"99 cents per song?? Are you kidding me? In my city a newer CD costs about $15-18. And usually contains 10 to 20 songs. So if I buy the actual CD it's close to a dollar a song. How is 99 cent mp3s a deal? HA!"
Convenience. You don't need to wait until the store opens, leave your computer, and venture out into the wild.
If the convenience factor has no value, then that's great for you -- but Apple has just sold their three billionth song, and their growth rate is accelerating. iTunes is something like the #3 music retailer, without having a single brick and mortar store.
Thus, I'm a bit perplexed by your "they just don't get it" comment. A simpler explanation is that you are not their target customer. They seem to be doing fine without you.
"There's no financial incentive to do that as opposed to just living off of the interest of the $1,000,000. Your salary needs to be more than $60,000 after taxes in order for you to break even."
Good points, but I should explain that a common mindset around here is that everybody is simply too greedy. Musicians, for example, should be happy with touring for the rest of their lives to make money -- or at least the Slashdot zeitgeist goes.
My plan calls for, among other things, asking artists to take less royalties than they might make with a major label contract. If my plan allowed for the owner of the business to make $60K a year, it might be seen as bad, from a moral perspective, as the traditional labels. Running a successful business in recording, producing, promoting and selling music at $0.50 per track means making sacrifices at all levels -- not just shorting the artists.
"I am not sure you know what inflation is. Look at purchasing power from the 80's until now. Many prices have dropped despite increased wages....look around your house. What would that item cost in 1988? How about your computer, or your microwave for example? Maybe if the Music industry spent less time trying to find a consumer-screwing scheme that didn't screw consumers, they would be able to charge less."
Excellent point!
The minimum wage in the mid-80s was, IIRC, about $3.75. New CD releases cost $18 - $20, for a ratio of about 5:1.
Minimum wage is presently $5.85 (it'll be going to $6.55 next summer and it's already higher in California). The average cost of a new CD release today is $13 and change, for a ratio of 2.5:1.
You may be right that record labels are just too inefficient. I've thought a bit about how an indie record label could be profitable selling tracks at $0.50 each (which is, of course, still too high for many Slashdotters). Here's my proposal:
Start with $1MM in the bank. Put it into a high interest account (say, 10%) so you'll make about $60K a year in interest after taxes.
Put a cap of $10K in production costs per album. This can be done fairly easily; it means that you can't produce any music that requires a lot of engineering, or session musicians. Your $1MM foundation will allow you to produce six albums per year. This pretty much means that most of your productions will have to be financially successful; you can't rely on the big label model of having one hit pay for 99 failures. Choose your artists carefully!
Do not sign contracts in which the artist, composer and lyricist are three different people. This helps cut down on mechanical royalties. Otherwise, you might end up paying $0.25 in royalties per track.
Pay yourself a salary of no more than $20K a year -- this has to be a hobby, not a full time job. You'll need another job to pay the mortgage.
Sell your music by the album, not the track, or at least require customers to purchase multiple tracks at once. This will prevent you from being dinged by the minimum CC transaction fee for each track.
Forget about a traditional advertising campaign. Make the best of it with word-of-mouth and viral campaigns.
If you manage to whittle the royalties and other costs per sale to $0.20 per track, this will give you $0.30 net profit per track before costs of production. At a production cost of $1K per track ($10K per CD), you'll need to sell 3K copies of each track to break even. This is within the realm of possibility.
So -- what enterprising Slashdotter with a million bucks in the bank wants to help me get started?;-)
"The cost of distributing a dozen songs (a CD that actually did cost a few dollars to stamp and ship twenty years ago) is now a download from a server that costs them only fraction of a cent, but they still want us to pay 1988 prices?"
CDs cost about $20 in 1988, or the equivalent of about $2 per track. That's about $34 (or $3.40 per track) in today's money.
The record labels may want to charge $3.40, but they do not. That's the critical difference. They charge $0.99, not $3.40.
Your views on incremental costs of sale are very common around here (as shown by your 5, Insightful). I think the reasoning is that if an album costs $100K to make, but if the bandwidth for the download costs a nickel, then the cost of the download should be a nickel. Many Slashdotters are also of the understanding that since a digital file can be copied an infinite number of times, then the amortized cost per track is essentially zero. Now, I acknowledge that this line of reasoning is useful if you want to justify piracy -- after all, their cost per sale is essentially zero, and they sell the track for $0.99, then that's an insane amount of profit. The record companies are just too greedy for their own good, and piracy is our moral prerogative to teach them a lesson!
But many folks understand that production costs are accrued not over the potential for reproduction (infinity) or the potential for sale, but across the actual number of tracks sold. If your digital good cost $100K to make and you sell 100K of them, that's a rough cost per sale of a buck -- no matter how many copies were distributed without being paid for. And, as covered above, the digital medium's potential for unlimited copying does not weigh in here -- if you've sold 100K items, you've sold 100K items. Your revenue stream ends there.
A lot of people also understand that there are fixed per-sale costs other than bandwidth. Although the record companies try everything they can to get out of it, artists and performers do get royalties by law -- up to $0.25 per track in some instances. Add credit card fees and you may be up to a cost of $0.30 per sale before you even get to the innumerable amortized costs and overhead.
"Very depressing that people are now hacking content they paid for:("
My understanding is that they pay to stream, not to download. A download version would presumably cost more, as it has more value. This hack lets you download and save to your hard drive and only pay the price for streaming.
Pay less, get less, pay more, get more. I see that there's a fair amount of outrage here; it's billed as a streaming service but I suppose that we feel that should be getting more for our money -- thus it's our prerogative to have it. But in the physical world, if you pay for a hamburger with the understanding that you'll get a hamburger, there's little room for outrage that you're not given a cheeseburger.
"It's not a big deal to you. It's a big deal to those making a living distributing/selling software. Copyright holders are entitled to treble damages for infringement."
I do indeed make my living through my IP. I fully support the copyright of those who develop software, but here's the thing -- I support everybody's rights equally.
Perhaps I wasn't clear: all of the Valve and ID titles are available for free on the file-sharing networks. I daresay that many if not most folks reading this enjoy using BitTorrent to procure free software, in violation of copyright. When the BSA takes action against pirates, they are typically seen as the bad guy around these parts. And we all scramble all over ourselves to point out how our actions are justified.
So why the sympathy for the DOSBox folks?
I suspect it's because they give the software away for free. Mean old nasty Microsoft, Adobe, ID, Valve, etc. sell their software, and are thus greedy, and do not deserve our sympathy. I think that's the elephant in the room that nobody's pointing out. If I am incorrect, please let me know.
"The problem is that DOSBox is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (aka GPL). This license is the foundation for the vast majority of open source software, and explicitly states that if you distribute software under it, you must also redistribute the souce code."
Yes, but why is it a big deal?
The entire library of iD and Valve titles is freely available via BitTorrent. Their copyrights are violated countless times daily. Yet that's certainly not news around here.
Methinks it's a case of all copyright holders being equal, only some are more equal than others.
Seriously: somebody please explain why I should care about the DOSBox folks' rights more than than anybody else's.
"In order to prove it's the song they claim it to be, they must have downloaded it themselves, which could be seen as a form of entrapment -- obviously whoever they are downloading it from commits a crime by uploading the file to the RIAA goon doing this, which they might not otherwise have committed."
I'd love to see somebody try that in court. "Yes, your honor, my client did make all those files available for sharing, but if nobody had downloaded them, my client might not have shared them in the first place." Sort of a Schroedinger's Cat defense.
"Right -- although that has to be stated more clearly. Everyone knows you're sharing copyrighted works -- it's not public domain. But, you could claim you thought it was Creative Commons or something similar -- that you didn't know you weren't allowed to share it."
Do you mean lie and state that you thought Star Wars Ep. IV was Creative Commons? For most of the stuff shared on BT, this would be tough -- it wouldn't likely pass the laugh test.
"Also, the producers' work will be viewed by thousands of people, and probably reviewed by tens of professionals and might reach production company managers, who may hire them for their next movie..."
Ah yes, the "design my website for free" argument.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 5, Insightful
That's an interesting viewpoint.
Are you also of the opinion that auto industry executives hold the naive view that auto theft-deterrent systems are infallible?
When I first got into the Apple warez scene in the early 80s, I asked somebody older and wiser why, say, they bothered to put copy protection on Wizardry when clever guys like me could easily crack it.
"Because," he pointed out, "if the copy protection prevents just one person from copying it, it's done its job."
And that's why copy protection on CDs and DVDs exists today: to deter casual copying. Much to their disadvantage, most people out there just aren't as technically adept as Slashdot readers.
Can you clarify why you believe that folks who use DRM don't understand this? It requires quite a stretch, but if you think you have solid evidence, I'd like to hear it.
"That's exactly what is happening here: the RIAA is suing for 750% of the perceived value of the good stolen. This is absurd, and there are probably some judges who would agree."
Huh? That's the minimum statutory damage per work as defined by law. The RIAA is legally allowed to claim up to $30K per work.
Understand that this is per work, not per "copy of work." If you have a song in your share directory and it's downloaded 1,000 times, the RIAA is still likely to only go after you for $750 for that work, even though you've distributed $1K worth of copyrighted material. Due to the magical nature of P2P, 1,000 copies is actually quite mild -- back in Kazaa's heyday, somebody did some fingerprint analysis of rips and found that one rip was responsible for some 16,000 individual copies of an Eminem CD.
For what it's worth, I think that in the age of P2P, $750 is too high; I believe it's a remnant of the NET Act and the justification was the pirate rings which distributed copies of PhotoShop on FTP sites. Given the vast explosion of non-profit P2P copying nowadays, I think $100 is much more fair. But even at $100, if the RIAA catches you with 1,000 songs in your share directory (which is not uncommon), they'll still wave the threat of a $100K lawsuit in your face in an effort to get you to settle for $3,000.
"Surely theoretically, if the RIAA sues someone, and taht person had never bought an album, then there is good reason to beleive the person would never buy any of the songs, so the RIAA has lost nothing, and therefore has nothing to sue for.....?"
The whole point is whether the $750-per-work statutory damage is constitutional. Statutory is the key here. I think you may be confusing this with compensatory, or as USC17 puts it, "actual" damage.
Enforcement of copyright law does not require proof of monetary loss -- it is about violating the right to copy. You need not offer something for sale in order to claim copyright (remember, GPL relies on copyright). Of course people who share music on BT will claim that they're not causing economic harm -- that would be impossible to prove; and thus we have statutory damages.
Folks around here have been saying that the "sell stuff for a profit" model is dead for the record industry for almost a decade now. But I rarely see people hazard a guess as to when this will happen. Legitimate download resellers like iTunes are making a ton of cash, and I think most Slashdotters would claim that piracy doesn't actually significantly affect record sales, so we can't say that it's piracy that will kill the beast.
Perhaps you're claiming that this will be the case because the market will be taken over by indie musicians who distribute their stuff for free. The problem with this theory is that the market is already saturated with unsigned artists who sell their stuff directly and or givie it away, yet there are still a lot more artists who want record deals than get them. Slashdotters like to claim that artists can use the mighty power of the Internet to promote and distribute their music, but the record labels are doing this, too... the mighty power of the Internet is rising all the boats.
If you think it's obvious that the business model is dead, then great -- but do you have an estimate of when the record industry will go away?
"Another interresting choice of words : not the artist, but "the industry"... A slip-of-the-tongue perhaps ?"
Nope -- the RIAA represents the recording industry. That's what the "RI" stands for. She's being honest and accurate.
Artists (composers and lyricists, at least) are represented by ASCAP/BMI. They also flex their legal muscle from time to time. When that happens the general tone around here is "fuck the greedy artists" rather than "fuck the greedy record labels."
"Now we will see the same people who oppose RIAA/MPAA copyrights cheering the copyright action that enforces open source. Don't you see that you can't have it both ways?"
And adding further humor, Skype was developed by the guys who developed Kazaa. They knew what Kazaa would be used for; they certainly weren't naive enough to think that it would be used only for Linux distros and Creative Commons materials.
At any rate, it's perfectly justified to ask to have something both ways. For example, many people like to pirate music because it's a great way to enjoy music for free. But at the same time, we wouldn't want our term papers or graduate thesi shared with our schoolmates before we've turned them (the papers) in. It's other people's information that typically wants to be free.
Sorry, I don't -- it's my understanding of their strategy from a few years back when the lawsuits began, from reading some of the court documents. They may have changed now that they're expanding their program and leading with settlement letters; for all I know you might be liable to get a letter if they catch you sharing just one song. Ray Beckerman might be able to jump in here and offer his opinion, since he's on the front line.
Statutory damages are, I believe, $750 per work, so the plaintiff has a lot more leverage if they go after somebody whom they've observed to be sharing 1,000 songs. A $3,000 check might not seem so bad if they're wagging a potential $750K tort in your face.
You may be correct that the RIAA no longer makes such a distinction when sending out settlement letters, but the law does. At $750 per unit, the statutory damages can get scarily high even if you're a typical pirate with just five or ten albums in your share directory.
"ever tape a song off the radio? seriously, I see a lot people posting with this idea of theft but how many of you have grown up mixing tapes and giving them to your friends or copying a song off the radio as a child?"
The RIAA tends to go after the "whales," who are sharing hundreds or thousands of songs. That allows them to leverage the maximum potential statutory damages possible when gunning for a settlement.
The taping of a song or two, vs. the massive distribution of music in violation of copyright law, aren't really equal, and anybody who equates the two need only look at other areas of the law. Moving a hundred kilos of weed is liable to get you in more hot water than selling a joint or two to a friend. Stabbing your friend with a fork is far less serious than stabbing ten thousand strangers with a fork. Driving five miles above the speed limit in a school zone will net you a smaller fine than driving 50 miles above the speed limit. In so many areas of the law, how much of it you do makes all the difference.
I've copied a CD or two for friends but I don't think for a minute that this is equivalent to sharing it with a hundred thousand of my closest friends with BitTorrent.
"The copyright law used to allow copyrights to expire in a reasonable period of time. I felt that before the time of the "Sonny Bono Copyright act" that the period was already longer than was reasonable...so they extended it. Then with the DMCA they extended it again."
Oh, I agree 100%. I think copyright terms are at least twice as long as they should be.
However, this is largely not relevant to the discussion at hand. See all the posts about how piracy is booming at their school? It's largely new stuff. These are teenagers we're talking about -- they're not building their collections of Elvis Presley music or Bing Crosby movies, nor are they trading old Apple ][ warez. Big Champagne tracks the traffic on the P2P networks; notice how this week's top pirated songs match up so closely with the top legal downloads. Sure, some older stuff that perhaps should fall into the public domain is being tracked, but it's not a significant part of the P2P volume.
A century or so ago, copyright term was 14 years. Even if we had that 14 year term today, the vast majority of the stuff that college students are trading would still fall under copyright protection.
"This is the law that the RIAA wrote, and bought. I may fear it, but I won't respect it."
Copyright law was very much alive and well before the RIAA came around in the 1950s. When the RIAA was formed, recorded music had already been protected by copyright for three decades.
The most recent revision that's the biggest threat to your file sharing is the NET act, which makes you liable to go to the klink if you distribute enough stuff even if you're not charging for it. But Microsoft and other software vendors are your bugaboo, here.
"If I lived in Canada and purchased an iPod that included a fee that went straight to the record companies, I'd naturally assume this gave me immunity and just pirate to my hearts content. It's just logical because I've already paid my pirating fee. But hey that's just me."
Good news: most of the Canada levies go directly to the artists and bypasses the record labels. The bad news... only Canadian artists.
Assuming the levy gives you immunity is a bad, bad idea. It's a common misperception that the Canada levies are a form of socialized entertainment; that you're "paying in advance" as in socialized health care. This is incorrect.
If you're a Canadian and you feel like pirating some music from a US or British (or some other non-Canadian) artist, go ahead -- if you want that music and you'd rather not pay for it, that's your choice. Better the money stays in your pocket than going to somebody you've never heard of, right? But don't do it because you paid a levy at some point. They will not see one cent of that money.
Take a look at the policy itself -- it expressly refers to DMCA violations. This and a bit of common sense should make it clear that they are not attempting to prevent students from surfing the Web.
"*Drools on keyboard*, um nope, still not getting it.. are you trying to tell me that the the manufacturing "supply" of raw materials is what sets the price for goods? Or is it the costs of those materials? i saw you said demand a few times.. if the manufacturer demands materials more will the cost go down or up?"
Sorry, I was unclear in using the phrase "supply and demand" as that invokes images of a commodity like oil.
I think we were talking about DVDs here, right? The cost of DVDs is based much more on the demand curve than the production costs (including costs of materials). This is where the GGP was getting off the beam, comparing production costs to retail prices... intuitively one might make that correlation, but there are so many other factors that it's pretty much irrelevant. If I'm being unclear, take another look at the last point I made... a $10MM indie film and a $200MM blockbuster will end up having similar retail prices when they're released to DVD.
"Okay... so when people stop buying CDs in droves (often while citing the price of CDs relative to other goods in their lives), what does that have to say about the location of the current price of CDs on their supply-demand curve?"
CD prices go into freefall. The average price of a new CD was about $20 ten years ago. Then P2P exploded. By 2004, the average price of a new CD was about $13.50. Then online venues like the iTunes store and became more viable (my personal reason for not buying CDs any more) and now it's quite easy to find new releases for $11. Most of the CDs on Amazon's best-seller lists are $9.99.
That $20 we were paying for CDs in 1997 is almost 25 bucks today's money. This means CD prices have fallen by more than half. Ain't the demand curve great?
I don't think CDs are going to fall much below $11 or so... their share of the market vs. online sales will continue to wither away to a core group of consumers who seek out a physical medium, but I don't think we'll see the record companies will chase it down much further.
"Is it really my job as the consumer to figure out exactly who's screwing me?"
It's in your own best interest. Now that you know that you've been shopping at the wrong places, you'll be able to save a lot on music purchases. If the record companies were selling CDs into the channel for about $15, then you'd be hosed -- you'd pay $18 - $20 no matter where you shop. But they actually sell for $8 - $10. Armed with that info, you can take the time to shop around. Seriously, dude -- try Amazon.
"Regardless of that, it's still an indictement of a system that would let such anti-competitive scenarios arise, and in the end, this is all this debate is about."
The record industry is hugely competitive. There are four or five big companies which make most of the money and maybe about 1,000 indie labels in the US that fight for the rest, but you can be assured that Sony and BMG would be happy to put each other out of business. If you mean that it's anti-competitive at the retail level, I am not sure that I agree, either. I sell computer peripherals to many of the same retailers that also sell music -- Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, etc. -- and I could tell you stories. It's quite cutthroat.
"Trying to hunt and peck at individuals is pointless when the whole thing's corrupted."
I was not clear enough in my original post. I asked where you are shopping if you are paying $20 for a CD, and I pointed out that those prices are way out of line with what most of of the rest of us are paying.
Where are you shopping for CDs where prices are typically $20? Thanks in advance.
Slashdot Mirror
"99 cents per song?? Are you kidding me? In my city a newer CD costs about $15-18. And usually contains 10 to 20 songs. So if I buy the actual CD it's close to a dollar a song. How is 99 cent mp3s a deal? HA!"
Convenience. You don't need to wait until the store opens, leave your computer, and venture out into the wild.
If the convenience factor has no value, then that's great for you -- but Apple has just sold their three billionth song, and their growth rate is accelerating. iTunes is something like the #3 music retailer, without having a single brick and mortar store.
Thus, I'm a bit perplexed by your "they just don't get it" comment. A simpler explanation is that you are not their target customer. They seem to be doing fine without you.
"There's no financial incentive to do that as opposed to just living off of the interest of the $1,000,000. Your salary needs to be more than $60,000 after taxes in order for you to break even."
Good points, but I should explain that a common mindset around here is that everybody is simply too greedy. Musicians, for example, should be happy with touring for the rest of their lives to make money -- or at least the Slashdot zeitgeist goes.
My plan calls for, among other things, asking artists to take less royalties than they might make with a major label contract. If my plan allowed for the owner of the business to make $60K a year, it might be seen as bad, from a moral perspective, as the traditional labels. Running a successful business in recording, producing, promoting and selling music at $0.50 per track means making sacrifices at all levels -- not just shorting the artists.
"At the end of the day, profit margins on CDs are so high that it is highly unlikely piracy rates would become high enough to make them unprofitable."
What is your estimate of the average net profit margin per CD?
"I am not sure you know what inflation is. Look at purchasing power from the 80's until now. Many prices have dropped despite increased wages....look around your house. What would that item cost in 1988? How about your computer, or your microwave for example? Maybe if the Music industry spent less time trying to find a consumer-screwing scheme that didn't screw consumers, they would be able to charge less."
Excellent point!
The minimum wage in the mid-80s was, IIRC, about $3.75. New CD releases cost $18 - $20, for a ratio of about 5:1.
Minimum wage is presently $5.85 (it'll be going to $6.55 next summer and it's already higher in California). The average cost of a new CD release today is $13 and change, for a ratio of 2.5:1.
You may be right that record labels are just too inefficient. I've thought a bit about how an indie record label could be profitable selling tracks at $0.50 each (which is, of course, still too high for many Slashdotters). Here's my proposal:
If you manage to whittle the royalties and other costs per sale to $0.20 per track, this will give you $0.30 net profit per track before costs of production. At a production cost of $1K per track ($10K per CD), you'll need to sell 3K copies of each track to break even. This is within the realm of possibility.
So -- what enterprising Slashdotter with a million bucks in the bank wants to help me get started? ;-)
"The cost of distributing a dozen songs (a CD that actually did cost a few dollars to stamp and ship twenty years ago) is now a download from a server that costs them only fraction of a cent, but they still want us to pay 1988 prices?"
CDs cost about $20 in 1988, or the equivalent of about $2 per track. That's about $34 (or $3.40 per track) in today's money.
The record labels may want to charge $3.40, but they do not. That's the critical difference. They charge $0.99, not $3.40.
Your views on incremental costs of sale are very common around here (as shown by your 5, Insightful). I think the reasoning is that if an album costs $100K to make, but if the bandwidth for the download costs a nickel, then the cost of the download should be a nickel. Many Slashdotters are also of the understanding that since a digital file can be copied an infinite number of times, then the amortized cost per track is essentially zero. Now, I acknowledge that this line of reasoning is useful if you want to justify piracy -- after all, their cost per sale is essentially zero, and they sell the track for $0.99, then that's an insane amount of profit. The record companies are just too greedy for their own good, and piracy is our moral prerogative to teach them a lesson!
But many folks understand that production costs are accrued not over the potential for reproduction (infinity) or the potential for sale, but across the actual number of tracks sold. If your digital good cost $100K to make and you sell 100K of them, that's a rough cost per sale of a buck -- no matter how many copies were distributed without being paid for. And, as covered above, the digital medium's potential for unlimited copying does not weigh in here -- if you've sold 100K items, you've sold 100K items. Your revenue stream ends there.
A lot of people also understand that there are fixed per-sale costs other than bandwidth. Although the record companies try everything they can to get out of it, artists and performers do get royalties by law -- up to $0.25 per track in some instances. Add credit card fees and you may be up to a cost of $0.30 per sale before you even get to the innumerable amortized costs and overhead.
"Very depressing that people are now hacking content they paid for :("
My understanding is that they pay to stream, not to download. A download version would presumably cost more, as it has more value. This hack lets you download and save to your hard drive and only pay the price for streaming.
Pay less, get less, pay more, get more. I see that there's a fair amount of outrage here; it's billed as a streaming service but I suppose that we feel that should be getting more for our money -- thus it's our prerogative to have it. But in the physical world, if you pay for a hamburger with the understanding that you'll get a hamburger, there's little room for outrage that you're not given a cheeseburger.
"It's not a big deal to you. It's a big deal to those making a living distributing/selling software. Copyright holders are entitled to treble damages for infringement."
I do indeed make my living through my IP. I fully support the copyright of those who develop software, but here's the thing -- I support everybody's rights equally.
Perhaps I wasn't clear: all of the Valve and ID titles are available for free on the file-sharing networks. I daresay that many if not most folks reading this enjoy using BitTorrent to procure free software, in violation of copyright. When the BSA takes action against pirates, they are typically seen as the bad guy around these parts. And we all scramble all over ourselves to point out how our actions are justified.
So why the sympathy for the DOSBox folks?
I suspect it's because they give the software away for free. Mean old nasty Microsoft, Adobe, ID, Valve, etc. sell their software, and are thus greedy, and do not deserve our sympathy. I think that's the elephant in the room that nobody's pointing out. If I am incorrect, please let me know.
"The problem is that DOSBox is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (aka GPL). This license is the foundation for the vast majority of open source software, and explicitly states that if you distribute software under it, you must also redistribute the souce code."
Yes, but why is it a big deal?
The entire library of iD and Valve titles is freely available via BitTorrent. Their copyrights are violated countless times daily. Yet that's certainly not news around here.
Methinks it's a case of all copyright holders being equal, only some are more equal than others.
Seriously: somebody please explain why I should care about the DOSBox folks' rights more than than anybody else's.
"In order to prove it's the song they claim it to be, they must have downloaded it themselves, which could be seen as a form of entrapment -- obviously whoever they are downloading it from commits a crime by uploading the file to the RIAA goon doing this, which they might not otherwise have committed."
I'd love to see somebody try that in court. "Yes, your honor, my client did make all those files available for sharing, but if nobody had downloaded them, my client might not have shared them in the first place." Sort of a Schroedinger's Cat defense.
"Right -- although that has to be stated more clearly. Everyone knows you're sharing copyrighted works -- it's not public domain. But, you could claim you thought it was Creative Commons or something similar -- that you didn't know you weren't allowed to share it."
Do you mean lie and state that you thought Star Wars Ep. IV was Creative Commons? For most of the stuff shared on BT, this would be tough -- it wouldn't likely pass the laugh test.
"Also, the producers' work will be viewed by thousands of people, and probably reviewed by tens of professionals and might reach production company managers, who may hire them for their next movie..."
Ah yes, the "design my website for free" argument.
That's an interesting viewpoint.
Are you also of the opinion that auto industry executives hold the naive view that auto theft-deterrent systems are infallible?
When I first got into the Apple warez scene in the early 80s, I asked somebody older and wiser why, say, they bothered to put copy protection on Wizardry when clever guys like me could easily crack it.
"Because," he pointed out, "if the copy protection prevents just one person from copying it, it's done its job."
And that's why copy protection on CDs and DVDs exists today: to deter casual copying. Much to their disadvantage, most people out there just aren't as technically adept as Slashdot readers.
Can you clarify why you believe that folks who use DRM don't understand this? It requires quite a stretch, but if you think you have solid evidence, I'd like to hear it.
"That's exactly what is happening here: the RIAA is suing for 750% of the perceived value of the good stolen. This is absurd, and there are probably some judges who would agree."
Huh? That's the minimum statutory damage per work as defined by law. The RIAA is legally allowed to claim up to $30K per work.
Understand that this is per work, not per "copy of work." If you have a song in your share directory and it's downloaded 1,000 times, the RIAA is still likely to only go after you for $750 for that work, even though you've distributed $1K worth of copyrighted material. Due to the magical nature of P2P, 1,000 copies is actually quite mild -- back in Kazaa's heyday, somebody did some fingerprint analysis of rips and found that one rip was responsible for some 16,000 individual copies of an Eminem CD.
For what it's worth, I think that in the age of P2P, $750 is too high; I believe it's a remnant of the NET Act and the justification was the pirate rings which distributed copies of PhotoShop on FTP sites. Given the vast explosion of non-profit P2P copying nowadays, I think $100 is much more fair. But even at $100, if the RIAA catches you with 1,000 songs in your share directory (which is not uncommon), they'll still wave the threat of a $100K lawsuit in your face in an effort to get you to settle for $3,000.
"Surely theoretically, if the RIAA sues someone, and taht person had never bought an album, then there is good reason to beleive the person would never buy any of the songs, so the RIAA has lost nothing, and therefore has nothing to sue for.....?"
The whole point is whether the $750-per-work statutory damage is constitutional. Statutory is the key here. I think you may be confusing this with compensatory, or as USC17 puts it, "actual" damage.
Enforcement of copyright law does not require proof of monetary loss -- it is about violating the right to copy. You need not offer something for sale in order to claim copyright (remember, GPL relies on copyright). Of course people who share music on BT will claim that they're not causing economic harm -- that would be impossible to prove; and thus we have statutory damages.
And quit calling me Shirley.
Folks around here have been saying that the "sell stuff for a profit" model is dead for the record industry for almost a decade now. But I rarely see people hazard a guess as to when this will happen. Legitimate download resellers like iTunes are making a ton of cash, and I think most Slashdotters would claim that piracy doesn't actually significantly affect record sales, so we can't say that it's piracy that will kill the beast.
Perhaps you're claiming that this will be the case because the market will be taken over by indie musicians who distribute their stuff for free. The problem with this theory is that the market is already saturated with unsigned artists who sell their stuff directly and or givie it away, yet there are still a lot more artists who want record deals than get them. Slashdotters like to claim that artists can use the mighty power of the Internet to promote and distribute their music, but the record labels are doing this, too... the mighty power of the Internet is rising all the boats.
If you think it's obvious that the business model is dead, then great -- but do you have an estimate of when the record industry will go away?
"Another interresting choice of words : not the artist, but "the industry" ... A slip-of-the-tongue perhaps ?"
Nope -- the RIAA represents the recording industry. That's what the "RI" stands for. She's being honest and accurate.
Artists (composers and lyricists, at least) are represented by ASCAP/BMI. They also flex their legal muscle from time to time. When that happens the general tone around here is "fuck the greedy artists" rather than "fuck the greedy record labels."
"Now we will see the same people who oppose RIAA/MPAA copyrights cheering the copyright action that enforces open source. Don't you see that you can't have it both ways?"
And adding further humor, Skype was developed by the guys who developed Kazaa. They knew what Kazaa would be used for; they certainly weren't naive enough to think that it would be used only for Linux distros and Creative Commons materials.
At any rate, it's perfectly justified to ask to have something both ways. For example, many people like to pirate music because it's a great way to enjoy music for free. But at the same time, we wouldn't want our term papers or graduate thesi shared with our schoolmates before we've turned them (the papers) in. It's other people's information that typically wants to be free.
Sorry, I don't -- it's my understanding of their strategy from a few years back when the lawsuits began, from reading some of the court documents. They may have changed now that they're expanding their program and leading with settlement letters; for all I know you might be liable to get a letter if they catch you sharing just one song. Ray Beckerman might be able to jump in here and offer his opinion, since he's on the front line.
Statutory damages are, I believe, $750 per work, so the plaintiff has a lot more leverage if they go after somebody whom they've observed to be sharing 1,000 songs. A $3,000 check might not seem so bad if they're wagging a potential $750K tort in your face.
You may be correct that the RIAA no longer makes such a distinction when sending out settlement letters, but the law does. At $750 per unit, the statutory damages can get scarily high even if you're a typical pirate with just five or ten albums in your share directory.
"ever tape a song off the radio? seriously, I see a lot people posting with this idea of theft but how many of you have grown up mixing tapes and giving them to your friends or copying a song off the radio as a child?"
The RIAA tends to go after the "whales," who are sharing hundreds or thousands of songs. That allows them to leverage the maximum potential statutory damages possible when gunning for a settlement.
The taping of a song or two, vs. the massive distribution of music in violation of copyright law, aren't really equal, and anybody who equates the two need only look at other areas of the law. Moving a hundred kilos of weed is liable to get you in more hot water than selling a joint or two to a friend. Stabbing your friend with a fork is far less serious than stabbing ten thousand strangers with a fork. Driving five miles above the speed limit in a school zone will net you a smaller fine than driving 50 miles above the speed limit. In so many areas of the law, how much of it you do makes all the difference.
I've copied a CD or two for friends but I don't think for a minute that this is equivalent to sharing it with a hundred thousand of my closest friends with BitTorrent.
"The copyright law used to allow copyrights to expire in a reasonable period of time. I felt that before the time of the "Sonny Bono Copyright act" that the period was already longer than was reasonable...so they extended it. Then with the DMCA they extended it again."
Oh, I agree 100%. I think copyright terms are at least twice as long as they should be.
However, this is largely not relevant to the discussion at hand. See all the posts about how piracy is booming at their school? It's largely new stuff. These are teenagers we're talking about -- they're not building their collections of Elvis Presley music or Bing Crosby movies, nor are they trading old Apple ][ warez. Big Champagne tracks the traffic on the P2P networks; notice how this week's top pirated songs match up so closely with the top legal downloads. Sure, some older stuff that perhaps should fall into the public domain is being tracked, but it's not a significant part of the P2P volume.
A century or so ago, copyright term was 14 years. Even if we had that 14 year term today, the vast majority of the stuff that college students are trading would still fall under copyright protection.
"This is the law that the RIAA wrote, and bought. I may fear it, but I won't respect it."
Copyright law was very much alive and well before the RIAA came around in the 1950s. When the RIAA was formed, recorded music had already been protected by copyright for three decades.
The most recent revision that's the biggest threat to your file sharing is the NET act, which makes you liable to go to the klink if you distribute enough stuff even if you're not charging for it. But Microsoft and other software vendors are your bugaboo, here.
"If I lived in Canada and purchased an iPod that included a fee that went straight to the record companies, I'd naturally assume this gave me immunity and just pirate to my hearts content. It's just logical because I've already paid my pirating fee. But hey that's just me."
Good news: most of the Canada levies go directly to the artists and bypasses the record labels. The bad news... only Canadian artists.
Assuming the levy gives you immunity is a bad, bad idea. It's a common misperception that the Canada levies are a form of socialized entertainment; that you're "paying in advance" as in socialized health care. This is incorrect.
If you're a Canadian and you feel like pirating some music from a US or British (or some other non-Canadian) artist, go ahead -- if you want that music and you'd rather not pay for it, that's your choice. Better the money stays in your pocket than going to somebody you've never heard of, right? But don't do it because you paid a levy at some point. They will not see one cent of that money.
Take a look at the policy itself -- it expressly refers to DMCA violations. This and a bit of common sense should make it clear that they are not attempting to prevent students from surfing the Web.
"*Drools on keyboard*, um nope, still not getting it.. are you trying to tell me that the the manufacturing "supply" of raw materials is what sets the price for goods? Or is it the costs of those materials? i saw you said demand a few times.. if the manufacturer demands materials more will the cost go down or up?"
Sorry, I was unclear in using the phrase "supply and demand" as that invokes images of a commodity like oil.
I think we were talking about DVDs here, right? The cost of DVDs is based much more on the demand curve than the production costs (including costs of materials). This is where the GGP was getting off the beam, comparing production costs to retail prices... intuitively one might make that correlation, but there are so many other factors that it's pretty much irrelevant. If I'm being unclear, take another look at the last point I made... a $10MM indie film and a $200MM blockbuster will end up having similar retail prices when they're released to DVD.
"Okay... so when people stop buying CDs in droves (often while citing the price of CDs relative to other goods in their lives), what does that have to say about the location of the current price of CDs on their supply-demand curve?"
CD prices go into freefall. The average price of a new CD was about $20 ten years ago. Then P2P exploded. By 2004, the average price of a new CD was about $13.50. Then online venues like the iTunes store and became more viable (my personal reason for not buying CDs any more) and now it's quite easy to find new releases for $11. Most of the CDs on Amazon's best-seller lists are $9.99.
That $20 we were paying for CDs in 1997 is almost 25 bucks today's money. This means CD prices have fallen by more than half. Ain't the demand curve great?
I don't think CDs are going to fall much below $11 or so... their share of the market vs. online sales will continue to wither away to a core group of consumers who seek out a physical medium, but I don't think we'll see the record companies will chase it down much further.
"Is it really my job as the consumer to figure out exactly who's screwing me?"
It's in your own best interest. Now that you know that you've been shopping at the wrong places, you'll be able to save a lot on music purchases. If the record companies were selling CDs into the channel for about $15, then you'd be hosed -- you'd pay $18 - $20 no matter where you shop. But they actually sell for $8 - $10. Armed with that info, you can take the time to shop around. Seriously, dude -- try Amazon.
"Regardless of that, it's still an indictement of a system that would let such anti-competitive scenarios arise, and in the end, this is all this debate is about."
The record industry is hugely competitive. There are four or five big companies which make most of the money and maybe about 1,000 indie labels in the US that fight for the rest, but you can be assured that Sony and BMG would be happy to put each other out of business. If you mean that it's anti-competitive at the retail level, I am not sure that I agree, either. I sell computer peripherals to many of the same retailers that also sell music -- Amazon, Best Buy, Wal-Mart, etc. -- and I could tell you stories. It's quite cutthroat.
"Trying to hunt and peck at individuals is pointless when the whole thing's corrupted."
I was not clear enough in my original post. I asked where you are shopping if you are paying $20 for a CD, and I pointed out that those prices are way out of line with what most of of the rest of us are paying.
Where are you shopping for CDs where prices are typically $20? Thanks in advance.