This bothers me, while realisticly they are just trying to build an effectivly watermarked audio sceme, I am torn between the ability of someone to prevent "theft" of there material, and my right to have an audio format that is playable on anything I own.
1. You do not have the right to play a digital audio file on anything device you own. Specifically, fair use does not guarantee the right to make digital copies.
2. You can make an analog copy with a cassette recorder, and then digitize that. This is iffy, but likely falls within fair use.
In addition to IBM, DEC also made great keyboards. The LK-201, which was on the VT-220 and VT-320 terminals, as well as the VAXstation and early Alpha workstations, is my favorite keyboard. Plus, it had all of the extra VMS keys, and not just the standard PC layout. It felt great, and real keyboard clicks, red LED's, and everything. Too bad they cannot connect to a PC! (I have a couple of Alpha's here with PC keyboards - the blasphemy!)
the case study didn't look at whether or not students were buying their cd's online. And in fact since his store's decline began two years ago, when Napster was just rolling out, it would be doubtful Napster could be the sole cause of it. A more judicious study would have examined bandwidth useage in comparison to lost sales.
Yes, but Napster is not the only method for illegally pirating and stealing MP3's, and methods existed a long time ago. Three years ago online theft of music was extremely rampant in college campuses, but they used FTP, the web, and chat rooms instead. Your logic is flawed because you are assuming piracy was non-existent before Napster, and non-significant until this summer. This is incorrect.
Slashdot doesn't take a huge slug of money from its readers to pay for monopoly profits and heavy image advertising, thus its not vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Really? Slashdot is in the business of selling comments. This comment I am writing right now becomes Slashdot's property and they make money by selling it. I have never received a paycheck for any of the hundreds of comments I have written. Slashdot keeps all of the money for the comments with the posters write to themselves.
With the record industry, the music exec's sell the work which the musicians make, but they also give it to the people who produced and wrote the music. Slashdot, on the other hand, just robs its users blind because it makes money from them without any compensation at all.
And what if you listen to, say, Celtic folk music, and the radio stations around you play Top 40?
Then you subscribe to folk music magazines, and read the reviews, and buy what sounds interesting.
What if you listen to techno, and the only radio stations you get in your car are country & western?
Then you bury your head in shame. What does techno have to do with music?
How many times have you been in a record store and picked up a CD because you thought the name of the artist was neat/you liked the cover art/your best friend knew someone who knew someone who once listened to the band?
About 75% of the 1,000+ CD I own were bought without listening to a single note first, and at least in half of the cases, not having read a review first. Getting a recommendation means it's no risk at all.
If your record store is like most, there aren't any listening stations. Are you willing to pay $22 for a CD you might hate?
No. But I'll risk $15 on what might be my next favorite CD. You can stop the lying right now: if you have trouble finding places that charge less than US$22 for new domestic CD's, then you are really clueless.
Or would you simply download three tracks from Napster, listen to them, and buy the CD if you liked those 3 tracks?
Few serious music lovers like to listen to samples first because it dilutes the experience of the album, and gives a potentially faulty impression. Moreover, you need to listen to an album in its entirety 30-40 times before you make a decision on it. The most significant investment in purchasing a new album is not the rather paltry $15 spent on it, but the 30-40 hours needed to understand it.
Though I question how it's 'stealing', as there's no actual deprivation of property going on, and a lot of times, the people doing the download are the people who wouldn't buy the album after all.
Please buy a book on copyright law. This will help to answer your questions.
- Katz has become extremely wealthy and has made millions of dollars per year from his book
- With the advent of e-books Katz (and other publishers/authors) will no longer to make money off of writing
- Katz risks losing it all with the advent of e-books, and this scares the daylights out of him
- Therefore, Katz uses his position in a multi-billion dollar media and computer hardware firm to spread FUD about e-books and discourage its adoption.
This is all fine, of course, but it is not fine when on the other hand Katz first words were "information wants to be free". His words about what "young, techno-savvy" people read is just plain insulting (game manuals?!).
Katz, e-media means that books, music, and movies will all be free to download for anyone. Please decide your position on this. You are for e-media when it doesn't affect your income, but it scares the droppings out of you when it does. As long as you are for freedom of e-music, and e-movies, but against e-books, you have absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
You are systematically doing something wrong. I own 1000+ CD's, some of which I've owned 10+ years, and have damaged 2-3 in that time period (and none in the past 8+ years). Here's a clue: you need to put them in the jewel box, and not set them out on the floor for people to step on.
As for whether making a copy is illegal or not, that is a completely separate issue from Napster which is a distibution method, and a channel for stealing, rather than a means of making archival copies. As we found out in the my.mp3.com case, having somebody else make the copy for you without license, is indeed willful copyright violation (even if you own the CD).
I was a Metallica fan but this does it for me. When a bunch of hick rock artists can blow into town and demand restrictions on the use of software in Universities it's time to put them in their place.
So, what you're saying is, that you don't care about the actual quality of the music at all, but just the politics.
You came after Lynx? So you're really new to the internet.
Contrary to popular belief, operating a newsreader and posting to Usenet is not specialized knowledge. Furthermore, what knowledge it does require is limited to operating a specific program. A monkey can learn to do this.
The only area I would expect Usenet users to be more competent that non-Usenet users is in areas specifically related to Usenet operation, such as use of news software. They may be marginally more knowledgeable about networks or computers in general, but only just.
The vast majority of communication over the internet is non-technical in nature. One's ability or lack of ability to communicate in these areas has nothing to do with the skills required to operate software. For example, one's potential contribution to a discussion about classical music has nothing at all to do with the ability to use a newsreader. Some of the most knowledgeable posters on Usenet use WebTV or AOL, and some of the least knowledgeable use text newsreaders on Unix.
And, furthermore, Usenet has never been a respectable hub of knowledge. It is nothing more than people bantering and has no respect as a resource anywhere. Unlike the web, which actually has some useful resources.
It means two things: in ECON 101 you learned (or apparently did not) that in a competitive market, price will drop to marginal cost. Since copies of information in the digital age have a marginal cost of zero, it can be seen that information does indeed want to be free.
This is a completely and thoroughly incorrect analysis. You obviously haven't taken ECON 102 yet.
- CD's are not a perfectly competitive industry
- The only perfectly competitive markets are things such as grain, corn, blank CD-R's, and notebook paper.
- CD's are not a perfectly competitive market because they are not perfectly substitubable. You cannot substitute a Patsy Cline CD for an Eminem CD.
- CD's are in a market classified as "monopolistic competition".
- Every industry in the world outside of commodity markets is under monopolistic competition. For example, the fast food restaurant is monopolistic competition: a Big Mac is not perfectly substitutable for a Whopper, and their respective sellers have a monopoly on each product.
- Monopolistic competition is by any definition good for the consumer. Consumers value variety and are willing to pay for it.
- If CD's were perfectly competitive and substitutable, there would be only one CD title, which you could buy anywhere. This is bad.
- The marginal cost of delivering information electronically is not zero. There are constant costs such as electricity, additional bandwith expense, and so forth, which increase in cost as you deliver more product.
For christs sake, Napsters servers hold no copyrighted works. End of story. How can you be sued for copyright infringement when you didn't copy anything???
Napster is not being sued for copyright infringement. They are being sued for contributory copyright infringement.
Just how are they encouraging their users to copy music illegally when they have a clear license agreement prohibiting this when you sign on for their service.
a. Internal documents at the companies creation indicate that they were created solely in order to facilitate copyright infringement, and to put the record industy players, large and small, out of business.
b. They have the technical means to allow only pre-approved files to be listed in their system, but they choose not to do this.
Please read Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's judgment which granted the preliminary injunction. It will help answer your questions.
I don't donate money to EFF because I don't agree with their principles. I think DeCSS should be outlawed and the authors should be criminally prosecuted, and I certainly think online companies should be able to collect any information you send their way, and that they should be able to use it or do anything they want with it. But, as well all know, Commander Taco (I'm not sure about ESR) is a poster-boy for the EFF, agrees with them on every issue, and is worth (literally) tens of millions of dollars, yet (to the public's knowledge) has donated no money, not even a few dollars, to the EFF. Why is that?
My theory: He doesn't actually care about or understand the issues at stake, but knows he can get millions of dollars of page views if he creates controversy, and yet appears to be on the side of his customers, on Slashdot.
Since you base your buying decisions on politics and not technology, you still have many choices: IDT, Transmeta, Cyrix, API, etc. I don't know if all of these manufacturers have unlocked FSB multipliers, but you may want to check some of them out!
And don't forget about ESR who upon the day he became worth $30 million (about 90% of which he has since lost) bragged that he wouldn't donate it to charity. So I guess he hasn't given anything to the EFF.
How much has Commander Taco donated to the EFF? He owns like 4 or 5 Ferrari's, and is worth tens of millions of dollars, but to my knowledge he hasn't sent a cent into the EFF.
However, what is missing is that 90%+ of all musicians are in contracts that do not allow them to leave to create music for other companies, or even to own the music they create. Take that and add in the profit-gluttony (illegal anti-trust stuff too) of the RIAA, and we have a problem that is not correctable through legal means.
Congrautulations, you win the award for making the comment with the longest distance from the point.
Last time I checked, deciding not to purchase an item was a legal means of protesting business practices which you disagree with.
So (for the musicians) is deciding not to sign the contract. They chose to do it out of their own free will. It's their fault that they didn't have the foresight or the talent to negotiate a better contract.
If the RIAA *really* wants to find out if Napster is about greed or a
new business model, it'll go into competition with Napster. Surely
the RIAA knows how to set up a web server big enough to sell the same
content available via Napster.
I know you're really new to this, but Napster is not a web site, and it does not sell songs. You are thinking of EMUSIC, which is a web site which sells songs. RIAA is not in the business of selling music - you are thinking of the record companies. The record companies are already competing with EMUSIC. Several months ago, Capitol put up Dark Side of the Moon for sale online, for example.
Black
markets aren't about greed -- they're about buying what you want to
buy, not necessarily what's for sale.
Riiiiiight. All of those billionaire drug lords who risk there life in the free world smuggling drugs into the country do it because they want to expand the marketplace. Uh huh. Yep.
Contrary to what you claim, you can buy whatever Napster lists. Just buy the CD and use your computer to digitize it.
Napster functions exactly like a black market, except that the price
is solely your time spent finding a good copy of what you want.
And potentially a law suit from the owner of the property you steal.
Whenever you interfere with a market -- whenever
you tell people that they can't buy something -- you get a black
market.
Right. Kind of like those markets for stolen credit card numbers, kiddie porn, and plutonium.
No major American corporation would move to Africa. In most African countries, where there is electricity, it goes off regularly. There is no good transportation or communications infrastructure. These are temporary problems, which can be cured, but there are deeper problems. In many African countries a majority of the residents are illiterate, and very, very few are college grads. But there is also civil unrest; in Sierra Leone, armed forces are taking over the diamond mines, for example. Why wouldn't they take over computer centers? These countries do not have adequate national defense. Although some computer companies have had success in third world countries -- for example, Intel has plants in Malaysia and Costa Rica -- they are limited to manufacturing jobs. Information driven jobs are limited to the skilled workforce which those countries do not have.
You are incorrect. Herbert von Karajan was worth 1/2 billion Deustchmarks when he died. Paul McCartney is worth at least as much. Master P is one of the richest people in the world under age 40. And those are the very richest, very biggest stars. Many, many, many other musicians have more modest wealth (millions or tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions). If record companies are stealing away artists money, how did these musicians become extremely wealthy? Do they rob banks when they're not recording?
Slashdot Mirror
If you make a perfect digital copy, the watermark will be preserved perfectly also. You don't understand how this technology works, do you?
The analog transfer will probably introduce enough noise to destroy most watermarking schemes.
Proof please? Please give a demonstration that an analog transfer will degrade the frequencies of the watermark but not the music.
For instance, connect your soundcard "out" to your "in" and record--there's no getting around that.
Oh my. You are really new to this.
This bothers me, while realisticly they are just trying to build an effectivly watermarked audio sceme, I am torn between the ability of someone to prevent "theft" of there material, and my right to have an audio format that is playable on anything I own.
1. You do not have the right to play a digital audio file on anything device you own. Specifically, fair use does not guarantee the right to make digital copies.
2. You can make an analog copy with a cassette recorder, and then digitize that. This is iffy, but likely falls within fair use.
In addition to IBM, DEC also made great keyboards. The LK-201, which was on the VT-220 and VT-320 terminals, as well as the VAXstation and early Alpha workstations, is my favorite keyboard. Plus, it had all of the extra VMS keys, and not just the standard PC layout. It felt great, and real keyboard clicks, red LED's, and everything. Too bad they cannot connect to a PC! (I have a couple of Alpha's here with PC keyboards - the blasphemy!)
In fact, a whopping 72% of Americans feel that big businesses have gained too much control over many aspects of their lives.
A whopping 72% of teenage girls think that N*Sync is the best group ever, but that doesn't mean they're right.
the case study didn't look at whether or not students were buying their cd's online. And in fact since his store's decline began two years ago, when Napster was just rolling out, it would be doubtful Napster could be the sole cause of it. A more judicious study would have examined bandwidth useage in comparison to lost sales.
Yes, but Napster is not the only method for illegally pirating and stealing MP3's, and methods existed a long time ago. Three years ago online theft of music was extremely rampant in college campuses, but they used FTP, the web, and chat rooms instead. Your logic is flawed because you are assuming piracy was non-existent before Napster, and non-significant until this summer. This is incorrect.
Slashdot doesn't take a huge slug of money from its readers to pay for monopoly profits and heavy image advertising, thus its not vulnerable to this kind of attack.
Really? Slashdot is in the business of selling comments. This comment I am writing right now becomes Slashdot's property and they make money by selling it. I have never received a paycheck for any of the hundreds of comments I have written. Slashdot keeps all of the money for the comments with the posters write to themselves.
With the record industry, the music exec's sell the work which the musicians make, but they also give it to the people who produced and wrote the music. Slashdot, on the other hand, just robs its users blind because it makes money from them without any compensation at all.
And what if you listen to, say, Celtic folk music, and the radio stations around you play Top 40?
Then you subscribe to folk music magazines, and read the reviews, and buy what sounds interesting.
What if you listen to techno, and the only radio stations you get in your car are country & western?
Then you bury your head in shame. What does techno have to do with music?
How many times have you been in a record store and picked up a CD because you thought the name of the artist was neat/you liked the cover art/your best friend knew someone who knew someone who once listened to the band?
About 75% of the 1,000+ CD I own were bought without listening to a single note first, and at least in half of the cases, not having read a review first. Getting a recommendation means it's no risk at all.
If your record store is like most, there aren't any listening stations. Are you willing to pay $22 for a CD you might hate?
No. But I'll risk $15 on what might be my next favorite CD. You can stop the lying right now: if you have trouble finding places that charge less than US$22 for new domestic CD's, then you are really clueless.
Or would you simply download three tracks from Napster, listen to them, and buy the CD if you liked those 3 tracks?
Few serious music lovers like to listen to samples first because it dilutes the experience of the album, and gives a potentially faulty impression. Moreover, you need to listen to an album in its entirety 30-40 times before you make a decision on it. The most significant investment in purchasing a new album is not the rather paltry $15 spent on it, but the 30-40 hours needed to understand it.
Though I question how it's 'stealing', as there's no actual deprivation of property going on, and a lot of times, the people doing the download are the people who wouldn't buy the album after all.
Please buy a book on copyright law. This will help to answer your questions.
Face it: Napster is the only interesting thing going on in the pus filled trough called the music industry. The only interesting thing in years...
Oh boy. It looks like someone hasn't listened to Pierre Boulez's new one yet.
- Katz has become extremely wealthy and has made millions of dollars per year from his book
- With the advent of e-books Katz (and other publishers/authors) will no longer to make money off of writing
- Katz risks losing it all with the advent of e-books, and this scares the daylights out of him
- Therefore, Katz uses his position in a multi-billion dollar media and computer hardware firm to spread FUD about e-books and discourage its adoption.
This is all fine, of course, but it is not fine when on the other hand Katz first words were "information wants to be free". His words about what "young, techno-savvy" people read is just plain insulting (game manuals?!).
Katz, e-media means that books, music, and movies will all be free to download for anyone. Please decide your position on this. You are for e-media when it doesn't affect your income, but it scares the droppings out of you when it does. As long as you are for freedom of e-music, and e-movies, but against e-books, you have absolutely no credibility whatsoever.
You are systematically doing something wrong. I own 1000+ CD's, some of which I've owned 10+ years, and have damaged 2-3 in that time period (and none in the past 8+ years). Here's a clue: you need to put them in the jewel box, and not set them out on the floor for people to step on.
As for whether making a copy is illegal or not, that is a completely separate issue from Napster which is a distibution method, and a channel for stealing, rather than a means of making archival copies. As we found out in the my.mp3.com case, having somebody else make the copy for you without license, is indeed willful copyright violation (even if you own the CD).
I was a Metallica fan but this does it for me. When a bunch of hick rock artists can blow into town and demand restrictions on the use of software in Universities it's time to put them in their place. So, what you're saying is, that you don't care about the actual quality of the music at all, but just the politics.
It's just had to recall the P4.
Let's get this moderated down. Any post with a fact as clueless and incorrect as this needs to be moderated down.
Huh? What does using the internet have to do with being geek?
You came after Lynx? So you're really new to the internet.
Contrary to popular belief, operating a newsreader and posting to Usenet is not specialized knowledge. Furthermore, what knowledge it does require is limited to operating a specific program. A monkey can learn to do this.
The only area I would expect Usenet users to be more competent that non-Usenet users is in areas specifically related to Usenet operation, such as use of news software. They may be marginally more knowledgeable about networks or computers in general, but only just.
The vast majority of communication over the internet is non-technical in nature. One's ability or lack of ability to communicate in these areas has nothing to do with the skills required to operate software. For example, one's potential contribution to a discussion about classical music has nothing at all to do with the ability to use a newsreader. Some of the most knowledgeable posters on Usenet use WebTV or AOL, and some of the least knowledgeable use text newsreaders on Unix.
And, furthermore, Usenet has never been a respectable hub of knowledge. It is nothing more than people bantering and has no respect as a resource anywhere. Unlike the web, which actually has some useful resources.
It means two things: in ECON 101 you learned (or apparently did not) that in a competitive market, price will drop to marginal cost. Since copies of information in the digital age have a marginal cost of zero, it can be seen that information does indeed want to be free.
This is a completely and thoroughly incorrect analysis. You obviously haven't taken ECON 102 yet.
- CD's are not a perfectly competitive industry
- The only perfectly competitive markets are things such as grain, corn, blank CD-R's, and notebook paper.
- CD's are not a perfectly competitive market because they are not perfectly substitubable. You cannot substitute a Patsy Cline CD for an Eminem CD.
- CD's are in a market classified as "monopolistic competition".
- Every industry in the world outside of commodity markets is under monopolistic competition. For example, the fast food restaurant is monopolistic competition: a Big Mac is not perfectly substitutable for a Whopper, and their respective sellers have a monopoly on each product.
- Monopolistic competition is by any definition good for the consumer. Consumers value variety and are willing to pay for it.
- If CD's were perfectly competitive and substitutable, there would be only one CD title, which you could buy anywhere. This is bad.
- The marginal cost of delivering information electronically is not zero. There are constant costs such as electricity, additional bandwith expense, and so forth, which increase in cost as you deliver more product.
For christs sake, Napsters servers hold no copyrighted works. End of story. How can you be sued for copyright infringement when you didn't copy anything???
Napster is not being sued for copyright infringement. They are being sued for contributory copyright infringement.
Just how are they encouraging their users to copy music illegally when they have a clear license agreement prohibiting this when you sign on for their service.
a. Internal documents at the companies creation indicate that they were created solely in order to facilitate copyright infringement, and to put the record industy players, large and small, out of business.
b. They have the technical means to allow only pre-approved files to be listed in their system, but they choose not to do this.
Please read Judge Marilyn Hall Patel's judgment which granted the preliminary injunction. It will help answer your questions.
I don't donate money to EFF because I don't agree with their principles. I think DeCSS should be outlawed and the authors should be criminally prosecuted, and I certainly think online companies should be able to collect any information you send their way, and that they should be able to use it or do anything they want with it. But, as well all know, Commander Taco (I'm not sure about ESR) is a poster-boy for the EFF, agrees with them on every issue, and is worth (literally) tens of millions of dollars, yet (to the public's knowledge) has donated no money, not even a few dollars, to the EFF. Why is that?
My theory: He doesn't actually care about or understand the issues at stake, but knows he can get millions of dollars of page views if he creates controversy, and yet appears to be on the side of his customers, on Slashdot.
Since you base your buying decisions on politics and not technology, you still have many choices: IDT, Transmeta, Cyrix, API, etc. I don't know if all of these manufacturers have unlocked FSB multipliers, but you may want to check some of them out!
Indeed.
And don't forget about ESR who upon the day he became worth $30 million (about 90% of which he has since lost) bragged that he wouldn't donate it to charity. So I guess he hasn't given anything to the EFF.
How much has Commander Taco donated to the EFF? He owns like 4 or 5 Ferrari's, and is worth tens of millions of dollars, but to my knowledge he hasn't sent a cent into the EFF.
However, what is missing is that 90%+ of all musicians are in contracts that do not allow them to leave to create music for other companies, or even to own the music they create. Take that and add in the profit-gluttony (illegal anti-trust stuff too) of the RIAA, and we have a problem that is not correctable through legal means.
Congrautulations, you win the award for making the comment with the longest distance from the point.
Last time I checked, deciding not to purchase an item was a legal means of protesting business practices which you disagree with.
So (for the musicians) is deciding not to sign the contract. They chose to do it out of their own free will. It's their fault that they didn't have the foresight or the talent to negotiate a better contract.
If the RIAA *really* wants to find out if Napster is about greed or a
new business model, it'll go into competition with Napster. Surely
the RIAA knows how to set up a web server big enough to sell the same
content available via Napster.
I know you're really new to this, but Napster is not a web site, and it does not sell songs. You are thinking of EMUSIC, which is a web site which sells songs. RIAA is not in the business of selling music - you are thinking of the record companies. The record companies are already competing with EMUSIC. Several months ago, Capitol put up Dark Side of the Moon for sale online, for example.
Black
markets aren't about greed -- they're about buying what you want to
buy, not necessarily what's for sale.
Riiiiiight. All of those billionaire drug lords who risk there life in the free world smuggling drugs into the country do it because they want to expand the marketplace. Uh huh. Yep.
Contrary to what you claim, you can buy whatever Napster lists. Just buy the CD and use your computer to digitize it.
Napster functions exactly like a black market, except that the price
is solely your time spent finding a good copy of what you want.
And potentially a law suit from the owner of the property you steal.
Whenever you interfere with a market -- whenever
you tell people that they can't buy something -- you get a black
market.
Right. Kind of like those markets for stolen credit card numbers, kiddie porn, and plutonium.
No major American corporation would move to Africa. In most African countries, where there is electricity, it goes off regularly. There is no good transportation or communications infrastructure. These are temporary problems, which can be cured, but there are deeper problems. In many African countries a majority of the residents are illiterate, and very, very few are college grads. But there is also civil unrest; in Sierra Leone, armed forces are taking over the diamond mines, for example. Why wouldn't they take over computer centers? These countries do not have adequate national defense. Although some computer companies have had success in third world countries -- for example, Intel has plants in Malaysia and Costa Rica -- they are limited to manufacturing jobs. Information driven jobs are limited to the skilled workforce which those countries do not have.
You are incorrect. Herbert von Karajan was worth 1/2 billion Deustchmarks when he died. Paul McCartney is worth at least as much. Master P is one of the richest people in the world under age 40. And those are the very richest, very biggest stars. Many, many, many other musicians have more modest wealth (millions or tens of millions instead of hundreds of millions). If record companies are stealing away artists money, how did these musicians become extremely wealthy? Do they rob banks when they're not recording?