"Its not different enough. its still not housing the content."
I think I see the confusion here -- it's important to understand the difference between "copyright infringement" and "contributory copyright infringement."
A lot of people read the summary a little too quickly and are of the impression that the sites were busted for infringement. If that were the case, then you'd be 100% correct: they weren't hosting the files, so this would be a hugely inappropriate ruling.
You can add "contributory," "facilitating," "aiding and abetting," and similar terms to the beginning of many, many crimes and torts and come up with a separate offense. It works kind of the same way: you can be busted for being an accessory to robbery even if you didn't hold a gun or even set foot on the property. And, as the link blog operators are learning, you can be nailed for contributory infringement, even if you're not hosting the files.
"This has so many long term ramifications that it should scare the piss out of you if you value your freedom to speak."
Nope. Betamax decision. If you want to understand your file-sharing rights, it's imperative that you understand the Betamax decision and its implications. It's what protects Borders, Google, and libraries. It does not, however, protect the "free movie download" link blogs.
The Betamax decision is about 20 years old. In the old days of Slashdot, it was lauded as a protector of our fair-use rights. Lately, though, I've seen more and more posts from folks who aren't familiar with it. It set some important legal precedent that works hugely in the favor of fair-use advocates. The downside is that it works against the guys who were just busted.
Nope. The same Betamax decision that we're all thankful for also protects sites like Google. "Substantial non-infringing uses" is the key concept.
Additionally, intent has everything to do in many areas of the law. To give a somewhat silly example to prove my point: if you accidentally mow a guy down with your car, or if somebody else waited in his house and murdered him when he arrived, the poor fellow's still dead. But you and the premeditated murder guy would likely get very different treatments from the legal system.
It's this same principle which protects general-purpose sites like Google yet allows the law to go after the guys who run the movie link blogs. You could probably find a link to the latest Harry Potter film using both sites, but intent and our friend the Betamax decision will keep Google out of trouble.
"How does Pirate Bay make money from other peoples work?"
A more accurate way to put it is that TPB makes money by facilitating piracy. Similarly, Slashdot makes money by facilitating reading and discovering tech news.
They're lying. Yes -- sometimes the good guys lie, too. If they were losing money, they wouldn't be in business.
Lots and lots of people have figured out how to profitably operate web sites that operate solely on donations and ad revenues... even sites which have a limited selection of advertisers due to the content they carry. Plenty of other tracker site operators have acknowledged that they make pretty good money. Could it be that the TPB guys just haven't figured this out, while the rest of us have? Possible, but extremely unlikely.
"$1 a track is a ripoff. $0.05 is reasonable. I know EXACTLY what is involved in this distribution and I know that pricing is totally doable. $0.10 if they're greedy."
Here's the thing: by law, the labels generally have to pay mechanical royalties of at least $0.08 per download -- more if the song has a separate lyricist and composer. This does not include royalties paid to the performer. So, the royalties paid out can be $0.16 or higher. If you're paying out > $0.10 per track by law and selling those tracks for $0.10 or less, it's just simply not possible to make up the difference in volume. It's a money-losing proposition.
How would you recommend fixing this? I know how the record companies would like to fix it: change the law so that the mechanicals are paid as a percentage of the selling price of the track, rather than fixed at eight cents. Their rationale was that if market forces are requiring that they cut prices, then the composers and lyricists have to share in the pain and take less money, too. But, as you can imagine, this notion did NOT go over well when it was reported on Slashdot.
I think the consensus is that we would like the record companies to sell tracks at $0.10 each ($0.05 each in your case), while adhering to current law and paying mechanicals at $0.08 per track or more.
"Torrentspy contained ZERO copyright material...ZERO, NIL, NADA, NOTHING. It contained no songs, no movies, no books, no videos, no nothing."
They were nailed not for copyright infringement, but for facilitating copyright infringement.
"Why isn't google or microsoft or yahoo or any other site stopped from doing this..."
Come on, guys... they're protected by the Betamax decision. It's super important that every pro-piracy Slashdotter understand this. Google, like a VCR and like the BitTorrent protocol itself, is a generic tool with substantial non-infringing uses. TorrentSpy was not -- the court found that they were specializing in facilitating piracy. Intent has everything to do with it.
The guy didn't bother to show up in court. This apparently pissed off the judge, so he got the default judgement of the statutory maximum ($30K) per work.
"Speaking of reason, I can't see how at least some of the judgement can stand. It would mean I can legally make something available on my hard drive, publish its availability, and not be infringing on the copyright."
If a copyright holder took you to court, and the court ruled the same way, and the copyright holder couldn't prove that a file was actually downloaded, then yes.
"To put that another way, if I allow free downloads and accept donations, I'm not infringing, even if I'm paying for bandwidth too."
Whether you accept donations doesn't have much to do with it (although it might affect the settlement if you were found liable). 'Twould be too easy for the copyright holder to get the server logs, or even just download one of the files to show that infringement had taken place (cue the "but that would be entrapment!" crowd in 3, 2, 1...)
Excellent points! You're certainly correct that it might make it a lot harder.
Funny that you referenced Vanatu -- of course, that's where the fine folks at Kazaa registered their company, apparently in a similar attempt to throw up some legal barriers. As we know, it ultimately didn't work out, as they were tried in Australia, where the executives live.
I did not state that the kid running Demonoid is a Canadian (the "canada back online" title was from an earlier post, something about being blocked in Canada, I believe). I referenced the Berne Convention, but that cuts a pretty wide swath -- Canada's a member, but so are about 180 other countries. I don't know that he's in a signatory nation, but IMO it's pretty likely.
"What about CDs that are no longer in print (and impossible to find second-hand), or hard-to-find DVDs that are encoded for a region other than yours?"
That's a fine tangental discussion, but not really relevant. Look at the top list of most any tracker, or the list published by BigChampagne, which aggregates this info. It matches closely with the stuff that's popular at the moment.
The BitTorrent protocol can also be used to share Linux distros, and other authorized stuff. But neither these, nor the "no longer in print" content, are the primary traffic on Demonoid.
It's fine to acknowledge that many people use piracy as a substitute for buying. There's nothing wrong with this -- opting to get something off of a tracker vs. purchasing it leaves you with more money in your pocket. Having more money is the same motivation that drives most musicians, artists and filmmakers, so it's nothing to be ashamed of. When you choose to torrent something rather than buying it, you're simply acknowledging that you'd rather have that money in your pocket than in the pocket of some actor, musician, or writer whom you don't know, and whom you'll probably never meet. This is perfectly understandable and requires no rationalization.
Not if the site operator resides in a country that's a signatory to the Berne Convention and is providing access to folks in those countries.
I'm aware that it's a popular myth that hosting your site in some other country will exempt you from the laws of the country in which you live. And, sure enough, lots of folks have tried it. But it's generally not the case.
If this is boggling anybody, conduct a thought experiment by substituting "information freedom fighter sticking it to the rich and greedy copyright owners" with, say, "child pornography distributor." If I were to sit in my house in California and launch a child pornography site on a host in the Ukraine and registered in Brazil, the law'd be all over me -- and rightly so.
Copyright law and child pornography laws are different, of course, but in the case of the relevance of where the business operator resides, they're close enough.
The article includes a a link to a simulator. Why not try your theory? Play twenty rounds where you switch, and twenty where you don't.
If your theory is correct, then your average results won't change, whether you switch or not.
"Though at 10-20 cents a song I would buy a lot more music."
Do you have a gut feeling for how much more you'd buy?
Let's say for sake of comparison that a track costs a record label, on average, $0.15 per download (assuming minimal royalties and no overhead). If they're aiming for a $0.20 price, then they might take a penny in profit and get the store (iTunes, Amazon MP3, or whatever) to take $0.04 in markup.
Now let's say that they're selling that same track today for $0.80. On Amazon it's been estimated that the store takes about $0.10 in margin, so the record label is netting $0.55 per track in net margin.
This means that for it to make economic sense for the record label to aim for a $0.20 price per track, then such a price drop must increase sales by 5400%, if my math is correct. In other words, if an average customer buys ten tracks a month, they'd have to buy 540 tracks a month to be of the same value to the record label.
Here's where this breaks down: at $0.80 to a buck a track, I have no problem buying as much music as I want. There's just no elasticity below $0.80 for me. I wouldn't buy any more if tracks were $0.60, $0.40 or even $0.20.
I've no doubt that many people's financial situation is such that there's significant elasticity between $0.80 and $0.20. But enough to grow sales by 54X? Not likely for most people.
manage to get the store (iTunes, Amazon MP3 or whatever) to take four cents in markup, then the net margin for that sale is a penny.
If they're currently selling that track on Amazon MP3 for $0.80
"I couldn't disagree more. I use allofmp3.com as an example because people were spending substantial aggregate money there en masse in order to use a convenient, non-crippled, reasonably-priced, easy-to-use service. If the industry could manage to open a store exactly like it, they would make plenty of money from the moral majority who don't mind paying for things. But they expect market forces to answer to their demands."
We're running into a zeitgeist conflict here.
As you know, by law, each track includes mechanical royalties of about eight cents each for the lyricist and composer; this doesn't include the royalties for the perfomer or, of course, the overhead in producing the music.
You'll recall that a few months ago, the record labels were trying to get the law changed so that mechanical royalties are a percentage of the sale price, rather than fixed at eight cents. Their rationale, of course, was that this would allow them to better address a market where prices are falling.
Naturally, this notion didn't go over well on Slashdot at all. If we have our way, the law will go unchanged, and tracks will continue to have royalties of anywhere between $0.08 and $0.25.
Yet we're fond of pointing out that if the record companies were to just sell tracks for a dime each, all their problems would be solved.
I had an Airport Express. It was cheap, but non-interactive -- I had to run back to my computer to change music. It was good for setting up a long playlist to stream for a party, but that was about it.
The Squeezebox Duet (which a few people besides me have recommended) has an interactive controller which feeds my music attention deficit disorder quite nicely. And, as has been pointed out, it's open source, so if the controller doesn't do what you like, you can make it bend to your will.
I guess I'm not sure what's meant by integration with Rhapsody's catalog, but here's what I can do with Rhapsody with the controller that came with my Duet:
Access my library (ie stuff I've added using the controller or the Rhapsody software)
Search the Rhapsody library by artist, album, track, composer or keyword
Browse playlists and channels
Access the Music Guide, with new releases / staff picks / just added, etc. along with browsing by genre, top artists / albums / tracks.
In short, while it's certainly a different interface, I believe I can do just about anything with the Duet's controller that I can with Rhapsody's interface on my PC. Searching for music is clunkier, as I'm using the controller's iPod-style scroll wheel to enter a search term, vs. just typing a search term on my PC.
The wiki entry appears to refer to the older Squeezebox, which has a very simple VFD display (good enough for most things but apparently not enough for getting full access to Rhapsody). But the color display on the Duet controller is a different story.
I enjoy the heck out of my Squeezebox Duet. A two-room system would be about $550, which is about half the Sonos price, so I guess it would be 2X a reasonable price for you. But it's still great.
"Now what exactly did Creative have to gain by doing this? Maybe somewhere an unhappy customer who installed these drivers, and for whatever reason, they didn't work or broke something, and that ignorant but well meaning customer blames Creative."
Well, yes. But the big advantage is that by practicing their due diligence of keeping the links off of the forums, they're minimizing the chances of being sued by their licensors (Dolby, et al). Being sued is a huge financial risk, and it's dishonest to ignore this vital component of the situation.
It might be easy to shrug off a lawsuit as no big deal -- after all, it's happening to somebody else, right? But this is Slashdot, where we bemoan the $3K RIAA settlements and state that they "ruin lives." Being nailed for not doing their due diligence here would not make their day, either.
And if you think that Creative has the money -- well, they probably don't. Creative had to sell its headquarters just to avoid taking a huge loss last quarter.
"If they had half a brain, they would have quietly hired him for a very handsome sum of money. If they didn't try then they deserve whatever backlash they get."
Perhaps he'd be an asset to their engineering team, but remember that this isn't a story about Creative being unable to release the drivers -- they'd just rather not pay the licensing fees that will allow them to.
If this isn't clear to anybody reading this... say, for example, that some enterprising fellow fixed some bugs in OS X and then distributed his own "OS X Plus" -- not a diff, not a patch, but modified Apple code, which undoubtedly contains some technology licensed from other vendors. You can bet that Apple would remove all posts on their forum linking to the code, and make it a point to tell the fellow to stop distributing his hacked version of OS X and asking for donations for it. Would this piss off geeks? You bet. Would you and others be here pointing out that Apple's lawyers don't have "half a brain," to use your words? Probably. But Apple would still do it.
It's a subscription -- when you stop paying, you don't have access to the music any more. This is why I use it to listen to new stuff that I probably wouldn't buy and stuff that I probably won't miss terribly. If it's good enough to keep, I'll buy it -- on Amazon MP3 if iTunes or Rhapsody don't have it in DRM-free format.
As covered before, I used be a huge iTunes fan, for the reason that I want to keep my music, and have it easily transportable to my iPod. Getting the Squeezebox Duet, and thus shifting most of my music listening to the living room, has (much to my surprised) shifted my value equation by 180. I can sit on my sofa and listen to just about any artist, any album. My girlfriend loves it, and it's a great party tool. This might be one reason why Apple is reportedly considering going in this direction... they're trying to move music enjoyment to the living room, and there may be other people like me for whom a subscription service is much more palatable in this environment.
"Mind you, you can already get this feature from Rhapsody To Go for $14.99/mo for unlimited access to ~4.5 million songs. They've had this feature for quite a while now."
Thanks for pointing this out.
At this very moment I'm using my new Squeezebox Duet to listen to the new Gnarls Barkley album in its entirety. I probably won't buy it, but my Rhapsody subscription allows me to listen to it as much as I want until I grow tired of it. As I can with all of the new music that comes out that I'd like to listen to, but which I probably won't have much interest in ten years from now.
I used to spend about $50 a month on iTunes. Since I got my Duet and got Pandora and Rhapsody working on it, my iTunes spend has dropped to zero. The next time I come across some music that I'd like to keep, or to take with me on my iPod, I'll buy it. But the all-you-can-eat model is taking care of all of my music consumption for the time being. I used to be a huge iTunes fan, but in my household it's quickly become irrelevant.
"Break the logic down. Currently any P2P user is a pirate, or a pirate/pornographer, except for the "overwhelming" minority."
Yes, that's exactly what he meant, and he's probably right, for most values of "overwhelming." There's no way of knowing, but my educated guess is that 95% of BitTorrent content swapping is unauthorized.
"P2P good, piracy bad" is by no means a contradiction, and it is we Slashdotters are usually quick to point out that P2P != piracy.
"I may be reading this wrong, but it looks like the only thing that can possibly save P2P from its ghetto is GE/NBC. Once they start distributing with P2P (by borrowing your bandwidth) in the future, the tubes will be safe again."
Well, he's correct. Until a really big owner of content (think GE, Disney, Universal, etc.) starts getting heavily invested into P2P distribution, P2P is going to be largely pirated content. The ratio will be changed by an elephant jumping into the pool. It remains to be seen if GE's going to be that elephant.
But, I think you've sorta foreshadowed the Slashdot reaction when the time comes, with your "borrowing" aside. If NBC starts distributing their stuff via P2P and padding it with ads, the standard Slashdot reaction will be something akin to "they think they're going to use MY bandwidth to distribute THEIR content? FUCK THEM!". There will also be a similar reaction on Digg, except that it will be also include "TPB FTW!!!!!11!cos(0)!!."
"Why use mp3 in a situation where you might be in trouble over patents? There are plenty of other codecs out there, ogg for one. Most ripper programs hat I know of can rip to ogg, and there are conversion tools. It wouldn't be hard to set up a conversion system."
Sadly, there's not much of a market for Ogg-only players. I'm perfectly aware that Slashdotters would have not the slightest issue with purchasing a FLAC-only or Ogg-only player, but we're the very tippy-top of the market. The Chinese knockoff vendors are going for the bottom 90% of the market, not the top 10%. It would be somewhat akin to releasing a music player that works only with Linux. Again, Slashdotters might have no problem with such a device, but it would not do well in the market.
Either way, my understanding is that many of the vendors that were raided were creating knockoffs with hardware designs similar to popular devices -- think iPhone clones and the like. I don't think eliminating MP3 compatibility would have saved many of them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Its not different enough. its still not housing the content."
I think I see the confusion here -- it's important to understand the difference between "copyright infringement" and "contributory copyright infringement."
A lot of people read the summary a little too quickly and are of the impression that the sites were busted for infringement. If that were the case, then you'd be 100% correct: they weren't hosting the files, so this would be a hugely inappropriate ruling.
You can add "contributory," "facilitating," "aiding and abetting," and similar terms to the beginning of many, many crimes and torts and come up with a separate offense. It works kind of the same way: you can be busted for being an accessory to robbery even if you didn't hold a gun or even set foot on the property. And, as the link blog operators are learning, you can be nailed for contributory infringement, even if you're not hosting the files.
"This has so many long term ramifications that it should scare the piss out of you if you value your freedom to speak."
Nope. Betamax decision. If you want to understand your file-sharing rights, it's imperative that you understand the Betamax decision and its implications. It's what protects Borders, Google, and libraries. It does not, however, protect the "free movie download" link blogs.
The Betamax decision is about 20 years old. In the old days of Slashdot, it was lauded as a protector of our fair-use rights. Lately, though, I've seen more and more posts from folks who aren't familiar with it. It set some important legal precedent that works hugely in the favor of fair-use advocates. The downside is that it works against the guys who were just busted.
Nope. The same Betamax decision that we're all thankful for also protects sites like Google. "Substantial non-infringing uses" is the key concept.
Additionally, intent has everything to do in many areas of the law. To give a somewhat silly example to prove my point: if you accidentally mow a guy down with your car, or if somebody else waited in his house and murdered him when he arrived, the poor fellow's still dead. But you and the premeditated murder guy would likely get very different treatments from the legal system.
It's this same principle which protects general-purpose sites like Google yet allows the law to go after the guys who run the movie link blogs. You could probably find a link to the latest Harry Potter film using both sites, but intent and our friend the Betamax decision will keep Google out of trouble.
"How does Pirate Bay make money from other peoples work?"
A more accurate way to put it is that TPB makes money by facilitating piracy. Similarly, Slashdot makes money by facilitating reading and discovering tech news.
They're lying. Yes -- sometimes the good guys lie, too. If they were losing money, they wouldn't be in business.
Lots and lots of people have figured out how to profitably operate web sites that operate solely on donations and ad revenues... even sites which have a limited selection of advertisers due to the content they carry. Plenty of other tracker site operators have acknowledged that they make pretty good money. Could it be that the TPB guys just haven't figured this out, while the rest of us have? Possible, but extremely unlikely.
"$1 a track is a ripoff. $0.05 is reasonable. I know EXACTLY what is involved in this distribution and I know that pricing is totally doable. $0.10 if they're greedy."
Here's the thing: by law, the labels generally have to pay mechanical royalties of at least $0.08 per download -- more if the song has a separate lyricist and composer. This does not include royalties paid to the performer. So, the royalties paid out can be $0.16 or higher. If you're paying out > $0.10 per track by law and selling those tracks for $0.10 or less, it's just simply not possible to make up the difference in volume. It's a money-losing proposition.
How would you recommend fixing this? I know how the record companies would like to fix it: change the law so that the mechanicals are paid as a percentage of the selling price of the track, rather than fixed at eight cents. Their rationale was that if market forces are requiring that they cut prices, then the composers and lyricists have to share in the pain and take less money, too. But, as you can imagine, this notion did NOT go over well when it was reported on Slashdot.
I think the consensus is that we would like the record companies to sell tracks at $0.10 each ($0.05 each in your case), while adhering to current law and paying mechanicals at $0.08 per track or more.
"Torrentspy contained ZERO copyright material...ZERO, NIL, NADA, NOTHING. It contained no songs, no movies, no books, no videos, no nothing."
They were nailed not for copyright infringement, but for facilitating copyright infringement.
"Why isn't google or microsoft or yahoo or any other site stopped from doing this..."
Come on, guys... they're protected by the Betamax decision. It's super important that every pro-piracy Slashdotter understand this. Google, like a VCR and like the BitTorrent protocol itself, is a generic tool with substantial non-infringing uses. TorrentSpy was not -- the court found that they were specializing in facilitating piracy. Intent has everything to do with it.
The guy didn't bother to show up in court. This apparently pissed off the judge, so he got the default judgement of the statutory maximum ($30K) per work.
"Speaking of reason, I can't see how at least some of the judgement can stand. It would mean I can legally make something available on my hard drive, publish its availability, and not be infringing on the copyright."
If a copyright holder took you to court, and the court ruled the same way, and the copyright holder couldn't prove that a file was actually downloaded, then yes.
"To put that another way, if I allow free downloads and accept donations, I'm not infringing, even if I'm paying for bandwidth too."
Whether you accept donations doesn't have much to do with it (although it might affect the settlement if you were found liable). 'Twould be too easy for the copyright holder to get the server logs, or even just download one of the files to show that infringement had taken place (cue the "but that would be entrapment!" crowd in 3, 2, 1...)
Yup. My guess is that for most readers, it's not just the space shuttle that's whooshing way overhead.
Excellent points! You're certainly correct that it might make it a lot harder.
Funny that you referenced Vanatu -- of course, that's where the fine folks at Kazaa registered their company, apparently in a similar attempt to throw up some legal barriers. As we know, it ultimately didn't work out, as they were tried in Australia, where the executives live.
I did not state that the kid running Demonoid is a Canadian (the "canada back online" title was from an earlier post, something about being blocked in Canada, I believe). I referenced the Berne Convention, but that cuts a pretty wide swath -- Canada's a member, but so are about 180 other countries. I don't know that he's in a signatory nation, but IMO it's pretty likely.
"What about CDs that are no longer in print (and impossible to find second-hand), or hard-to-find DVDs that are encoded for a region other than yours?"
That's a fine tangental discussion, but not really relevant. Look at the top list of most any tracker, or the list published by BigChampagne, which aggregates this info. It matches closely with the stuff that's popular at the moment.
The BitTorrent protocol can also be used to share Linux distros, and other authorized stuff. But neither these, nor the "no longer in print" content, are the primary traffic on Demonoid.
It's fine to acknowledge that many people use piracy as a substitute for buying. There's nothing wrong with this -- opting to get something off of a tracker vs. purchasing it leaves you with more money in your pocket. Having more money is the same motivation that drives most musicians, artists and filmmakers, so it's nothing to be ashamed of. When you choose to torrent something rather than buying it, you're simply acknowledging that you'd rather have that money in your pocket than in the pocket of some actor, musician, or writer whom you don't know, and whom you'll probably never meet. This is perfectly understandable and requires no rationalization.
Not if the site operator resides in a country that's a signatory to the Berne Convention and is providing access to folks in those countries.
I'm aware that it's a popular myth that hosting your site in some other country will exempt you from the laws of the country in which you live. And, sure enough, lots of folks have tried it. But it's generally not the case.
If this is boggling anybody, conduct a thought experiment by substituting "information freedom fighter sticking it to the rich and greedy copyright owners" with, say, "child pornography distributor." If I were to sit in my house in California and launch a child pornography site on a host in the Ukraine and registered in Brazil, the law'd be all over me -- and rightly so.
Copyright law and child pornography laws are different, of course, but in the case of the relevance of where the business operator resides, they're close enough.
The article includes a a link to a simulator. Why not try your theory? Play twenty rounds where you switch, and twenty where you don't. If your theory is correct, then your average results won't change, whether you switch or not.
"Though at 10-20 cents a song I would buy a lot more music."
Do you have a gut feeling for how much more you'd buy?
Let's say for sake of comparison that a track costs a record label, on average, $0.15 per download (assuming minimal royalties and no overhead). If they're aiming for a $0.20 price, then they might take a penny in profit and get the store (iTunes, Amazon MP3, or whatever) to take $0.04 in markup.
Now let's say that they're selling that same track today for $0.80. On Amazon it's been estimated that the store takes about $0.10 in margin, so the record label is netting $0.55 per track in net margin.
This means that for it to make economic sense for the record label to aim for a $0.20 price per track, then such a price drop must increase sales by 5400%, if my math is correct. In other words, if an average customer buys ten tracks a month, they'd have to buy 540 tracks a month to be of the same value to the record label.
Here's where this breaks down: at $0.80 to a buck a track, I have no problem buying as much music as I want. There's just no elasticity below $0.80 for me. I wouldn't buy any more if tracks were $0.60, $0.40 or even $0.20.
I've no doubt that many people's financial situation is such that there's significant elasticity between $0.80 and $0.20. But enough to grow sales by 54X? Not likely for most people.
manage to get the store (iTunes, Amazon MP3 or whatever) to take four cents in markup, then the net margin for that sale is a penny.If they're currently selling that track on Amazon MP3 for $0.80
"I couldn't disagree more. I use allofmp3.com as an example because people were spending substantial aggregate money there en masse in order to use a convenient, non-crippled, reasonably-priced, easy-to-use service. If the industry could manage to open a store exactly like it, they would make plenty of money from the moral majority who don't mind paying for things. But they expect market forces to answer to their demands."
We're running into a zeitgeist conflict here.
As you know, by law, each track includes mechanical royalties of about eight cents each for the lyricist and composer; this doesn't include the royalties for the perfomer or, of course, the overhead in producing the music.
You'll recall that a few months ago, the record labels were trying to get the law changed so that mechanical royalties are a percentage of the sale price, rather than fixed at eight cents. Their rationale, of course, was that this would allow them to better address a market where prices are falling.
Naturally, this notion didn't go over well on Slashdot at all. If we have our way, the law will go unchanged, and tracks will continue to have royalties of anywhere between $0.08 and $0.25.
Yet we're fond of pointing out that if the record companies were to just sell tracks for a dime each, all their problems would be solved.
I had an Airport Express. It was cheap, but non-interactive -- I had to run back to my computer to change music. It was good for setting up a long playlist to stream for a party, but that was about it.
The Squeezebox Duet (which a few people besides me have recommended) has an interactive controller which feeds my music attention deficit disorder quite nicely. And, as has been pointed out, it's open source, so if the controller doesn't do what you like, you can make it bend to your will.
I guess I'm not sure what's meant by integration with Rhapsody's catalog, but here's what I can do with Rhapsody with the controller that came with my Duet:
In short, while it's certainly a different interface, I believe I can do just about anything with the Duet's controller that I can with Rhapsody's interface on my PC. Searching for music is clunkier, as I'm using the controller's iPod-style scroll wheel to enter a search term, vs. just typing a search term on my PC.
The wiki entry appears to refer to the older Squeezebox, which has a very simple VFD display (good enough for most things but apparently not enough for getting full access to Rhapsody). But the color display on the Duet controller is a different story.
I enjoy the heck out of my Squeezebox Duet. A two-room system would be about $550, which is about half the Sonos price, so I guess it would be 2X a reasonable price for you. But it's still great.
"Now what exactly did Creative have to gain by doing this? Maybe somewhere an unhappy customer who installed these drivers, and for whatever reason, they didn't work or broke something, and that ignorant but well meaning customer blames Creative."
Well, yes. But the big advantage is that by practicing their due diligence of keeping the links off of the forums, they're minimizing the chances of being sued by their licensors (Dolby, et al). Being sued is a huge financial risk, and it's dishonest to ignore this vital component of the situation.
It might be easy to shrug off a lawsuit as no big deal -- after all, it's happening to somebody else, right? But this is Slashdot, where we bemoan the $3K RIAA settlements and state that they "ruin lives." Being nailed for not doing their due diligence here would not make their day, either.
And if you think that Creative has the money -- well, they probably don't. Creative had to sell its headquarters just to avoid taking a huge loss last quarter.
"If they had half a brain, they would have quietly hired him for a very handsome sum of money. If they didn't try then they deserve whatever backlash they get."
Perhaps he'd be an asset to their engineering team, but remember that this isn't a story about Creative being unable to release the drivers -- they'd just rather not pay the licensing fees that will allow them to.
If this isn't clear to anybody reading this... say, for example, that some enterprising fellow fixed some bugs in OS X and then distributed his own "OS X Plus" -- not a diff, not a patch, but modified Apple code, which undoubtedly contains some technology licensed from other vendors. You can bet that Apple would remove all posts on their forum linking to the code, and make it a point to tell the fellow to stop distributing his hacked version of OS X and asking for donations for it. Would this piss off geeks? You bet. Would you and others be here pointing out that Apple's lawyers don't have "half a brain," to use your words? Probably. But Apple would still do it.
It's a subscription -- when you stop paying, you don't have access to the music any more. This is why I use it to listen to new stuff that I probably wouldn't buy and stuff that I probably won't miss terribly. If it's good enough to keep, I'll buy it -- on Amazon MP3 if iTunes or Rhapsody don't have it in DRM-free format.
As covered before, I used be a huge iTunes fan, for the reason that I want to keep my music, and have it easily transportable to my iPod. Getting the Squeezebox Duet, and thus shifting most of my music listening to the living room, has (much to my surprised) shifted my value equation by 180. I can sit on my sofa and listen to just about any artist, any album. My girlfriend loves it, and it's a great party tool. This might be one reason why Apple is reportedly considering going in this direction... they're trying to move music enjoyment to the living room, and there may be other people like me for whom a subscription service is much more palatable in this environment.
"mull /ml/ Pronunciation Key"
Correct. Further, as much of the info was provided by Apple insiders, this is known as the "mulled apple 'sider" scenario.
"Mind you, you can already get this feature from Rhapsody To Go for $14.99/mo for unlimited access to ~4.5 million songs. They've had this feature for quite a while now."
Thanks for pointing this out.
At this very moment I'm using my new Squeezebox Duet to listen to the new Gnarls Barkley album in its entirety. I probably won't buy it, but my Rhapsody subscription allows me to listen to it as much as I want until I grow tired of it. As I can with all of the new music that comes out that I'd like to listen to, but which I probably won't have much interest in ten years from now.
I used to spend about $50 a month on iTunes. Since I got my Duet and got Pandora and Rhapsody working on it, my iTunes spend has dropped to zero. The next time I come across some music that I'd like to keep, or to take with me on my iPod, I'll buy it. But the all-you-can-eat model is taking care of all of my music consumption for the time being. I used to be a huge iTunes fan, but in my household it's quickly become irrelevant.
"Break the logic down. Currently any P2P user is a pirate, or a pirate/pornographer, except for the "overwhelming" minority."
Yes, that's exactly what he meant, and he's probably right, for most values of "overwhelming." There's no way of knowing, but my educated guess is that 95% of BitTorrent content swapping is unauthorized.
"P2P good, piracy bad" is by no means a contradiction, and it is we Slashdotters are usually quick to point out that P2P != piracy.
"I may be reading this wrong, but it looks like the only thing that can possibly save P2P from its ghetto is GE/NBC. Once they start distributing with P2P (by borrowing your bandwidth) in the future, the tubes will be safe again."
Well, he's correct. Until a really big owner of content (think GE, Disney, Universal, etc.) starts getting heavily invested into P2P distribution, P2P is going to be largely pirated content. The ratio will be changed by an elephant jumping into the pool. It remains to be seen if GE's going to be that elephant.
But, I think you've sorta foreshadowed the Slashdot reaction when the time comes, with your "borrowing" aside. If NBC starts distributing their stuff via P2P and padding it with ads, the standard Slashdot reaction will be something akin to "they think they're going to use MY bandwidth to distribute THEIR content? FUCK THEM!". There will also be a similar reaction on Digg, except that it will be also include "TPB FTW!!!!!11!cos(0)!!."
"Why use mp3 in a situation where you might be in trouble over patents? There are plenty of other codecs out there, ogg for one. Most ripper programs hat I know of can rip to ogg, and there are conversion tools. It wouldn't be hard to set up a conversion system."
Sadly, there's not much of a market for Ogg-only players. I'm perfectly aware that Slashdotters would have not the slightest issue with purchasing a FLAC-only or Ogg-only player, but we're the very tippy-top of the market. The Chinese knockoff vendors are going for the bottom 90% of the market, not the top 10%. It would be somewhat akin to releasing a music player that works only with Linux. Again, Slashdotters might have no problem with such a device, but it would not do well in the market.
Either way, my understanding is that many of the vendors that were raided were creating knockoffs with hardware designs similar to popular devices -- think iPhone clones and the like. I don't think eliminating MP3 compatibility would have saved many of them.