To me music is a better "investment", tastes and mileage may vary.
Looking at it objectively, last year's best selling CD sold 4.6 million copies. I believe the new version of Grand Theft Auto did six million copies in the first few week. Ten years ago, video games were not even valid competition. Now the video game industry's income has surpassed the music industry. It is a factor.
Though here is a question... Who's right? I really don't agree with unfettered sharing and access of free songs, nor do I agree with the RIAA behavior.
There's another side to be considered, namely that of the musician who sees the Internet as a promotional tool and actively encourages the sharing of their music in hopes that more people will hear it.
I especially don't agree with the RIAA's treatment of artists, which, to me, would be the most valid (and powerful) argument to go out and buy music instead of finding it for free.
Not trying to pick a fight over this tiny point, but if I want to see the artist get paid, I'll buy a concert ticket.
The most valid and powerful argument for buying a CD is that you heard a song and loved it. The most powerful argument not to buy it is the RIAA.
There has to be a compromise that allows money to the artists, and stops the endless abuse of their customer base.
An equitable solution for compensating artists whose work is used on the Internet would mean that the 3 million bands on MySpace ought to be paid something, too, at least those which generate traffic. The RIAA will not generate any solution which recognizes their existence.
The Internet Archive has offered to be a repository for every song ever recorded (at least the ones we can find) and count the downloads. If there were a pile of money to distribute, all artists, songwriters, etc. could be paid fairly based on what music was downloaded.
The RIAA doesn't want a solution unless they own it and dictate the terms. They do not represent artists; they represent the record labels. They are not interested in compromise. As a result, no solution for compensating artists will be reached unless it is forced upon them or the RIAA ceases to exist.
Judging from their sales figures, the latter seems to be more likely to occur first.
Yes, the semantics argument is getting old, but it pales in comparison to the tediousness of the RIAA's legal approach.
They've filed 40,000 lawsuits over the last 5 years, according to BusinessWeek, and only 100 or so have bothered to contest them in court. This would seem to leave the RIAA with almost $120 million (at $3000 per settlement -- your lawsuit may vary) to fight those 100 troublemakers.
We all know what copyright violation is
No, we don't. We all think we know, and many of us will eventually be proven wrong.
Since the copyright law, as written, does not acknowledge the existence of the internet, file-sharing, uploading or downloading, each case allows complete litigation of every facet of what the RIAA thinks it might say.
Fred von Lohmann of EFF thinks that the digital files in your shared folder do not even meet the copyright law's definition of a copy as a "fixed, material object." Your hard drive or flash drive might be a material object, but the contents of your shared folder are certainly not fixed. A CD is "fixed." You can't take the music off and put something else there; you can't edit, delete or change the pitch. The fact that the RIAA spends a lot of time trying to track down who used an IP address at a particular point in time is, in and of itself, a valid argument that what they're looking is not fixed, but transient, volatile and fluid.
Then we go to things like "making available," whether the infringer is the person with a shared folder or the person who downloads it and makes a new copy, whether an IP address is an identification, and all those semantic arguments.
The RIAA's continued income from this enterprise depends on the lack of legal definitions. Every case starts at square one. After 40,000 cases, not a damn thing has been cleared up from a legal point of view, which is certainly in the RIAA's best interests, because every defendant has to pay an attorney to counter every theory the RIAA dreams up, no matter how distanced from reality. Now they're pushing them into the system faster than ever, exploiting this for maximum financial gain while making no attempt whatsoever to get a binding decision on the underlying issues.
If the law was clear, those on both sides of the issue would have to pack up the semantics and adapt to reality. Either the settlements are a reasonable fine for violating copyright law and there is now such a thing as "illegal music," or they are baseless accusations based on a flawed perspective.
The RIAA wants people to stop sharing their music on p2p because the RIAA thinks the p2p folks are stealing their stuff. Those of us who think the RIAA is comprised of idiots also want p2p users to stop sharing RIAA music because you're the only thing keeping them alive at this point and if you had stopped sharing their stuff five years ago, they'd already be gone instead of being busy trying to figure out how to get $5 from every internet connection to "compensate" for their "loss."
If the RIAA starts proving their points and legal definitions are made, maybe people will finally catch a clue and stop sharing RIAA music, get that "illegal" music off their iPods, and find something else.
Carrying on the fight against the internet "pirates" (not to be confused with those involved in making physical counterfeit copies for sale) is much more profitable than winning. If there were no pirates, they might be forced to acknowledged that the video game industry has intercepted a big pile o' dollars that adults would have spent on music a decade ago. You can listen to a CD for about 40 minutes. You can play a video game for weeks, if it's a good one. Highly superior investment of the shrinking entertainment budget.
"...And Justice For All" sold 8 million copies (http://www.allmetallica.com/info/recordsales.php). Hannah Montana sold 3 million copies of her first album. It debuted at number one, attracting the attention of one percent of the population, concentrating on the demographic that's too young to have a job much less afford CDs.
"Justice" was purchased by 2.6% of the population -- and it took 20 years.
Popular music is really not all that popular.
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Everyone that bitches and complains about the RIAA, its tactics, attitude toward music fans and should remember that Metallica was the first band to punish its audience for wanting to hear their music. They wrote the RIAA's favorite tune -- "The Pirates Are Stealing Our Stuff."
They cannot "follow in the footsteps of Radiohead, NIN," as the headline asserts. Radiohead and NIN appreciate their fans. Metallica has acted like their fans are thieves.
Some members of Metallica's audience are oblivious to this or simply don't care, for whatever reason. The rest of us exited the fan club in 2000. Had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the attitude of the band toward people unfortunate enough to like it.
I don't want their next album. Not even for free. They'd have to bring beer and a couple of joints, pay me to listen to it AND sign a waiver stating that the RIAA would not sue me for possession of "illegal" music.
the answer is it runs on Microsoft IIS server and Microsoft SQL Server.
Microsoft's technical team was taken by surprise, giving them fresh hope that they, too, can develop software which runs on Microsoft IIS server and Microsoft SQL Server.
Piracy is not a valid argument against EMI's behavior in this instance. The blacksmiths and buggy whip makers didn't take their own product, make it more difficult to use, limit the number of horses the buggy whips could be used on, tell you where you could and could not store it and then sue you if you manage to access it successfully without taking the buggy whip back for verification every time.
Edison tried something like that with the moving picture business, which promptly moved 3000 miles west to get away from him.
...some people are interested in music (and other art forms) that are created under copyright.
In the U.S., everything which falls under the category of "music and other arts forms" is copyrighted by default at the moment of creation. Underground music is no less copyrighted than mainstream music.
Basically, it suggests an irrational prejudice against commercial music.
In the "old days," the commercial stuff went on Top 40 and was played to death until you never wanted to hear the song again. It was called "AM radio." The underground stuff was on FM.
The music on FM was always more diverse, more adventurous, and sometimes songs were longer than 3 minutes. The teenyboppers listed to AM. Then Clear Channel came along and turned FM into AM Top 40, which now seems to be the only option.
Last year's best selling album (in the U.S) moved 4.8 million copies, putting it in the hands of roughly 1.6% of the population. The other 98.4% of us passed on it.
Prejudice against commercial music is not irrational. Believing it is somehow superior seems to to be the bigger leap.
We didn't have computers when I was in high school. Calculators were new. We used a slide rule and an abacus before that.
the programmer at the time knew that it would be an issue.
But they didn't bother to fix it until the last minute.
Planned obsolescence which is known in advance and takes place right on schedule does not constitute a disaster, although ignoring it until you can induce urgency makes an excellent sales plan.
Not being a user of Microsoft products due to exactly this sort of inherent flaw in their general attitude, I was actually rooting for Y2K. I fully expected a mass malfunction due to the prevalence of their operating system at the time. I was highly disappointed when every Windows machine on the planet did not stop operating as promised, which would have been the best argument ever against Microsoft, which may have been in the midst of an antitrust suit at the time.
I'm biased against Microsoft, which I only say to illustrate a perspective wherein what you think of as a disaster becomes the ultimate "I told you..." moment. MS might have been in the middle of an antitrust suit at the time, maybe even just the beginning of it. Put it all together and that could have been the end of Microsoft and happiness would rule the land.
But it didn't happen. I didn't see anything malfunction. Not even a little bit. And I really, really wanted to.
The American public did not suddenly raise their collective intelligence high enough to thoroughly avert this potential doomsday. That's too much to believe.
"Silent Spring" is no more a crock than "Y2K" was. The disaster was averted because America acted.
No offense intended, but I hope you've got a better comparison than that. Some of us realized that you might need four digits for the year before 1998 rolled along.
The potential disasterous results of every Windows machine in the world shutting down because of two missing digits was one of the best sales gimmicks I've ever seen. To believe Y2K was a real threat requires that there was a) a potential disaster, and b) that "America acted" to prevent it by buying new software, maybe even completely new hardware to run it. Everyone -- every business in the country, every individual. Just in time, evidently. Installed it all properly, too, because nothing stopped working.
Whew. That was a close one with a Hollywood ending, wasn't it?
There's a sequel coming where the computers you bought to avert the Y2K disaster rise up and unite, creating "The Attack of the Zombie Computers." Homeland Security is already warning about it.
Your next upgrade will be a matter of national security. At least that's what they're going to tell you.
Yeah, that 99 cent song is going to cost a whole dollar now. Maybe $1.05....profits will go down...
And just when they were recovering from the pirate attacks...
Do you think that Apple, Microsoft, and the RIAA are going to support a bill that means they make less money?
Microsoft sells music?
Do you think Apple really cares about the 30 cents a song they get now? They have to sell a billion songs to make $300 million. Or sell a million iPods.
The RIAA (at least Warner Music), wants to charge a monthly fee to everyone's internet account, whether you download anything or not. I don't live in California, but if we're (you're) going to be forced to pay some sort of tax, I'd rather have it go to the government than the RIAA. It's not like it'll make any difference to the artists either way.
It seemed to me that what they describe as "paranoid" might be called "awareness" or a "self-defense mechanism." Take it a little further and it becomes "law enforcement" or maybe "military training."
Maybe a shoplifter is a bad analogy. How about a mugger?
A mugger who takes everything you own, but you still have it.
The merchants are using the analogue versions of the RIAA methods.
They arrest everyone that looks at a CD?
Oh, and can we finally put a nail in this tacky "you can't tell who an IP address belongs to!" argument?
That's not the argument. You may be able to tell who an IP address belongs to, but that doesn't tell you which computer was used. There's this thing called a router...
for Pete's sake, their pleading goes on to talk about...there's pleading in the alternative alright, but this is just contrary.
That's pretty funny.
They're arguing (read the pleadings) that the IP addresses are sacrosanct and such precious information, but their defense is that IP addresses are useless in terms of figuring out who is who?
You don't quite understand how the whole legal thing works, do you?
There is a law that says schools can't give out certain student information. The fact that IP addresses are worthless in identifying anything other than a building is a separate issue.
500 million CDs at an $11 wholesale price = $5.5 billion 200 million internet users x $5 a month = $10.5 billion a year.
50 cents a month is much more reasonable.
Who gets paid? Unknown. Basis for determining what was played? Unknown. Level playing field? Doubtful. Pay the songwriters? SoundExchange doesn't.
Rumsfeld would call those the "known unknowns".
Beyond that, the biggest problem for this enterprise is that it is now attached to Warner Music. Can they be trusted to work with the other labels to oversee a comprehensive digital library?
Wouldn't that be an antirust violation?
For a system, even as poorly described as the one in TFA, to function efficiently and fairly would require several things that not one of the four major record labels has ever demonstrated a capability to do:
1) Honest, transparent accounting -- Every major label is under perpetual audit by its artists. You have to schedule 2 years in advance to get a chance to see how bad they're screwing you.
A couple of years ago, Warner Music's annual report warned stockholders that they might have some problems because their royalty accounting might not fly under the Sarbane-Oxley Act.
2) Accurate statistics -- What the RIAA puts out as statistics each year is meaningless drivel, pumped up (or down) by fantasy "value" (no one pays the "manufacturers suggested retail price"). Neilsen SoundScan tracks sales of a "representative sample" of retail outlets and guesses at the rest. ASCAP has a team of listeners. What they hear is what gets paid.
And it's all a secret. Want to know how many new releases there were last year? That's gonna cost you about $125. How many copies of your last release were actually manufactured? Aw, gee. We forgot to keep track. They can tell you how many boxes they put on the truck, but anything that came before or after that brief moment in the sunlight is like the 7th Level of Scientology.
The entire music industry is based upon bogus statistics. They lie so much to each other that there is a cottage industry selling information back to the labels about their business.
3) Pay the artists -- Dave Marsh has said (paraphrasing) that the purpose of the music industry is (and has always been) to collect every dime possible for the use of music and give as little as possible to the artists who made it for them.
This is why all their numbers are bogus. They've never paid the artists. No logical reason to expect they'll start now.
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Start with a monthly fee in the 25-50 cents range and the basic idea has potential. If such a thing is to be created, the purpose should be to support the "useful art" of music and provide incentive to those who would write and perform it. It's the kind of thing that the Internet Archive is set up for. Alternatively, drop the DRM and the 99 cent payment and the iTunes Music Store is a good starter database. I'd bet Apple can tell you exactly which songs were downloaded how many times.
Put it in the hands of a record company, or one of its subsidiaries, and it turns out the same as everything else they're involved with -- for exactly the $ame rea$on$.
There is no change in strategy. First, you scream "pirate!" Then you condemn it. Then you take it over or copy it, create access barriers, collect all the money and give as little as possible to the artists.
Yeah, like the millions of dollars spent developing DRM and rootkits. Then there's another huge pile of cash that goes to places like MediaSentry to punish people who listen to it. Gotta pay the salary of everyone at the RIAA, not to mention financing all of the political bribery, er, I mean lobbying and the ongoing "education" campaign. Payola used to be in that "overhead," too. So are the lawsuits and the endless audits of artist royalty accounting.
So if it a CD costs $15 in a store, at least $8 of the price can be attributed to their legacy of stupidity.
Actually, my friend is a guitar player. His primary use for a computer is also multi-track audio recording. I've dragged mine across the country and back, used it to record live performances in bars and it's really taken a beating. His computer never leaves his house/studio.
The Mac I'm using right now was manufactured in July 1998 and purchased very shortly thereafter. At the time I bought it, my band mate purchased a Windows machine because it was more economical. He saved somewhere between $350 - $500, compared to my Mac purchase, which was $1300.
In the 10 years that have passed, he has purchased at least four or five new computers, plus sound cards, video cards, it's always something. Don't know how many weeks a year he spends re-installing his system, running antivirus, trying to keep up with the Security Patch of the week, etc. Whenever I asked him if he had a copy of a song that we were working on, his system was inevitably crashed.
I'm still using the same machine. Use it every day. Do a lot of multi-track audio, graphics, web development and the occasional cross-platform client-server relational database development. Bought a bigger hard drive, went through a few monitors, maxed out the RAM (and no, this does NOT void your Apple warranty). It has never required service, although I do open it every third year or so just to blow out the dust. It does 100% of what I need it to and 97% of what I want it to. Ran an antivirus on it once this decade, but I've been using Macs since 1986 and I've never seen an infected Mac.
Never had a single day of downtime in 10 years. I gave the beta version of OSX a shot when it first appeared, didn't like the way it ran on that machine and reinstalled OS9. Never had any real system problems prior to that event or since. Haven't bought any software since 2000, except for ProTools, which I got for half-price from my friend because it just didn't work right on his Windows machine. Five albums worth of material later, no problems to report.
I'm really not trying to be a fanboy, not trying to be smug. If you prefer PCs, then buy them. I'm not going to try to convince you to come over to the "think different" side. You either want to or you don't. Business compatibility issues might also dictate the choice.
The price comparison between Macs and PCs changes drastically when you consider the lifespans of the two machines. Then factor in the time spent trying to keep them running (almost zero for the Mac). Time is money, you know. Unless you can buy at least four budget PCs for less than the price of a Mac, you're going to spend far, far more than the "rich guy".
This is why Apple's market share has always remained so low. They last forever. Truly dead Macs are almost as rare as virus-infected Macs. If you're basing your decision solely on cost, a Mac is much cheaper in the long run. Good tools cost more and last longer.
I'd think it comes down to whether you intend to play games or do some kind of work where your data is important and downtime is an expense, as opposed to an inconvenience.
Another major label lapdog has come up with a plan to collect a monthly fee from internet service providers and "put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels." It sounds like a good idea on the surface -- if you're a pirate or if you work for a major label. As usual, everyone else gets bent over and told to squeal like a pig.
Who Gets Fucked?
Honest People are going to be suddenly asked to pay for a service that, on the advice of the recording industry, they have refused to use for free.
The Legally Astute, who knew that sharing (distribution) was the only potential violation of the copyright law and that "illegal downloading" is smoke that the RIAA has been blowing up the public's ass for years. This includes everyone smart enough to simply uncheck the "sharing" option on their p2p software.
Borderline Computer Illiterates, who have an Internet connection, but can barely do e-mail. They're not using p2p because it's wa-a-a-y too complicated for them.
People Who Have No Use For Peer to Peer -- Maybe you're just not a big music fan. Maybe the idea of a "black market" kind of scared you away a little. Maybe you heard that the music industry was trying to sue everyone who uses p2p. Maybe you tried it once, only to get a recording of Madonna saying, "Fuck you." Or viruses, or popups, or any number of other intentionally placed annoyances.
It's no better this year, but now you get to pay for it.
Word is that there are currently 40 million p2p users in the United States. According to internetworldstats.com, there are 215 million people using the Internet in America.
That means 175 million of us have to pay up $5 a month for something we never used or want to use. This adds up to $875 million a month, or $10.5 billion a year, just from the people who don't use peer-to-peer in the first place. Add in the $2.5 billion they'd collect from the people actually using p2p and we're up to $13 billion a year, which is about twice what the entire industry grossed from wholesale sales last year.
The Down Side
Yeah, it gets worse, which is why I kept mentioning peer to peer. Payouts will be based on what gets shared on p2p. This would be similar to only paying radio broadcast royalties to songwriters that get played on Clear Channel.
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of acts that have been giving away your music on the Internet as soon as it was possible, at mp3.com, then DMusic, GarageBand, IUMA, vitaminic, mySpace or any other legal, aboveboard site that offers music, you're not on the list of songwriters and performers that will be compensated unless you have already earned enough attention that people are searching for your stuff on p2p. And finding it.
Good luck with that. As always, the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
The Ultimate Insult
If you care about music, this is the most insulting idea to come down the road in a long, long time. What is the industry going to do? Take the people they've been calling pirates for the last 7 years, accusing them repeatedly of destroying the music business, and turn them overnight into the focus group that determines who gets paid for music.
The people who thought they've been sticking it to the man are going to discover that they're really sticking money in the man's pocket, just like I've been saying all along. The peer-to-peer crowd always had the power to determine how this turns out. Still does, but I seriously doubt that the instant gratification crowd has the collective intelligence to figure it out because they've been playing the RIAA's game all along.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the lawsuits the day that no law changes but file-sharing is suddenly legal. Or will they simply sue everyone who pays the $5?
If box office sales are booming, you can't fire the cameramen, grips and union workers because you need them to make more movies.
I don't download movies, don't go to the theatre and almost never buy DVDs/videos. Once in a while we'll rent a movie, but for the most part, we just wait until it shows up on HBO or Showtime. As a result, the amount of money I'm giving to the movie industry is a fixed, limited amount ($5 or $10 a month), which is way more than I'm giving the record industry ($0).
If I downloaded a few movies on a rainy weekend, as opposed to watching whatever's on cable or reading a book, and someone loses their job, it wasn't because my actions created some sort of shortfall. I wasn't going to give them money anyway. Since I don't download, I just don't see the movie for 6 months to a year.
If they're gonna fire the sysadmin, I can't imagine how not watching a movie can save his job. But that's the ethical thing to do, we're told.
Whatever. If I were in the movie biz, I'd be checking out what the Sundance Film Festival does. I'm told it's almost impossible to find those films on the net.
The songwriter/publisher hold the copyrights to words and music. Harry Fox and ASCAP pay the publishers, who are supposed to split it 50/50 with the songwriter.
The record label usually owns the sound recording copyright, although the artist can ask for it back after 35 years. This is the copyright which people are being sued for allegedly infringing upon.
If the artist did not write their own songs, they don't own any copyrights. The artists are paid according to the terms of their contracts. Unless there's a clause that deals specifically with this issue, the record label is under no legal obligation to give the artists a cut from the lawsuits.
Although this is more proof (as if we really needed it) that the RIAA lies every time it repeats the "it's all about the artists" mantra, I think that they are probably immune to being sued for it, except perhaps for the times they did it in a Senate or House subcommittee hearing or in court, and then only if they were under oath.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hardly a smart move" could be the RIAA's secret motto.
To me music is a better "investment", tastes and mileage may vary.
Looking at it objectively, last year's best selling CD sold 4.6 million copies. I believe the new version of Grand Theft Auto did six million copies in the first few week. Ten years ago, video games were not even valid competition. Now the video game industry's income has surpassed the music industry. It is a factor.
Though here is a question... Who's right? I really don't agree with unfettered sharing and access of free songs, nor do I agree with the RIAA behavior.
There's another side to be considered, namely that of the musician who sees the Internet as a promotional tool and actively encourages the sharing of their music in hopes that more people will hear it.
I especially don't agree with the RIAA's treatment of artists, which, to me, would be the most valid (and powerful) argument to go out and buy music instead of finding it for free.
Not trying to pick a fight over this tiny point, but if I want to see the artist get paid, I'll buy a concert ticket.
The most valid and powerful argument for buying a CD is that you heard a song and loved it. The most powerful argument not to buy it is the RIAA.
There has to be a compromise that allows money to the artists, and stops the endless abuse of their customer base.
An equitable solution for compensating artists whose work is used on the Internet would mean that the 3 million bands on MySpace ought to be paid something, too, at least those which generate traffic. The RIAA will not generate any solution which recognizes their existence.
The Internet Archive has offered to be a repository for every song ever recorded (at least the ones we can find) and count the downloads. If there were a pile of money to distribute, all artists, songwriters, etc. could be paid fairly based on what music was downloaded.
The RIAA doesn't want a solution unless they own it and dictate the terms. They do not represent artists; they represent the record labels. They are not interested in compromise. As a result, no solution for compensating artists will be reached unless it is forced upon them or the RIAA ceases to exist.
Judging from their sales figures, the latter seems to be more likely to occur first.
The semantics argument is ALSO getting old, mind.
Exactly the comment I was looking for.
Yes, the semantics argument is getting old, but it pales in comparison to the tediousness of the RIAA's legal approach.
They've filed 40,000 lawsuits over the last 5 years, according to BusinessWeek, and only 100 or so have bothered to contest them in court. This would seem to leave the RIAA with almost $120 million (at $3000 per settlement -- your lawsuit may vary) to fight those 100 troublemakers.
We all know what copyright violation is
No, we don't. We all think we know, and many of us will eventually be proven wrong.
Since the copyright law, as written, does not acknowledge the existence of the internet, file-sharing, uploading or downloading, each case allows complete litigation of every facet of what the RIAA thinks it might say.
Fred von Lohmann of EFF thinks that the digital files in your shared folder do not even meet the copyright law's definition of a copy as a "fixed, material object." Your hard drive or flash drive might be a material object, but the contents of your shared folder are certainly not fixed. A CD is "fixed." You can't take the music off and put something else there; you can't edit, delete or change the pitch. The fact that the RIAA spends a lot of time trying to track down who used an IP address at a particular point in time is, in and of itself, a valid argument that what they're looking is not fixed, but transient, volatile and fluid.
Then we go to things like "making available," whether the infringer is the person with a shared folder or the person who downloads it and makes a new copy, whether an IP address is an identification, and all those semantic arguments.
The RIAA's continued income from this enterprise depends on the lack of legal definitions. Every case starts at square one. After 40,000 cases, not a damn thing has been cleared up from a legal point of view, which is certainly in the RIAA's best interests, because every defendant has to pay an attorney to counter every theory the RIAA dreams up, no matter how distanced from reality. Now they're pushing them into the system faster than ever, exploiting this for maximum financial gain while making no attempt whatsoever to get a binding decision on the underlying issues.
If the law was clear, those on both sides of the issue would have to pack up the semantics and adapt to reality. Either the settlements are a reasonable fine for violating copyright law and there is now such a thing as "illegal music," or they are baseless accusations based on a flawed perspective.
The RIAA wants people to stop sharing their music on p2p because the RIAA thinks the p2p folks are stealing their stuff. Those of us who think the RIAA is comprised of idiots also want p2p users to stop sharing RIAA music because you're the only thing keeping them alive at this point and if you had stopped sharing their stuff five years ago, they'd already be gone instead of being busy trying to figure out how to get $5 from every internet connection to "compensate" for their "loss."
If the RIAA starts proving their points and legal definitions are made, maybe people will finally catch a clue and stop sharing RIAA music, get that "illegal" music off their iPods, and find something else.
Carrying on the fight against the internet "pirates" (not to be confused with those involved in making physical counterfeit copies for sale) is much more profitable than winning. If there were no pirates, they might be forced to acknowledged that the video game industry has intercepted a big pile o' dollars that adults would have spent on music a decade ago. You can listen to a CD for about 40 minutes. You can play a video game for weeks, if it's a good one. Highly superior investment of the shrinking entertainment budget.
Suing a million people won't change that.
There are 300 million people in the U.S.
"...And Justice For All" sold 8 million copies (http://www.allmetallica.com/info/recordsales.php). Hannah Montana sold 3 million copies of her first album. It debuted at number one, attracting the attention of one percent of the population, concentrating on the demographic that's too young to have a job much less afford CDs.
"Justice" was purchased by 2.6% of the population -- and it took 20 years.
Popular music is really not all that popular.
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Everyone that bitches and complains about the RIAA, its tactics, attitude toward music fans and should remember that Metallica was the first band to punish its audience for wanting to hear their music. They wrote the RIAA's favorite tune -- "The Pirates Are Stealing Our Stuff."
They cannot "follow in the footsteps of Radiohead, NIN," as the headline asserts. Radiohead and NIN appreciate their fans. Metallica has acted like their fans are thieves.
Some members of Metallica's audience are oblivious to this or simply don't care, for whatever reason. The rest of us exited the fan club in 2000. Had nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the attitude of the band toward people unfortunate enough to like it.
I don't want their next album. Not even for free. They'd have to bring beer and a couple of joints, pay me to listen to it AND sign a waiver stating that the RIAA would not sue me for possession of "illegal" music.
the answer is it runs on Microsoft IIS server and Microsoft SQL Server.
Microsoft's technical team was taken by surprise, giving them fresh hope that they, too, can develop software which runs on Microsoft IIS server and Microsoft SQL Server.
I wasn't arguing with you. Yes, M$ is crap. So is DRM.
Just saying that it's a mistake to think they don't care.
Not that I think they can do a damn thing about it.
Look at the title of this page.
Piracy is not a valid argument against EMI's behavior in this instance. The blacksmiths and buggy whip makers didn't take their own product, make it more difficult to use, limit the number of horses the buggy whips could be used on, tell you where you could and could not store it and then sue you if you manage to access it successfully without taking the buggy whip back for verification every time.
Edison tried something like that with the moving picture business, which promptly moved 3000 miles west to get away from him.
...some people are interested in music (and other art forms) that are created under copyright.
In the U.S., everything which falls under the category of "music and other arts forms" is copyrighted by default at the moment of creation. Underground music is no less copyrighted than mainstream music.
Basically, it suggests an irrational prejudice against commercial music.
In the "old days," the commercial stuff went on Top 40 and was played to death until you never wanted to hear the song again. It was called "AM radio." The underground stuff was on FM.
The music on FM was always more diverse, more adventurous, and sometimes songs were longer than 3 minutes. The teenyboppers listed to AM. Then Clear Channel came along and turned FM into AM Top 40, which now seems to be the only option.
Last year's best selling album (in the U.S) moved 4.8 million copies, putting it in the hands of roughly 1.6% of the population. The other 98.4% of us passed on it.
Prejudice against commercial music is not irrational. Believing it is somehow superior seems to to be the bigger leap.
Slow down there. This is the music business AND Microsoft we're talking about. You were applying actual logic. That'll get you in trouble every time.
Cracking the DRM is still a DMCA violation, even if there is no legitimate way to read the content.
We didn't have computers when I was in high school. Calculators were new. We used a slide rule and an abacus before that.
the programmer at the time knew that it would be an issue.
But they didn't bother to fix it until the last minute.
Planned obsolescence which is known in advance and takes place right on schedule does not constitute a disaster, although ignoring it until you can induce urgency makes an excellent sales plan.
Not being a user of Microsoft products due to exactly this sort of inherent flaw in their general attitude, I was actually rooting for Y2K. I fully expected a mass malfunction due to the prevalence of their operating system at the time. I was highly disappointed when every Windows machine on the planet did not stop operating as promised, which would have been the best argument ever against Microsoft, which may have been in the midst of an antitrust suit at the time.
I'm biased against Microsoft, which I only say to illustrate a perspective wherein what you think of as a disaster becomes the ultimate "I told you..." moment. MS might have been in the middle of an antitrust suit at the time, maybe even just the beginning of it. Put it all together and that could have been the end of Microsoft and happiness would rule the land.
But it didn't happen. I didn't see anything malfunction. Not even a little bit. And I really, really wanted to.
The American public did not suddenly raise their collective intelligence high enough to thoroughly avert this potential doomsday. That's too much to believe.
"Silent Spring" is no more a crock than "Y2K" was. The disaster was averted because America acted.
No offense intended, but I hope you've got a better comparison than that. Some of us realized that you might need four digits for the year before 1998 rolled along.
The potential disasterous results of every Windows machine in the world shutting down because of two missing digits was one of the best sales gimmicks I've ever seen. To believe Y2K was a real threat requires that there was a) a potential disaster, and b) that "America acted" to prevent it by buying new software, maybe even completely new hardware to run it. Everyone -- every business in the country, every individual. Just in time, evidently. Installed it all properly, too, because nothing stopped working.
Whew. That was a close one with a Hollywood ending, wasn't it?
There's a sequel coming where the computers you bought to avert the Y2K disaster rise up and unite, creating "The Attack of the Zombie Computers." Homeland Security is already warning about it.
Your next upgrade will be a matter of national security. At least that's what they're going to tell you.
If taxes go up, less people will be buying music
...profits will go down...
Yeah, that 99 cent song is going to cost a whole dollar now. Maybe $1.05.
And just when they were recovering from the pirate attacks...
Do you think that Apple, Microsoft, and the RIAA are going to support a bill that means they make less money?
Microsoft sells music?
Do you think Apple really cares about the 30 cents a song they get now? They have to sell a billion songs to make $300 million. Or sell a million iPods.
The RIAA (at least Warner Music), wants to charge a monthly fee to everyone's internet account, whether you download anything or not. I don't live in California, but if we're (you're) going to be forced to pay some sort of tax, I'd rather have it go to the government than the RIAA. It's not like it'll make any difference to the artists either way.
Really what is the difference between a corporation investing in a film and an artist giving a helping hand up to the next generation of artists?
One seeks to make a profit; the other seeks to make a difference.
It seemed to me that what they describe as "paranoid" might be called "awareness" or a "self-defense mechanism." Take it a little further and it becomes "law enforcement" or maybe "military training."
Maybe a shoplifter is a bad analogy. How about a mugger?
A mugger who takes everything you own, but you still have it.
The merchants are using the analogue versions of the RIAA methods.
They arrest everyone that looks at a CD?
Oh, and can we finally put a nail in this tacky "you can't tell who an IP address belongs to!" argument?
That's not the argument. You may be able to tell who an IP address belongs to, but that doesn't tell you which computer was used. There's this thing called a router...
for Pete's sake, their pleading goes on to talk about...there's pleading in the alternative alright, but this is just contrary.
That's pretty funny.
They're arguing (read the pleadings) that the IP addresses are sacrosanct and such precious information, but their defense is that IP addresses are useless in terms of figuring out who is who?
You don't quite understand how the whole legal thing works, do you?
There is a law that says schools can't give out certain student information. The fact that IP addresses are worthless in identifying anything other than a building is a separate issue.
Nice try. Thanks for playing.
I know for a fact that all the commercial software I have knowledge of...
That's a finely crafted disclaimer, Sgt. Shultz.
"I see nothing. I know nothing."
I would like to go beyond morely pointing out how bad this is and offer a more rational alternative.
http://www.azoz.com/newsarchive/2008dash03/RealPlan.html
Follow the "Discussion" link at the bottom of the page for a lengthy debate about the details.
Change of strategy? I think not.
500 million CDs at an $11 wholesale price = $5.5 billion
200 million internet users x $5 a month = $10.5 billion a year.
50 cents a month is much more reasonable.
Who gets paid? Unknown.
Basis for determining what was played? Unknown.
Level playing field? Doubtful.
Pay the songwriters? SoundExchange doesn't.
Rumsfeld would call those the "known unknowns".
Beyond that, the biggest problem for this enterprise is that it is now attached to Warner Music. Can they be trusted to work with the other labels to oversee a comprehensive digital library?
Wouldn't that be an antirust violation?
For a system, even as poorly described as the one in TFA, to function efficiently and fairly would require several things that not one of the four major record labels has ever demonstrated a capability to do:
1) Honest, transparent accounting -- Every major label is under perpetual audit by its artists. You have to schedule 2 years in advance to get a chance to see how bad they're screwing you.
A couple of years ago, Warner Music's annual report warned stockholders that they might have some problems because their royalty accounting might not fly under the Sarbane-Oxley Act.
2) Accurate statistics -- What the RIAA puts out as statistics each year is meaningless drivel, pumped up (or down) by fantasy "value" (no one pays the "manufacturers suggested retail price"). Neilsen SoundScan tracks sales of a "representative sample" of retail outlets and guesses at the rest. ASCAP has a team of listeners. What they hear is what gets paid.
And it's all a secret. Want to know how many new releases there were last year? That's gonna cost you about $125. How many copies of your last release were actually manufactured? Aw, gee. We forgot to keep track. They can tell you how many boxes they put on the truck, but anything that came before or after that brief moment in the sunlight is like the 7th Level of Scientology.
The entire music industry is based upon bogus statistics. They lie so much to each other that there is a cottage industry selling information back to the labels about their business.
3) Pay the artists -- Dave Marsh has said (paraphrasing) that the purpose of the music industry is (and has always been) to collect every dime possible for the use of music and give as little as possible to the artists who made it for them.
This is why all their numbers are bogus. They've never paid the artists. No logical reason to expect they'll start now.
------
Start with a monthly fee in the 25-50 cents range and the basic idea has potential. If such a thing is to be created, the purpose should be to support the "useful art" of music and provide incentive to those who would write and perform it. It's the kind of thing that the Internet Archive is set up for. Alternatively, drop the DRM and the 99 cent payment and the iTunes Music Store is a good starter database. I'd bet Apple can tell you exactly which songs were downloaded how many times.
Put it in the hands of a record company, or one of its subsidiaries, and it turns out the same as everything else they're involved with -- for exactly the $ame rea$on$.
There is no change in strategy. First, you scream "pirate!" Then you condemn it. Then you take it over or copy it, create access barriers, collect all the money and give as little as possible to the artists.
Nothing new here.
Surely we must have missed something?
Yeah, like the millions of dollars spent developing DRM and rootkits. Then there's another huge pile of cash that goes to places like MediaSentry to punish people who listen to it. Gotta pay the salary of everyone at the RIAA, not to mention financing all of the political bribery, er, I mean lobbying and the ongoing "education" campaign. Payola used to be in that "overhead," too. So are the lawsuits and the endless audits of artist royalty accounting.
So if it a CD costs $15 in a store, at least $8 of the price can be attributed to their legacy of stupidity.
Actually, my friend is a guitar player. His primary use for a computer is also multi-track audio recording. I've dragged mine across the country and back, used it to record live performances in bars and it's really taken a beating. His computer never leaves his house/studio.
For gaming, I have a PlayStation.
The Mac I'm using right now was manufactured in July 1998 and purchased very shortly thereafter.
At the time I bought it, my band mate purchased a Windows machine because it was more economical. He saved somewhere between $350 - $500, compared to my Mac purchase, which was $1300.
In the 10 years that have passed, he has purchased at least four or five new computers, plus sound cards, video cards, it's always something. Don't know how many weeks a year he spends re-installing his system, running antivirus, trying to keep up with the Security Patch of the week, etc. Whenever I asked him if he had a copy of a song that we were working on, his system was inevitably crashed.
I'm still using the same machine. Use it every day. Do a lot of multi-track audio, graphics, web development and the occasional cross-platform client-server relational database development. Bought a bigger hard drive, went through a few monitors, maxed out the RAM (and no, this does NOT void your Apple warranty). It has never required service, although I do open it every third year or so just to blow out the dust. It does 100% of what I need it to and 97% of what I want it to. Ran an antivirus on it once this decade, but I've been using Macs since 1986 and I've never seen an infected Mac.
Never had a single day of downtime in 10 years. I gave the beta version of OSX a shot when it first appeared, didn't like the way it ran on that machine and reinstalled OS9. Never had any real system problems prior to that event or since. Haven't bought any software since 2000, except for ProTools, which I got for half-price from my friend because it just didn't work right on his Windows machine. Five albums worth of material later, no problems to report.
I'm really not trying to be a fanboy, not trying to be smug. If you prefer PCs, then buy them. I'm not going to try to convince you to come over to the "think different" side. You either want to or you don't. Business compatibility issues might also dictate the choice.
The price comparison between Macs and PCs changes drastically when you consider the lifespans of the two machines. Then factor in the time spent trying to keep them running (almost zero for the Mac). Time is money, you know. Unless you can buy at least four budget PCs for less than the price of a Mac, you're going to spend far, far more than the "rich guy".
This is why Apple's market share has always remained so low. They last forever. Truly dead Macs are almost as rare as virus-infected Macs. If you're basing your decision solely on cost, a Mac is much cheaper in the long run. Good tools cost more and last longer.
I'd think it comes down to whether you intend to play games or do some kind of work where your data is important and downtime is an expense, as opposed to an inconvenience.
Another major label lapdog has come up with a plan to collect a monthly fee from internet service providers and "put it into a pool that would be used to compensate songwriters, performers, publishers and music labels." It sounds like a good idea on the surface -- if you're a pirate or if you work for a major label. As usual, everyone else gets bent over and told to squeal like a pig.
Who Gets Fucked?
Honest People are going to be suddenly asked to pay for a service that, on the advice of the recording industry, they have refused to use for free.
The Legally Astute, who knew that sharing (distribution) was the only potential violation of the copyright law and that "illegal downloading" is smoke that the RIAA has been blowing up the public's ass for years. This includes everyone smart enough to simply uncheck the "sharing" option on their p2p software.
Borderline Computer Illiterates, who have an Internet connection, but can barely do e-mail. They're not using p2p because it's wa-a-a-y too complicated for them.
People Who Have No Use For Peer to Peer -- Maybe you're just not a big music fan. Maybe the idea of a "black market" kind of scared you away a little. Maybe you heard that the music industry was trying to sue everyone who uses p2p. Maybe you tried it once, only to get a recording of Madonna saying, "Fuck you." Or viruses, or popups, or any number of other intentionally placed annoyances.
It's no better this year, but now you get to pay for it.
Word is that there are currently 40 million p2p users in the United States. According to internetworldstats.com, there are 215 million people using the Internet in America.
That means 175 million of us have to pay up $5 a month for something we never used or want to use. This adds up to $875 million a month, or $10.5 billion a year, just from the people who don't use peer-to-peer in the first place. Add in the $2.5 billion they'd collect from the people actually using p2p and we're up to $13 billion a year, which is about twice what the entire industry grossed from wholesale sales last year.
The Down Side
Yeah, it gets worse, which is why I kept mentioning peer to peer. Payouts will be based on what gets shared on p2p. This would be similar to only paying radio broadcast royalties to songwriters that get played on Clear Channel.
If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of acts that have been giving away your music on the Internet as soon as it was possible, at mp3.com, then DMusic, GarageBand, IUMA, vitaminic, mySpace or any other legal, aboveboard site that offers music, you're not on the list of songwriters and performers that will be compensated unless you have already earned enough attention that people are searching for your stuff on p2p. And finding it.
Good luck with that. As always, the wants of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
The Ultimate Insult
If you care about music, this is the most insulting idea to come down the road in a long, long time. What is the industry going to do? Take the people they've been calling pirates for the last 7 years, accusing them repeatedly of destroying the music business, and turn them overnight into the focus group that determines who gets paid for music.
The people who thought they've been sticking it to the man are going to discover that they're really sticking money in the man's pocket, just like I've been saying all along. The peer-to-peer crowd always had the power to determine how this turns out. Still does, but I seriously doubt that the instant gratification crowd has the collective intelligence to figure it out because they've been playing the RIAA's game all along.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the lawsuits the day that no law changes but file-sharing is suddenly legal. Or will they simply sue everyone who pays the $5?
That makes no sense.
If box office sales are booming, you can't fire the cameramen, grips and union workers because you need them to make more movies.
I don't download movies, don't go to the theatre and almost never buy DVDs/videos. Once in a while we'll rent a movie, but for the most part, we just wait until it shows up on HBO or Showtime. As a result, the amount of money I'm giving to the movie industry is a fixed, limited amount ($5 or $10 a month), which is way more than I'm giving the record industry ($0).
If I downloaded a few movies on a rainy weekend, as opposed to watching whatever's on cable or reading a book, and someone loses their job, it wasn't because my actions created some sort of shortfall. I wasn't going to give them money anyway. Since I don't download, I just don't see the movie for 6 months to a year.
If they're gonna fire the sysadmin, I can't imagine how not watching a movie can save his job. But that's the ethical thing to do, we're told.
Whatever. If I were in the movie biz, I'd be checking out what the Sundance Film Festival does. I'm told it's almost impossible to find those films on the net.
The songwriter/publisher hold the copyrights to words and music. Harry Fox and ASCAP pay the publishers, who are supposed to split it 50/50 with the songwriter.
The record label usually owns the sound recording copyright, although the artist can ask for it back after 35 years. This is the copyright which people are being sued for allegedly infringing upon.
If the artist did not write their own songs, they don't own any copyrights. The artists are paid according to the terms of their contracts. Unless there's a clause that deals specifically with this issue, the record label is under no legal obligation to give the artists a cut from the lawsuits.
Although this is more proof (as if we really needed it) that the RIAA lies every time it repeats the "it's all about the artists" mantra, I think that they are probably immune to being sued for it, except perhaps for the times they did it in a Senate or House subcommittee hearing or in court, and then only if they were under oath.
On Wired's site today is an article by Craig Anderson, titled "Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business". http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free
So I'm certainly not the only one following this line of thought.