Every file will be in the database. I’m not giving a projected timeline here, but it will happen, eventually.
And also note that 100% accuracy or 99% accuracy in tracking usage need not be the goal.
Currently music is sold “per copy”. And you can listen to that copy as many times as you like, or zero times, you can sell it once you’re tired of it, you can loan it to a friend, you can play it at a party. The one time per-copy fee for unlimited use is a rough proxy for usage, not an exact track. Same with books, same with movies. There was no WAY to track usage, charging per copy was just a TECHNOLOGICALLY POSSIBLE rough proxy for usage.
So even if the royalty usage tracking system doesn’t cover everything, it doesn’t need to be perfect, just pretty good. The copyright laws weren’t written to restrict and lock down and control, they were written with the goal of advancing the useful arts and sciences by creating a way for creators to benefit from their creations, using a fairly easily enforceable mechanism. At least, it used to be pretty easy to enforce back in the days of industrial book and music manufacturing. A printing press or a record press cost a lot of money, and no one would copy books or records willy-nilly unless they hoped to somehow make money doing it. And the large capital investment needed, and the need to sell your illegal copies made tracking the copyright violation back to the source pretty easy.
Except none of that applies nowadays. You can copy a file trivially. Copying is so easy people will do it for their own personal use, not because they hope to sell the copies. So the previous control scheme, which was a workable rough way to compensate creators so they would create more, cannot work any more. The only question is whether we’re going to have an inexpensive, easy, and legal system that compensates creators, or if we have an expensive, difficult, confusing and frustrating method. If we have the second, then we’ll inevitably get a free, easy illegal system that doesn’t compensate creators.
The celestial jukebox is inevitable, I just want to set it up in such a way that creators get SOME money somehow, rather than nothing. Otherwise, musicians will have to go back to working for tips.
So will composing your own music be illegal, or just technically impossible? Regardless, you still need some information to tell you which particular file is being played. Unless you just want to pay the same amount to everyone, irrespective of their popularity.
I see your point, Lemur866, and I think that sort of system is great. But it amounts to “let’s just get rid of DRM (or restrictive DRM)”. The people who really want DRM won’t go for it, since it doesn’t fix any of the problems DRM systems purport to solve (and by making all the songs available, looks even worse from their perspective).
Why would composing music be impossible? I would say that if you don’t bother to register your music in the database, then there’s no way for you to get royalties if someone plays a copy of it. The only thing the database is used for is to track usage and pay royalties. The database doesn’t contain the music files themselves, those are stored on thousands or millions of servers all over the country, by whoever wants to store them. Library of Congress, fans, guys who like music, bands, whatever. It doesn’t matter because no one cares about “copying” any more. Copying and control over copying will have to go by the wayside.
What exactly is DRM supposed to solve? Look, as was mentioned above, workable DRM schemes are always going to be problematic, because the goal is to send someone a message but not let them have the message. That’s hard to do. So you’re trying to prevent someone from accessing a file unless they’ve paid for it. But once they’ve paid for it, computers make redistribution of that file trivial. This will eventually require making general purpose computers illegal.
Copyright, patents, and intellectual property laws are intended to advance the useful arts and sciences. When copyright law no longer advances the useful arts and sciences, it should be scrapped for another system that does advance the useful arts and sciences.
If you are going to pay people based on how often a song is played then there needs to be some kind of mechanism to guarantee to a reasonable degree of accuracy that when a song is played it is counted and for this case not count when it is not played. You will probably need to evolve something like the Nielsen ratings or have some kind of approved music players. You will need to prevent music from being played on non approved players and have some mechanism for preventing people from falsely claiming that a song was played. This sounds exactly like DRM to me.
But the advantage is that you won’t need heavy duty DRM. You don’t need real protection on your data gathering, just enough that average people won’t see any purpose in altering it.
Sure, you could set your player to do nothing but play a track from your favorite band over and over and over again 24x7, and each time it plays your heroes get $0.00001, and after a few months they’ve got a few bucks.
But so what?
The point is that just about all media players would have usage tracking built in. If you wanted a media player that didn’t report usage you could get it or build it or hack it, but why would you bother? 99% of the population would just buy a home media player or a mobile media player, turn it on, and play whatever they liked “for free”. There would be no financial or other reason for consumers to fudge usage results, since they pay a flat fee per month. The only people with an incentive would be creators interested in boosting their royalties. Sure, there might be fraud schemes where bands try to boost their royalties, but anything that boosts you into serious numbers is going to be investigated and tracked back.
There’s something I’m not sure I’m getting. Rhapsody currently does exactly what I described in my OP – on-demand streaming, no downloading; the only flaw is limited song selection due to DRM headaches. Are you saying that there’s a wide-open security hole whereby someone can use Rhapsody, capture the data, and cancel after a month with their entire catalog saved to their hard drive? Why hasn’t this brought Rhapsody and the other subscription services down already?
I don’t think you are missing anything. Rhapsody uses DRM to ensure that you can’t save the downloaded files and play them at a later date. That said, you absolutely can save stuff off of Rhapsody. I personally don’t know a better way than recording and re encoding the music as it comes out of your soundcard. As is stands right now that is a bigger pain in the butt than paying the nominal fee to Rhapsody. And some people get upset about the loss of fidelity by going through the encode decode cycle more than once.
googling ripping rhapsody looks like the first hit will save anything coming out of your sound card.
There’s always a security hole. If nothing else, you can just stick a microphone in front of the speakers and re-record the song. This is an unavoidable hole that will always exist. At some point the protected music has to be turned into analog information for the speaker, and an attacker can insert themselves there.
I’d guess a major reason for your other questions is that there are many easier ways to get free music files than going to this trouble messing around with Rhapsody.
It’s not that there’s a wide open security hole, just your normal security holes. The point is that DRM is inherently unreliable because if your media player allows you to play a music stream, somewhere in your media player that stream has to be decoded before it gets to the speaker of your player. Making sure that the data is never accessable is a nontrivial task. Any such scheme can be broken. And the more difficult a scheme is to break, the more likely it is that people won’t be able to access the files you want them to access. Nobody wants to have to buy a proprietary black box player before they are allowed to listen to music.
And the other trouble is that files with no DRM are everywhere. CDs have no DRM. Are music companies going to round up and smash CDs? So clean digital files of just about all music ever made is available…somewhere. On some computer hard drive or another. The problem is accessing it. Your computer doesn’t care whether a file is saved on a local hard drive, or on a CD, or on a flash memory, or on some server 10,000 miles away.
So it doesn’t matter where the file is located, what matters is whether you have the right to access that file or not…have you paid for that right, or has that right been granted for free, or not? And my contention is that keeping track of which person has the right to access a particular file in a particular format on a particular proprietary format for a particular time, and enforcing this through software that runs on that person’s own computer that they totally control isn’t going to work for very long.
Why do we insist that only people who have paid for a copy of a song have the right to listen to the song? Because we have to pay artists somehow. But this will quickly become unenforceable. We’ll have giant DRM battles, giant public failures, people who paid for music that they can’t listen to, and the whole system will get more and more screwed up and people will get more and more frustrated with the legal systems that they’ll turn to pirated music just so they can have clean copies of things they’ve already paid for. And as this becomes more and more common, DRM becomes harder and harder to enforce and more and more of a joke. Continue until the music industry is financially ruined, or some other method of compensating musicians arises.
Yeah yeah – that’s not what I’m worried about. (See above).
I have a crappy $300 set of speakers at home, and I’m not an audiophile, but I can still tell that Rhapsody sounds terrible. I didn’t just make that claim based on the bitrates. I signed up for the free trial, and was loving it for a few days, even playing music I already owned on CD because it was easier than finding the cd. They’ve got great usability. But then I played a song (I don’t remember which one) and noticed that it sounded terrible. I pulled out the CD and played the two side by side. Then I cancelled Rhapsody.
I think you’re handwaving over a lot of the actual details, and I think that the devil is in those details in this case.
Is this flat fee going to be collected by the government as a tax of some sort? If not, I find it unlikely in the extreme that content producers will be happy with a flat fee in the long run. Flat fees for very different use patterns do a poor job of maximizing profit. What they really want to do is charge per play, or for even finer distinctions, like what kind of equipment you’re using, who else is listening, and what you’re doing at the time, which means DRM, and all kinds of issues with authentication and accurately verifying play counts. And what’s to keep me from opting out entirely and just listening to the music I already have? Or claiming that I am and pirating content?
If it is a tax, that opens up a whole other can of worms.