Tag: downloading

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Copyright: Subsidizing Obsolescence

The world has changed. Get over it. I think people still immersed in the old business models see their infrastructure crumbling but can’t see how the new possibilities might be even better– as Apple clearly did with the iPod.

I hope Viacom has their wish: Youtube will delete all their videos– that’s their policy if they receive a complaint. Then Viacom will pay millions of dollars to show clips in ads on regular TV. Duh!

The “principle” of copyright is indeed in trouble. The trouble is that people don’t really understand the original purpose of copyright. The trouble is also that people have this illusion that Walt Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”, for example, is “original” (Disney stole it or bought it, along with “The Lion King” Pinochio, Aladdin, and most of everything else they produce). Most rock’n’roll is derived from long established models of chord progressions and riffs. Art steals from landscapes or objects (Warhol’s Campbell Soup can is only the most obvious example). Ever see a TV episode in which one major character seems to have forgotten another major character’s birthday? Lucy? Mr. Ed? Gilligan? Edith? Maude? Homer?

The sad truth is that most of the current big corporations fighting for stricter copyright enforcement could not themselves have been profitable without outright theft. (Exactly how many “reality” tv shows are there, by the way? Hey, I got an idea: we get a bunch of people on a show, have them do something, then kick one of them off every episode!…)

We have simply entered an era in which definitions of “original” and “copy” and “collage” and “edited” and “found” are rapidly changing. We’ll survive. We’ve never had as much money to spend on diversions as we do now, and the money is madly flowing in all directions. The groaning and creaking we are hearing is the sound of decrepit old business models struggling to re-orient themselves to the new realities. The nimbler minds at Google, and Apple, and YouTube, and Myspace, etc. have already found their way. The older models are not only inefficient — they’re boring.

It would be very, very bad policy for the government to try to artificially prop up those old monsters, the way some governments and unions used to try to require stokers on diesel trains. The DMCA was a clumsy attempt to do just that and I hope it dies slowly, the death of a thousand YouTubes.

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Copyable Media

From the online forums….

“One key fact is that the copyright holder still *does* have the right to decide to expose and sell their product efficiently, inefficiently, or not at all. You, on the other hand, have NO rights to that product or that decision. You have NO right to decide how the product should be exposed or distributed. “

Not quite that simple. I absolutely agree, though, that any musical artist has every right to NOT distribute their music on CD. Go for it, Ashlee! No problem there.

But… the general public, the consumer, made the choices (from among competing technologies) that established vinyl, then cassette, then CD as the format of choice for musical recordings.

The public also has a right to expect that providers of content compete fairly in the market place. If Ashlee wants to issue her recordings on vinyl, she can. That way nobody will steal her work. Some other artists might conclude that they could compete successfully against Ashlee by issuing their work on more popular mediums, but who am I to second guess them! So if you want Ashlee’s work, buy her vinyl album. That’s your choice and you’re free to make it.

But she should not have the right to collude with other recording artists to force Pioneer and Toshiba and Sony to hijack the CD format and impose changes on it that the public didn’t ask for and does not  want.

She and the other artists are absolutely, totally, completely free to go to Toshiba and Sony and Pioneer and offer to pay them to develop a new uncopyable technology that will only be used to distribute her music on.

The public, I’m sure, will adopt it in droves, especially once they understand that they can’t use it to make their own recordings or assemble their own music collections, or play it on the portable players they already own.

Go for it Ashlee! Please!

(Incidentally, I don’t mean to pick on Ashlee. I really don’t know anything about her other than the Saturday Night Live gaffe.)

Bottom line. I have no problem with artists switching to a new medium that prevents copying. As long as other artists have the right to continue using copyable mediums like the CD or Radio or television with a stereo signal if they want to.

Now you’re a young artist. You want to become famous and have people hear your music and sell a few CD’s and tickets to your shows. You gonna join the proprietary, protected gang, or offer your stuff to the public on their medium of choice?

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Pepsi Poseurs

You can’t get much phonier than this.

Pepsi collects about 15 teenagers who were targeted for lawsuits by the vicious RIAA, for downloading copyrighted music from the Internet. Pepsi put them into an ad with a few labels– “incriminated”, “busted”– over– get this– Green Day’s swipe of the Clash’s cover of “I Fought the Law”. Then one of the girls says that she is still downloading…. at iTunes! She didn’t say “but now I pay for it”. She says “legally”.

Did Green Day think most people have never heard of the Clash? Sounds like they copped the basic arrangement from them.

I Fought the Law? The gist of Pepsi’s smarmy little ad is that you should give your money to Apple and buy Pepsi and listen to your mommy and daddy– except they are probably downloading music too– and respect authority. It’s cool to be a serf.

But even this ad is not as smarmy as the one featuring a kid who is supposed to be a young Jimi Hendrix, trying to choose between a Pepsi and Coke.

I presume that permission was granted by some Twisted Trustees of the Estate of Jimi Hendrix. As I have said before in these pages, it should be illegal for anyone, trustee or not, to be able to sell the image, name, or likeness of someone who is dead. It should be covered by the laws about “rendering an indignity to a dead body”. If someone is long dead, it should be public domain anyway. For someone like Hendrix, it’s too contemptible for words. It is a terrible, terrible dishonor to his memory to suggest that he would sell out like this, that he would so allow his name and image to be tarnished, cheapened, and insulted like this.

This is far, far more disgraceful than anything Janet Jackson did at the Super Bowl. The FCC should look into it. Michael Powell should call his dad and ask him how big of a fine would be enough to compensate the general public for the indecency rendered to the body of Jimi Hendrix.

Next, we go after IBM for what they did to the Little Tramp.

Here’s the biggest irony: the MPAA and Recording Industry always claim that they are protecting their “original” creative works whenever they try to shut down a piracy site. Then they use an absolutely ripped off version of “I Fought the Law” to flog the idea.

Listen to the version by the Clash and then Green Day. Do we need to protect artists who rip off other artists so blatantly? [Added 2012-01-18]

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Alt-Napster

Do you know what the music companies want to offer you as an alternative to Napster?

They want you to pay them $10 a month for a subscription which allows you to listen to 75 songs on your computer without actually being able to download the file. You will only be able to access these files by being on the Internet. My guess is that they will also probably demand your credit card number and hit you up with advertising constantly while you are connected to their site. They will probably collect information about what you listened to and sell it to other companies to hit you with spam.

So they’re adding insult to injury by making you pay to be advertised to and exploited. Furthermore, it looks right now like the music companies will not cooperate and offer each others’ catalogue at a single centralized site, so if you have any kind of diversity to your musical taste, you will have to subscribe to multiple services at $10 or more a pop. That still excludes independent labels and most of the back catalogue.

It sucks. I don’t think people will buy it. In fact, it has prompted me to seek out alternatives to Napster. Right now, I’m trying Bear Share.

As you probably know, the music industry will not be able to shut down the alternatives to Napster because they rely on peer-to-peer networking instead of centralized catalogues.

They will deserve what they get.

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Napster

I have followed, with some amusement, the misadventures of the American legal system over the insidious, corrupting, devilish program Napster.

Napster allows users to “kidnapster” music files from other users on the Internet running the same application. You log on and type in a search string and the Napster finds MP3 files on other users’ computers and allows you to download them onto your computer and listen to them.

Well, right is right and wrong is wrong. Is it wrong to “steal” music over the internet? Yes. Is it wrong to rip off young artists? Yes– but that’s what the music industry does better than a million internet users. Is the current system of distribution of music unjust, unfair, and grossly inefficient? Yes. It will die of it’s own contradictions.

I watched the debate and the court proceedings with amusement because the judge that tried to shut down Napster made a ruling that is ridiculous and will only bring scorn and ridicule to the legal process.

Here’s why:

1. Though shutting down the Napster site will temporarily stop people from using Napster to download MP3 files, there are dozens of other programs that do the same thing. When the Napster site was temporarily shut down last month, the Gnutella site had so many hits that it too went down. Shutting down Napster will have almost no effect on the distribution of music over the internet.

2. Sony has announced that it will sell music over the internet for $2.98 per cut. This is a bad joke. This is obscene. It is more obscene than millions of users sharing their music over the internet without paying the artist. This amount is so ridiculously high that it will only serve to increase the scorn and hatred of the music industry out there among computer hackers. If the music industry is going to sell music over the internet, the price is going to have to be about ten cents a cut. At this price, the music industry will– believe me– still make piles of money, because they will sell 100 times as much music as they currently sell.

3. The other programs that do the same thing as Napster don’t do it in the same way. Napster still requires a “server” which a judge could order shut down. Other programs, however, function in a more decentralized way. It may be impossible to shut down these systems by shutting down a small number of servers. A zealous judge would have to shut down everybody– which means it won’t happen.

4. Even if Napster, and Gnutella, and all the other programs succeed and prevail, the music industry will survive, and it will continue to sell music through music stores. In the first place, MP3 is not really a very good music format. The new generation of DVD’s will provide better quality sound and there will always be a market for disks. In the second place, even though it has long been possible to record music off the radio and television programs off the TV, the markets for CD’s and video tapes continues to grow. A lot of people just want to get the disk or tape in their hands.

5. The music industry will cease to have a cooperative monopoly (something the banks and oil companies already have) over the sales and distribution of music. Anyone can get on the internet and distribute and promote his or her own work.

6. Video is next. The fact that we cannot, at the present time, watch television programs when we want to, rather than when they are scheduled is, when you think about it, absurd. If Monty Python is on at 2:00 a.m. and I want to watch it, and the television station showing it wants me to watch it, why shouldn’t I be able to move that program to a day and time when it would be convenient for me to watch it? Furthermore, why can’t I watch programs that aren’t scheduled whenever I want to? Want that Dick Van Dyke episode from 1964? The news footage of the Munich Olympics hostage crisis? The Beatles appearance on Ed Sullivan? Someone should have it on file somewhere. If the television industry was smart– and I don’t think they are– they would put up web sites right now and announce plans to make the entire back-catalog of television programs available as soon as it is practically possible to make them downloadable. They would publish the specs for creating the compression algorithms necessary, and make it freely available to all.

Yes, I know, we already have the means with which to “time shift” television programs: the VCR. However, even after twenty-five years of development, most people still don’t use it regularly to tape programs they would otherwise miss. What do they use it for? To watch pre-recorded tapes rented, at outlandish prices, from a video store.

That should teach us something. For one thing, it indicates that there will continue to be a market for CD’s and video tapes in spite of new medias. For another, it indicates that a large number of people will never learn to master some new technologies.

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MP3’s

Let me make it clear, first of all, that I have no desire to save the music industry. The music industry consists largely of blood-sucking vampires who abuse, deceive, and exploit raw talent. A pox on all of their houses.

But, I do want artists to be paid for their work.

It is clear that there is no way to stop people from using the internet and their computers to freely copy music. It’s too easy. Even if you wanted to pay for the music, it is easier to download a copy from the internet than it is to buy a CD at your local record store.

But if the music industry can no longer sell enough CD’s to pay their artists, how will the artists be paid?

Here’s my solution: the government should impose a surcharge on all personal  internet accounts. The surcharge will be collected by all Internet Service Providers and remitted to an organization managed by representatives of the musical artists community. All artists who wish to be paid for their music will have the option of joining or not joining. This organization will find a way to track the volume of downloads for each member artist. Based on these numbers, each artist will be compensated directly from the fund.

The amount of the surcharge will probably only have to be about $2 or $3 a month or less.

The beauty of this plan is that the government is not required to monitor anybody’s downloads, or try to regulate internet usage. All it has to do is impose the fee and ensure that the money is funneled directly to the artists (and not to the parasitical music industry itself).

The only problem with this proposed system is that someone will have to develop a way of monitoring downloads and tabulating the numbers for each artist. I rather think that the makers of Napster, faced with multi-billion dollar law suits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would be more than happy to comply. As for all those people who are paranoid of government intervention, it should be stressed that the monitoring is done by the proposed artists’ agency and not by the government or the recording industry.

There. Done. A remarkably simple and effective solution. I hereby copyright it.

All I ask is mere .01% of the take.

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Napster Hamster

Is Napster the Death of the Music Industry?

If you are not familiar with a program called the Napster, these are the salient facts:

The Napster creates a sub-network of users on the internet. Anyone who is logged on and running the program can become part of the network. When you join, the Napster scans a directory on your hard drive for MP3 files (you specify this directory when you set the program up). It then makes a catalog of these files available to all the other users of Napster on-line at that moment. While it’s doing that, you can use the search function of Napster to scan the MP3 files on every other user’s hard drive. When you find something you like, you click on it and download it to your machine.

The music industry is dead.

As I ran the Napster and did a search for some Tom Waits, I remembered something I read a while ago about the music industry going after some university servers that were carrying a lot of “illegal” MP3 files. The representatives of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America –or Vampires Anonymous) went to the administrators of these universities and forced them to delete the MP3 files and take action against the students who posted the files.

The “action” consisted, generally, of a very stern warning.

The RIAA had some mild recourse in this situation: there was a physical server upon which the files resided and from which they could be deleted.

But there are no servers for Napster. Or rather— there are thousands of servers. They appear, and then they disappear, when the user logs off. They could be in Anchorage or Vancouver or Minsk or London or Bogota or Moscow.

At the time I logged on, there were 1500 servers and 200,000 songs on line.

There is no way that the RIAA is ever going to be able to shut down such a network. There is no way the police can possibly track down and arrest all of those users. There is no way the government is going to impose protocols or software encryption programs on the internet to prevent the distribution of music. No one will accept it. No one even accepts that the government can tax the internet. There is a deep consensus out there– in government and academia and business– that the internet cannot be regulated and no one should even attempt it. Even if you could try to shut down all the servers in the U.S., traffic can be simply routed overseas.

There is no way that anyone will be able to prevent people from rapidly distributing “illegal” copies of any recorded work whatsoever, and that will soon include video. There is no way to convince these people that they should not do it. For one thing, many of them don’t care about right or wrong when it comes to copyright. For another thing, many of these people are mighty sick and tired of the music industry gouging them on the price of CDs and Hollywood gouging them on the price of movie tickets.

And, finally, some of these people are aware of how the music industry and Hollywood gouges and cheats their own artists.

It’s all good free enterprise, you know. For all the talk about morality and values and ethics, the United States promotes the idea of free enterprise capitalism above all else. Is it really such a large step from Microsoft’s or AOL’s marketing practices to stealing music and video? Come on…. Microsoft has been robbing people for years by negotiating deals with vendors that require them to pay for a copy of Windows for every computer they sell regardless of whether or not the purchaser wants it. That is “theft” by any other name. What has the Department of Justice done? So far, a big fat nothing.

It might be possible, in the future, for the music industry to encode CD’s in such a way that they cannot be copied. Well, no they can’t. First of all, that would only last a few weeks, at best, because the hacker community would quickly find a way to defeat the encryption that is used. Secondly, people will not want to buy CD’s that cannot be copied. Thirdly, no form of encryption will actually prevent someone from playing the CD– of course–and as long as it can be played, it will never be too difficult to convert it to an MP3 file.

Consider that the music industry has already won a major concession from the government. In the future (if not already), all blank tapes and CD’s are going to be “taxed” to return some of the “lost” royalties to the music industry. Think about this. Blank tapes and CD’s. Precisely at the moment when the media has become irrelevant, the government proposes to tax it!

The Napster doesn’t require a tape or a CD. All it requires is some hard drive space.

I’ve been saying for years that the music industry will never be able to sustain it’s current marketing strategy in the face of new computer technologies. The Napster, and similar programs that are sure to come along, might well be the last nail in the coffin.

Good bye Sony. Good bye Warner Brothers. Good bye EMI and Deutsch Gramophone.