Of course the RIAA keeps suing, and they'll keep doing so. What next? In response, a lot of IP academics are calling for alternative systems that would "get the artists paid" but when it comes to them, the devil is in the details...
How many people will have to have their Internet use watched in order to generate a meaningful sample?
If the sampling is truly anonymous, how can it prevent cheating?
Will 'offensive' works be excluded? If they are, what is the impact on Free-Speech?
Will such bureaucratic governmental (or quasi-governmental) control over the arts really be an improvement?
I've written some about "compulsory licensing" here.
It creeped me out when she revealed that we had traded email, but that she had used a fake name.
When I'm helping people that I don't know, I talk differently than I do when I'm helping friends.
So, when she told me that she had emailed me tech support questions as "Jane Grey" (a mistaken reference to X-Men's Jean Grey) and I went and re-read the emails that I had sent to "Jane Gray" it was pretty weird.
By way of background, I make Andromeda which turns collections of MP3s into streaming sites.
So... my g/f Amy, not at all a techie, secretly learned how to set up and use Andromeda, emailed my friends for suggested listening, and surprised me on my birthday with a fully set up music site. It was totally amazing!
She even set up a fake Hotmail address so she could write me with tech support questions. Sneaky.
"As a programmer, I don't mind being at a disadvantage."
It is perhaps worth keeping in mind that you may not mind being at a disadvantage now, but other programmers like you might, and you may later find youself wishing for greater economic power, if even to help support some other cause that you may believe in.
Ultimately, the loss of economic power of the "programming class" will come at the expense of the political power of the programming class...
Sure, some people do get paid to develop free software, but the fact is that free software financially supports far fewer professionals.
Somebody is likely to chime in with some free software business model, but those never really pass the fairydust test. Again, some will get paid to work on free software, but the total amount of money going to coders is reduced.
Advantage: (qty=n) Linux programmers; Disdvantage: ([(qty=n)+x], where x is much greater than 1) programmers
Society in aggregate does seem to benefit from access to free software, but that benefit is only possible through the hard (and generally unpaid) work of skilled programmers. Advantage: Everyone, Disadvantage: Programmers.
"A similar fate has been met by a couple of university students/amatuer hip-hop deejays in Australia.
They ran mp3wmaland.net, which was shut down about half a year ago, and they were prosecuted about three months ago and were jailed. The whole story was rather grim... deejays subpoened at clubs for playing illegal bootlegs, police raids into bedrooms and seizing everything, complete incomprehensibility of the fact they have broken the law and face jail, by the three responsible."
1) The fact that somebody else caught in a similar situation might say "but I didn't know it was wrong" should come as no surprise.
2) As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse anyway -- even if they didn't know it was wrong, that doens't mean that they can just do it with impunity.
3) The DJ example is especially bad -- I don't know the specifics, but I'm assuming that these are professional DJs that are paid to play parties? That's a professional use of this music. They're paid, in part, for the music that they bring.
"But if the software is open source, anyone could create a Baudio-encoded version himself and collect royalties on the download instead of the author. Besides, this has nothing to do with the musical encoding. The author could just as easily grant a license to download the gzipped version of his software by paying a certain amount of money. Of course, if it's open source already, it would be kind of stupid for the same reason as the Baudio-encoded version."
For starters it's highly unlikely that taking somebody else's copyrighted work, passing it through Baudio, and selling that would be legal. (why pay for something that's free?)
And you may be missing the point about the open source software -- it's already free to redistribute, and so selling it isn't likely to work.
However, if there's an audio-only compulsory, those open source authors could convert their files to audio and take a share of the pie. The end users still don't have to pay for anything -- all they have to do is download the audio version, and that helps to support the project.
Yeah, that's a neat thing I found -- compressed files (zip, mp3, gif, jpg) tended to sound like steady static and uncompressed files (especially pictures) had more interesting rhythms -- if you listen to the Photoshop image, my guess is that the 3 "doings" at the end are the RGB channels, but that's just a guess...
Hey, that's a really cool idea and squarely shows how my Baudio idea could easily be mapped over to something that is more traditionally musical in nature. Neat!
And the point is, in part, that 'compulsories' don't generally bother to address all the other file types are just as easily traded over P2P, and so Baudio simply turns any type of file into audio.
And since all the original binary data is intact, it's simple to revert to the original state of the file.
Interestingly enough, I did just that, but at 3k it's too short to be all that interesting. I also realized that compressed files (like zip and mp3 and gif and jpg) tend to sound like steady uniform static whereas other files (especially uncompressed image files) are more likely to have rhythms -- you can kind of hear the RGB channels at the end of the Photoshop file.
Well, as just one example -- an open source app could offer downloads in both regular and Baudio-encoded formats. They could then tell their users that if they choose to download the Baudio-encoded version, then they're helping the team.
But I think your point stands -- I think most copyright holders don't want to be forced into a compulsory license -- they want to be able to make that sort of decision for themselves...
fwiw, Baudio won't help you decript anything -- it simply transforms the binary data of any file into a valid WAV file. And so when you decode a Baudio-encoded file, if it started as an encrypted file, it ends as an encrypted file...
Of course the question you raise is: who gets to be the one saying 'bah' and telling somebody else that their work doesn't count.
btw, I made Baudio, and I stand by the artistic merit. For instance, the Baudio-encoded audio was at least capable of sparking this very conversation, and I'd say that conversations like these are (in part) what art is all about...
With most of these systems, the size of the pie is fixed, and so assuming that Baudio-encoded files count, then more people (like coders and so on) would be taking a share of that fixed pie.
And if Baudio-encoded are excluded, the question is the artistic basis for making such an exclusion, and who gets to make those decisions, and what other works might they also try to exclude...
Depending on how you get your bandwidth, you might shop around for a better deal.
A lot of people seem to like Speakeasy (they're geek friendly) and it looks like their low-end residential DSL service starts with 256k upstream for about $50/mo. (not bad!)
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How many people will have to have their Internet use watched in order to generate a meaningful sample?
If the sampling is truly anonymous, how can it prevent cheating?
Will 'offensive' works be excluded? If they are, what is the impact on Free-Speech?
Will such bureaucratic governmental (or quasi-governmental) control over the arts really be an improvement?
I've written some about "compulsory licensing" here.
When I'm helping people that I don't know, I talk differently than I do when I'm helping friends.
So, when she told me that she had emailed me tech support questions as "Jane Grey" (a mistaken reference to X-Men's Jean Grey) and I went and re-read the emails that I had sent to "Jane Gray" it was pretty weird.
So... my g/f Amy, not at all a techie, secretly learned how to set up and use Andromeda, emailed my friends for suggested listening, and surprised me on my birthday with a fully set up music site. It was totally amazing!
She even set up a fake Hotmail address so she could write me with tech support questions. Sneaky.
Fat Tony wants you to know that shakedowns are a great way to get to know the community!
It is perhaps worth keeping in mind that you may not mind being at a disadvantage now, but other programmers like you might, and you may later find youself wishing for greater economic power, if even to help support some other cause that you may believe in.
Ultimately, the loss of economic power of the "programming class" will come at the expense of the political power of the programming class...
Somebody is likely to chime in with some free software business model, but those never really pass the fairydust test. Again, some will get paid to work on free software, but the total amount of money going to coders is reduced.
Advantage: (qty=n) Linux programmers; Disdvantage: ([(qty=n)+x], where x is much greater than 1) programmers
Society in aggregate does seem to benefit from access to free software, but that benefit is only possible through the hard (and generally unpaid) work of skilled programmers. Advantage: Everyone, Disadvantage: Programmers.
Though for the programmers actually getting paid for their work, Advantage: Programmers...
I actually wonder what CNET is really buying, is it mostly the domain name?
But cool doesn't pay for servers, bandwidth, staff, and so on. And nor did all those Sephora banner ads...
They ran mp3wmaland.net, which was shut down about half a year ago, and they were prosecuted about three months ago and were jailed. The whole story was rather grim ... deejays subpoened at clubs for playing illegal bootlegs, police raids into bedrooms and seizing everything, complete incomprehensibility of the fact they have broken the law and face jail, by the three responsible."
1) The fact that somebody else caught in a similar situation might say "but I didn't know it was wrong" should come as no surprise.
2) As they say, ignorance of the law is no excuse anyway -- even if they didn't know it was wrong, that doens't mean that they can just do it with impunity.
3) The DJ example is especially bad -- I don't know the specifics, but I'm assuming that these are professional DJs that are paid to play parties? That's a professional use of this music. They're paid, in part, for the music that they bring.
How about a Reality Science show? You know, watching real scientists do things like graph data, get the right glassware, and think about stuff?
Even if the RIAA looses the fast-track subpoena, they'll keep suing -- they'll just switch to John Doe lawsuits...
For starters it's highly unlikely that taking somebody else's copyrighted work, passing it through Baudio, and selling that would be legal. (why pay for something that's free?)
And you may be missing the point about the open source software -- it's already free to redistribute, and so selling it isn't likely to work.
However, if there's an audio-only compulsory, those open source authors could convert their files to audio and take a share of the pie. The end users still don't have to pay for anything -- all they have to do is download the audio version, and that helps to support the project.
Yeah, that's a neat thing I found -- compressed files (zip, mp3, gif, jpg) tended to sound like steady static and uncompressed files (especially pictures) had more interesting rhythms -- if you listen to the Photoshop image, my guess is that the 3 "doings" at the end are the RGB channels, but that's just a guess...
Hey, that's a really cool idea and squarely shows how my Baudio idea could easily be mapped over to something that is more traditionally musical in nature. Neat!
heh, "his" == "me"
And the point is, in part, that 'compulsories' don't generally bother to address all the other file types are just as easily traded over P2P, and so Baudio simply turns any type of file into audio.
And since all the original binary data is intact, it's simple to revert to the original state of the file.
Interestingly enough, I did just that, but at 3k it's too short to be all that interesting. I also realized that compressed files (like zip and mp3 and gif and jpg) tend to sound like steady uniform static whereas other files (especially uncompressed image files) are more likely to have rhythms -- you can kind of hear the RGB channels at the end of the Photoshop file.
heh, Windows executables are on the way, and I'd be happy to add anything else that anybody wants to help with...
But I think your point stands -- I think most copyright holders don't want to be forced into a compulsory license -- they want to be able to make that sort of decision for themselves...
fwiw, Baudio won't help you decript anything -- it simply transforms the binary data of any file into a valid WAV file. And so when you decode a Baudio-encoded file, if it started as an encrypted file, it ends as an encrypted file...
btw, I made Baudio, and I stand by the artistic merit. For instance, the Baudio-encoded audio was at least capable of sparking this very conversation, and I'd say that conversations like these are (in part) what art is all about...
With most of these systems, the size of the pie is fixed, and so assuming that Baudio-encoded files count, then more people (like coders and so on) would be taking a share of that fixed pie.
And if Baudio-encoded are excluded, the question is the artistic basis for making such an exclusion, and who gets to make those decisions, and what other works might they also try to exclude...
Will the circle be unbroken? ;)
A lot of people seem to like Speakeasy (they're geek friendly) and it looks like their low-end residential DSL service starts with 256k upstream for about $50/mo. (not bad!)