that corporations have claimed as their own, and how important is it to defend IP that is actually original? Most of my response has been centered on defending the ability to produce and distribute stuff (music, video) that is original, knowing that the _facilities_ for this production and distribution are under continuous attack, but my right to produce is not actually in question.
Are programmers in danger of losing their right to produce, or is the perceived threat simply that anything programmers do will be patented by corporations and taken away from them? There is a point at which this begins to seem unreasonable. Somebody at Amazon _thought_ they invented one-click ordering, which is stupid but doesn't necessarily mean Amazon set out to 'steal' stuff from the public domain. I question the wisdom of assuming, from the start, that what YOU CREATE is so doomed that it must be 'subversive' to survive. I would suggest trying to remain visible and CREATING stuff, quite openly. Use contractual tools like the GPL to protect your interests. Don't assume you're so outclassed that you must go into hiding! We're looking at an era of much legal rule-changing. Some of the rules are changing to heavily favor corporations and piracy, by them, of intellectual property and other types of property and privileges. Some of these rules will be changed BACK once the consequences are clear. Act as if the world was fair and you had rights! Behave in good faith and don't knuckle under to the appearance of oppression. Act AS IF you had rights, know what they would be if you had them. Don't act like you are a criminal just because some other entity profits by criminalising you.
The last word is this- when you create, you set the rules. My CDs will have "All commercial rights reserved- noncommercial copying OKAY" at the bottom of every single one of them. If the RIAA manages to make (for instance) copying of tracks off audio CDs automatically illegal, I will happily participate in a test case: someone can rip my stuff and put it on Napster, and I will testify that I explicitly allow such noncommercial copying of MY CDs, thus no blanket rule can be made. The RIAA DOES NOT HAVE THE RIGHT to set MY rules, and my rules for my CDs permit noncommercial copying. I'm even spelling it out on the CD itself where it can't be missed- my wishes _will_ be respected. That's justice.
I'll bet he's plotting a one click web fulfillment system- the bastard! *g*
I would be very interested to know your definition of 'deities' :) is gravity a deity? Is the self-organizing properties of genetic algorithms a deity? Is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem (or its sentence 'g') a deity? (I think the last would make a nifty one, in all seriousness :) )
James Madison in Federalist #10 makes this case far better than I could- it is deeply important, because there haven't been any examples of pure majority-dominated democracy that worked worth a damn, and our founding fathers _knew_ that when they made the rules and wrote all these things that have colored how American government works.
If our government is truly failing at this it will be destroyed. There is no way to blindly stomp all the little factions and get away with it- you end up with bloody revolution, and sooner rather than later. To survive as a country we NEED to be listening to those South Florida Cubans, to the computer geekocracy, to all the little factions. That doesn't mean there will be a clear answer- when the clear answer disenfranchises lots of different groups of Americans, you need to quit looking for a clear answer and go for a muddier answer that's more flexible and adaptable.
I would question, however, how much this is a _technical_ problem. I can tell you what mp3.com looked like from the viewpoint of an artist earning a few hundreds of dollars on downloads and streaming- I saw a lot more straight downloads than streaming. Of course, this is colored by the fact that I _allowed_ downloads rather than just streaming: but the result is that I still got to observe thousands of song 'hits' of all different types.
Getting slashdotted was always a delight ;) normal volume was much less. Either way, it tended to work out to an emphasis on downloads rather than streaming. This might be affected by the fact that my music was and is the un-easy-listening AOR 'radio station' dribble- if it was more 'lite' I might have seen more use by streaming mp3.com customers. However, I still think what I saw is reasonably representative.
The upshot is this: it'd be a big help if anyone was doing a just plain SERVER for hosting mp3 files- legit ones for the artists. Could a nonprofit organization (such as a 501c3) get past the mp3licensing.com threat of hitting up the hapless site for $15,000 and 1 cent per download minimum? I'm not confident a successful mp3 hosting site offering free downloads and earning money through ad revenue (in other words, your usual site) would be safe from this sort of attack.
I think it's probably time to bite the bullet and scrap any hope of getting musicians paid per download- my thought is, surely legal nonexclusive rights to this sort of content have a value that justifies offering the hosting space free? mp3 files add up: I was at several hundred megs of material when I left mp3.com (all now deleted off their system). iuma limits you to ten songs for presumably this reason, which is a major problem. Many sites (mp3.com, farmclub.com) have ugly contracts, or barely-hidden landmines in the contract just waiting to turn even uglier.
The situation doesn't require computer engineering, it requires social engineering. You either side with the RIAA folks (let's all exploit some artists to line our pockets! How much can we con them out of?) or you start to ask for something like what mp3.com seemed to be- a huge warehouse that hosts music files, charging no rent. It's not expected to promote the artist. It needn't even pay the artist, itself. It simply needs to have the following characteristics:
- no limit on sizes- at all. I have an entire composition that needed to be split to be hosted on mp3.com- 'Extended Play'. Never again.
- contract seeks only nonexclusive rights to only the materials being shared, for the purpose of doing the sharing. The site must _not_ be trying to collect IP.
- If the artist terminates agreement with the site, and deletes the songs/art (if art is even required!) then that material is gone- the site does not hang onto rights to distribute that material for longer than necessary to clear the databases.
- high availability, high bandwidth. The site needs to _be_ there.
That would just about do it. Seemingly appealing options might include stuff like art and fancy pages (which could be a headache, depending on how unified the site is supposed to be. Couldn't it just be a file repository, more efficiently?), or top 40 charts, or message boards. However, these might not be the best thing- on mp3.com these things simply led to griping, extensive cheating of the system and attempts to guess the workings of the system, and a burial of musician communication under 10,000 posts begging "Please download my song" or (I am not making this up) "I will download all the songs on your page if you'll just download this particular one of mine, which I'm trying to get into the charts!".The reason mp3.com changed from what (once) was a very similar system to what I describe, is hubris- Michael Robertson has always had plenty of chutzpah but it turns to over-reaching. It made mp3.com by FAR the biggest site of its kind- no other is even close- but has also destroyed it.
When mp3.com goes down there are going to be an awful lot of musicians looking for mp3 hosting. It's potentially a great positioning for someone who wanted to simply take Really Big Bandwidth And Storage and turn it into the _next_ 'biggest site of its kind'. It's just a question of whether anyone else can execute this strategy without blowing it by overreaching- by trying to out-promise the RIAA labels (HA! Not!) and ending up hopelessly broke, moneylosing and in court.
Well, it's worth a shot :) yes, I am gearing up to do just this. Some would argue the thing to do is then to turn around and sell the 'high end' handmade product for $40 or something, but I have a hard time seeing any CD as being worth that much :)
Or would they just shoot all the poor and sell the bodies to Procter+Gamble? :P
Unless or until I find another good place to host that stuff (I'm batting 0 for 3 now, still with no luck at all)...
Napster is the only legal way to get my music online. And that state of affairs might persist for a while... I certainly cannot afford to do it on my own airwindows.com site, and I'm not seeing whole bunches of indie mp3 sites, much less ones that make some pretense of paying me like mp3.com did. So it's Napster or... silence...
*g* I just get a huge kick out of this for some reason. I guess it's my sick humor or something. "Oh please Judge Marilyn, don't hurt my only remaining way to legally distribute my music over the net! I beg of you!" Think that'd work? *hah!*
I think you make an admirable case, a sensible argument. However, I am not the one who needs to be convinced of it. The original record labels are the ones who would need to be convinced of that- BEFORE! mp3.com went around ripping all their CDs to provide a commercial service.
If they'd made this case and the labels agreed that it was 'space-shifting' and didn't affect their core business (shyyeah right- but let's pretend) then we'd have an AGREEMENT and there would be no lawsuit because mp3.com was doing stuff with content that the labels AGREED to have done.
Instead, mp3.com blew it- which I think is a great pity. They behaved as if all that stuff was public domain, just because a lot of people owned copies. They needed to ASK PERMISSION. I would even say that you could make a case that nothing more would be needed- that there would be no case for paying the labels for access to the content for the purpose of building this big database of mp3s for commercial purposes. But they did NOT ask.
I hope when Warner's or Universal come after _my_ content to make some sort of 'centralised music e-collection! Includes all the music in the world, now you need never ever look at indie music websites and hear their pathetic pleas for you to buy your CDs, because we have all the mp3s they released, right here with a Warner's ad banner on top!' website...
Would you feel the same way if Universal got to copy my 'indie' albums which I own, and broadcast them out to people, making it seem as if they are 'Universal' albums?
I concede that the my.mp3.com service is relatively innocuous- I would have a 'wait and see' attitude if even Universal tried to do something like that with my stuff (a 'timeshifting', 'spaceshifting' sort of thing). However, enough of that stuff, or the wrong sort of 'fair use' (FOR profit, IMPLYING an association that doesn't exist, WITHOUT consent of any sort) and Universal starts to look like the GATEKEEPER, and people looking for 'Rain Dragon' (currently legally available only on Napster! :) ) are led to believe they must go through Universal to get it.
That, I would object to, because I hate the major labels thoroughly. So I can't be _too_ protective of my.mp3.com: so much of what mp3.com was doing was good and legitimate. The ripping of all those major label CDs was not, and they're suffering the consequences of their choice to not attempt to communicate. They have also made the terms for any FUTURE spaceshifting site much, much worse by their actions. If they hadn't changed their artist contract I would _still_ be with them even so- but I have never felt my.mp3.com was a sensible move. The idea is good but so mishandled! You can't run around doing stuff like that without talking to the content producers. Even if it's just a bunch of corporate droids, it's _still_ wrong not to ping them about what you're doing with 'their' content.