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The Media Your Rights Online

Copyrights Need New Business Models 205

Posted by michael from the can't-teach-old-Hollywood-new-tricks dept.
fleener writes "Business 2.0 has an article simplifying the brouhaha over DVD and MP3. In a nutshell, the author argues a new business model is needed which destroys the motive to copy, not the mechanisms used to copy. For example, "a wireless flat-fee/advertising-supported jukebox of unlimited capacity would strip us of our desire to make MP3 files." He goes on to relate this idea to the success of other media formats, such as video cassettes. So, if the mechanisms for copying digital works are not restricted, what business model do you think is viable for the MP3/DVD paranoid entertainment industry?" And more important, how would you convince them to adopt it?
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Copyrights Need New Business Models More

Copyrights Need New Business Models

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  • This world is moving faster than legislators can keep up with. Copyright that applies to printed material can't work in the digital age. People will need to change the way they think about information.
    Information wants to be free. Let it.
  • Ignorance is the worst threat to freedom. We need to educate people. I call upon every Slashdotter to explain to at least 3 people tomorrow that it is legal to copy anything for your own personal use, as well as the other issues.

    You should begin the conversation with something like, "So, did you hear what the RIAA are doing?!"...

    (I don't know whether or not this post is humorous...)

    --

  • The industry powerhouses won't accept it until they have no other choice. They think they can control everything if they throw enough money and lawyers at it, and they've got plenty of both. I'm not sure how it's all going to pan out, but it's going to take quite some time, and there's probably going to be legal casualties. There's too many people out there sharing the information for the industry to stop them all, so they'll pick the few that they can conjure up the best cases against, and try to make examples of them. History shows that this seldom is an effective technique, especially the short but compelling internet history, but it's going to happen nonetheless.
  • a wireless flat-fee/advertising-supported jukebox of unlimited capacity would strip us of our desire to make MP3 files.

    What about choice?

    What if I wanted to listen to a Gentle Giant track from 1974. Or a Dixie Dregs track from 1981?

    Unless this broadcast facility had EVERY RECORD EVER RECORDED this wouldn't seem to elliminate the proliferation of MP3's (which I fail to understand anyway).

    But imagine if you could get EVERY RECORD EVER RECORDED, you could then get Richard Klein to advertise for the company!

    (1970's Comedy reference)

  • "wireless, unlimited jukebox"? (Score:4)

    by arcsNsparx ( 120318 ) on Thursday February 03, 2000 @08:44PM (#1306862)
    Let me see if I got this straight - Wireless, flat fee/Advertising supported jukebox with unlimited capacity... So we would set up transmitters in every city, and a phone line where listeners could call in and ask for a song to be played, and have different kinds of stations play different kinds of music! And support it by ads - we could even offer news and weather on the hour! And THAT could be sponsored by advertisers too! People could have little players that fit in cars, on their wrist, on their heads! Maybe we could call it - FM Radio!!! Genious? No - maybe something else.

  • Capitalism at its finest (Score:4)

    by cdlu ( 65838 ) on Thursday February 03, 2000 @08:45PM (#1306863) Homepage
    Always one for cynicism, I think this whole thing with the RIAA and the MPAA and the DeCSS is just going to show how far out of whack US capitalism has gone.

    Patents, Copyrights, etc. are[were] designed to protect people, not profits. It used to be a crime to profiteer in the US, now its a crime to prevent the rich from getting richer. I feel very strongly that its time for the US to go back to revolution and start clean. Same applies to most western democracies.

    I can't remember who said it (I'm no historian), but one of the American 'fathers' cautionned that the US needed a civil war or societal restructuring of some sort every generation to ensure a truly democratic nation.
    #include <signal.h> \ #include <stdlib.h> \ int main(void){signal(ABRT,SIGIGN);while(1){abort(-1); }return(0);}
  • Yes, wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone had unrestricted "free" access to all art (note... Britney Spears and NSYNC are not art, and should cost extra) and literature, but how feasibly is it really? Record companies and publishers are not going to be convinced that they can make as much money by "giving away" their "products," even if it might be true! They will fight tooth and nail, we are living in a world where money is the driving force, not quality of life, i'm sorry to say.

  • Could have been easy, now it's tricky (Score:4)

    by P_Simm ( 97858 ) on Thursday February 03, 2000 @08:48PM (#1306865)
    If the industry had been more tech-aware and less paranoid, they could have turned the mp3 trend into their own cash cow - not by trying to sell them, but simply by dominating the mp3 scene with their own free distribution of singles. They could have set up their own mp3 web sites, paid for by advertising and by the generated sales. They wouldn't be giving up much more than they already do by playing singles on the radio. They probably would have stopped the illegal mp3 scene from growing so rapidly, since almost everyone looking for mp3's just wants the latest single they heard on the radio anyway.

    Now, the mp3 scene is probably too big for them to even catch up with, and they won't release singles for fear of appearing weak on their anti-piracy stance. It'd be great if an intelligent business approach was taken in this area - let's just hope it's not too late.

  • The RIAA really does need to take a whole new approach to the way they do business. Instead of relying on overpriced CD's for revenue (and attempting to add a copy-protection scheme once they realize there is no way to stop the mp3 revolution) why don't they attempt to make some money out of this?

    They should just put up a massive online collection of mp3's of all the artists from major labels. They could rely on ads and/or promotions (concert tours, merchandise, etc) to generate income...they could even charge a nominal fee for unlimited access to the servers, and I don't doubt that an enormous amount of people would flock to a site like this. As nice as Napster is, it's very irritating when my transfers get cancelled midway through - or when I try to download from someone on a "T1" line speed and get 2k/sec... if the recording industry put up servers with all their music in mp3 form they would make a LOT of money. It's really too bad that they don't seem to understand this. Instead of adapting to new technology, they're simply trying to suppress it, and if history is any guide they are obviously doomed from the start.
  • ... how copying an mp3 is different from stealing? If I walk into a car dealership and drop off $5000 (to pay for cost the raw materials that compose the car) for a car and drive off with a $80,000 car, is this not wrong? How is copying an mp3 any different? Theoretically I don't even have to drop the $5000 because the cost of the raw materials is arbitrarily assigned, and in my opinion those materials are abundant and can be easily found, thus they should cost nothing, thus the price of the car is nothing.
  • These companies that are very profitable are going to lose money and go to flat rate scheme that lets you get what the hell you want...WRONG..the issue is that it's not that their loosing money from mp3's (people still by cd's) it's the fact thier loosing control..to quote austin powers Its about "freedom baby Yea"...our freedom..and the artist freedom. Freedom not to have to lick the boots of some corporate thug.

  • Cost will be a major driving force. For any method to work it will need to make it cost effective to just buy the original.

    With the advent of very fast computers it is just not possible to make a copy protection scheme that will last for any duration. A means around the protection will always be found. Encryption is easy to break because the key needs to be on the player at some point, and at some point the raw digital data needs to be available. Due to both of these constraints it just isn't feasable to use copy protection to protect a work. There will always be a way around it.

    Ease of use. If Joe Schmoe 50 IQ can't deal with it, it will fail.

    Because of these constraints I feel low cost download will likely be the wave of the future.

  • I generally agree with the idea that we do need a new way to think about informatin, but let me play devil's advocate for a moment. There is a lot of talk about making information free, but very little about how to do that pratically in our society. Do we commision pop stars to write songs that we (the general public) then own? If we distribute funds (goverment or otherwise) to artists, how do we decide who gets the money? Would George Lucas be able to make the next Star Wars prequils if he depended on public finacing? I highly doubt it. So, what would this ideal free-information economy look like?
  • I really don't think it is neccessary. So long as material is priced within reason the vast majority wont copy.
    Sure some people will pirate like mad, they are pirates and the law can deal with that.
    keep prices cheap more people will buy legit. Half of the reason the estimates of piracy are so high is that it is calculated on an inflated fee in the first place.
    • High price == high piracy == same profits
    • Low price == low piracy == higher profits
    • flat fee == medium piracy == cable TV
    • no fee == minimal piracy == radio / TV

    cya, Andrew...
    PS:anyone else notice xooom.com's stats are haywire??

  • The Fundamental Difference. (Score:3)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 ) on Thursday February 03, 2000 @08:57PM (#1306873) Homepage
    There is one major fundamental difference that everyone seems to ignore when it comes to MP3s and DVD piracy. Whereas with videocassettes and cassette tapes and photocopies, you had to pay for some sort of medium on which to copy the target work, with MP3s and DVD rips, you don't need anything but disk space, which people already have. I see people say that copyright laws were there to prevent people from rattling off 1000 copies of a book and then selling them, but a) it cost a bit of money to rattle off 1000 copies and b)the copies weren't identical to the original. But with an MP3 rip, it is identical, and it doesn't cost anything to do it. Sure, no one's selling MP3s, but copyrights weren't meant to prevent people from selling stuff, they were meant to give the author the right to manage the content, including distribution. Giving something away still steals a sale from the copyright owner.

    The VCR debate is not an analogy to the Mp3/DVD debate since it required both a) an extra machine and b) another video cassette. Both induced financial burdens that could be monitored, but the warez activity on USENET shows that this is not the case for MP3s. What the RIAA and MPAA are worried about is not controlling your lives to make sure that you can't get your information, but controlling their information which they have the legal right to distribute. The problem they have is that people are ignoring that right, just simple blatant ignorance. I think the MPAA and RIAA are taking a typical corporate hard-line stance in favor of their legal arguments, their open-source opponents are taking an equally hard-line stance against them, and the end result is helping neither side. OS people look like a bunch of little anarchist brats with no regard for the world they live in. Just as the MPAA and RIAA have been adversarial in their approach to the situation, OS members have been just as adversarial in theirs ("Oh, well, if we post DeCSS to all the newsgroups and message boards on the Internet, they can't stop us!").

    The article's suggestions about a jukebox and about new copyright laws are what I would call constructive ideas. They show the MPAA how to control distribution in such a way as to give the people what they want. I think the idea itself is a bit too much like radio and does not take into account that people can freely copy the data and ignore the signal, but at least it's constructive. It ignores that fundamental difference, though, free and easy redistribution.

    I personally wouldn't mind paying for my MP3s or DVD rips. Figure out a way to code in a security check that replies with a key unique to your player, so that even if you do copy it, it needs a certain key to play. Granted, any security system can be cracked with brute force, but if that's the only way it can be cracked (ie. no deCSS our there for the files), then that's ten times better than battles between crackers and corporates.

    The idea is not to reject our current copyright system, for it does work very well to protect intellectual rights. The idea is to figure out a way to respect those rights and give the people their data. I would much rather listen to my music knowing that I had respected the author's right to distribute it than listen to brats and bigwigs bicker back and forth about what each other's rights are.
  • Because once you've executed this little scenario, the car is no longer in the shop.

    Whereas, with an mp3, or anything digital, it's still in the shop.

    Arbitrarily assigned does not mean zero, either.

  • What if I wanted to listen to a Gentle Giant track from 1974. Or a Dixie Dregs track from 1981?

    Buy all the Gentle Giant CD's while you can get them. Online distribution of music will completely homogenize music, because it is so expensive to deliver music. The margins will be so low (if not zero), that only highly profitable, homogenized music such as Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails will get produced. The more creative and innovative acts (such as the would-be Gentle Giants of the 2000's) will not get produced. The music industry will splinter into two camps: mega-produced mega-stars on one hand, and poorly produced amateur acts on the other. The middle ground of artists who have thrived in the industry, such as Gentle Giant, other progressive musics, folk musics, jazz, and ethnic musics, will be completely destroyed. This is the danger of online distribution. Say goodbye to creativity, and usher in the new era of commoditized downloads, with ads attached.

    I'm particularly not looking forward to the the future of recorded classical music, which online distribution will completely and thoroughly destroy. (Wanna stream The Ring on 56k, anyone?)

  • What Jim Griffin proposes isn't a bad solution to the whole ugly mess that we're heading towards now. However, as some people point out, it'll only work if it contains EVERYTHING.

    On the other hand, if a flat-fee, web-accessible, moderately comprehensive jukebox system were put into place, then maybe those of us that wanted to hear, for instance, National Health, would be willing to order (and pay for) the album. This might be supplied through the jukebox clearinghouse[1], or through more traditional channels.

    [1] This unfortunately suggests the possiblilty of corruption, due to the absolute power over recorded music. Probably won't work that way.

  • thomas jefferson ...every thirty years...
  • In the early 1960's (god I'm giving away my age) when I was but a kid, I remember the bru-ha-ha over a new medium of marketing music called the Cassette. (either 8-track or the currently seen 4 track) This was predicted by the Music companies as being the end of thier ability to be profitable because it made pirated copies too easy to make. However the opposite turned out to be the case. Although it was easy to make a copy, the expense, time, and lower quality of a home made copy vs. a store bought one proved to be in favor of the music companies by a longshot. In addition, it turned out that this new medium actually INcreased their profits because it allowed for lower cost reproduction, more market penatration, (portible players, car audio systems etc.) In other words instead of fighting the tech the record companies embraced and even advanced the tech. ie. Dolby noise reduction, surround sound, quadrophonic sound etc. The record companies need to take a lesson from thier own history and embrace and expand. A profesionally engineered MP3 has got to be better than a dorm room rip any day. Sides why should a consumer spend an hour downloading an MP3 with a 28.8 when they could take thier Rio to the store and BANG have a copy of the latest from whoever they chose. Leading the tech means that Record companies stand to make more than fighting it. Simple math, Simple history lesson.
  • They still have the information to build the car. They just have to assemble it. (Remeber in the copying scheme we have labor == $0).

  • The answers are already here - website advertising, free music samples, pay per month encyclopaedias, small fees for music downloads, convenient internet ordering.

    The problem is that some industries don't want to enter the 21st century. After all, their gravy train might end! They might not be able to herd the sheep of humanity anymore! For god's sake people may start to think for themselves!!!!

    It's up to new companies (or those that are willing to change) to use business models that don't screw over consumers and still make them money. And it's up to us to support them if we think they're worth it. The informed consumer can still win in the end.

  • The difference between the library and digitally encoded music smashes the parallel that the article tries to draw between them:

    Libraries effectively created a mass-market of literate potential book-purchasers. The reason that they would purchase books when they had enough money to do so was that although it is great to be able to trundle down to the library and borrow things that you don't really know if you like, or can't afford, ultimately if it's a great book and you've got the cash it is much handier to be able to buy it than keep on borrowing it, having it recalled by other users, having to pay fines.

    Now, when books and music and films are potentially storable at home on the comfort of one's own PC the incentive is to trundle out to the library, copy the ones you want and keep them and never buy the dead-tree version.

    It may be that there would be enough revenue stream from advertising giving away free information, but the are the companies that are doing the advertising (of physical products presumably) the same ones that are potentially going to lose the revenue gained through selling information?

    If they are (and if the links between companies are all that they are claimed to be they probably are) then that is a possible model.

    However I bet there are plenty of companies that just produce information and are going to hang on tooth and claw to their sole revenue stream come what may.

  • Let's see radios. Well the music industry basically controls all of them too. Do you really think a free-based system of advertised music will ever beat the ability to play when you want music? I didn't think so either. Besides who has that kind of wireless broadband just sitting around. This is a wonderful idea from a not to technical viewpoint.

    It's kind of like "Hey we'll never have to do chores ... we'll have computers and robots do them for us." Tell ya what I STILL have to shovel my driveway.

  • With video, there are several methods which may defray the production costs of a program, such that the copying of a program does not impact the production company.

    We don't pay for television program viewing per show. Advertisers pay to interrupt the show every 7-10 minutes to let us know about their great products. By using product placement in movies, e.g. a close up of a bag of Brand X Potato Chips, advertising costs can be used to defray the production costs associated with video. Another great way to save no production costs in the first place is to stop paying movie stars $20 million per movie. Some movies (e.g. Star Wars, and anything made by Disney in the last 10 years) are effectively no more than 100 minute long advertisements for the merchandise associated with the movie. Action Figures, Video Games, T-Shirts, etc. are all "difficult to copy" goods that can be sold to make back production costs. I suspect Lucasfilm could sell DVDs for TPM at cost + $0.01 and still make back much more than the movie cost to produce via merchandise sales.

    Audio, however, presents a slightly more difficult problem. Product placement doesn't fit in very well, although artists could acquire corporate sponsorships to make a living. Bands don't generally make money through touring, as the tours have traditionally been the advertisements for the records/CDs/tapes.

    The fundamental tradeoff that the RIAA is looking at, is that it's easier to surf the mp3 search engines for popular songs, and download them, than it is to purchase the music legitimately. DVDs don't present as much of a problem in this area, as it would take weeks to download a movie via modem. Combine that with expensive DVD blank media, and it just isn't cost effective to duplicate DVDs electronically. Audio data, however, is relatively low bandwidth, and is easy to share, as teenagers/college students have always done. Blank tapes have a surcharge built into the price to defray the cost of piracy to the record labels (and by proxy, to their bands), but a totally electronic distribution scheme would be impossible to track and tax accordingly.

    Another thing to consider is that a fair amount of music in mp3 format can be obtained legally from web sites that cater to the DIY (do-it-yourself) recording industry. What's the difference between downloading the newest songs from that garage band in Timbuktu and buying the latest Limp Bizkit CD? The price is the popularity of the band, sharing a common musical experience with others across the globe. Back in the days of vinyl, artists could offer more than just music. Different colors of vinyl pressings, elaborate artwork (e.g. Roger Dean or H.R.Giger), and creative jacket design (e.g. Velvet Underground, Rolling Stones) could be used to make the legitimate purchase "worth it".

    What incentives do they offer us now?

  • Historically, many societies regarded middlemen as contemptible: they didn't produce anything, they just got rich shuffling goods around. But however little they were liked, the economic forces of the time dictated their existence.

    A modern, digital parallel of the middleman is an outfit like RIAA: they don't make music, they get rich packaging and selling other people's work. We have become so used to such middlemen that we forget that they don't have to exist at all. In fact, we've now come full circle. The internet kills the economic reason for the existence of these dealers in digital media. So-- what a great irony!-- we get laws like DMCA intended to perpetuate these once-reviled institutions, despite the economic forces of our time.

    My personal bet for the New Business Model in the music industry is that the corporate part will disintegrate, digital music will be free (or so cheap that pirating isn't worth the trouble), and musicians will make their money from live performances.

  • I have seen versions of this idea posted here on slashdot and in other forums; but it makes sense to reiterate it and hopefully bring it into focus. The current furor over copyrights will eventually settle into a metastable arrangement where the rights of creators and consumers are balanced de facto if not de jure. It seems likely that what it will settle down towards is a mixture of subscription funded digital archives (sort of like what MP3.com is attempting to build) but based on the backcatalogues of the major recording labels; and trade/sharing networks like napster and various IRC channels.
    Now it might seem odd to predict that the majors will have a (very) profitable business going when anybody can effectively make perfect copies of their product and pass it out to a few hundred thousand of their friends. But they will, keeping a large archive organized and accessible is a chore one that most people would gladly pay ~$5 a month for, especially if it allowed them immediate access to just about any piece of music ever recorded.
    The thing is that it would be a worthwhile service even to people who could load up a sharing server (like napster) and find what they were looking for IF it was available right then and IF it didn't take too long to find it.
    However, and I'm making one of those bold predictions that could be quite wrong. It's the file-sharing networks that will determine who the stars are. I'm betting the majors with a clue are already working on ways to maximise penetration of message to the various sharing groups.
  • Since they do not compose any of their own music (at least to my knowledge) they are not artists. They are performers though. Some might even consider them entertainers (although I don't :).

  • We have so much more available to us now than we did in the beginning of the century... back then it was to make sure that one person didn't print 1000 copies of another author's book and make money off of it unfairly.

    We have more precisely BECAUSE we have copyright. Do you enjoy movies? TV shows? Music? All of these media require literally millions of dollars to produce. Movies takes many, many millions of dollars to produce. People are able to make money off these because of copyright. Titanic cost $200 million to produce. If it weren't for copyright, it wouldn't have made any money, because it could be freely pirated in theaters. You are completely out of your mind if somebody is going to invest $200 million in something which they are going to give away.

    Copyright law is not a relic, but is more relevant today than ever before. An amazing number of people do not understand the difference between owning a physical artifact, and owning the right to what's on there. In the future, there will be fewer physical artifacts. So the ownership of the content independent of the physical representation is AHEAD of its time, not behind.

  • ...but there's a problem with his approach. Namely, implementation. What's the best way to do it? The basics are already in place, perhaps, but work still needs to be done.

    This would, in the end, be very similar to radio. Incidentally, adio is probably the single biggest contributor to CD saled out there, actually; I can think of one, maybe two CD's I've ever gotten for reasons other than the fact that I'd heard a song on the radio that I'd liked.

    I pity RIAA more than anything else, to be honest. They're getting left behind in the course of technological evolution, and they're being held back by nothing but first paranoia (people will steal our music), then greed (let's stop that by making it pay-per-listen), then stupidity (yeah, the public will stand for that... sure). If RIAA had harnessed the power of MP3 and streaming when these technologies had first come out, they would have owned the scene by now. But they refused, and now they're paying the price. I'm not too certain they'll be able to recover from it, in fact.

    But this guy gets it. He's on to something, even if he's forgotten some of the details. He'll never convince the RIAA that it'll work, but he has the right idea regardless.
  • The fundamental difference between sucking MP3's across the net and using DeCSS to play a DVD on my Linux box, is that I *own* the steenking DVD, legit, paid for, and so long as I don't give away copies or charge people to see it, I should be able to see it on whatever hardware I so choose. Besides, I don't even want an archive copy; I don't believe in wasting that much disk. What the MPAA is doing with DeCSS is like telling a blind guy he can't use his OCR to speak a book aloud. All's he's doing is using different hardware to exploit the media.

    They tried similar bovine scatology with DiVX and failed miserably. If these beauzeaux don't get a clue fast, I get the feeling that ESR and I are going to have a little party with our DVD players and some hot lead, and publicize the hell out of it. So maybe VHS isn't as durable as DVD.... that's why you make archive copies. It beats the hell out of kowtowing to those goons' ivory tower.

    Feel free to flame the snot out of me, and thrash my karma to hell. That's how I feel about it, and anybody who says I can't do as I please with the bits on a disk I *own* can just stick it.

  • Restrictions on copying, distribution and performance, if fully enforced, would effectively prevent all but the "Top 40" music, and blockbuster movies from being exposed to most people. Since it is these which generate the majority of profits for the recording and production companies anyhow, there should be a much more liberal policy regarding other works.

    Consider, I have a few friends over, and I play an album from a little known artist, which they really enjoy. Then they go out and buy CDs, or attend concerts, etc., because they've been exposed to it. But this was an unauthorized performance. Had I not done so, they'd have never heard it at all, and would likely never have supported the artist at all.

    More out on the edge, services like Napster, which undoubtedly contribute to copyright infringement on a large scale, help artists with smaller audiences gain greater exposure. Somebody might have heard good things about Beth Orton, but never actually heard any music by her -- downloading an MP3, one could actually listen to it and decide to go out and buy her album.

    Indeed, Napster is a perfect example of what the industry should be SUPPORTING. With or without advertising revenue, this is a model which on the whole adds to their bottom line. And indie labels should be in the forefront of this.
  • > musicians will make their money from live performances.

    Obviously spoken by someone who has never tried to make money by playing live music.

    Sure, wedding bands and "jukebox" bands can make enough to live on, if it supplements a menial day job, or they live in the band's van. But if you play your own music, it's difficult to get enough people together in one club to make any "real" money doing it.

    In a former life, I was performing artist in the Baltimore/D.C. area. I can't remember a single area band whose members didn't hold down day jobs. Most chose occupations that would help the band in some way. If one of your bandmates works at Kinko's, flyer costs tend to drop to the negligible range. Someone does a little writing or advertising sales for a local music magazine, and you can get a small block of advertising in exchange.

    In a way, the 'net changes a lot of this, as you are no longer forced to convince dozens/hundreds of people in a small geographic area to put up with a dingy, smoky, beer stained environment to make a buck with your music. Now you just have to convince people that the few demo songs they can download off your website are good enough to justify purchasing a full length release...

  • We don't pay for television program viewing per show. Advertisers pay to interrupt the show every 7-10 minutes to let us know about their great products.

    That's not true in the UK. Everyone pays a license fee to the British Broadcasting Corporation for possesion of a T.V. reception apparatus. And I've got to say that T.V. in the U.K. is way than in the U.S. I actually bothered to watch it when I was there because it would hold my attention span. I fucking hate being interrupted with advertising all the time and I considered the #40 or so pounds pretty reasonable for commercial free TV which also produced original drama.

    By using product placement in movies, e.g. a close up of a bag of Brand X Potato Chips, advertising costs can be used to defray the production costs associated with video.

    There's already a lot of that in the movies and funnily enough the movies with the most of it are the ones that suck - they're commercial, whoring to the ad-execs and the big companies.

    Audio, however, presents a slightly more difficult problem. Product placement doesn't fit in very well,

    I can just hear the Dead Kennedys or RATM popping in soundbites for Ford Explorers.

    I totally agree with your last 2 paragraphs - they've got to offer attractive packaging. Although I have the opportunity to burn my own audio CD's I like to buy them if they have good sleeve notes or artwork, I also collect vinyl for exactly the same reason. Companies have to learn to sell good physical products, not information.

  • The marketing people can attempt to circumvent pirating, but they will never succeed. The audio/video or whatever still has to be accessible to the hardware. I can record whatever I want simply because I have a sound card and a video card. I have the analoge signal!! It's really easy!

    I can only hope for the day when everything is self-produced. Let big music/movies die a gruesome death.

  • If RIAA had harnessed the power of MP3 and streaming when these technologies had first come out, they would have owned the scene by now.

    Yeah, but what scene? If they were giving away free music over the internet, they probably would own the scene, but how would that benefit them? They would be giving away intellectual property and getting nothing in return but maybe some advertising revenue. Not a bad deal if it isn't your intellectual property to begin with, (like MP3.com or Napster) but not such a good idea for the RIAA.

    The RIAA's paranoia over their music being stolent is real. When faced with a choice between paying and just taking, a lot of people will just take. And as time goes on, it's looking less and less like there is anything the RIAA can do to stop people from just taking. The question now is, how can creators make a living from their intellectual property in a world where their work can be accessed by anyone, anytime, without paying them?
  • In devising a new business model for IP distribution, I think its important to keep in mind that our ultimate goal make everyone better off--not just the consumer. Artists and producers should make more money off their content. Consumers should have greater availability of content and lower prices. However, if that goal means the elimination of certain "middle-men" in the current system, then so be it. Keep in mind that in an ideal system which maximizes economic profit for both, the producers of IP sell directly to the consumers. Whether this can be accomplished in reality will be up to the market and the marketing skills of those who produce IP.

    NOTE: see my earlier post here which goes into greater detail:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/01/21/23423 5&cid=141

  • The article's suggestions about a jukebox and about new copyright laws are what I would call constructive ideas.

    I personally think that the music industry, and maybe the entire entertainment industry, will undergo a huge change in its "business model" not simply because of the internet, but simply because of the way the tech is getting cheaper and cheaper. I can set myself up with a computer-based recording studio for $2500, which includes a nice computer with lots of storage and memory and a Digi001 card (8 line-ins). (In case someone doesn't believe me: I'm doing it.) I don't know about movies, but I would be interested in hearing from others how hard/easy it would be to set up their own studios, using computers.

    I don't think there will be any real need for the big studios in say about 30-40 years. I can see that kind of power and influence being useful for touring, which is where bands make most of their money, but I think recording will start to fall by the wayside, become a sort of vanity thing. It will become too easy for Joe Schmoe to get his or her (Jo) own studio set up in their basement for little outlay. Although, to be honest, the REAL locus for THAT little change will have to be in the minds of the musicians themselves. If musicians stopped feeling like they need to be on MTV, and started committing to a DIY set-up, then the big labels really would be in trouble.

    Of course, they encourage that attitude.

    Anyone got observations on how the movie industry will go?

  • This article is right-on.

    In the information age, digital forms of art, especially music and video, need to be sold as a service, not as a product. One cannot blame large traditional companies for not quickly realizing this, but one can definitely blame them for their efforts to hamper such progress.

    Once the primary method of distribution is the internet, the cost of distribution should drop sharply. If the drop in cost of distribution is passed on to the user, the piracy problem is solved. Who will spend the time making and trading MP3s when higher quality versions are available faster for pennies, or better yet, for a flat fee of ~$20 a month?

    My real worry is the following: The record and movie industries realize that the internet is the distribution medium of the future. The recent attacks on MP3s and DeCSS are not to prevent eventual internet distribution, but in fact to give the record and movie industries time to cement their control of this distribution medium. With standards like DVD and CSS in place with the backing of laws like the DMCA, one organization can have control of distribution of music or video for an entire medium. Imagine a future where CSS-like standards are in place for internet-distributed movies and audio. Laws like the DMCA make it a felony to remove such encryption, or even to write programs capable of removing such "protection". The companies in question then sell these protected files dirt-cheap, or as a cheap service, and completely replace MP3's. Only problem is, they still have complete control, and no competition. Record companies can still screw the artists and the customers. The movie industry can do the same. This is why MP3.com is being sued. This is why DeCSS is under attack. The corporations in question are not as dumb as we'd like to believe.

    -Larry Lansing
    www.fuzzynerd.com
    +++

  • I can just hear the Dead Kennedys or RATM popping in soundbites for Ford Explorers


    RATM, definitely, but I think Jello Biafra has more class than that. =)


    However, I could see DK flashing closeups of their Doc Martens for a small fee...

  • Jefferson said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
  • Spot on. The advertising model has been done with audio, video, and text.

    Rod Serling put the complaint about this model the best:

    It is impossible to tell a story properly and keep the audience in the right mindset when you are interrupted every 12 minutes by cartoons of dancing toilet paper"

    We need a mechanism to provide content for pay without the intolerable interruptions of advertisers.

    I would suggest that the ad-free digital music channels that are thrown in with most satellite TV deals are an example - particularly of the value put on the feed: near zero. 7x24, times a dozen music channels, for an extra five bucks a month on the pay-TV deal. That's half a milli-cent per 5-minute tune.

    I'm very sorry for people wedded to the profit margins in the current business model, but it's over.

    A century of world exploration was funded by the profits on "spices of the Orient" when pepper traded ounce-for-ounce with gold. Pepper is now a thousandth that price.

    They'll just have to get over it.

  • The DVD thing is not about piracy. Why does anyone think that it is?

    Sure, people will pirate DVD's with DeCSS. But, those people can already pirate DVD's without DeCSS. Commercial programs exist to record everything sent to the video card into an AVI or MPG file. The most common use I've seen for them is when a company creates how-to CD's for a product.

    Given that, DeCSS is not any more of a pirating tool than those programs you can buy. So, the only use of DeCSS beyond this already possible pirating, is playback of movies you own.

    Of course, the judge says something to the effect of "you must have a license...without one you have effectively bypassed a copy protection scheme..." which is illegal by our new Digital Mellinium...etc.

    So, what we should be fighting are the new laws!
  • What are you talking about? That rant has to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. The fact is that online music distribution will have the complete opposite effect.. With CD's and cassettes, the costs of production and distribution are too high for any individual artist to afford, and hence only a select few of them can enjoy widespread exposure. Online distibution is dirt cheap in comparison, and any almost any musical artist can afford to distribute their works via stream or download. Not every artist will make a lot of money, but making money is not the primary goal of most musicians.

    I completely fail to see how you draw your conclusions. Please explain to me how there is any factual basis in your preposterous claim that online distribution will be more expensive. All it requires is recording a track, encoding it into a digital format, and placing it on a web server. That doesn't guarantee that one will actually listen to you, but that's beside the point. Contrast online distribution with the current CD/Tape distribution model which requires mass production and retail strategies with distributors and resellers.

  • I think the current problem of the media is that it's too cheap to reproduce and so a free information (`end of days` is information?) won't sustain an economy.

    <p>Originally a b&w 2D video couldn't be copied but now it can. Because of the nature of people no one would try and control the tide and so colour films at high res with selectable languages and interactive - flow chart styled - movie sequences are also easy to possibly copy. The technology is wide spread.

    <p>Maybe the artists could move into media that involves technology people don't have the ability to copy. Like atoms and not this easy digital thing.

    <p>Tickle me Elmo is a prime example.
  • There was an idea I read in the paper a few days ago about movie rental that you earned by watching ten minutes of adverts and answering questions - or paying the rental fee.
  • I think that trying to compare MP3/DVD distribution to the duplication of books, cars, etc, is the wrong analogy. To me, this all looks much more like the (computer) age old problem of software piracy - something that doesn't seem to be such a raging issue any more.

    As far as I can see, the software industry has really given up. They tell you not to do it (pages of legal jargon in every pack) - they try to catch the big offenders (warez sites etc), but rely encouraging purchase with the value-adds like support and distribution for income (smells like open-source to me).

    Do we think this model can apply to music? Hey, buy the CD, get a nice little booklet, and some useful support (fan club mail, discount tickets?) in the post.

    Litigating the butt of everybody is going nowhere - after all did the companies that made software to duplicate those magical key floppies ever get shut down?
  • The point is they don't produce any of it. They PERFORM. The dance is choriographed (sp) by choriographers (sp). The songs are written by other people. The music is written and performed by others. They are strictly involved in performing. I guess you could consider their idiosyncratic styles art, however, I think that would be a strech. I'm not belitteling the importance of performance, I'm just saying they aren't artists.
  • Grand idea, ole chap. Streaming web-jukebox.
    Somebody should get on that pronto.

    What? Mp3.com already has?

    Allright, lets commend those guys!

    What? They're being sued?

    Hmph
  • But with an MP3 rip, it is identical, and it doesn't cost anything to do it.
    I guess you don't have very good audio hardware. MP3 rips are a definite drop in quality from the original CD. Listen on a good system and you will definitely notice the difference. Not that it matters much for the Dead Kennedys or Sex Pistols, but still...
    --Shoeboy

  • DVD can be defeated. Here's how it might be done:

    1. Invent and patent your own disc-based distribution medium. It would include a straightforward method of recording to blanks. Ideally, the medium would be similar to removable hard-drives, but more robust, and similar to floppies, but with a huge DVD-size capacity. Perhaps solid-state devices are the way of the future here.
    2. Form your own company to market the invention. At all costs, keep it out of the hands of any company affiliated with The Bad Guys.
    3. Allow any company to manufacture players/drives and blank discs. By opening up the manufacture of players/drives and discs to all comers, you will improve the chance that the market will accept your product. It's why VHS won out over Beta: Beta was Sony-only, and VHS was everyone else.
    4. Charge a token patent royalty on every drive/player that is manufactured. (say, about US$5). You gotta eat, you know.
    5. Charge largish patent royalties (say, about US$5) for every blank disc that is manufactured.
    6. Distribute half or more of the blank-disc royalties to artists. Royalties for prerecorded discs go to the artist appearing on the disc. Royalties from blank discs go to a general pool that's paid to all artists. Movie makers and software makers would be included as "artists" here. They would have less to fear if they got some payment from the sale of blank discs.
    7. Make your company into a recording company for low-volume artists (typically those who would sell less than 1,000 units), so they can get their fair share of royalties from sales.
    8. Try to gain enough market share such that it is a viable competitor to DVD. DVD has enough weaknesses as a format to make another marketable product that overcomes these weaknesses.

    Think I'm dreaming? Right now, the world is crying out for a viable replacement for the old 1.4 Mb floppy disc. The 1.4 Mb floppy disc is long past its peak of usefulness, but a floppy drive is still installed by default on all new computers, because no replacement is yet available that meets all of the criteria of robustness, ubiquitousness and ease of use. Invent and patent such a replacement, and you will make millions.

    I didn't say it would be easy. But to anyone willing to try, I wish you good luck.


    --

  • You are completely out of your mind if somebody is going to invest $200 million in something which they are going to give away.

    While they might not be able to recoup $200 million on a single movie, perhaps they could recoup $10 million without copyright, by having movies be comissioned. This would probably reduce the number of movies being made and make actors only well-to-do instead of megawealthy, but I would find this an acceptable trade so we could reduce the limits of freedom of speech.


  • Commissioning artists nowadays can work. For an
    example that used the web to attract potential patrons, see the latest
    CD from the singer/songwriter Momus. Personally, I don't like his music, but I am hardly an arbiter of good taste.

    For a real media report on this, try this [npr.org] from npr.org's all things considered archive.
    ----

  • Re:RIAA (Score:1)

    by Tino ( 1418 )
    A lot of people would (and probably will) point out that denying artists the income from recordings will result in the End Of Music, etc., etc., woof woof woof.

    The problem with that idea is that music (and all other art) existed for millions of years prior to the rise of the RIAA and the MPAA. And never mind that only a few artists at the top of the recording food chain ever see much money from the sales of their recordings.

    mp3s do not pose much of a risk to the income of most recording artists. They pose a risk to the very existence of the recording companies, though. This is why it's the recording companies, not the artists, that are telling you about how much money the artists are losing because of mp3s.

    It's important to realize that. If the companies were just interested in maximizing their profits in the face of new technology, they'd eventually face reality and do what was necessary (like distribute their artists' mp3s and sell ads).

    But because the recording companies' only reason for existence is that they control the means of physical mass-distribution of the artists' product -- CD-pressing plants, record store supply chains, etc. -- they will fight any new means of mass-distributing that product to the bitter end.

    My assessment is that the recording industry, in anything like its present form, is no longer a viable business to be in. Either the companies will go bankrupt attempting to fight technology, or future artists' contracts will not grant exclusive distribution rights to the recording companies, and they'll go bankrupt after the artists discover that they can now effectively self-distribute and still make their money (as they do now) from concert ticket and T-shirt sales.

  • >But with an MP3 rip, it is identical, and it doesn't cost anything to do it.

    Mp3 rips are very lossy, the sound difference is easily discernable depending upon the ripper, especially at the almost-mp3-standard of 128 kbps. If you listen closely to an mp3 you can easily hear a whooshing sound. Personally I think mp3s will die because people will begin to care more about digital audio as they buy better computer speakers.

    Once lossless encoding is adopted like the shn, then I think the music industry will have serious problems. However, lossless encoded shns is currently not decodable on the fly like mp3s are.

    Ben

    for information on shns, visit www.softsound.com

  • Here in Australia, a new-release CD costs about $30; the same album on cassette $10. Presumably both are profitable, and the cost of manufacturing each would have to be pretty close ($1-2 I'd think). I guess $30 is the "profit-maximising" price for CDs; probably the profit profile would have a large peak at around the $10 mark and a slightly larger one at $30 with a dip in between. That profile would fail to take piracy into consideration, however -- if half the people who pirate music would pay for it at $10, the peak there would be much higher than the one at $30.

    I think the music industry believes that people who pirate music would do so at any price, and although this is true for some, I suspect that most people say to themselves, "This disc is worth $30 to me; I'd like that one, but I couldn't justify $30 for it... I guess I'll fire up Napster."

    Most people are not fundamentally stupid enough to wish that the musicians they like should starve. Nor are they fundamentally stupid enough to believe that they are not being taken advantage of with current prices. They simply make the compromise that their finances allow.

    I've got a list as long as my arm of CDs I would like to get; unfortunately it keeps getting longer... for every CD I buy another two seem to end up on the list... there's that 30:10 ratio again.

  • Ummm...wrong

    Broadband and compression technology will allow for an infinitely larger number of stations to come into existence, as the cost to an individual or business of setting one up wouldn't exceed the cost of a server and the tracks being played. If you don't like the playlists of the hundreds of thousands of stations that will be accessible to you, you'll be free to create your own. Contrast that with the necessity to have access to a mountain of radio equipment, antennas. and whatever the hell else that is necessary to set up your average FM radio station. If it's easy for me to listen to a fairly specific genre of music at any given time (or even a station that revolves around a specific artist), then casual music fans such as myself won't have a very large incentive to actually to purchase music. The ownly reason why we purchase CDs is because we cannot rely on FM radio to deliver our favorite music in a consistent fashion, if at all. Because FM radio is expensive, only commercially viable music is played -- only it can pay for the equipment, the high utility bills, etc. If one only needs to pay for a web server and a broadband connection, one can afford to play pretty much anything one wants.

  • It wouldn't need every mp3 recorded, initially.

    It could work if the users involved were able to post up "want lists" and there were rewards (money?) for posting up the music a requestor wanted. Maybe a flat rate for uploading new music not even on the servers?

  • The difference is that with a car, labor has to be performed with every car made, whereas with online music distribution, the marginal cost is zero.

    A proper analogy would be looking at your neighbor's car (with his permission) and building your own car, modeling it after his. The car company can still sue you for doing this, but it seems a lot less like theft to most people.

  • Suppose I like the car you're driving and decide that I want one just like it. As this is a futuristic setting, I take out my molecular replicator (which as of so far has not been invented), zap your automobile and create an exact replica for myself. Your car is unscathed, and you may continue to use it just as you did before. The only difference is that I now too have a car. I haven't stolen anything from you in this situation. "Stealing" requires taking something away from you, which I haven't done.

  • This article makes a lot of sense. We need a new business model, not just for music, but for any product that can be copied with high fidelity. Right now this is clearly the case with music and software; later it may extend to movies; and maybe far in the future, to nanotech constructors.

    The current system is workable because people who pay for music and software subsidize people who don't pay for it. It's a stable system, as long as it's more convenient to buy a product than to pirate it. However, it will only get easier, not harder to freely distribute information, as programs like Napster show. As the cost of copying software drops, the price a developer can charge for software will have to drop as well, just so developers can compete against copies of their own product.

    Which brings us to the question: how do we allow developers to charge a reasonable price for their software, while encouraging, not restricting, the free transfer of information?

    Here's the proposal:

    1. Allow music, software, etc. to be freely copied without restriction.
    2. Have companies like Nielsen Media research develop product popularity metrics based on easily quantifiable demographics.
    3. Have people pay a fixed fee every year for "intellectual property use" based on their demographic group.

    Of course, some immediate objections come to mind:

    • I don't want to pay for someone else's software use.

    If you buy software, you already are. This system will be more fair. Besides, there are plenty of situations where we subsidize a larger group based on statistical information, i.e. any sort of insurance, paying a flat fee for internet access, property taxes.

    • The system won't be accurate.

    In the limit of perfect statistics, we could determine a person's software use exactly, and each person would pay for exactly what he used. We can't, and so we clump people together into larger groups, with good enough statistics so that the end result is roughly correct.

    This is better than the current system, where the industry aspries to have each person pay for exactly what he uses by mandating that this be the case, rather than making a determination based on actual measurements.

  • The fact is that online music distribution will have the complete opposite effect.. With CD's and cassettes, the costs of production and distribution are too high for any individual artist to afford, and hence only a select few of them can enjoy widespread exposure.

    The cost of producing music today is GOOD because it pre-selects talented artists. There are tens of thousands of talented artists who produce music today. If anybody has the opportunity to produce music, then people will make MP3's of people singing in the shower. There will be a greater quantity of music, but it will be impossible to sift through it all, because the number of talented artists will not increase substantially.

    I completely fail to see how you draw your conclusions. Please explain to me how there is any factual basis in your preposterous claim that online distribution will be more expensive.

    On-line distribution is not more expensive. On-line distribution will have SUBSTANTIALLY lower margins. This will result only in low risk, mega-pop-superstars who are guaranteed to turn over profit (Backstreet Boys, Pearl Jam, etc.) More creative and risky acts won't receive play because the margins will be so low.

    All it requires is recording a track, encoding it into a digital format, and placing it on a web server.

    It costs between $250,000 and $1,000,000 to produce CD's today. The cost of the physical artifact is negligible compared to the cost of recording. On-line distribution will not reduce the actual cost of music substantially. However, the selling price will go down because most people are so clueless that they think they will be getting less because they don't get a physical artifact.

    Most people who think CD's are expensive don't have the slightest clue about what it costs to produce. Some people seem to think you just go next to the computer, do cat /dev/audio > my-album.au, and you're done. Maybe this will work for certain primitive musics, but I'd love to see you produce something substantial, such as Mahler's symphony #8, for less than $1,000,000. Anybody who advocates less expensive music is advocating a serious degradation in music production quality. As a music lover, I am firmly against this. You are really willing to give up the absolute stellar quality of music production for free distribution? No thanks, I'm more than happy to pay for quality.

  • Intellectual rights are created to insure credit. Why does this have to be in a monetary form?

    Uh, because "kudos" doesn't pay the rent?

    It seems to me any smart capatalist would fleece consumerism by freeing and then supporting a products path into the hands of the market.

    So artists should give away their work for free, and then make money by somehow "supporting" that free product? In what way does one "support" music? And what makes you think that enough "support" payments will actually be made to actually allow the artist to make up the costs of producing the initial product.

    The problem here is that the open-source community and the corporations are taking to opposite extremes in this issue, when what we really need is some sort of middle ground. Developing music, or movies, or computer software has a lot of up-front costs. Hence, the corporations feel that they need to restrict copying in order to make back their investment, plus make some profit. Making "one more copy" of data is free though, so open-source extremists say that copying should be completely free.

    Both of these sides are right to an extent, and also wrong to an extent. The producers of the data do deserve to make back their investment if people are really making use of that data. It's pretty obvious that the media companies are gouging consumers though. The prices are way higher than they should be, and the actual artists get a disproportionately small "piece of the pie".

    The open source extremists are right in that making another copy is free, so it shouldn't cost that much to get another copy. The problem is, how do the artists get paid for all of the work they did? Open source extremists would probably say it could work like open source software. There aren't any good business models for OSS either though.

    Imagine if music used the open source model, as exemplified by Red Hat, et al. Musicians would write music, and not get paid for it. They'd have to work as waiters or cashiers for a living, or maybe to some live performances if they're lucky. The music labels would sell "distros" that would have music from various artists. They would have some sound engineers on staff to do some tweaks to the sound on their distros to make them sound a bit better. You could either download the music for free, or buy the music in the store (but you're really buying a box and "technical support"). In the latter case, only the label makes any money. The musicians rarely, if ever, make a cent off of the work they did. Yup, that sure sounds like a great business model...

    Before you go and say "the artists could make money in some other way", think about what that other way would be. Does it apply to all artists? (Musicians that create symphonic electronica, like Galbatron [galbatron.com], can't exactly do "live performances", for example...)

    While I do think open source software is great (yes, I've contributed code to a few projects), I'm getting a bit sick of seeing people say "the existing business models suck" and suggesting that evrything should be open source without actually proposing any business models that would be practical in the real world.

    And before someone points me over to the business models on ESR's opensource.org [opensource.org] web page, most of them are red herrings... (think about how many of them are 100% open source, and actually ensure that the developers get paid for their work)

  • About Fscking Time (Score:3)

    by ewhac ( 5844 ) on Thursday February 03, 2000 @10:38PM (#1306935) Homepage Journal

    It's about time someone else floated this idea; namely, that existing business models cannot work in the digital universe, where everything can be infinitely copied. Just imagine what life would be like in a world with Star Trek-like replicators; how would you be able to sell anything?

    So, there are two issues needing to be addressed:

    1. What intellectual property laws will we need in a universe with infinite copyability,
    2. What economic models do we create to replace the market-based economy, which we use to motivate people to do useful/necessary things?

    In a world with replicators everywhere, trying to restrict copying isn't just impossible, it's childishly naïve. People would laugh at the attempt. However, even though control over copies isn't possible, control over reputation is. In fact, reputation becomes tremendously important. If you see (a copy of) something you like, and would like to have something similar made, you'd like to be able to get in touch with the original designer, reliably. You'd like to be assured that the person you're speaking to is the true holder of the reputation you're seeking, rather than a charlatan. So laws guarding against theft/dilution of reputation will be important and necessary.

    As for the second point -- economic models -- that one's a little tougher for "ephemeral" stuff, like music. Although copies are freely available, the creator's time is still a scarce resource. So the economy will revolve around competing for the artist's time rather than their artifacts. How would people know to approach a particular artist? Through their reputation.

    One possible way this could be done today is to set up a Web site whereby artists/programmers put up their wares for open bidding. Let's say John Carmack decides he wants $50M for Quake-4. So he puts it up for bid: "Quake 4, by id Software. Price: USD$50,000,000". Visitors bid whatever they want for it: $10, $50, $100, etc. The bids are held in escrow for a certain time limit (established by the artist). When the sale price is reached, Carmack gets the $50M, and Quake 4 is released free to the world. (Quake 4 remains listed on the Web site, so people can throw "tips" in the jar.) If the requested sale price isn't reached, the code isn't released, and all bidders get their money back. The artist can resubmit for a different price if they wish.

    This is just one possible idea (one I think is terribly interesting and worth exploring). Others doubtless exist.

    Start exploring, people...

    Schwab

  • First, You mistaken in your idea that books differs MP3s because you don't have to pay for the media with books, while you don't with MP3s. As you yourself state, "all you need is diskspace", you pay for that don't you? Paper costs next to nothing as does disk space, but that does not mean they are without cost.

    That being said, you make another statement that is more disturbing because it is not a simple mental skip. You state "For it [the current copyright system] does work very well to protect intellectual rights" Do you really think this? It works well right now?

    The Grateful Dead made cash, they allowed free bootlegging and for fans to trade these audio files and with only one top ten single they were fine. The majority of copyright law is based on Lockeian property law. That just doesn't apply in the digital age.

    If you want to extend the overall goals of current patent law that is one thing, but the implementation is a very different sector.

    Nate Custer
  • The copying model has no method of compensation for labor. Thus, labor in your counter-example doesn't matter. Labor is free in the copying model.

  • Semantic Trap (Score:4)

    by Robert Wilde ( 78174 ) on Thursday February 03, 2000 @11:14PM (#1306938)
    The best forms of copy protection are new business models that destroy the motive to copy, not its mechanism.

    The argument of the article is solid, but it has fallen into accepting the semantic trap that copyright owners are using to frame the issue.

    What is the difference between:
    1. Copyright Protection
    2. Copy Protection
    3. Access Protection

    The first is what copyright holders have traditionally held. For the last several decades, however, there has been a trend to equate copying with copyright violation. Nothing could be further from the truth - copyright law only exists because of the balance that was struck between the inherent fair use rights of the public and the statutory rights granted to content providers.

    Now, under the DMCA, copyright holders are attempting to change the debate again. According to the DMCA, copyright holders now have the right to dictate the terms under which you can access a copyrighted work.

    The community needs to lobby hard to overturn the DMCA's restrictions on access and fair use. That means writing your Congressman and Senator (yes, he or she voted for the DMCA - they all did) and inform them of the abuse of law that the MPAA and RIAA is engaging in. Digital works should be protected by the same tradition of copyright that helped spawn innovation in this country over the last 200 years. Digital works do not deserve special protections beyond the scope of traditional copyright law!
  • The margins will be so low (if not zero), that only highly profitable, homogenized music such as Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails will get produced. The more creative and innovative acts (such as the would-be Gentle Giants of the 2000's) will not get produced. The music industry will splinter into two camps: mega-produced mega-stars on one hand, and poorly produced amateur acts on the other. The middle ground of artists who have thrived in the industry, such as Gentle Giant, other progressive musics, folk musics, jazz, and ethnic musics, will be completely destroyed.

    Well, I already SEE the industry as destroyed. I don't think there are very many talented people being recorded by major labels (unless we're talking jazz or classical). I have to look far and wide and search hard to find import catalogs to find anything to which I want to listen.

    I'm particularly not looking forward to the the future of recorded classical music, which online distribution will completely and thoroughly destroy. (Wanna stream The Ring on 56k, anyone?)

    I'm really not that certain I agree with you here. I don't think this will affect classical music as much as pop (if at all). Classical music always had a niche.. one even smaller than jazz, and I suspect that this won't change. Not only don't I think the powers that be will want to make it available, I suspect the average classical listener wouldn't like that online method of distribution anyway.

    Just a thought.

  • Re:The Fundamental Difference. (Score:3)

    by Chris Johnson ( 580 ) on Thursday February 03, 2000 @11:24PM (#1306940) Homepage Journal
    "Imagine if music used the open source model, as exemplified by Red Hat, et al. Musicians would write music, and not get paid for it. They'd have to work as waiters or cashiers for a living, or maybe to some live performances if they're lucky. The music labels would sell "distros" that would have music from various artists. They would have some sound engineers on staff to do some tweaks to the sound on their distros to make them sound a bit better. You could either download the music for free, or buy the music in the store (but you're really buying a box and "technical support"). In the latter case, only the label makes any money. The musicians rarely, if ever, make a cent off of the work they did. Yup, that sure sounds like a great business model..."

    ROFL! Talk to some musicians. Your fears of the future for an 'opensource' musician actually describe the lot of a musician in the existing industry. It's no way to make a living, and switching to some other model would be no hardship for most musicians, who already deal with fulltime dayjobs and actually spend money at their art rather than earn money with it- and I'm talking about signed musicians.

    I think it would be very interesting to see ideas thrown around for opensource music business models. The ones that work would (interestingly) share huge amounts in common with the existing strategies for maybe (if you're lucky + willing to work hard) gaining instead of losing off the current industry. In other words, putting together a business plan, financing the gear you need to do your job (and _only_ the gear you need- good advice is that if you're not a sound engineer, don't build a studio, rent time at one and prepare well), putting a lot out there for exposure (which invariably seems like throwing it away, whether it's mailing off 50 expensive promo kits or allowing people to download your MP3s), and then having some means (gigs, merchandising, a little indie label) to get income from people who want to clap _and_ throw money.

    It sounds like a better deal than the industry, because it is a better deal than the industry. The only caveat is that it's even more obvious that you have to have a business plan to make money- that or I hope you have a good manager :) however, this is not in fact _different_ from the status quo in the industry, it's just more in-your-face: nobody would dream of putting across a fiction that you could sit at home giving away MP3s and people would pay you for it, where by contrast some people like putting across the fiction that with the industry there's some chance of sitting at home recording songs and the industry will pay you for it. And that's nonsense, you need the business team and a plan.

  • And more important, how would you convince them to adopt it?
    You wouldn't. That's the point: the MPAA and RIAA have their head up their collective ass. As anyone can(and has) not-so-astutely observe, there's nothing that the above lettered organizations can do to stop us. They can sue one person, but the hydra-like internet will pop up three new individuals to protest an unjust action for each such action taken. Besides, the illegal nature of (some) mp3 trading is a good thing in that the draconian measures taken to stop it breed a healthy distrust of authority in many who lacked it before. Oh, yeah, this post is redundant, since the mp3/pirated media discussion completed its natural course about a year and a half ago. I would suggest that moderators mark my post down as such, but I think that the moderation system was the biggest policy mistake CmdrTaco and the others ever made, except perhaps for attachment of the nom de plume "anonymous coward" to anonymous posts. It only encourages people to act down to the expectations set by such a degrading name. I guess the fuckwit moderators can mark this as off topic now, too.
  • Not every artist will make a lot of money, but making money is not the primary goal of most musicians.

    Huh, well I have dozens of friends who are musicians, and have recorded dozens of bands over the last 4 years and can assure you... most of the musicians I've worked with want to make it, and make money at it. But that's just my experience.

    I completely fail to see how you draw your conclusions. Please explain to me how there is any factual basis in your preposterous claim that online distribution will be more expensive. All it requires is recording a track, encoding it into a digital format, and placing it on a web server. That doesn't guarantee that one will actually listen to you, but that's beside the point.

    It seems to me that that is PRECISELY THE point. What's the difference if we're using the old system and no one is listening to you because you can't afford distro, or you're using the new system and no one is listening to you either?

    It's sort of like asking if you'd rather be killed by bullet or by drowning. Ultimately, DEAD IS DEAD.

    Are you now going to claim that not only don't musicians want to make money, but that additionally they don't want to be HEARD?

  • If they were giving away free music over the internet, they probably would own the scene, but how would that benefit them? They would be giving away intellectual property and getting nothing in return but maybe some advertising revenue.

    Wow. Did you even read the rest of my post?

    First, you're underestimating the power of ad revenue; keep in mind that entire commercial radio stations are run on nothing but that. Even television stations run on little else. However, that's not the main point.

    Look again at what I said. Radio increases sales of music; it doesn't hinder it. Think about it: why do you normally buy CD's? Sure, some people follow certain artists, but even they buy other music as well. In most cases, it's because they hear a song they like over the radio, and want to buy the whole album for more. Not all returns are direct, you see. Look at concert tours. Those things are hideously expensive to finance. They aren't even really all that profitable. But they fuel record sales like you wouldn't believe, not to mention the merchandising deals, so in the end you get a net profit overall.

    The RIAA's paranoia over their music being stolent is real. When faced with a choice between paying and just taking, a lot of people will just take.

    Unfortunately, the reality of the situation proves you to be dead wrong. Given a choice, most people still buy the music, rather than just keep the MP3's. I've bought CD's after downloading tracks from them before myself.

    And as time goes on, it's looking less and less like there is anything the RIAA can do to stop people from just taking.

    Here, you have a point. However, RIAA hasn't been able to do anything about the situation for years.

    The question now is, how can creators make a living from their intellectual property in a world where their work can be accessed by anyone, anytime, without paying them?

    Creators, for the most part, already don't. You'd be surprised at how little artists actually see of the revenue generated by their albums; it's a tiny fraction (which I don't think is right, buw we're dealing with the way things are here, not the way they should be). The money is in distribution. For every dollar that an artist makes, distributors make ten, often more. Simply because the medium changes doesn't mean that everything goes down the tubes. You have to change to adapt to the current situation, or you'll be passed by. That's how the universe has worked for untold billions of years and I'll be damned if a few ethically-questionable record execs who mostly can't even carry a tune themselves are going to change that.
  • A profesionally engineered MP3 has got to be better than a dorm room rip any day

    I don't see why...it's not like you need specialized hardware to encode an MP3, or horrible amounts of time. And the GPL'd encoders like LAME are getting pretty close to the Fraunhofer encoder etc, as well. So the difference between typing on a command line in a dorm room or in a studio shouldn't sound different...
  • Libraries already allow people to borrow music CDs and movies, it seems the next logical step would be to have this digital and online.

    Then how do artist get paid? Simple, taxes. Everyone pays an "art tax" and artist get paid in proportion to how popular their music/movie is. Each time you play a song you increased that artists revenue. Of course barriers to cheating would have to be implemented.

    The advertising industry still promotes artist in return for a cut of that artist's yearly earnings. There is no actual product changing hands - just a bid to make the artist more popular. So the only part of the industry that goes away is the brick and mortar stores that do actual sales.
  • The cost of producing music today is GOOD because it pre-selects talented artists.

    Well I certainly don't agree with that. The worst bands I have ever heard in my life are often given HUGE recording budgets, and the most talented people I have seen are given nothing, or have to fund themselves. Blame people's watered down musical pallettes.

    this will result only in low risk, mega-pop-superstars who are guaranteed to turn over profit (Backstreet Boys, Pearl Jam, etc.) More creative and risky acts won't receive play because the margins will be so low.

    As I said to you in a previous post, this seems to describe the industry already.

    It costs between $250,000 and $1,000,000 to produce CD's today. The cost of the physical artifact is negligible compared to the cost of recording.

    Perhaps if you're talking about the top .1% of the people being recorded today. But with the proliferation of high quality inexpensive digital formats like 20-bit ADATs and consoles like the Yamaha O2R, you can produce recordings with very good sonic integrity at very reasonable prices. (although I prefer analog, but that's another subject entirely!)

    I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to record the most talented musician I've seen in a long time, and we did a full length jazz-fusion CD (~59 minutes) for around $11,000. This included recording, mix, mastering, and production of 1000 initial units.

    I'm pretty happy with the sonic integrity of the finished product (recorded on 16-bit ADATs and mixed on an Amek Big (by Graham Langley) console with a decent selection of outboard gear.

    Sure, in retrospect I would have done a few things differently and perhaps made it sound a bit better, but we learn something new every day.

    Could I have made it better with a $100,000 budget? You bet... a better console with better mic pre's and a better mix path would have helped... at least to my ear. But is John Q. Citizen going to hear the difference?

    Nah.

    Sure given the choice and money I'd be happy to take it to that next level. But with a lot of the gear today, I'm not convinced it's necessary anymore.

    Anybody who advocates less expensive music is advocating a serious degradation in music production quality. As a music lover, I am firmly against this. You are really willing to give up the absolute stellar quality of music production for free distribution? No thanks, I'm more than happy to pay for quality.

    In the long run I agree with you. I consider myself an audiofile and a perfectionist in the studio. Bad engineering and bad production make me CRINGE (you have no idea!)... I demand stellar music production... but I don't think you need to spend $1,000,000 unless you have the very example you cited. An orchestra with dozens of musicians and the necessity of a huge studio environment. Other wise you can do great work for in most cases for mid 5-figures, and often less.

  • The author gets it right when he says we need a new business model if we're going to distribute "intellectual property". I'm suprised record companies havent devised some sort of NDA on their recording media that says you won't make copies of the product. The kicker with intellectual property is that it's physical production costs are insanely low due to our culture's industrialization. A CD which stores digital copies of a dozen songs only costs 2$ at the very most to produce. This is about the same for a DVD, a book, software program, ad infinitum. The problem with these media is that they are heavy and bulky and require gasoline, jet fuel, manpower, paper, plastic, ad infinitum to transfer to your convienience which adds to the cost of these things. The second drawback from a distrobution point of view is the fact they are physical object which take up space. Digital media on the otherhand is all virtual, it takes up space per se but seeing as a fully stocked library can fit onto a DVD disc the space restrictions aren't quite as restrictive. Lets try a little equation real quick. Say a CD costs $13.95 and has 14 songs on it for a total of 570 megabytes of music. The CD obviously costs $13.95, not including the price of gas to drive to buy it. Now lets calculate how much it would cost to download this album in MP3 format. 570 megabytes at 10:1 compression equals 57 megabytes. Current hard drives go for about 2 per megabyte which is roughly $1.14 worth of storage space. Now lets say you use a DSL connection to download this album. Your DSL service is from your phone company so it costs you about $39 per month and you can download at 512Kbps on average. Thats roughly 52KBps depending how you calculate it. SOme fancy arithmatic gets me about 18 minutes to download the album. Thats not even one penny (monthly connection fee devided by minutes in a month) worth of bandwidth on your DSL. So at most an album costs you $2 to download and keep. Why are recording companies so pissed off over MP3s? It isn't the piracy excuse, they are afraid of people having their own cheap distribution method of music that the record companies don't own. Every CD you buy gives a record company a chunk of chanrge, one larger than the artist gets for their troubles. New CDs are sold at sale prices, but older albums cost you a healthy bit more, giving the record company a larger chunk of change for something they stamped out months of years prior.
    I like the one guy's idea about people bidding in escrow for someone to release software, music, movies and such and then have them freely avilable. Another idea that would work fine is record companies offering really high speed distrobution channels that are fee-based. What a coincidence, HDTV is on the way in America which will offer nice sized data pipes into many people's houses. What if record and movie companies invested along with traditional cable companies to develop these networks. Your monthly payment would go in part to the record/movie companies to download high quality music and video for use in all sorts of consumer devices and on your trusty desktop computer. What makes this enticing to companies? The data pipe downstream is huge but the upstream pipe is tiny. People can share files if they want but it won't be nearly as fast as getting it strait from the fibre/coax/dish/radio.
  • Anyone who has worked in the music industry knows that the labels and the big 5, whup 4, music companies treat their talent like sh*t. It's not music, it's product. If you don't believe me, read Moses Avalon's book "Confessions of a Record Producer" [barnesandnoble.com].

    Now that we've established that, take a look at the history of copyright and authors vs publishers at: http://dvd.picketwyre.com/~hthor eau/css.html#history [picketwyre.com]. Copyright was first established as a right of publishers over the authors and public. It didn't work. Copyright was established in the US to be a bargain between author and public, not between publisher and public.

    Online distribution of music will completely homogenize music...

    Like having 4 record companies and 5 radio station chains hasn't?

    because it is so expensive to deliver music...

    The typical "big label deal" costs about 250k-1m to produce. 19 times out of 20 the deal ends up with the artist in debt to the label - the album must sell more the 2m copies! Basically musicians are forced into indentured servitude for two or more albums more by the legalize in their contracts at that point. Ever wonder why the 2nd album sucks? It's because the artist is broke and still has to fill his contract.

    The odds of success and profits are much better at the indies. An album might cost 50k to produce, and is manufactured in small quantities. A working musician like Christine Lavin [christinelavin.com] can tour, fill small halls, sell a few dozen CDs a day, and make an honest living. With the decline in price of a good home studio (you can build a good 24 track home studio for less than 10k these days), it is perfectly feasible to self produce your own albums. MP3 cuts the labels and distributors and radio stations out of the distribution problem entirely - with MP3 there is no dependence on airplay, bribes, distribution, at all!! And I for one, and every last musician I know that has had the music industry suck on their tit - say - "Good Riddance, Music Industry. Don't let technology's revolving door hit you on the way out. Have a nice day. Don't call us, we'll call you."

    I think with the advent of MP3s homogenized music such as the Backstreet Boys and Nine Inch Nails will go the way of the dodo. Instead of a few dozen mega-stars we will see tens of thousands of musicians finally able to make a modest living in music.

    As for the delivery costs of radio stations... who cares? They can go the way of the dodo, too....

    Say goodbye to creative and innovative acts...

    The creative and innovative acts will always get produced. An artist is not driven by money but by the need to creat art. Further, widespread MP3 availability will make it possible for these acts to be heard and to get gigs.

    Say goodbye to creativity...

    We've already said goodbye to creativity. Albums using sampled music are so dangerous to produce due to various claims to copyright on "licks" that it's amazing any new music is being produced at all in the United States. This is a case where music as property has been taken too far. Can you imagine a world where every time you play a lick from Professor Longhair or Eric Clapton you have to pay a royalty?

    Usher in a new era of commoditized downloads... I admit that I'm bugged by the sites that destroy or cut various Mp3s that they are distributing in the name of advertising. This is destroying art. This is treating art as property. I have to point out that LONG before mp3s existed there was the informal concert taping community (DAT-Heads [eklektix.com]) - who've been trading tapes for a long time and many bands support [eklektix.com] our efforts!!

    It is the labels that are against concert taping and MP3s because they believe in a law of artificial scarcity, that somehow there being one and only one copy of "Sensitive New Age Guy" somehow increases its value, which is dead wrong. Music evolves. Every live performance is different.

    As for your last point about the future of recorded classical music, do you have any idea how much money recordings net most orchestras? Zip. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. I think high quality MP3s of classical music will do more to open up peoples ears to classical and into attending classical concerts than any number of snooty PBS shows.

    A future where good music is distributed commercial free via MP3s, where an artist can make a decent living playing live and from selling albums at shows - that is the world I want to live in.

    (I buy CDs at every show I go to - why? because I can get them autographed, I always find CDs I had never heard of, and I'm supporting the artist)

    I, Rhysling

  • Re:The Fundamental Difference. (Score:3)

    by Hobbex ( 41473 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @01:51AM (#1306957)
    You are completely and entirely wrong and you haven't even thought through what you are saying. Sometimes I wish that Slashdot moderators would actually read the posts rather than marking anything that is long and well worded up.

    This not a matter of equally wrong sides bickering. There is an ethical choice here: Can a person or organisation ever have the right to with threat of violence control the spread of information?

    If you answered yes, you can say goodbye to Freedom in the information age.

    The MPAA president had it right when he said in his LA Times collumn that "you cannot own something that you cannot controle." And that pretty much sums their side. They want to maintain controle, and hence ownership, of information at any cost to the consumer. We are infringing on their economic interests to protect our freedom, they are infringing on our freedom to protect their economic interests. If you think that both sides are equally justified, you need to _seriously_ re-evaluate your personal ethics.

    The idea IS to reject our current copyright system, because it works only to the benefit of the creators of thought and art to a small degree of what it works to benefite large multinational coroporations that couldn't care less about rights or innovation or art. The idea IS to reject our current copyright system because it based on the idea that infromation is not free, and an information society can NEVER be free if information is not.

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • hmm.. It sounds like a nice idea.. but I am not sure popularity is a good measure. Something like.. opera will never be as popular as say.. britney spears. Furthermore I think this still puts too much power in the hands of the musicindustry's giants. Power which I think should be with the artist. I don't pretend to have all the answers, but the attempts of the corporate giants to control what we can use to play, where, and when need to be stopped IMO.

    //rdj
  • Radio stations get most records for free.

    Radio stations pay a fee to ASCAP [ascap.com] and BMI [bmi.com] for the songs that are played on the air.

    Most of my music is on MP3. I don't listen to the radio... but I realize, now, that I am my own radio station, with an audience of one, available 24 hours a day without commercial interruption!! (It's a great station. The DJ is deeply rooted in my subconcious...) If I'm a radio station... how do I support the artists I'm playing?

    For non-profit stations the yearly fee from ASCAP is some negotiable amount less than 450 dollars.

    Now 450 dollars a year is a bit pricy. I'm trying to find out what a non-commercial radio station pays in fees as I write.

    ASCAP fees are unfairly divided between the record company and the songwriter. (So far as I know, bandmembers get nothing if they don't have songwriting credit)

    ASCAP also requires you to complete and submit a playlist so that the proper authors get reimbursed.

    Anyway, the key here is that a mechanism already exists that reimburses artists and publishers for their works without having to have purchased their media (cds,records,tapes). It sorta works. Perhaps it can be improved on.

    I, Rhysling

  • Opera is about live performance and have a night out so I don't think it would change significantly. Opera singers don't derive much of their income from CD sales.. and they still wouldn't because of a small audience.

    Likewise, bands will still be able to charge for live performances - because it's about the experience and not the music.

    Think of this as voting for an elected offical. Except here you are electing a musican by playing his/her music. The musican gets money instead of an office. To increase their odds of winning the musicans will obviously hire PR staff and tour the country trying to drum up support and interest (votes).

    It seems a little evil if you carry this analogy the other way. Say.. Sony music inks a contract with George W. Bush saying : "we will get you elected, in return you must do this for us once elected"
  • copyrights weren't meant to prevent people from selling stuff, they were meant to give the author the right to manage the content, including distribution.

    No! You are so wrong! I don't know what country you're from, but here in the US the legal intent of copyright law is defined in, of all places, the US Constitution, the highest law in the land.

    The Constitution says (and I quote):

    The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries
    Federal copyright law owes its entire legitimacy to this clause in the Constitution. Reading it, you will see that copyright law exists to promote progress in science and arts, and not, as you say, to give authors control.

    The incorrect notion that copyright and patent law exists to give the copyright/patent owner control over their work has been misused time and time again by corporations to justify increasingly restrictive intellectual property laws, even to the point of choking progress in science and arts in a manner contrary to the Constitutional justification for copyright and patent law. But the Constitution is very clear on this point, assuming anyone even bothers to read it anymore. Authors should not be given an amount of control over their work that is so excessive that it hinders instead of promotes progress.

  • Well, that might be what the constitution says, but copyright and patents are older than the USA, and in fact originate in monarchies that never say fit to write the reasoning behind their laws down.

    Loosely speasking there are two liberal views of property rights (of which intellectually property rights are a subset for these purposes).

    The bit of constitution you cited is an example of the view first expressed clearly by Hobbes - That property rights are conceded to individuals by everyone else because it is in our long run advantage to do so. In this case it "promotes progress in science and the useful arts".

    The alternative view, originating with Locke, is that persons acquire a right to property by "mixing their labour with it". In this view intellectual property rights are acquired "naturally" by the process fo discovery and society's enforcement of them comes later.

    Having said that, I personally agree with you (and Hobbes).

    Simon

  • I'll have to (respectfully) disagree (Score:3)

    by guran ( 98325 ) on Friday February 04, 2000 @04:38AM (#1306983)
    Can a person or organisation ever have the right to with threat of violence control the spread of information?
    If you answered yes, you can say goodbye to Freedom in the information age.

    Let me state another question:
    Can a person or organisation (or society) ever have the right to with threat of violence expropriate your information?

    If you answer yes to *that* question, you no longer have any right to complain about for example doubleclick or echelon-ish schemes.

    My thoughs are information. Are they free too? Am I a bad guy when I choose to keep some of them for myself? I might have written something positive about my country. I would very much want the (legal) means to react if I was quoted out of context on a Nazi site.

    Hobbex, you have made many good posts, but I think you are going a bit far here. The purpose of copyright *is* to protect the artist or innovator. The artist is in his/her full right to give up their rights, either by GPL-ing (or similar) or by selling out to a distributor. The problem is that there are not enough "good" distributors to tackle the megacorps.

    The way to fight (MP|RI)AA and their clueless|evil likes is *not* by forcing them to free information. It is to demonstrate how flawed their business model is. Continuing down the path of the RIAA here will make consumers *and* artists lose and find alternative ways. How long do you think they will survive as middlemen of a vacuum?

    Let the artists free their information because they *want* to, not because *you* want them to.

  • And this is not an attempt to justify mpaa-ish behaviour.

    To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries

    Depending on your views you can read that as:
    "We want to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. Therefore we secure the rights of the Authors and Inventors"

    or:
    "The rights of the Authors and Inventors shall be secured. (We believe that it promotes the Progress of Science and useful Arts.)"

    For obvious reasons, media companies prefer the second interpretation.

  • I think it would be very interesting to see ideas thrown around for opensource music business models.

    "Open source music" will be much more profitable for the average artists then open source programming has been for average the open source programmer. The reason is that music is closer to a true service then programming.

    There are a million was to make money by giving away free mp3s: include advertisments and links back to your webpage, sell CDs, sell shirts, sell fan access to weakly tracks which may not be released (people will pay for access to the weakly directory and they wont pirate the stuff, buecause a newmix or version of a song every weeek is just too much to pirate). Just look at the success of web based comics like Sluggy Frelance. The bands will do fine if they promote themselves becuase they they will be the ones taking the risk and making the profit. I'm not talking about mp3.com, emusic, or a label in internet clothing.. I'm talking about doing it yourself.

    There will even be companies which charge bands to upload their music to all the pirate sites as promoton.

    Jeff
  • I think we should just make it illegal to sell hard disks over 1GB. Think about it, about the only reason that you would want a large hard drive, is to store media. If people had no place to put their music, they wouldn't download it. The only way to get digital music, would be to stream it and the RIAA could easily control that.

    Plus, microsoft would undoubtably latch on to this brilliant scheme. I think that we would all appretiate the reduction in bloatware that this would cause.

  • Authors should not be given an amount of control over their work that is so excessive that it hinders instead of promotes progress.

    I think part of the problem is that our Congress (for sure) and our Judges (perhaps) equate profits with progress. I guess that's how they justify it at the end of the day.
  • its generally accepted that only a few pennies of each $15 cd go to the artist.

    I'd be in favor of a 'pay for download' system where I can get authorized works (cleanly encoded, too) without funding the Big Pigs, aka, the record execs.

    IMHO, the execs do little to actually contribute to the art yet they get the lion's share of the revenue. so of course they revolt against this new model and cry 'Foul!'. I suppose, to be honest, if I was raking in that kind of dough, I'd be overprotective about keeping the cash flowing too.

    but technology is now equalizing things and its bigger than they are. their way of gouging cash from consumers has a very limited lifetime now. if they are smart, they'd adapt to the new way of things and try to make the system work for them instead of fighting it so much.

    anyway, I'd pay $0.05 per song to download it - no problem. heck, even $0.10 per song, and give that extra nickel to the execs. they should be happy for ANY charity we throw toward them ;-) but the days of the "$15 for 10 songs, 2 of which are worth listening to" is reaching its end...

    and btw, the current model is to force folks to buy music in bulk (ie, the whole cd). we all know that most popular bands today are producing a high fluff-to-quality ratio on the cd's. I'm sure the ability to buy only the songs we want puts a chill up the exec's back. this is probably another reason why they are so against a per-song download model of business. even if we pay the same proportion for mp3's as we do for full cd's, few folks will want to get the full cd. so the exec's profits go WAY down...

    --

  • RMS wrote an essay back in 1992, "The Right Way to Tax DAT" [gnu.org], advocating a very similar approach for digital audio tape recording machines.

    (Thanks to record-industry lobbying, DAT machines for consumers can't make a second-generation copy of a prerecorded digital audio tape. And how many consumers these days buy DAT machines? Hmmm....)
    --
    "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

  • This sounds like the Street Performer Protocol [firstmonday.org] that John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier have written about.
    --
    "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

  • Actually, some parts of the industry have embraced MP3. For example, at Noise Records [noiserecords.com] you can download MP3 singles from the latest albums by Kamelot, Virgin Steele, Stratovarius, etc. The difference is that you'll probably hear the MP3 and buy the CD many years before it ever actually gets played on a radio station. ;-)

    I think that somebody at Noise must really have a clue. They realize that The Internet is the way to publicize, if you don't have a large payola budget to put things on radio/MTV/etc.


    ---

  • The only reason Open Source works is that everybody donates their time, and do something else to eat. If everybody got paid for what they did, all the software would be better, but how are you going to pay everybody.

    I've been paid to work on open source software -- but, I wasn't been paid for the software I wrote, I was paid for the work I did. Most programmers are paid like that anyway -- what percentage of programmers of closed-sources software do you know who get per-copy royalties? (the answer: very few. even the ones who freelance are typically paid by the hour, not per copy of software used)

    I don't think charging consumers per-copy is really fair, given that the programmers typically never get any of it anyway. We may as well stop trying to pretend programming isn't a service, and focus on funding software development appropriately.

  • No, you're both wrong. ;-) I hope that the general public doesn't get the impression that the hacker community is somehow unified and homogenious, because I don't wanna get lumped in with either one of you.

    Some of us don't have any serious problem at all with most of the pre-DMCA copyright system. It's just the provisions to "protect protection" and inhibit fair use that are causing problems. I do not reject the idea of copyright.

    As far as I'm concerned, the perfect business model is very simple: sell multimedia in an open unprotected format (e.g. MPEG, redbook CDs, etc). Place no restrictions on how the end user stores, transforms, or plays back the data.

    Will some people steal the information or treat it as "free" and spread it around? Yeah. But the industry should combat it with means other than copy protection, and never should have been allowed to pass any legislation that forces people to accept copy protection.

    They can educate. Show poor bands who can't even afford to buy fuel for the tour bus to get to the next town, unless they sell enough CDs/T-shirts/etc at the show. (This really happens.) Show people that when they steal from musicians, they are hurting those musicians, who happen to be real people who make the art that we enjoy.

    Prosecute pirates. After "making an example" of a few people who are passing around entire albums over the net, then maybe pirates will start to live in fear that one of the people they are sharing with is a narc. I have no sympathy for these assholes.

    This campaign should be combined with wisdom -- they need to recognize the difference between pirating entire albums at 256kbps and grassroots promotion (passing around one or two 64kbps MP3s from each album). One decreases sales, the other increases sales.

    ... it works only to the benefit of the creators of thought and art to a small degree of what it works to benefite large multinational coroporations that couldn't care less about rights or innovation or art.

    Using open and unprotected formats would help to change that situation. Stuff like CSS and SDMI dramatically increases the entry costs for publishing, so that only large corporations can afford to publish in those formats. If the standards shift to stuff like unencrypted MPEG which can be burned on inexpensive consumer equipment, or downloaded by customers via the internet without any weirdo special servers, then the creators of thought and art will no longer need those multinational corporations. Guess who the copyright system will protect then: the very people it was intended to protect.

    To get there from here, all we have to do, is get rid of these stupid laws that enforce copy protection, and do whatever we can, to help them fight pirates at the same time. This will help creators and hurry the corporations on their road to obsolescence.


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  • I think part of the problem is that our Congress (for sure) and our Judges (perhaps) equate profits with progress. I guess that's how they justify it at the end of the day.

    I don't think it's profit. It's net revenue.

    I think that if they focused on the profits made by the creators, we might not have a problem. Instead, they are trying to protect the whole string of middlemen who do not add value.

    People in government have this weird idea that they are supposed to "create jobs" and that it is somehow "good for the ecomony" to circulate money even when value isn't being produced.


    ---

  • Whereas with videocassettes and cassette tapes and photocopies, you had to pay for some sort of medium on which to copy the target work, with MP3s and DVD rips, you don't need anything but disk space, which people already have.

    And if they fill it with MP3s and MPEG video, they'll have to buy more. The additional hard drives will cost as much/MB as blank DVD and 3 times as much as blank CD-Rs.

    So, you can either pay plenty of money or you can save some by getting both a) and extra machine (DVD or CDROM burner) and b)another DVD/CD-R disc.

    Yes, there are people pirating video and music. There have been pirates since the very day that IP was first recognized. MOST of the people on /. don't seem to be advocating that (nor do I). The problem is that RIAA and MPAA are trying to kill basic technologies because one of their many uses is piracy. The great irony for MPAA is that they are trying to kill DeCSS in order to keep their profits from DVD which is the digital version of the VCR which is what they tried to kill!

    The other problem is that they are knowingly trampling on fair use rights in their quest to prevent even a single copy from being bootlegged.

    The idea is not to reject our current copyright system, for it does work very well to protect intellectual rights. The idea is to figure out a way to respect those rights and give the people their data. I would much rather listen to my music knowing that I had respected the author's right to distribute it than listen to brats and bigwigs bicker back and forth about what each other's rights are.

    The best way to stop criminal activity is to arrest the criminal! Preventing fair use is not an acceptable answer.

  • Actually, the current assault on Fair Use began with a new business model, a business model which began only after things like:

    1. Encryption

    2. Cheap Modems

    and 3. Massive Databases

    Became available to business. The new business model I refer to? Divx. Divx was intended to change (or rather truncate) the entire concept of ownership when it came to intellectual property. If Divx had suceeded, as opposed to DVD, even tighter controls on where, when and how you could use your DVD (all a Divx disk was was an "enhanced" DVD) would have been imposed. The court cases we're having wouldn't be over whether a Linux box could be created for Linux, but whether that "gold Divx" version of The Little Mermaid that you bought would have to be rebought after you let your account at Circuit City expire for a few years.

    Of course, digital video enthusiasts caught on to Divx right away, and had to fight some nasty lies in order to defeat the concept. I think most digital video enthusiasts understood the dangers of the Divx model, stuff like the Nosferatu effect (Bram Stoker's widow thought Nosferatu was to close to Dracula and successfully got many copies of the film destroyed. If the Divx age had come to pass, all she would've had to do was have her lawyer send a letter off to Richard Sharp, and the movie would effectively cease to exist.)

    This business model isn't dead, it's just resting. Divx II won't be called Divx II but it'll show up as long as people in the content industry believe it will promise "a vast expanse of gold as far as the eye can see."

    Basically, technology hasn't been seen by Big Business as any reason to abandon content control, but as a method to increase it to the greatest degree possible. I'm not sure how far it will go, but I was one of the foolish people who sighed with relief when I realized Divx was dead. I've seen now that it will take something big to turn back the tide of increased (rather than decreased) content control on the part of Big Business.


  • DeCSS is not the only program to come under attack by the forces of copyright protection lately. What about, for example, Napster.

    Even if we rid ourselves of the DMCA copyprotection laws, you have not delt with programs like Napster or other system that are even more obviously meant to be used for what is, in corporate doublespeak, known as "piracy".

    You can make examples of all the "pirates" you want, and start executing them on the spot when caught, but as long as bandwidth keeps increasing and programs like Napster are easily available, you will not be able to keep "piracy" under control. So, copyprotection or not, you have to attack people writing such programs to protect the economic interests of the copyright, and that is exactly equivalent to attacking someone for writing a DeCSS program.

    If you want to preserve copyrights you have to attack freedom. I can't make your choices for you.

    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • Can a person or organisation (or society) ever have the right to with threat of violence expropriate your information?

    Noop. But as soon as violence is no longer needed, they have all the right to do so in the world. Unlike the current society, especially the American regime, that DOES want to force you by violence not to protect your data from expropriation by means of mathematics (cryptography), I consider this a right. In fact, the right to secrecy and the freedom of information go hand in hand in the information age, but neither needs to be enforced by violence as God (through mathematics) has already provided.

    By the same token, if the MPAA or RIAA did manage to make a copyprotection system that actually worked, I would not attack them.

    My thoughs are information. Are they free too? Am I a bad guy when I choose to keep some of them for myself?

    Of course you have a right to keep your thoughts to yourself, but as soon as you discuss them in public they are no longer exclusively your own, and you cannot claim any ownership of them.

    Hobbex, you have made many good posts, but I think you are going a bit far here. The purpose of copyright *is* to protect the artist or innovator.

    I see this as very bad critisism since the statement you quoted is at the heart of my entire philosophy of information. If you are an enemy of the freedom of information, I would hope that you disliked all my posts.

    The artist is in his/her full right to give up their rights, either by GPL-ing (or similar) or by selling out to a distributor. The problem is that there are not enough "good" distributors to tackle the megacorps.

    Yes, Stallman is a genius and the GPL is a silent revolution that could come from below and drive copyrights right out of existance just because, when it comes down to it, regardless of how much we have been taught to think otherwise, the freedom of information does make sense to us. I do hope that there is room in the world for the screaming revolutionaries like myself though.


    -
    We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
  • Of course you have a right to keep your thoughts to yourself, but as soon as you discuss them in public they are no longer exclusively your own, and you cannot claim any ownership of them.

    Again, I'd like to be able to claim "ownership" of them. The question is what rights that "ownership" gives me. Do I claim (or grant others) the right to prevent people from access?, No!! What I do want is protection from misquotes, the chance to explain what I meant and so on.

    Two times I've been asked permission to use texts I've written (actually, that I and some friends wrote) My answer has been "Yes feel free to use it, *if* you would make any money from it, give us what you consider fair"

    I certainly don't consider myself an "enemy of the freedom of information" I just fear the possibilities for abuse. If information is free, how do I keep a secret? Where is the line between a private conversation in confidence and an open discussion? This reply is public (since I prefer an open discussion). The words of my post are definitely free. If I had responded by mail, would my words still be "public"?

    Free information is generally much more useful than closed. Therefore let the best system win in each and every case Forcing an "all information is free"-doctrine is (almost;-) as worng as forcing "all information is closed"

    OK I'm ranting. Keep screaming, revolutionary. The day everybody agrees either 100% or not att all will be a sad one.

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