Copy Protection - Scapegoat or Real Threat? 403
ZenShadow asks: "Okay. The RIAA is screaming about MP3s being a problem because they
can be digitally copied and distributed. Now we have this recent
slashdot article in which the FCC cites copy protection as a key
issue in digital TV standards. My question is this: We've had cassette tape recorders and VCRs for years now, so why is this such a big deal? Is this just an excuse by the industry to hold back the advancement of technology, or is the ease of distribution -really- that much of an issue?"
MP3s are a monkey wrentch in their plans (Score:1)
Re:Plain old greed. Well, and stupidity. (Score:1)
Re:It's not about IP; it's about control (Score:1)
Being that I like a lot of punk music, I feel very strongly that I must support the bands and their smaller labels. Therefore I purchase a lot of CD's. Now, my budget is not large enough to purchase everything I remotely find cool, so I don't. I purchase within my generous limits.
On some levels, I am criminal. However, this is not much different than grabbing a box of CD's from a friends house, and listening or sampling them all.
My opinion is that the RIAA is justified in protecting copyright. I'm sure that for every person like me, who wants to be a good consumer, there are many who will take advantage of a given situation.
Luckily, those I choose to support, at least get the majority of what I give them, over costs. The same can't be said for artists on Sony or WEA/Atlantic labels. The last two not only stiff the consumer, they stiff the artists too. Too bad I can't get addresses for many of their artists, to mail money in -- because I'm not supporting their ologopolized distribution network.
Did CDR kill CD music industry? No. (Score:1)
It's about control (Score:1)
Of course we can copy tapes and CD's but the record companies basically have a lock on the distribution channels.
But with MP3, anyone on the net can have a site. Even if the site is removed, another one can spring up in a matter of hours. They can no longer prevent 'illicit distribution'.
Mark Edwards [mailto]
Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
Re:Not just a scapegoat (Score:1)
256k (Score:1)
Re:From a libertarian standpoint . . . (Score:1)
This is absolutely rich...
:)
Re:My thoughts... (Score:1)
You talk about art as if it is ideas. You are roughly equating an algorythm for encrypting text with "Starry Night".
I personally oppose patent law, but I would like to hear why you feel you "own" a song just because you heard someone play it.
Thanks
Unauthorized Copying (Score:2)
Where Unauthorized Copying becomes a profit issue is in some of the non-EU European countries, Southeast Asia and China. In these countries there are organized groups of people who make massive amounts of copies for sale. In many areas these people have better distribution chains than the legitimate producers. When you couple it with the fact that they usually have better prices as well, and there is little enforcement of IP law in these countries, the legitimate producers can have trouble selling to these markets.
Even though I see a legitimate threat to the producers posed by such copying, I still consider it a primarily scapegoat issue. Many of the organizations involved (eg. RIAA, SPA, MPA) are trying to strengthen IP law in the US, often to the point where it steamrolls over First Ammendment rights and long standing convention (such as fair use and contract by mutual consent). Here they use unauthorized copying as a scapegoat, and produce bogus figures to try to justify unconcionable actions.
To touch on Copy Protection, it's just a technical solution (as opposed to a legal solution) to impede unauthorized copying. It has been shown time and time again to be an ineffective solution at best. At worst it has actually cut into the producers' sales, for example the video tapes with copy protection that impairs video quality when you're watching the original. Another good example is if the DeCSS lawsuit somehow gets a verdict in the DVD people's favor, it will directly harm DVD sales, since fewer people will have DVD players available to them.
----
Re:Irony? (Score:2)
It's not that they're paying too much attention to copy protection, there really isn't any for cds. It's the fact that they're trying to take action against the MP3 format, which is legitimately used by many to make perfectly legal copies of cds that they own. Sure, there's piracy, but there's piracy in almost every media format. They just need to live with it or develop media that they can protect better. If I can't make personal copies, then I simply won't purchase that media.
The film industry screwed up by creating a pathetically weak protection scheme for DVDs. They then proceeded to try to take away people's rights when the scheme was broken. The record industry screwed up by trying to take away people's rights because they feel threatened by MP3s.
Re:Give people a break (Score:2)
Whether MP3 makes piracy easy or not, the RIAA is not justified in attacking it. I use it to make personal copies of my CDs, which is perfectly legal (although the RIAA would love to get rid of that right). They have ulterior motives in this case and I don't want to see them further degrade our rights. Copyright isn't a God-given right that they posess. It's granted to them by the government, but there are conditions attached. They're trying to get around these.
If they want to make their music harder to copy, that's their right. If it gets to the point that personal copies are too difficult to make, then I'll take that into consideration when I'm deciding whether or not to buy their product. Otherwise, they have no right to screw with my ability to make legitimate copies of CDs that I've already purchased. I purchased them with the understanding that I could make personal copies. Trying to take that ability away after I've already purchased the product is just a scam. Who the hell are they to try to take away my ability to exercise my right to copy music that I've purchased legitimately?
huh? (Score:2)
I just bought 2 cds in the last couple weeks that I would not have bought had I not been able to listen to the mp3s first. They were from rather obscure bands (here in the states anyway). I liked the songs I heard though, so I bought the cds. This wasn't the first time either. I don't have a large MP3 collection. I do have some that are illegal, but most are from CDs that I now own. As for the illegal ones, I have no intention of buying the whole cd when I only like one song. If the record companies were smart, they'd sell custom-made cds online and then I would actually buy these songs. Nevertheless, they didn't lose a sale since they were never going to get that sale in the first place. It certainly doesn't seem like the situation is much worse than it was with cassette tapes.
If the RIAA would quit trying to whip up a hysteria about piracy to convince the public that any and all copying is illegal, perhaps I'd be more inclined to consider their point of view. As it stands, I don't feel an ounce of sympathy for them. They are the true pirates. As long as they are going to try to deceive people, they deserve whatever they get.
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
You DO have lifetime rights to personal playback.
Then please explain the DeCSS suit which is based on the fact that it might fascillitate making that backup you speak of. (And the holdup of Audio DVD until they can make it nearly impossable for the home user again). Also explain the RIAA resisting the existance of consumer priced CD-R drives and the attempts to get CDROM drive manufacturers to prevent audio ripping (unsuccessful attempts obviously).
It would seem that RIAA and the movie industry are doing their best not to provide me with the rights I am supposedly paying for.
Re:It's a paradigm change on the part of the indus (Score:2)
In this, it's important to realize that the lack of CDs does not mean that revenues from the sale of music will go down.
Given that mp3.com splits 50/50 with the artist and the record companies are more like 90/10 ( and that's before the various creative accounting methods and making the band pay for every last thing out of their 10%), the artists stand to make MORE money with mp3 releases than they do now. Consider if the music sells to the consumer, but the artists percentage is 5 times greater.
MP3s will not reduce the demand for live concerts. The demand will be there, and there will still be money to be made. There will also be people with front money who want a piece of the action. So some of the names might change, but concerts will be funded by people with money who want to make more money, just like it is now. Concert promoters aren't likely to quit and get a day job because of mp3.
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
In the US at least, personal use copies are explicitly permitted under fair use. That will change very soon due to new legislation.
Re:It's a paradigm change on the part of the indus (Score:2)
Anyway, my point was that mainstream labels have a stranglehold on the mediums of promotion.
Currently, they have an almost absolute stranglehold. However, once they start to loose their grip, things change. mp3.com can't promote as well as a major label because radio stations can't risk offending the majors. If mp3 could get play on a radio station in a large market, things would start to change. Unfortunatly, that's easier said than done, but in time it can happen. For purposes of this arguement, MTV is a radio station with a HUGE market.
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
Uh, no, if I steal something, that is theft. If I copy something, that is copyright infringement, perhaps, unless it falls under fair-use or the other (vanishing under lobbying pressure) loopholes for individuals and personal use. If I copy something and then redistribute it, this is almost certainly unauthorized redistribution unless you have given me permission.
Further, all of the above are legal (although perhaps incorrect, IANAL and so on) terms; you appear to be dangerously close to conflating legality and morality. I don't always agree with the speed limit in a particular zone, but I generally follow it (unless I'm making a traffic hazard of myself by being the only person driving less than 20 miles an hour over it, but anyway..); similarly, I probably have pirated far less material even than you have, but I can still think that the current enforcement of copyright law (and perhaps the law itself) is dumb and has more to do with financial and political power than with morals or ethics.
Please keep your terms and realms of reasoning separate and clear; it makes it so much easier to have rational discussions instead of namecalling.
Thanks,
Daniel
Re:DIVX (Score:2)
Daniel
Three words: Digital Audio Tape (Score:2)
Do you remember Digital Audio Tape? Shortly after CDs (the digital equivalent of a vinyl record) became popular, the Digital Audio Tape was introduced, with the hopes (by some) that it would becom the digital equivalent of the cassette tape. Unfortunately, the RIAA was as afraid of DAT then as they are of MP3 now. A DAT could potentially make a first generation pristine copy of a CD -- which would have ruined the market for CDs.
So the RIAA lobbied legislators and filed lawsuits ... and the end result was legislation was passed mandating that DAT decks that could write DATs had to have copy guard circuitry that would prevent copying CDs (or other commercial DATs). The requirement for the copy guard reduced demand, and without demand the manufacturers wouldn't lower prices. Today it's almost impossible to buy a DAT deck, which is exactly what RIAA wanted. And what happened to DAT technology? The manufacturers built it into computer tape drives for backing up hard drives, and camcorders.
The Catch-22 of Creating a New Distribution Media (Score:2)
Theres a fundamental problem with creating any new type of distribution media:
These three things are played out constantly in the marketplace. Right now, we're seeing a push by the publishers to prevent a massive move towards the more portable, and cheaper-to-produce MP3 format (the quality issue I'll leave for the audiophiles amongst us).
It's my opinion that traditional mediums such as CD have, reached the limit of quality that the market will bear. Since a significant portion of music-listeners can't hear the difference between CD quality and DAT quality for most applications, no one is going to successfully market a new format with 10 times better quality than CD. That leaves portability (MP3 has excellent portability) and cost (MP3 distribution can be very inexpensive compared to moving crates of CDs).
MP3 is thus the most competitive format to come along since the advent of CDs, IMO. I suspect that either MP3 or another digital format will exist alongside CD for quite a while. Consumers WANT to be able to copy things though, and that will definitely have an impact on which digital format will make it with buyers.
Of course, the really interesting stuff to watch won't be in audio at all, but in video...
~Acheron
11000010 10001001 10100011 10000011 10001000
Right Idea, but Wrong Target... (Score:2)
It's an attempt by the media to kill the concept of fair use. Their goal isn't malicious; frankly I'd be less disgusted with them if it were. No, the motive is plain and simple: pure, unadulterated greed. And not even by the artists, mind you (the artists only ever see a comparatively tiny fraction of the mopney their work makes). It's by the execs.
The media, particularly the recording industry, would love nothing more than to make all media pay-per-view (or per-hear, or per-read, or whatever is appropriate to the given medium). It's far more lucrative than being sponsor-based. HBO can tell you that one; I've never seen any commercials on their various channels, except for things on other HBO-affiliated channels, and yet they make huge amounts of money. They're not strictly pay-per-view, I know, but the concept is similar.
Now, if this money went to the people who actually made the works, I wouldn't mind so much. Artists should be paid for their creations; they work hard to bring them to life. But very little of the money goes to the artists, actually. Or to the people who do the work to make the media on which the works are distributed. An artist may make a million dollars, but untold millions more go to execs who haven't done anything but give contractual deals which no one in their right mind in any other industry would ever take.
Nope; the media wants to kill fair use because it's not lucrative for them. This was never much of an issue before, because it was impossible to realize; how does one make a local file on a hard disk pay-per-view without the Net to connect to a server? But now, with today's advances, it is possible for them to do this. Witness DIVX as a proof-of-concept. Yeah, DIVX died, but that was only because no one supported it; if everyone had gone to DIVX rather than DVD, there would have been no choice. And the only reason no one went for DIVX was because unless everyone had gone for it, the public wouldn't have stood for it, and you can't count on everyone doing anything.
Frankly, this is a scary time as far as the media is concerned. As long as the people make it out with their rights intact, I'm OK with whatever happens. But the media industries don't want that, not necessarily out of any wish to destroy people's rights, but simply out of a lust for The Almighty Dollar.
Sick, isn't it?
Other reasons they probably worry... (Score:2)
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
"total logical disconnect" (Score:2)
The RIAA bugs the shit out of me (as does the MPAA). I understand that the labels and the artists have legal and voluntary contracts that give the recording companies the exclusive right to distribute their music, and that's fine. I do realize that when I download an MP3 from a CD I don't own and don't subsequently buy, I have hurt the label, and to a lesser extent, the artist. I do not know for sure, but I have heard that the artist's cut from a $15 CD is about 25 cents, and certainly under $1. Soooooo, if an album sells a million copies, assuming even the $1 figure, the artist receives $1,000,000 (only $400,000 if it's a quarter). BUT, a combination of hearsay and gut feeling says the LABEL gets, ohhhh, $5,000,000? My issue with the actions of the RIAA is that they're acting the typical corporate hypocrite. They *claim* that they're "looking out for the artists", or that it's somehow about the "artist's rights", blah blah blah. Assuming the figures I've used are not total fabrications, the label is getting anywhere from 5 to 20(!) times as much money as the artist is, so it's pretty obvious to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of arithmetic just WHOSE interests the RIAA is looking out for, eh? Something I considered doing is, when I have the chance, acquire a CDR copy of a CD I want, then send the artist a check for $5. That way, I end up paying maybe $2 to the friend who made me the copy (or myself I had a recorder), and $5 to the artist, netting myself basically a 50% discount off the retail price. Everyone's better off but the damned hypocritical labels. This is a moral stand against the labels' behavior of which I do not really approve. HOWEVER, I have not done this, and the reason is simple. On the back of my Libertarian Party membership card, it says this:
"We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others do live in whatever manner they choose."
I really believe in that principle. And I know that when I deny the labels their cut, which they have arranged by legal and voluntary contract, I am "forcibly interfering" with their rights. So I have not embarked on my CDR-getting & check-mailing endeavor. I do still occasionally download MP3s and not buy the source album (usually for soundtrack songs and one-hit-wonders), or make a handful of MP3s from a friend's CD that's not good enough to earn my dollars. But on the bright side, and what the RIAA *totally* ignores, is that often I get an MP3 and it spurs me to buy a CD, or even several. Not too long ago, I got a couple of Type O Negative MP3s, "Haunted", and "Cinnamon Girl". Now I have 4 Type O CDs. If it weren't for what the RIAA blankets as "piracy", I doubt I ever would have discovered this wonderful music. If I'd never got to download Corrosion of Conformity's "Albatross", I never would have purchased "Deliverance". A whole bunch of Rammstein files I got a while back prompted me to buy both of their albums. Same story for Stabbing Westward. But there's a rub here, too. All 4 of those Type O CDs were purchased USED. So what? The thing is, when a CD is purchased by a distributor and subsequently sold to a retailer (or some other outlet), then and only then is a cut given to the label (and the artist). The Joe Q. Public who originally bought the copy of "October Rust" I have now did in fact help to line the pockets of Roadrunner Records, BUT I DID NOT (at least not directly). I have a feeling that the RIAA knows this, and secretly hates used record stores for that reason. But there's no way they could pass off a ban on used sales on any sane person. That's why, as an earlier very eloquent post noted, that all media distribution industries lust for self-destructing or limited-use media. Witness DIVX. It was great for the industry. It was like pay-per-view with media. But it sucked for the consumer, and we knew it, and we voted with our dollars. I don't know where I'm going with this, so I'll change the subject again.
The other thing I don't like about the RIAA's attempts to run MP3 out of town on a rail is they completely deny any legitimate use of the format. I'll tell you what, if there were no Internet, I would still dig MP3. Why? I'm no audiophile. I honestly can't tell the difference between a decent 128K/44KHz MP3 and a CD (or even between VHS and DVD most of the time). So rather than buying a 100 disc CD changer or whatever, it's perfectly convenient for me to make MP3s of the songs I really like and keep them on my computer(s). In my main music directory, I have 538 songs using about 2.8GB of space. I would guess that less than 100 of those songs are "illegitimate". Most of them are just copies of songs that I legitimately own and simply wish to have available in a different format. I don't want a Rio (or whatever) to play "Internet music", I want it because it's small, doesn't skip, and lets me mix'n'match my songs. But the RIAA doesn't dig that. In their minds (or at least their press releases), MP3=piracy. But their wrong, and that's why SDMI will fail (oh please oh please oh please). I, as a consumer, benefit not at all from SDMI over plain MP3. Nor, I would imagine, do any of the rest of us. And the wonderful thing is that since there is plenty of open-source software for the creation and playback of MP3 files, that no one, not the RIAA, not the US gov't, NO ONE CAN EVER TAKE IT AWAY. But the RIAA either doesn't see it, or just won't admit it, and that's their total logical disconnect.
MoNsTeR
(obligatory links: www.lp.org www.self-gov.org)
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
Re:Copying is just one element (Score:2)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:Copying is just one element (Score:2)
Sure, the quality was bad, but that's because they were shooting the screen from a bad angle in bad lighting, instead of copying the signal directly from the reel.
The Anime fansubs (Japanese Animation that has been translated and subtitled by one of the anime fanbase, usually a non-commercial venture) do this with anime tapes that are imported but not commercially available in the US in a translated/subtitled form.
Nothing can stop one from turning something like this into a full digital video file (numerous formats). While large, they are distributable (look at the ISO situation with Linux now). All that's needed is sufficient bandwidth and/or a little time.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:But it's so easy (Score:2)
Copy protection merely supresses legitemate uses of copying procedures (fair copy). True pirates merely find a way around it. Why do you think there's warez sites devoted to software cracks and key generators?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
WRONG! (Score:2)
You're making illegal copies of music and distributing it
No. Copying is not illegal. It falls under fair copying. For backup purposes. You've already bought the music. Technically, if you want, you can make a half-billion copies of the music, once you've bought it.
Distributing it is what's illegal. Transferring a copy of a work to another person who hasn't paid for it is against the law. It's theft.
You claim to have not bought music because it was available on the net or from friends. This doesn't mean that everyone else exists on the same level of moral turpitude. Personally, I own several MP3 compilation CD's. ALL of the music on them comes from my CD collection, or was bought, legally, from an online distributor.
Simply because one person might (or is proven to) be doing something isn't a reason to remove the rights of those who follow the rules/laws.
Merely tacking more laws into the books does not help the problem. Nor do exotic encoding/protection schemes. They were created, they can be cracked *COUGHDeCSSCOUGH*.
You're removing choice from people who abide by the laws, and you're not affecting the actual thieves at all. Just one more rule they ignore. Just a little extra effort to break another copy protection scheme.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
As for what your employer was doing - either they're just playing it safe or its more to do with your contractual obligations to your suppliers (non-disclosure, or whatever) than copyright.
there is a solution to this (Score:2)
DVD's are priced very reasonably, very little
more than video tapes cost before the advent of
DVD's. In fact, very little more than CD's.
It is the price of CD's that is driving the
"theft" of music and is helping push MP3 as an
alternative. They are cutting their own throats
by charging so much. If the price of CD's were
cut in half, CD's would sell like candy and the
studios would still make just as much profit.
And this would cut the legs out from under the
"theft" of music. MP3 would still advance but
not as quickly.
I don't think DVD's will have this problem that
music has, because the price is more reasonable,
for what you get.
Re:Doublespeak (Score:2)
I strongly disagree with that. He's actually doing quite the reverse - asking others not to use emotionally-loaded language which manipulates people psychologically without their conscious consent. The terms he and RMS have chosen are devoid of emotionl content. If we use neutral terms to discuss the issues then we are far more likely to get to the heart of the matter and reach an agreement.
As for the so-called "pro-life" people - don't get me started. Who could be "anti-life"? If I ever had any sympathy for their cause, their selfish and narrow-minded attempts to monopolise our preception of the truth have turned me off them forever. But my resistance is not an argument to let them continue, because their manipulation of the less clueful millions endangers even the freedom of the few who can filter out the crap.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:DIVX (Score:2)
If this is such a huge issue then why not complain about the bazillions of AOL and Compuserve CD's that come attached to Computer magazines?
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Doublespeak (Score:2)
I'm not saying a case against abortion can't be made (and I myself have mixed feelings about it) but in this particular instance the mistake you've made is in attempting to reason backwards from a given conclusion (that abortion is wrong). We all tend to do that on occasion if we forget to challenge our own assumptions from time to time.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
The record industry is under no obligation to replace damaged media, or to offer a discount on multiple purchases of the same software, but that doesn't affect your rights to make backup copies of software you have legally purchased.
Re:It's a paradigm change on the part of the indus (Score:2)
A dumb band will spend tons of money recording their album, then sit on their asses and expect their label to promote the hell out of them and make them rich.
A smart band will do everything they can to get people interested in attending their concerts. They will allow audience taping, put out free MP3s, tour their asses off
Besides, getting hit on the head by the pot of gold is pretty much a matter of chance. How many talented latin bands with good songs just faded out of the picture while the Macerana was played to death on the radio?
Of course it's an issue. (Score:2)
While I feel that outlawing (or even trying to outlaw) mp3's is illegal and unethical, the record companies especially have a lot to fear from them. If digital distribution of music becomes easy, then their whole business model falls apart.
One thing I think should be understood: record companies for the most part don't really sell music, they sell marketing. It's a value-added business. Nobody really buys Britney Spears CD's because she's so talented; it's the whole marketing image that people buy.
And you can fool people into thinking that a second generation cassette tape isn't good enough; that they need to have the original. With digital copying, this pretty much flies out the window. If portable MP3 players catch on, this really will mean a huge drop in business for the record companies. Especially since their marketing has more and more focused on younger crowds.
The question as posed is the wrong question: they're not "scapegoating" anybody. Rather, the powers that be see a real danger to their bottom line, and are willing to play very very dirty to stop it. The question isn't whether they're facing a real danger: of course they are. The question is whether their actions are legal and ethical.
Re:256k (Score:2)
Re:256k (Score:2)
Re:legislating the number (Score:2)
One comment about copyright: it was originally created for authors, not for those who owned printing presses. Read any history of Shakespeare, for example, and you'll hear a lot about unscrupulous printers who print and sell an author's works without due compensation. For the people that already had printing presses (granted, an expensive proposition) life before copyright was 100% profit except for costs of materials and distribution, because you didn't have to pay the content creator (if you could get away without doing so). Copyright protected content creators by providing them with a legal tool to protect their creations. This wasn't as good financially for the printers, but on the other hand it encouraged content creation because authors knew they were less likely to be ripped off. Over time this made publishing a much bigger industry than it otherwise might have been.
I agree with most of the points that you made - we have arrived in an era where everyone has an electronic printing press, but yet we still need to preserve the legal balance between content producers and content distributors that encourages content creation. This is going to be new and interesting because now everyone can be a content distributor.
Re:My thoughts... (Score:2)
However, I don't think your summary of the complaint with copy protection is quite valid, or at least it doesn't entirely line up with my view. As I see it, copy protection in some places is not a bad thing. I can understand why a company would want to protect their media from piracy, as that obviously hurts their business tremendously, and when working with any easily-reproducable media, piracy of your product is simple.
My complaint is not that copy protection used, but rather, how it is used. For instance, mp3's are a perfectly valid medium, yet the format itself has been attacked by the RIAA and others. They should be targetting piracy, not a medium which allows piracy. This type of practice is quite similar to attacking the VHS tape merely because it can recod.
Then of course, there's the DVD CCA battle, which is a great example of misuse of copy protection. It would be one thing if they were attacking pirates who had cracked the encryption and were distributing hacked videos, but as I understand it, they're going after people who broke the encryption for a legitimate reason: to get DVD's to work. Why are they justified to stop people from making DVD's easier to watch? Their copy protection oughtn't be there to stop people from using DVD's, it ought to be there to stop people from mis-using it. There's a big dfference, it seems to me, and it will really frighten me if things go their way.
Regardless of this, ultimately I think the many current attempts to create strong copy protection are pretty silly. Perhaps it's there merely because it can be... it's certainly easier to encrypt a DVD than it is to copy protect a VHS tape. But really, what are they protecting? I can still copy all these things just as well as I ever could, but it's a big hassle for me to make my DVD drive do what it's supposed to do in Linux. Seems kind of silly to me, even if I can understand why the companies might be concerned.
Remember those old games that made you look up what the third word on page 47 of the manual was? Didn't seem to stop piracy, which is much of the reason it was removed. Pretty silly, only ended up getting in the way of legitimate users, because the pirates could just be told what the word is. But then again, Q3's copy protection is working pretty darn well, as long as you want to play an internet game, so it just depends on the context. I'd just like to see copy protection used correctly...
Haven't we been here before? (Score:2)
(Not that I can imagine anyone wanting to pirate American television. It's not exactly the pinnacle of civilization.)
Re:Analogue recording (Score:2)
Some people are *really* into the "collectible" aspect of CDs -- the jacket and liner notes for some are as valuable as the audio. This is personally not my thing, but somne of my friends think like this.
A pirated CD certainly is worth nothing to a collector.
One click lawbreaking (Score:2)
Copy protection systems are incredibly annoying (probably unacceptably so) because they stop the user from making legitimate copies. And in the case of DVD/DeCSS it was wrong that you could only use the media on certain 'supported' platforms.
But to be honest, I (perhaps naively) think that if the media content industries really believed that people would only make legitimate copies, they might consider scrapping the whole copy protection issue. But let's face it, no matter what you or I might do, we have to admit that a large majority of users do use and distribue illegal MP3s - how many people really delete an MP3 they 'don't like' and go and buy a copy of the ones they do? It's an insignificant number, and theft is occuring. It's the natural tendancy of humans - if breaking the law becomes that easy, they play it down as a minor thing, and that it doesn't really matter. Downloading an MP3 doesn't hold the same gravitas as walking into a record store and physically stealing a CD.
If people didn't use the new technologies to steal there wouldn't be a problem. Making your own personal copy, or even small scale theft like making a copy for a friend, are fine. But large scale internet distribuion is a much bigger problem. And if society can't be trusted to 'behave' within the law, then obviously tactics such as copy protection will be tried.
It doesn't matter what your viewpoint on whether you think you should have to pay for music/film etc. is. Artists should have the right to sign up to a record company and sell their material to the public. If society then believes that material from other (possibly free) sources is as good, they will download such material, and record companies and their associated artists will die out as the artists who offer their material through other mediums prosper (presuming they can make a living from it). Market (or market-less) forces at work.
But in reality, we know that the record companies and their artists will go out of business becuase the new technologies for copying and distribution will mean that noone will buy their products because it's easier to steal them. This may or may not be a good thing (loosing large record companies and artists). Indeed, you could argue that once the majority of society believes that theft of this sort is acceptable, then the laws of society will be changed to legalise it. This too may or may not be a good thing.
Analogue recording (Score:2)
Their excuse for holding such things back is that suddenly you can make infinite perfect copies of the material.
(Of course, MP3 is far from perfect itself. Then again, the RIAA doesn't care, doesn't it?)
Remember how they tried to hold back DAT?
- Ed.
Middlemen (Score:2)
take a hard look at what it is they sell. Does the RIAA promote the sale of plastic discs in colourful cases, or do they sell music?
Lets see....I'm guessing...the plastic discs in the colorful cases? Imagine if you had a company that had huge amounts of capital invested in the production of a physical thing, money invested in the transportation of that thing, money invested in the Point Of Sale outlets, you had a stranglehold over the primary producers who needed your vast infrastructure to distribute. Then, some punks come along and make all of that non-necessary. The mode of production has changed and no longer needs your business. You can no longer milk the primary producers as effectively.
I'm betting that you'd try and stop it happening. I'm also betting that one of the companies is going to either invest quickly in the new technology and betray the others or that some upstart firm is going to make a killing here.
Re:My thoughts... (Score:2)
It is a great idea. But in reality and any time in the near future, it's not going to happen. Anyone with a little bit of money can record music or film a movie, but there are only about a dozen corporations on this planet that can take that album or movie and make it available to the mass market. Those corporations may fight with each other for market share, but when it's in their common interest, they are more than willing to work together. The one thing they all agree on is that no new players are going to get into the distribution game.
It would be wonderful if consumers could really vote with their feet and with their wallets. But as long as a vast majority of CDs and movies are purchased at stores like WalMart and Best Buy, no large number of people are going to get ahold of anything those dozen companies don't want them to.
Bottom line: Until the internet replaces brick and mortar stores as the primary means of content distribution, the system we have now will stay in place. I have no doubt that one day it will happen, but I don't see it happened any time soon.
-Barry
Re:never? (Score:2)
I own *one* pre-recorded VHS tape (The Rock, one of only two movies that Sean Connery swears in, I believe).
Re:c. all of the above (Score:2)
I'd agree with the fact that the industry probably "lost" more due to analog copying, and may still for a time, but I would think that MP3 is rapidly catching up.
I also think that their efforts are pretty futile at this point. They let it go on *far* too long without kicking up the royal fuss that they have now.
But one could apply (and here I expect some angry replies) the same arguments of "Just because it can be 'stolen' doesn't give you that right"...
My 0.02 cents anyway.
Re:c. all of the above (Score:2)
Vinyl RULES!! (Score:2)
Of course, there is the fact that CDs only have ~75% of the dynamic range of vinyl. Because they are only 16bit, CDs only have 96dB of dynamic range (the difference between the quietest sound and the loudest sound). Vinyl has a dynamic range of >120dB. That is why is is kind of annoying to listen to symphonic works on CD, you can't hear the quiet parts as well as you can on a record.
A wealthy eccentric who marches to the beat of a different drum. But you may call me "Noodle Noggin."
Re:It's a paradigm change on the part of the indus (Score:2)
The tough part is that these companies will spend their VAST resources trying to hold their ground. We've all seen how they'll do it too, in the courts with lawyers. There is a huge consumer vs. corporate battle brewing, it's time to choose sides, and make your opinions known (at least for me).
Piracy Shmiracy (Score:2)
One thing everyone forgets... (Score:2)
I think these guys see that coming and want to prevent it by proposing a medium (DVD) that you can't make your own recordings unless you pay some outrageous fee to get a license key. It is a way to prevent the little guys from getting into the business.
It really comes down to the big players trying to maintain their hold on the market going into the digital age.
Question: Is this copying legit? (Score:2)
After playing with Napster, I've been wondering about the correctness of certain types of MP3 snarfing:
In particular, whether there should be anything at all wrong with grabbing a copy of an MP3 from a CD I already own. It seems to me that this is (or should be) entirely legitimate, as it simply saves me the trouble of having to rip the CD myself in order to get the MP3. I don't think even the RIAA claims that making an MP3 from a purchased CD is wrong, (presumably because it falls in to the "archival backup" category?)
The problem becomes a bit murkier in the case of grabbing an MP3 of a song I already own on tape or vinyl - is this legitimate? I don't own the CD, but I could (if I wanted to expend the effort) pipe the analog signal from the turntable of tape deck into the PC, then digitize and massage into MP3. Does the difference between analog and digital make me a criminal in this case?
I think it goes without saying that grabbing something I do not own in any form crosses the line (you may disagree with the copyright laws, but that does not change the fact that they are there and that the act clearly violates them.) Nonetheless, I have myself crossed that line for recordings that are no longer available (a lot of older music is essentially unavailable), and this seems defensible as well - I'd buy it if I could, but I can't.
Somehow, I think the people doing the downloads from my napster collection aren't being so particular.
Some of these areas seem legitimately gray and murky, even if you accept the validity of existing copyright law right up front...
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
- RIAA (or whoever) are greedy bastards
:+) - they are stupid for even trying to copy protect
- we've been able to do it for years with analogue - what's the big deal
- I have a 'right' to evaluate music even if I don't own it
Now don't get me wrong, I would love to pay nothing for my music and video/DVD etc. And I don't claim to be an angel when it comes to never ever pirating *ahem* backing up stuff, but let's get a reality check!I can't argue with that one
It's aways been a moot point (even for software) - the cost of copy protection tends to be passed on to the legitimate users, and seldom really slows down professional pirates
There is a fine line between legitimate duplication (I copy my audio onto tapes for my walkman - that is to preserve my orginals in good condition, whereas if I carried them around when I went hillwalking, they would need replacing once a year or so (as the tapes do)) and pirating for sale - and it is based on what you intend to do with the copy, not on the copy itself. copying is not good or evil - but it can be used for good or bad reasons.
Yep, you do - but not by taking an illegal copy. you can hear it on the radio, in nighclubs, or if it is fringe music, it may be in the copyright owner's best interest to give a "sample" of the song some webspace. you DON'T have any rights to own a copy of someone else's work unless you have paid them for it.
Indeed - for DVD you have the wrong end of the stick entirely!
- Blank DVDs cost more than pre-recorded ones - why copy?
- CSS doesn't stop you copying DVDs, it stops you playing them
- CSS enforces licencing fees for DVD players - preventing OSS players when the owners of the DVD drives HAVE ALREADY PAID for the unusable windows player software
- CSS enforces regioning - restriction of trade by making a DVD on sale in one country unplayable by the DVD players in another country
In general, copy protection has cost more time and effort to impliment than it saves in legitimate sales regained - the best sanctions against copyright theft are legal, not technical, and only the threat of loss, not only of their profits but of their expensive copying equipment and their personal freedom, will disuade professional pirates.--
Re:Piracy will be the downfall.... (Score:2)
> The first rule in mass-market money making is the guy with the best distribution channels wins.
That's just it, though! That's not why copy protection is stupid, that's why they're doing it.
If your distribution channel is free MP3s over the 'net, you may get listeners, but you don't get paid.
If your distribution channel is free copies of Netscape over the 'net, the same applies. If it's IE4 bundled with Win98, you do get paid.
If your distribution channel is copy-protected locked-up proprietary crap, you don't get listeners, but you DO get paid. And you get a full record of their listening habits, which you can resell by working in cahoots with snail-mail spammers like the DMA. If it's DIVX-style pay-per-listen, it's even easier, because you know when they're home and what they're listening to - for $0.50, I'll tell your telemarketers when your targets come home and you can call them 30 seconds after they turn the stereo on.
The war between MP3 and crappy-proprietary-copyprotected-shite is all about who controls the product. Technology has enabled us to give bit-for-bit perfect copies of music to our friends for free, rather than trading analog tapes, a freedom we've never had before. But it's also given the record companies the power (through, for instance, steganographically-added watermarks) to track everything you listen, and everyone with whom you share it - total control far exceeding what they've ever had before.
The only issue left is how to balance the abuse of our technologically-enabled freedom (MP3 piracy) against the abuse of technologically-enabled control (vendor lock-in, DIVX-style pay-per-play trackable music).
On that issue, I'm firmly and proudly on the side of the pirates. Why? Any abuse-by-piracy of MP3s and DVDs is an accident; MP3 and DeCSS were never developed with the intention of pirating music or video, whereas the abuse-by-control of the RIAA, CCA, the DIVX consortium, and the rest of the gang of intellectual-property pointy-hairs is always designed into their products with malice aforethought.
Make no mistake about malice aforethought. While copy-friendly (i.e. marketer-hostile) file formats are not a threat to present methods of distribution of music or video, they're a serious threat to the kind of Brave New World the entertainment industry wants to bring about in the future.
As you say - the guy with the best distribution channel wins. But RIAA is no longer content to control the music channel to your record store - there's more money in having control all the way from the recording studio to your eardrums, the technology to do so is now feasible, and that is why they see MP3 as a deadly threat.
Split distribution and payment (Score:2)
Divx tried this and was burned completely. I'm not really sure why. I think it was just a PR bungle, really. We are all happy renting movies (I personally don't own a single one), so I don't see why people got such a bug up their asses about Divx, but I digress.
The goals are as follows: we want to separate distribution and payment. Furthermore, different payment schedules are needed. For example, for a peice of software you'll use alot, you'd rather pay once, and have unlimited use. For an album of songs from an uneven artist, you'd rather pay-to-play. Maybe you could have an evaluation period.
By separating distribution and payment, we can get the middle men out of the picture. Sony, Geffen, and whonot are not really in the business of distributing cds; they only have to do that to enable their real business: to sell music.
Unfortunately, CDs have huge capital investments that need to be made (not so much in production, but sales and distribution), so they can only bet on sure things (to the detriment of smaller artists everywhere). This is of course where digital music comes in. A secure storage scheme would leverage the power of bits (to invoke negroponte). The internet has made distribution free. Give copies to your friends. Payment is what these companies should focus on. The same payment infrastructure would work for all acts, so once again, the marginal cost of signing up an act is miniscule.
So in summarium: a secure music format would benefit everyone, as the big companies would be free to take care of payments (and the necessary multiply redunant 100% uptime systems necessary to keep things humming). Distribution would be up to marketing companies or word of mouth. The barrier to entry would be so low that everyone could play.
Of course, the format would have to be uncrackable for the companies to bet the farm like this, so it would likely require encrypted-signal-to-output-device. A bit of infrastructure investment, then. Of course, your output device would have to be net enabled as well. But I believe it is inevitable.
Johan
Re:There is a reason they feel threatened. (Score:2)
Except that you could still copy the cd to tape..
How would cd's stop this?
Re:A Rational, Free-Market Solution (Score:2)
Um, except that making a copy for backup use is fair and legal.
Ever heard of "fair use"?
The problem is that ease of copying for "fair use" also allows ease of copying for "unfair use" or "pirating".
Either we must allow pirating to be possible, or get rid of the policy of "fair use".
Media companies are of course trying to do the second.
Digital vs. Analog (Score:2)
MP3s are bit for bit perfect, from the first encoding, to the millionth copy.
Piracy will be the downfall.... (Score:2)
That's total baloney. They said that about photocopiers and audiotape and videotape and of course piracy was supposed to cripple the software industry.
It hasn't worked out that way for any industry yet. Rather, the easier it was to make copies the more money the content producers made because their production costs just kept dropping even though their prices remained relatively constant.
I mean, software is easy as hell to copy and yet look at how many software guys are billionaires (to say nothing of the unwashed hordes of us who are mere millionaires).
There's no reason whatsoever to believe that things will be any different this time.
To understand why this is the case you have to understand that the driving factor in media penetration is not how easy it is to duplicate but how easy it is to get in the first place.
The first rule in mass-market money making is the guy with the best distribution channels wins. In the past this meant that if you could get your stuff in the most newspapers or stores you sold more of it than anyone else. The Internet is just another distribution channel. It's cheaper and more accessible than most but the same rules still apply.
Microsoft proved without a doubt that traditional distribution channels beat Internet distribution channels in the long term. It was easier to get your browser software preloaded than to download it. So Netscape, the first business to really leverage the Internet as a distribution channel, lost. They would have won if they had locked up the vendor distribution channel before Microsoft got their act together.
So long as the media companies have the power to make content more accessible than anyone else they will win. The Internet doesn't change that; they'll still have the money for faster connections and better advertising.
As for copy control, we have been developing a legal framework for that for centuries and it works long-term. If the other guy is stealing your stuff you sue them.
jim frost
When *haven't* the Hollywood types complained? (Score:2)
Making the point about Analog/Digital only aids these nitwits. Most non US first world countries have taxes on audio cassettes to remedy piracy and perceived incurred losses. Those are *analog* tapes. The media mogul types WILL TRY TO SCREW YOU EVERY WHICH WAY.
Pointing towards the Grateful Dead and other bands whose careers were enhanced by tape trading does not faze them. They think only of the present, and of perceived losses.
They have not yet been able to stay ahead of technology. 5 years from now we will all have DVD burners, but of course a new HDVD spec will probably be out by then. Given the pace of technology, they ought to be more concerned about getting stuff out the door than delaying it will half assed (given the global crypto situation) copy protecting it.
Personally, I am hoping for the giants like AOl / Time Warner to collapse. I am hoping that tv on demand will develop such that you can pay minipayments (my new term, you heard it hear first, as micropayents are cents and millicents, I'm talking 50-100 cents) to watch your shows from the studios and get rid of the established channels.
whew, i need to lay off the caffeine, : - )
matt
Changing Attitudes (Score:2)
I have many a friend into mp3, and I really don't think any payed for them ^_^ These people are all adolescents, and would normally be out pumping money into the Label's coffers, but instead I can log onto their ftp servers, and find hundreds of songs they just got off Napster [napster.com]. And it's not all 133t d00dz boasting about how many thousand they have. Mp3's are replacing CD's entirely for them. If they ever needed a CD, they'd burn it. These people are 'growing up' with the concept of free, readily availible music.
I'm not boosting the RIAA or anything (CD's are far too expensive for my liking), but what mp3 stands for really is a clear and present threat for the labels, and they damn well take it seriously. Are any of my friends gonna have 'second thoughts' and go out and buy a CD because The Smashing Pumpkins are losing money? No. Are they gonna go back to paying a lot of money for one or two songs they like (Canada doesn't have a real singles market). They ain't goin back
Re:Technology Held Back? (Score:2)
Are you driving an electric car? I'm certainly not...
---
Give people a break (Score:2)
Re:My thoughts... (Score:2)
Re:My thoughts... (Score:2)
Re:Differences (Score:2)
I think that the real reason that the industry doesn't like the idea of copying is that it helps keep prices in check. When VHS movies first started to appear for sale in the late 70s or early 80s, I seem to recall that they cost $40 or even $60 or more per copy. I also seem to recall that private copying of rented tapes was much more common back then. Now that the average price is $19.99, it's more convenient to just buy the movies you like, unless you are one of the few who has a major movie fetish and has to own lots and lots of tapes/discs. But I can't see this class of people having that much of an impact on the industry as a whole.
Re:Analogue recording (Score:2)
Anyway, I think the RIAA will be mad at you if you even dare mention the term MP3. They are simply scared off their asses... their era is coming to an end!
dufke
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Re:c. all of the above (Score:2)
Re:c. all of the above (Score:2)
yes, but after you acquire the cd, the mp3 is quite legal. record companies make money from it, they just don;t know it. i have a slow connection, so i buy cd's when i hear an mp3 i like. if i had a faster connection, i would get mp3s, and rip them on music cds as wavs.
i have done that, but they were bootleg tracks and illegal anyways >:]
There is a reason they feel threatened. (Score:2)
For starters, vhs and cassete tapes were/are analog and quite frankly the quality on them sucks. But the main reason that the RIAA is so hopping mad is two-fold:
1. With mp3 (and the internet) you can copy someones cd who lives in a different country (try that with a cassete tape).
2. I think a big part of the push to cds and away from cassetes was to STOP people from being able to pirate music with cassetes. They finally got everyone on cd's so they couldn't copy music anymore(try finding a new release on cassete) and all the sudden cd-r's are cheap.
Honestly though, I think we all know that the RIAA is barking up the wrong tree, but they are a special interest group. The RIAA doesn't want any new changes in the medium of music transmission unless they pick the medium. After all, they chose cd's..CONSUMERS chose mp3. They are no longer in control and it pisses them off.
Why not step back a minute? (Score:2)
Now we all know that record companies are actually in it for the truly _vast_ profits available, and the artists themselves actually don't get very much out of it. So the wider issue is: what's the best way to distribute music? And promote it?
Well the indie groups of the 80s came and went, partly bcos most of them weren't that good. But on the distribution side, they did make a fair-size dent, particularly in the nightclub/disco market. So what's probably needed for the next-gen record companies (and give me a break if you start hearing shades of 'Imagine' here
So to a real extent it's up to the artists to vote with their feet - we've told them how we want music to be, now they can choose how to do it.
But the other issue is where artists get their real money from, and the key here is MORE LIVE PERFORMANCE. The Beatles, and pretty much every band up to the mid/late 80s, didn't get big by record labels, and didn't get that much money that way either - the concept of bands (particularly manufactured boy/girl-bands) who can't perform live is a very new concept, and one which should be shot down. After all, even the Monkees (possibly the first manufactured band) could perform live.
Just a few incoherent thoughts...
Graham.
Re:Differences - CCS useless (Score:2)
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:2)
If person A was never going to buy person B's item but duplicates it (ie it wasn't worth $30 to A, but it was worth 5 minutes). Then person B didn't lose an item or a sale. This differs from theft where person B loses the item as well.
Yes, in the real world it's more complicated as person A gives a copy to his mate etc and person B might lose a sale, but there is still a large distinction.
I think you misunderstand why we think what they are doing is stupid. I don't think it's stupid because of our 'right to evaluate' or whatever, I think it's stupid because:
- It will fail
- It will cost them money
- It will cost us delays in getting the HDTV
- It will fail
It makes you think they are ignorant suits who actually *believe* someone with a bridge^H^H^H^H^Hcopy protection scheme to sell.
hehe, I'll sell you one.
Scapegoat I say! (Score:2)
It's a lose-lose scenario for them I'm afraid to say.
A Rational, Free-Market Solution (Score:3)
Notwithstanding the mournful, plaintive cries of the Liberal storm troopers aching for the NWO to get moving and conquer America properly (rather than quietly and in bits and pieces as they are now doing -- have you heard any news from Michigan lately? Its new rulers have blacked out all coverage), I think we can solve this property rights issue very easily -- and conveniently for all of those whose legitimate interests are threatened.
Let's face it, the work, in its entirety, belongs to whoever put up the capital to publish it. If the Rolling Stones didn't have a record deal, they'd be nothing. Their label, however, could just hire somebody else to make the same records of the Stones walked off. So really, the artist is irrelevant and has no rights of any description. They're all drug-addled perverts anyway. The only thing that matters is the guy with the checkbook. The customer is only buying the right to listen to the work, and certainly has no conceivable right to make copies or anything of that nature.
So here's the plan: All computers will be required by law to run a background process at all times (disablement of which will constitute an attempt to commit felony copyright infringement, with a number of counts to be determined by the time span during which the daemon is disabled divided by average song length). This process will detect attempts at copying. Operating systems which refuse to implement this in the kernel can only be doing so in order to facilitate copyright infringement; this is a felony. If you have nothing to hide, you'll play by the rules. The record companies have a compelling interest here, sorry. If we allow copying, we'll be destroying their incentives and the economy will be in flames within the week. It happened in the Soviet Union, and it can happen here. We must preserve the freedom of our economy at all costs. Furthermore, the monitor of each computer will contain a large, heavy, spring-loaded mallet. The law will require that the copy-detection process activate the mallet and clobber any user who attempts to copy any sound files of any description (statistics show that the segment of the population which creates its own files is statistically negligible, and the success of Mayor Giuliani in fighting crime has taught us that guilt-by-statistics can be implemented with no loss of voter confidence). Tampering with the copy-detection process will, obviously, incur the wrath of the mallet as well.
So there you have it. If any of you sick, whining liberal pansies want to take issue with this, don't even bother. Your hilarious irrationalities (esp. yours, JustShootMe) amuse me but they will not and can not deter me from my tireless efforts in the defense of liberty. Extremism in the defense of liberty is, as the man said, no vice.
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:3)
To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
The RIAA steals from people all the time. They claim that you are buying the rights to listen to the music contained on the disk (rather than the recording itself). So why is it then that if the CD gets broken, they charge exactly the same amount for a new copy (rather than the reasonable costs of media and handling)? After all, I supposedly bought lifetime rights to personal playback the first time around. If I want a CD for home, and a cassette for the car, they still charge full price even if I buy both at the same time so that there can be no doubt that I am paying twice for the same license.
Could it be that their party line is more of a convieniant excuse than an honest belief? Now we move on to fair use. Up until the latest massive lobbying efforts of RIAA, the consumer had an absolute legal right to make personal use copies of any music they licensed (bought). Now that they have lined enough pockets to get the laws changed, they are flexing their muscle to force the makers of players to cripple a perfectly good product and add cost to the units. Having to actually cough up more money to pay for a feature that is actively hostile to my use of the player is insult added to injury. I have to pay for that even if I decide to boycott the music and movie industries in favor of indepandants who are more free with their product.
I do not complain about RIAA or the movie industry protecting what's theirs, I complain about them offering one thing, but giving me something else. I complain about the presumption of guilt implicit in the copy protection systems (yes, I realize that innocent until proven guilty is only guarenteed in criminal law, but the principle is the same even if the guarentee is not).
A final note, I was reflecting the other day on why digital video tapes and data DAT and audio DAT are not compatable. They all have the same basic specification, and the transport and read/write mechanisms are REMARKABLY similar, but are just different enough to prevent compatability. Because of that, I can't just pop the tape of my last vacation into my backup tape drive and read off the mpeg-1 stream directly.
The only reason for that incompatability that makes any sense is pressure from the RIAA and movie industry. I'm pretty sure that's the reason, the only alternatives include: The makers of those products decided that re-inventing the wheel is fun, and the R&D costs just don't matter or they limited the appeal to consumers because they just hate having to add all those large numbers in their ledgers.
Re:Analogue recording (Score:3)
What do you mean, "tried"? They DID hold it back, they killed the bitch. You only see DAT in studios and purist's homes anymore.
The duplication argument has always been rather flimsy. Sure, analog looks bad today, but in its heyday it was the way to go. In 1984 nobody complained about the quality of video tape, consequently movie studios were equally afraid of analog piracy. Except they could do less about VHS then than they seem to be able to do about DVD now. Is it just me, or does the power of the entertainment industry really grow by the hour?
Regarding market forces and falling prices of CDs, bull$hit! Market forces should have dictated a long time ago that CDs should be way cheaper, yet strangely they're not. I mean, who really walks into Media Play and plonks down $18 for a CD, when you can get the same thing for $12 or less online? Yet they've retailed for $18 for the last ten or more years. Just check out Europe, where the cost of CDs has exceeded the pain threshold. Cheapo labels such as Naxxos (sp?) have made arguably quality classical music available for a fraction of the price of the big labels, and they sell like hotcakes. But you don't see Deutsche Grammophone going down in price, do you?
Personally, I think the problem is a recalcitrant generation of executives that simply can't smell the coffee. They're used to their set margins on which they've grown rich for half a generation, they can't envision a world in which they don't clear $10 on a CD.
Consequently I think CDs will eventually become irrelevant. Heck, I think most prerecorded media will become irrelevant. MP3 is only the tip of the iceberg. I firmly believe music servers will become the mainstay of the future stereo system. Get the music on that hard drive, and you can access it from anywhere in the house. 200 CD monster changers were a nice try, but not the answer. I want to get my CD on the network and NEVER touch it again. The big holdup is still the lack of widespread experience with the concept. Most people simply have never browsed a list of several thousand tracks from a few hundred CDs, clicked on one, and it started playing instantly. No walking up to the shelf, finding the CD, undusting it, ejecting and inserting the tray, waiting for the CD to spin up and track, etc etc. Once sufficient numbers of people experience this, the avalanche will start.
I have over three hundred CDs on the network at home. I can play the music from any of the desktops, or from a laptop anywhere in the house or outside via a wireless network. No storage duplication here, no multiple CDs to buy. A simple 486 machine with a cheapo 18G HD can serve up several simultaneous 128K streams. Once my Internet pipe is wide enough to allow me quick downloads of entire albums from an online vendor, I'll never touch another CD. Why would I want to go back to discrete physical media?
THAT'S what the media companies are scared of. Today it's music. Give it another 5 years and 500GB and 1TB drives, and we'll do the same with video. Suddenly the market for shiny disks is gone, and all that "protection" revenue is lost. And we're surprised the industry is up in arms about the digital revolution?
Re:Analogue recording (Score:3)
I've owned 2 DAT recorders, and have recorded over 300 DATs myself.
The RIAA threw two roadblocks to try and stop the proliforation of DATs. The first was SCMS. SCMS is supposed to prevent serial copying.
SCMS is only required on "non-professional" decks. The reality is that the market for DAT recorders is so small, that most decks on the market are sold as "professional" decks, at around the same cost as "consumer" decks. In other words, if you are encountering SCMS problems, then you didn't do your homework when you purchased your equipment.
The second roadblock was a tax on DAT media. This "tax" is paid directly to the music industry, as "compensation" for the unauthorized copying that they assume you are going to use the media for.
Of course, being drafted and paid for by the recording industry, this law directs that the money be paid out to artists in proportion to their record sales. So, even though probably half the DAT tapes in existance have recordings of the Grateful Dead and Phish, the money from those blank tapes goes to Michael Jackson and the Backstreet Boys.
The DAT tax roadblock was also immediately bypassed. DAT tapes and DDS tapes are nearly identical. The major difference is that DDS tapes are of slightly higher quality, and because they are computer backup media, they are not subject to the RIAA tax. So, most people who use DAT simply use DDS media instead of music-branded DAT tapes, and get better media for less money. And we don't give a penny to the RIAA. Millions for our music, but not a cent for tribute!
If you want to try out DAT technology, it's easy enough to do. Sony and Tascam manufacture excellent decks. They'll set you back at least $500.00, but if you want to make professional-quality amateur recordings, it's the only way to go. The only way for you to make better recordings is to go with professional reel-to-reel, and that's MUCH more expensive.
DAT was never an appropriate technology for the mass market. Both the tapes and decks are easily damaged, and subject to wear.
The best use for DAT is live field recordings. DAT is almost universally embraced by live tapers. These are people who purchase special "taper tickets" that allow them to bring their recording equipment to concerts.
Bands allow this for several reasons. First is the realization that people are going to make tapes no matter what they do, and creating a tapers section improves the concert experience for tapers and non-tapers, because tapers want the people around them to be quiet, and many non-tapers like to yell and make noise at rock concerts. Having the tapers together avoids this conflict.
Second is that allowing taping builds a tremendous amount of goodwill among the fans toward the band, and dramatically increases the band's exposure, and ticket sales. Most bands make their real money on concert ticket sales, and a lot of people's first exposure to a new band, especially one without a record contract, is hearing a live recording. If you like the tape, you might decide to see the band next time they're in town. Bands like moe., String Cheese Incident, have leveraged their fan base by allowing audience taping.
It's an interesting phenomenon. Very grass-roots.
If you look behind the soundboard at a concert where taping is allowed, you'll see a forest of microphone stands. Look to see what's plugged into those microphones, and it's almost all DAT recorders. Next time you're at a concert, take a peak at the soundboard setup. If the concert is being recorded by the soundman, odds are overwhelming that it's being recorded on DAT.
DAT has a couple of advantages in this situation. DAT recorders are extremely small and lightweight, and can record up to 2 hours on one tape with NO break. (They can record up to 3 hours on a 90 meter DDS tape, but this is frowned upon by some because 90 meter DDS tapes are out of spec and can cause problems on some DAT recorders.)
Compare this to Minidisc, which requires a disc swap every 74 minutes, or cassette, which requires a tape flip every 45 or 50 minutes. DAT also has true (uncompressed) CD quality audio (44.1 KHz), and better-then-CD quality (48 KHz) modes.
In a live recording situation, DAT means getting the entire set without having to worry about when to change the media.
The big disadvantages of DAT are that DAT tapes and recorders are fairly fragile and subject to quick wear. A DAT recorder has a cylindrical head -- a miniature version of a VCR head. These heads rotate at extremely high speed against the abrasive tape, and wear out over time, requiring an expensive replacment. Also, the tapes themselves are very thin, and wear out after about 100 passes. Once they wear out, they start to shed, and the result is digital noise -- like a chainsaw ripping through your music.
Also, DAT tapes do not age well. The expected lifetime of an infrequently played, properly stored DAT tape is estimated to be around 10 years, due to chemical deterioration as the tape base ages.
What is becoming more common is that tapers record on DAT, then take their DATs home, and digitally upload their music onto their computers to create CDRs for listening and trading purposes. Even the people who use DAT understand its limitations.
DATs and DAT recorders would never survive in the typical consumer environment. People leave their CDs and tapes on the dashboard of their car. They leave them piled up outside their cases. They let them become dirty, and use the dirty media anyway.
DAT tapes subjected to this treatment would quickly become damaged, and a damaged DAT tape can quickly destroy the heads on a DAT deck. A DAT deck so damaged would then destroy every DAT tape that was played on it.
In other words, even people who use DATs regularly understand that DAT is not an appropriate medium to replace cassettes.
CDRs are the best user-recordable mass market media available at this time. They are cheap, can be copied at 6x or greater (With the exception of a single Tascam dual deck, DAT can only be copied at 1x), and are easy to take care of. Their biggest drawback is the 74 minute limit.
DVD-R will blow that limit out of the water. The only question is when DVD-R will come to market. That's what I'm waiting for.
Blaming the record industry for "killing" DAT simply ignores a lot of realities about the technology.
Another attitude that concerns. (Score:3)
It's impossible to disagree with these obvious statements.
Is the above statement equally obvious?
I don't think so.
The above reasoning comes from the idea that copyrighted works and patents are Intellettual Property .
They are not.
They are a Temporary Concession granted by the Social Community to the copyright and patent holder.
It is logical and expected that the law protects these grant.
The use of words like theft, robbery, property has only the effort of making things look worse.
The use of distribution media that enforces these grant forever is even doubiously legal, IMHO.
If copying a DVD is illegal even when the copyright on its content will be expired, then I smell something wrong.
Just my 2 euro.
Copying is not theft (Score:3)
As far as I can tell, your entire argument is based on the above hypothesis. Too bad it's so wrong.
I have approximately 600 audio CDs, give or take a hundred. (I don't really know how many.) (And no, I didn't pirate them; I bought them.) Have you ever seen 600 audio CDs? It is a physical storage problem. They use a lot of space, and in order to make it easy to find the CD that I want, I try to keep them sorted. I say 'try' because every week or so when I get some new CDs, I have to do insertions. That's actually more work than I normally care to do. I have tried various types of racks and such, but so far, all of the physical media storage solutions fall short. Maybe if someone will invent a CD tower that uses binary trees to support log-n searches and insertions, they'll make some money off me.
Not to mention that it uses up a lot of physical space, yet needs to be in a place where I can access it easily.
I have figured out a solution to my problem. The solution is to feed my CDs into a computer, where they'll be MP3 encoded all onto a single hard disk. If I fill that disk, I'll just buy another disk. Then the CDs can be put into cardboard boxes out of the way somewhere. Whenever I want to play something it'll just be point'n'click. And I bet the computer won't have nearly as much trouble keeping them sorted as I did. What if I want to listen to something in the car? The best solution would be to copy some of the MP3 files to CDR/Zip/tape/flashram, and then get some kind of portable player for it.
And then there's my videotape collection. It's currently manageable, as long as I don't get too many more of them. But when I look at all those huge VHS tapes and compare them to the size of my 4 Gig DDS-2 tapes (and I imagine that DDS-3 and DDS-4 are even more efficient), the idea of MPEG compressing them to digital media is rather attractive.
This is theft? No, it's fair use -- as defined both by law, and common sense. I should be able to store multimedia however the hell I want to. Storage is my decision, not the content provider's.
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c. all of the above (Score:3)
Analogue dubbing was always rife, but remember how in school you might have got a third or fourth generation tape and the quality was terrible? Obviously digital recording is perfect (compression issues aside).
MP3's are rampant though. Never before has something come along on this scale. Software piracy is an issue, but not like this. There are billions of songs out there, and that's almost literal. People dispute claims of software piracy, saying "I wouldn't have bought it anyway". I know people who suck entire CDs down off the web. CDs they *would* have bought.
I don't think the "I have a right to evaluate a song" argument holds up. I have NEVER seen someone download an mp3, think "I like that, I'll go buy it now" and delete the mp3. To clarify, of course I (and many others) have bought CD's after hearing mp3s, but this argument really doesn't hold up to a lot of scrutiny.
Scapegoat? Sure. I don't think anyone here needs reminding of how mass media plays on the "terrorists, p0rn mongers and spammers" image.
But I think the issue of MP3s is actually quite legitimate, and worthy of some 'action', though no idea what.
New business model required. (Score:3)
The kind of personal digital control that people are regaining over the mediums that surround them is forcing certain industries to take a hard look at what it is they sell. Does the RIAA promote the sale of plastic discs in colourful cases, or do they sell music?
Once they stop fighting for the things that they sell, rather than the ideas that they sell then they can start focusing on a business model that works.
As far as I'm concerned, the cat is out of the bag as far as digital distribution goes. The RIAA can spend its last remaining years of importance fighting to put it back in, or it can find a better way to do things.
Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com]
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:3)
so THEY are entitled to get all their money back, even if environmental changes totally alter the distrubution system such that every single person in the world could appreciate their art WITHOUT ANY EFFORT, COST, or ATTENTION by the creating artist or controlling producer.
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours.
Theft, pure and simple eh? So if you read a book, get an idea, and think about that idea, then tell someone else about that idea, you have "stolen" it from the author. Sure the book is still there, sure the words are still there for anybody else to read, but it's still stealing, right? bah!
What exactly have I "taken" when I get an MP3 from Napster? What is moved? What is lost? What have I taken control of?
So the big deal is all about protecting what is the legal property of someone.
No the big deal is about lobbying to create laws that build a framework to control and limit something that is inherently infinite, and could benefit society in a variety of ways.
To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
To base a society on principles that it is bad to share with others is socially destructive.
When will people grow up and stop trying to pretend that theft is okay - try taking responsibility for your actions.
Right after you grow up and realize that it isn't the same world that it was 5 years ago, and those laws which define the "theft" of infinite products should be thrown out like yesterday's trash.
Why do you think people have this opinion of young computer people being pirates? Could it possible be because they hear comments from pirates trying to defend the undefensible?
Could it possibly be that there are enough slow witted folks to agree with the people condemning the pirates, while not realizing that the condemners are the same ones losing money because they didn't realize the world had changed underneath them, that we will be denied access to and the ability to share beautiful things?
My thoughts... (Score:3)
We see copy protection as being annoying - a tool used by these agencies to keep people from doing something that they're going to do anyway; it just slows them down. I think a lot of times this is the greedy point-of-view. Industries are desperate to hold on to *any* protection they can get, because they're afraid that without it they'll start losing their sales.
And they have good reason to be afraid. If bandwidth and hard drive space continue to increase in size and decrease in price, piracy will explode on the Internet. You think it's bad now, just wait -- you haven't seen anything yet. So here's my take (finally):
Let them implement their protection schemes. Nobody's forcing anyone to use any particular scheme, right? I mean, theoretically a movie producer could release an unencrypted DVD, if they felt so inclined. If you happen to release some work of your own, protect it. Or don't. Make the choice yourself, and allow others to make the choice for themselves with their works. If the unprotected way is really the best way, then it'll come around. Or consumers will vote with their feet -- that's the way the market works.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
YUP - artist == programmer (Score:3)
Think about it - a recoding artist is in exactly the same position as a small programmer - needs to distribute the result of his or her craft - but worries about being ripped of.
In the past they depended on a distributor to get their work out to their customers - now they have the net - they don't need the distributor provided they can get enough cusatomer mind-share - and they can reduce the price of their product enourmously if there's no distributor/retailer taking a cut.
The problem we all face - "how can we help the artists/programmers/writers/... the people who create the bits - make a reasonable living off of their work?".
The media distribution industry is toast - they just don't know it yet - and they aren't going to go away without a fight - they have a lot of lawyers and a lot of money in the bank ..... they just aren't required any more -if we can find a way to get money to the people who make the bits we can strangle them from both ends.
The almighty bottom line (Score:3)
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:3)
um, last I checked, I can copy anything I please. In fact, I do make backups of every CD I buy, since CD-R's can be had for 50 cents apiece. It's only if I distribute something I copied that I break the law. That's what RIAA doesn't want you to know - they want you to believe that any form of copying is piracy, so you'll swallow their copy protection measures. I'm sorry if it sounds like nitpicking, but I felt compelled to clear that up...
Quality or quantity? (Score:3)
Re:Where does this attitude of entitlement come fr (Score:3)
There are two weak spots in your post though. First of all, the easy one:
"If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours."
This is true in many cases, but is not a given. If I make a tape from a CD which I've purchased, so I can listen to it in the car, it is not theft. If I make a compilation of all the songs Martha Wainright has recorded (on the McGarrigles' CD, on Dan Bern's CD, and on her own), and I own all of the CDs I'm copying from, it is not theft. The artists, the RIAA, and the legal system all agree on this.
The other problem is that copy protection and so forth have not helped the artists--they've made money for the recording industry execs. Consider as a similar (not identical, I know) case in Canada right now. We just had a levy put on all blank media purchases to pay for illegal copying costs. Any of this levy that actually gets through the mill goes to the artists, based on total sales! In other words, Celine Dion gets a few buckets more money, the small artists get roughly nothing, and the tiny independent artists have to _pay_ extra for the blank media to record their original music!
Copy protection has historically done just as well at rewarding the artists. This is why I have recommended that anyone who copies a CD (or tape, or whatever) that they haven't bought should voluntarily mail five bucks or so directly to the artist. THEY'RE the ones who deserve it!
Why this is a big deal. (Score:3)
Sounds drastic, but it's very real. On the audio side, SDMI's plan includes both "watermarking" and encrypting new audio content. Devices without decryptors can't play new content. If a device with a decryptor sees audio content that's watermarked but not encrypted, it won't play either. However, the SDMI crowd has backed off from the original plan, which was to deploy dual SDMI/MP3 devices which, when they played their first encrypted content, destroyed their MP3 play capability. The new plan is that if MP3-encoded watermarked data shows up, it won't play. The secret self-destruct mechanism seems to have gone away for now. The music industry views this as a major concession; it means no protection for legacy content. (i.e. MP3s of "oldies" will still work.)
Over on the video side, the DVD CSS people have a control freak's wet dream planned. The plan is to move decryption out to the monitor, so a clear image never exists in a user-programmable computer at all. This is the long-term plan to deal with the current "crack". Part of the plan includes encrypted handshaking between everything on the home net to insure that everything has "approved" protection mechanisms. Plans are underway to encrypt DVD's, cable, Internet A/V content, and even broadcast TV if the FCC will stand for it. Deployment will come with HDTV.
On the legal front, the criminal "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act kick in this month. Look for arrests regarding DVD CSS soon.
We will soon have two choices - either buy hardware and software that is closed, or don't play entertainment content.
Where does this attitude of entitlement come from? (Score:4)
- RIAA (or whoever) are greedy bastards
- they are stupid for even trying to copy protect
- we've been able to do it for years with analogue - what's the big deal
- I have a 'right' to evaluate music even if I don't own it
- it's about the bottom line
- they feel threatened
- etc etc
Now don't get me wrong, I would love to pay nothing for my music and video/DVD etc. And I don't claim to be an angel when it comes to never ever pirating *ahem* backing up stuff, but let's get a reality check!Someone out there has spent time and effort and probably their own money creating some product be it music, a movie, whatever.
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple - you have taken something which is not yours. You can try and hide your actions by cloaking it in phrases like 'making a backup', or it 'they won't notice' or whatever, but there can be no argument that it is theft.
So the big deal is all about protecting what is the legal property of someone. To base a society on the principle that it is okay to steal from others is socially destructive.
All the other excuses (they feel threatened, bottom line etc) are not the main issue. The main issue is protection of what is legally theirs.
To feel that the big organisations of the ilk of the RIAA are making a big deal out of nothing, shows the attitude of entitlement that seems to foster amongst many people who whine about the actions of the RIAA.
Complain about high CD prices - that is fair enough. Complain about someone trying to protect what is theirs, and you sound like someone who has no connection with the values that every society is based on.
When will people grow up and stop trying to pretend that theft is okay - try taking responsibility for your actions. Why do you think people have this opinion of young computer people being pirates? Could it possible be because they hear comments from pirates trying to defend the undefensible?
legislating the number (Score:4)
legislating the number OR i'll chew my audio, thanks.
The 5% nation [soulcoughing.com] has switched from offering an mp3-encoded Soul Coughing recording each month in favor of releasing a greater volume of material in the Liquid Audio format -- the catch being that these Liquid Audio files are only playable for 30 days.
The deal, as I understand it, is that more music can be released in the Liquid Audio format, since the 30-day timeout makes a future commercial release of the music more lucrative.
Let me explain why I feel this is a Bad Thing. The issue is complicated, but I'll be as breif as I can.
Liquid Audio is very different from mp3.
First, it's a "secure format". That means that (either by patent or trade secret) only Liquid Audio (the company) and its licensees can make players for these files. It also means that you can't easily convert a Liquid Audio track into another format.
Second, that 30-day time limit is more than just an inconvenience. It raises questions. Clearly I'm not supposed to be able to get around that 30-day limit. But is it a legal restriction, or just a technological one? What's the legal status of a program I might write to to convert a Liquid Audio file into a
If we don't ask questions like these, they're going to be answered the way record companies want rather than the way we (as either fans or musicians) might want. Explaining why those answers aren't likely to be the same is a little bit of a task. I'll do the best I can, and provide links. If you're interested, they'll cover the topic much more thoroughly than I'm going to here.
About Mp3:
There is a political battle being fought over the mp3 format. Mp3, like many formats to come (trust me here), makes it possible to store and transfer high-quality audio recordings digitally within reasonable a size range and with reasonable transfer speed. This is becomes increasingly true as storage and network technologies allow for larger and larger files to be reasonable for storage and transfer. Suddenly, it's physically possible to receive and entire albums in digital format over the internet. No one needs to manufacture a CD. No one needs to ship CDs to stores. No one needs to run stores, and no one needs to go out to stores to get music. Record companies are terrified. That's because the business of physically distributing music media is very profitable, and in the near future, it will probably be very outdated -- unless record companies get their way and are able to create an artificial demand for the distribution of music. They've banded together as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to fight mp3. One of the most effective arguments they're using to convince people that such a system needs to be put in place deals with artist compensation and copyright protection. But before I get into that, here are some links for information on mp3 and what record companies are doing about it:
http://www.riaa.com/ [riaa.com]
http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] (search for "RIAA")
http://david.weekly.org/writings/sdmi.php3 [weekly.org]
About Copyright:
There was a time when Copyright made perfect sense. When printing presses were the only way to copy a publishable work, the trade-off was universally beneficial. Printing presses were expensive. Copyright made it possible for people with printing presses to profit from publishing a peice of writing, and didn't limit the rights of people who didn't have printing presses, since they had no reasonable way to copy printed works anyway. People with printing presses were happy, people without printing presses lost nothing of value, and authors could be rewarded for their efforts. When we stretch copyright to cover digital media, however, things get a lot more complicated. Anyone can copy a computer file. In fact, copying digital media is implicit in doing a lot of things that we have other metaphors for as well. To view this web page, for example, you've got to copy it from a server on the Internet. In its journey from that server to your computer, it is copyied between many other computers on the internet that you never have to pay attention to. When it arrives at your computer, it is copied around several times in RAM to get it into a format that will make sense to you, and it is probably copied from the RAM onto your disk for temporary storage to speed things up if you want to view it again in the near future. Then it's copied to a special place in the RAM, which is read by your video card, which then transforms it into the light you're seeing. Then it gets copied about in very similar ways in your eyes, your optic nerves, and in your brain. Worse, the whole web page, like any Liquid Audio track, image, or computer program, is represented within your computer as a number. What are the consequenses of legislating the rights people have over numbers and how they chose to interpret them? Copyright in the present day has become a very complicated issue. It's obviously still important to reward artists and authors for their work, but it's not at all clear how we should do it. Here are some links to pages which talk about what's wrong with the kind of Copyright that many record companies (and software companies before them) are in favor of:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyri
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html [gnu.org]
http://www.public-domain.org/old.html [public-domain.org]
Because of the mp3s released via the 5% nation, I used to count Soul Coughing amoungst the most politically progressive bands in terms of digital media policy. Such venerable (and notably non-major-record-label-affiliated) musicians as Frank Black and They Might Be Giants have released entire albums in the mp3 format. While I'm not sure it's really up to musicians to keep tabs on issues like these, it's certainly nice to see.
and this is an exerpt from a later post in the thread:
I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?
It comes back to the issue of how we're goinging to make music something someone can reasonably do for a living. I don't know how we should do that, but I know that a situation in which musicians get paid because people aren't allowed to do something which is essentially very easy to do will never work out. Getting controlled substances is considerably harder than copying digital media, and look how well the War on Drugs is doing. So why don't we drop that idea and start thinking very hard about what we can do instead?
If the RIAA run the car industry (Score:4)
If I want a new car, I cant sell my old. The licence says so.
My car only runs in one region. If I move, or travel I will need separate cars for separate regions. And of cource an imported car won't run here.
If my car is broken I am not allowed to fix it. I must buy a new one.
These new cars dont work on some roads. However It is forbidden to modify a car to do so, even if you have the skill.
Of cource these regulations are only there to protect the intellectual property of the car designers. Hey, they actually get 1 cent for every car sold.
It's a paradigm change on the part of the industry (Score:5)
Put simply, technology never supported an encryption option before, nor would it have been a salable feature for consumers.
If someone put out a version of the Philips cassette which was impossible to duplicate from, this 'feature' would meet with a singular lack of enthusiasm from consumers. Let's get creative and add that the new Philips cassette not only can't be copied from, but will only play on the tape player that you have, plus there's the option of spending a dollar less for a tape that will play only ten times and then destroy itself neatly without injuring the drive.
Well, woo frickin' hoo- what a triumph of technology for purposes either orthoganal or hostile to what the consumer wants! This would not fly. At the time of the 33rpm LP, the Philips cassette, even the CD, this sort of thing was not attempted. DAT was 'secure' from unauthorised consumer use- and DAT died in the consumer market.
The goal of the recording industry, and indeed the movie industry as well, is to establish a new playing field in which none of the power falls into the consumers' hands. You buy your DVD- if you move to another area you have to buy another copy of the DVD for that area's players. Limited-play media are another recurring industry wet dream, especially when confronted with the specter of 'perfect media that lasts forever'. The fact of vastly cheaper media production than the old days combined with raised prices on the grounds of higher quality is nice for the industry, sure, but perfect media copying scares them... hence the paradigm change.
The change is from rude methods of interoperability (many people make audio cassettes, but they all pretty much play on all the decks you can buy, due to rigorous specs as to the dimensions of the cassette shell and standards for tape speed and dimensions), forced by the reliance on cruder analog media, to the new world of entirely virtual media- media that is no more and no less than a bunch of data. The data is easier to standardize- but it is too accessible! Any clown could write that format, or alternately could suck the data off the disk and start making identical copies. So the paradigm is to treat media, data, like it is hostile software- the word encryption, and especially the word security, give people a sense of potential danger safely contained.
But whose safety is being protected? Hint: it is not the consumer's. Indeed, in many ways the world of the media consumer, with data that can only be played on regionally localized players, data that is only rented and though you own the container you only are licensed to view the data in certain ways and don't own even the copy you purchased, data that is increasingly way beyond the consumer's ability to comprehend or control- this world is less safe for the consumer than the days of 45s and LPs. The consumer is increasingly restricted, controlled, and where once the idea of a consumer's copying off loads of tapes was seen as an intolerable abuse of the consumer's reasonable freedoms, now we approach an era where the consumer may be literally not allowed to own their own media. Instead, he or she can only be trusted to buy and care for the carrier media for streams of data- which are marked off as explicitly not the consumer's property, and which may be so well defended that the consumer can only plunk a dvd into a player and watch the fiberoptics deliver a tightly encrypted datastream into a black box in a _speaker_... inaccessible, unopenable. One wonders if the music and film industries are devising scuttling charges, so that if evil hacker people try to open the black boxes, they destroy themselves, thus preserving their secrets and forever withholding... the consumer's purchase from the consumer.
That's the paradigm change, bigtime. Are you buying the data of a song when you buy the CD, or are you only buying permission to listen to the sounds? If you analyzed the grooves of a record to determine the harmonic content of Pink Floyd, would you be thrown in jail for it? Obviously not- the concept is absurd, you own the physical record. Now, what if you crack the encryption to run a fast fourier analysis on the harmonic content of a Pink Floyd DVD? Curious how the activity is the same, but all of a sudden you're in jail for what you are doing with your possession... or is it your possession?
*sigh*
I don't know about anybody else but I know where I stand on the matter. I have purchased a modern 20-bit ADAT (an 8 track digital audio recorder) and will be producing music again, after rather a long hiatus. I'll be releasing this music in MP3 and seeing if maybe I sell 'original master' CDs on the side. I also intend to offer free recording to the likes of slashdot nerds who also intend to release mp3s for free. If I end up too busy I might also require that the musician code something and release it under the gpl ;) but anyway, each of us eventually find our own best battlefield. For me it is using my sound engineering and musical skills (which are better than my writing or coding skills) for the purpose of the new media- putting a big-ass stake in the ground of mp3, lest trendy encrypted _crap_ wash it away. And yeah, I'd give up profit for that cause. It's not so much about 'where I want to be' as 'where I'm just not willing to go', and I confess to serious dread and ill feeling over the rage for encryption and redefinition of entertainment media as stuff that's owned by big corporations and only _lent_ to consumers on promise of good behavior. I do not think my behavior warrants my 'license to own music data' being revoked unconditionally- I don't think it's reasonable that I not be allowed to open the box and poke around inside it to see how it works and maybe break it, or maybe get it to work better.
I build audio gear now- but when I was a kid I killed something like four cassette 4-tracks :) I wanted them to do more! sound better! and I took them apart and tried to do things to make the sound bigger or brighter or just generally more amazing. This usually did not work, but eventually I learned neat and useful things.
It horrifies me that the kid like me, today, trying to take apart digital media and make it bigger and better, is a criminal- not for plans to make bootleg copies for all his little friends (that wasn't my concern either), but for having the arrogance to want to take apart the media and do it a different way. We now have a situation in which people are harrassed as criminals for simply grappling with information- not government secrets, not 'if you open this the warranty is *buahahaha!*', but criminal liability and court involvement to punish what I was doing for years as a reclusive geeky kid. And I find that quietly intolerable, and cannot coexist with it.
So geek musicians, keep posted, be ready to travel to Vermont (not like I can afford to do road trips!), because I'm moving as fast as I can, trying to answer this situation with action. I want to get _great_ music out there with sound that meets or beats the best the industry can offer, and have it be data that people can _have_ and do what they wish with. I've made that rant before. On the eve of my wonderful 20 bit adat arriving (yaaaaay!) I am ranting it again. There can be no coexistence with me and the industry- I hope more people come to that realisation within themselves. I'm no pirate and do not steal the music industry's so-paranoidly-guarded wares. In fact, I don't even download mp3s- I intend to make them and _upload_ them. I don't want to make the industry poor, I want to make them irrelevant. >:)
Cheers, slashdotters. -chris
Damming The Ocean (Score:5)
Recent stories on Slashdot have told of the ongoing "tennis match" between digital content providers versus consumers and technically skilled people. The recent cracking of DVD's Content Scrambling System (CSS) lent ammunition to the opinion held by computing professionals and users that copy protection systems are doomed to fail. The effort has been likened to building a dam against the ocean; a foolish and useless exercise. In Slashdot discussion fora, the point has often been raised, "If you can perceive it, you can copy it. What are they going to do, encrypt the bits all the way to the speaker/electron gun?" If the Copy Protection Technical Working Group gets its way, that is precisely what's going to happen.
I received a piece of email spam today, which actually turned out to be useful (probably the only time that's ever happened anywhere). It directed me to a flat panel display industry group. Among others, one of the links pointed to the California Display Network [caldisplaynet.org], which had a link pointing to technical info on flat panel technology. Since I currently earn my living writing graphics card and display drivers, I clicked through to see what I could learn.
I found an entry for an overview of digital visual interfaces [caldisplaynet.org], provided by Silicon Image [siimage.com]. As I reviewed the headings of the slides, one entry stopped me cold: Conten t Protection Status [caldisplaynet.org]. Content protection? In a flat panel?? Yup: "Implementation of DVI content protection is suitable for PCs and monitors." [emphasis mine]
Thus began an evening of link clicking and Google searches to find out what this off-handed remark could mean. The slide made mention of the 'CPTWG'. This is the Copy Protection Technical Working Group [ndsworld.com], a consortium of content providers (movie companies), consumer electronics manufacturers, and players in the IT industry. This is the same group that developed CSS for DVD players.
One paragraph from the above page is particularly disturbing:
The most recent meeting of the CPTWG was yesterday, 8 December, 1999. Their meeting announcements may be found here [dvcc.com]. According to the December meeting announcement [dvcc.com], the next meetings will occur on 11 January, 2000, and 9 February, 2000. It costs $100 to attend.
The attendance roster from the November meeting [dvcc.com] (PDF file, sorry) lists a very interesting, and possibly worrying, mix of organizations. A partial list of representatives included:
If you download the roster and read closely, you'll see every major piece of your computer represented. There is no doubt that at least one part of your computer -- your CPU, your RAM, your disk drive, your graphics card, your monitor -- is manufactured by one of these companies.
If you look further still, you'll see there are no consumer advocacy groups listed.
What are they all working toward? Quite simply, to prevent you from using your lawfully obtained digital material in any way they don't want.
Here's one example of how they'll do it: If you've visited Fry's or CompUSA recently, you'll notice that full-size flat panel displays are starting to appear. Currently, most of these displays are based on the old VGA analog signals, which are converted into the digital signals needed by the panels. The Digital Display Working Group [ddwg.org] is working on a new connector and signalling standard called Digital Visual Interface (DVI) that will allow computer displays to go all-digital. You won't need a DAC on the video card; the digital signals will be fed straight through to the display. Image fidelity will be much higher, since there won't be any intervening DAC/ADC conversions. Version 1.0 of the standard has been published and is available for download [ddwg.org] (PDF format). The DVI spec currently does not stipulate copy protection measures. However, plans are in the works to incorporate it.
Intel is one of the primary contributors to this effort. On Intel's developer site [intel.com], they have some papers on copy protection [intel.com] for IEEE 1394 (Firewire) digital streams. In two separate articles, 1394-based Digital Content Protection: an Intel Proposal [intel.com], and Content Protection for IEEE 1394 Serial Buses [intel.com] (the latter being a Powerpoint presentation masquerading as a PDF file), Intel outlines its proposal for protecting digital content over Firewire. By using cryptographic authentication techniques, a device offering digital content will "handshake" with other devices on the bus to assure that digital data is only received by, "compliant devices." In a revised overview of the proposal, IDF Talk: Content Protection for the IEEE 1394 Bus [intel.com], Intel offers concrete implementation details, including:
The full proposal [ndsworld.com] (currently version 0.91), with lots of technical detail, is mirrored on CPTWG's site (the links to Intel's site don't work).
Intel's proposal also recommends that the copy protection system be field-upgradeable to thwart ongoing attacks, and that it should be possible to revoke (read: disable) a device determined to be "compromised." (The tone of the proposals is also interesting. It's previously been thought that, because of USB, Intel is hostile to IEEE 1394. Yet these proposals suggest that Intel's quite enthusiastic about 1394... Once copy protection is incorporated.)
Intel's proposal mentions only IEEE 1394. However, it also mentions that there's nothing preventing the technique being applied generally to any bi-directional link. So for all occurrences of '1394', substitute 'DVI', and you've got an idea of what to look forward to in your new digital monitor. And your new DVD player. And your new HDTV set. And your new USB speakers.
Intel goes even further in their paper, A Framework for DVD-Audio Content Protection [intel.com]. In it, the author suggests that DVD-Audio recorders permanently remember the IRSC (International Standard Recording Code) of every song the device is asked to copy, so that it may only be copied once, period. They go on to suggest that the recorder could have a modem built-in to authorize (read: purchase) the ability to make additional copies.
In short, through this industry consortium, Hollywood proposes to exert control over every link in the digital chain, from the digital camera, to the disk drive, to the CPU, to the graphics card, to your display. They will decide what rights you have. Even if a court decides Fair Use includes multiple copies for personal use (such as assembling a video montage), it won't matter. Your computer will still refuse to make the copies (and probably fink on you, as well).
This coordinated effort is ostensibly to combat unsanctioned copying (which the industry chronically refers to incorrectly as 'theft' and 'piracy'). However, no one has ever been able to provably quantify the value of unrealized sales due to such copying. All dollar estimates that have been published are just that: estimates, based on idealized extrapolations of what-if scenarios. Moreover, although the industry claims to "lose" billions every year, they continue to post record profits. Finally, despite the proliferation of CDR drives and the Internet, most unrealized sales are the result of organized mass counterfeiting rings, not casual copying. None of the proposed methods I've seen appear to thwart mass counterfeiting at all. So clearly there's some other reason for all this.
The thing that puzzles me most is why the computer and consumer electronics industries haven't told Hollywood to take a hike. Intel's copy protection proposals state, in bold letters, "No content protection = No Hollywood content." This belief is taken as axiomatic by all the players, and appears to be the driving force behind the entire effort. This belief is also false.
Audio on CDs are recorded as plaintext, and the music industry continues to earn rapacious profits. Even the with the advent of CDRs, no music industry executive in his right mind would suggest dropping CD sales and going strictly with cassettes and vinyl. If nothing else, the manufacturing costs for CDs are lower than those for cassettes and vinyl. Likewise, DVDs are tremendously cheaper to produce than videotapes. Videotape duplication is a labor-intensive process; DVDs can be stamped out automatically. The savings in cost-of-goods alone would more than balance against any unrealized sales from casual copying. Corporate shareholders, always mindful of the bottom line, will also demand that the studios move to the cheaper, higher-quality process, copy protected or not.
The fact is that the computer and electronics firms are in the driver's seat, and are free to dictate how the new digital formats will work. Hollywood will use whatever format becomes popular, whether it has copy protection or not. They may grumble about it, but they'll use it. The economics afford them little choice.
We are only now beginning to explore the social and ethical consequences of a Star Trek-like universe where everything can be infinitely duplcated at zero cost. We have no idea where things will end up. But now is not the time to start erecting electronic walls and imposing artificial scarcity. The ignoble and richly-deserved death of DIVX showed -- fairly unequivocally, I thought -- that consumers want to make free, fair use of their digital media, without interference from outside. I believe its death reinforces the future toward which we've been pushing for centuries: Increased abundance at reduced cost.
Nevertheless, the CPTWG and the organizations supporting it are blindly moving forward. It may turn out it's impossible to dam the ocean, but they're gearing up to give it one hell of a try. We can only hope that the lesson of DIVX will be repeated until it is learned.
Schwab
Differences (Score:5)
There are some major differences between now and 5-10 years ago, which make this a much bigger issue than it was then.
Copying of movies and music certainly existed then (which is why even really old videos have that FBI warning on them), but it was limited in several respects. First of all, the media you mention, like all media back then, was analog, and duplication of analog media produces an irreducible loss of quality. To a lesser extent, even playback damages them. This means that one can only copy a tape a certain number of times before it becomes useless. Futhermore, real movie/music buffs won't settle for anything less than top quality, which means the original tape as sold by the studio or label.
This changed with the advent of CD and (recently) DVD. With digial media, one can easily make an exact copy of the original, and digital media generally don't wear out either. This is what terrifies the studios about DVD, and what bothered the labels about CD when it first came out- not the prospect of copying, but the prospect of perfect digital copying.
More importantly, the difference lies in distribution. 5 years ago, even though CD writers did exist, piracy wasn't a huge problem, except from large, organized pirating operations. This is because there is an irreducible cost contained in the physical media, and the shipping of that media. 5 years ago, if I wanted a song without paying for it, I would have to put in some effort, and a nonzero amount of money, to get ahold of it, whether paying for a blank CD or tape, or making the effort of locating someone with the song to copy from. On top of that, it involved a per-copy cost to the original owner- he must spend the time and effort to make each and every copy. The economic term for this is that there was a nonzero marginal cost for each additional copy. This put a practical limit on piracy- any given disc sold would be unlikely to produce more than, say, 5 pirated copies, and very few discs were pirated at all to begin with, so the problem was small. Imagine trying to pirate a DVD today. DVD CCA smokescreen aside, it's pretty much impossible- you have to find a copy of the movie, a DVD burner, and buy a blank DVD, which costs more than the legit movie does.
The internet is changing this situation rapidly. With mp3, the cost of distributing a pirated CD is essentially zero. There is a small bandwidth cost, but it is quite manageable thanks to MPEG compression. And, thanks to internet distribution, a single CD could easily spawn thousands of pirated copies, because once the disc is ripped, the marginal cost of giving the mp3s to someone is essentially zero, and so pirates became willing to give even complete strangers copies. On the other end, if I want a pirated song, I can get it for no more than the cost of my time searching for it, with no additional effort or cost to physically ship it or get it into playable form. This has led to a radical explosion of piracy.
Sooner or later, the same thing will probably happen to DVD. Right now, this is prevented by the combination of a high bandwidth cost and the absence of any software capable of playing a movie directly from a file stored on disc. The CSS crack will address the second relatively soon, leaving only the first. As the mp3 experience shows, that point is probably a lot closer than one might think- only a few years ago, distribution of CD-quality music over the 'net was unthinkable.
It's not about IP; it's about control (Score:5)
I'm a small-time artist (or was not too long ago anyway). I don't pirate CDs. I really *do* delete mp3s I download if I don't plan to buy the album (and I've bought many albums after getting to hear a few more of the songs on it). When the predecessor of the RIAA tried to stop DAT, it hurt *me*; it took away a tool I needed to record and distribute my music. The industry tried to stop the VCR, reel to reel, and the compact cassette, all tools I needed and used to their fullest. When the RIAA bans mp3 (not that I think they'll succeed) it prevents me from distributing my own music (and trading legit amateur music with my friends). "You want to distribute music without a contract? You must be a criminal."
To drive the point home: Heard much from Joan Osbourne recently? No, because her recording label hasn't liked her second album attempts (she wanted to go in a different direction), refuses to release the music and yet retains rights to it all. Her only option is to not record again. Same with XTC (whose contract recently expired), Prince (who is so pissed at Sony he's planning to rerecord *all* of his hits from the 80s). Don't give me *any* line about the RIAA or the music industry having anyone's interests at heart; their own musicians won't come out to back them.
The RIAA represents corporations with a big fat cow of money at stake. It's common sense: They will act in their own interests. They'll try the easy ways and go for the biggest pot of cash first. That in itself is not greedy or evil (although it is amoral). The tactics they've decided to use are the worst kind of FUD. "You don't believe in the Free Market and Capitalism? You must be a criminal."
The RIAA wants to turn a battle for artists' rights (that's right; I'm on the artists'-- my-- side) into a piracy story. It is not in their interests for artists to have any freedom. That will cut into their profits, so what do you expect them to do? The DVD Forum (which doesn't particularly like Linux or OSS; they want you to play on platforms they can strike Deals with) are turning a battle entirely about interoperability into a battle about piracy. "You want to watch DVDs with unapproved software? You must be a criminal."
Monty
xiph.org [xiph.org]