"Swallowed by the Internet"

Great Debates
1

In the past few years I’ve noticed the use of the computer, and more importantly, the internet as means of copyright violation. I assume that most internet/computer users have heard of MP3s. “MP3” is the most searched term on the internet. What many don’t realize, is that movies and music videos are available as well. Software piracy is as old as computers, but more recently other media has been pirated. Full length movies, many of which are still in the theatre, are available for download on IRC. In fact, a quick scan of a few channels shows that most of the movies that are still in theatres are available for immediate download.

Music videos are another medium that is now able to be collected. Music collections have come a long way from the record or tape. They can now consist of music, music videos, concerts and interviews all available for free, right now, on the internet.

Is there any medium that is safe from the internet’s and ultimately those who will copy this particular art form? What are the ethics involved with doing so. MP3 threads have been beaten to death, so lets try and keep this related to movies and music videos.

Should the recording industry begin to offer a legal alternative for music videos?

Will the MPAA approve an internet based distribution network for movies?

Is it already too late, given the infrastructure of Napster like peer to peer sharing programs?

Is it ethical to download music videos that are rarely if ever played on television? Interviews? Is it similar to having a friend tape a show for you? (Most of the content has appeared on television at one point)

Lastly, weve seen how the printed word has been given new competition with websites. The availability of MP3s has likely effected the music industry (whether the effect is negative or positive is another issue). How will the increased prevalence of the movie and music video effect the movie and music industries? Is there any other media that can be “swallowed by the internet” ?

There are many other issues that arise from these questions. Feel free to raise them and state your opinion.

2

Dang, you got a truckload of stuff in the OP.

Well, just to address the issue of “what other media will be swallowed/not swallowed by the Internet”, first, I think you need to ask yourself what your standards are. Is a pirated-off-the-Internet video going to be good enough quality that it repays viewing? Not the ones I’ve seen, especially if you have to sit there at the computer and watch it on a teeny little 17" monitor, instead of over on the comfy couch on a 25" TV.

Second, I think the arts are fairly impervious to being co-opted by the Internet. Sure, you can look at a digital rendition of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or Michelangelo’s David, but if your standards are high enough, it just won’t be the same, and hence is not worth worrying about.

Ditto dance. Ditto theater.

And I think the hard-copy newspaper/magazine biz is alive and well and living in Mid-America, no matter what the East Coast Knee-Jerk Liberal Cutting-Edge techno-pundits might think. Me and Frank and George and Martha and Betty and all the rest of us still want something to hold in our hands while we read on the john, that we don’t have to worry about dropping it in and blowing 300 bucks. :smiley:

3

Hey Utopia, have you been in a utopia for the past three months? The music and media industry had all the judges in their pocket and won their cases. Napster is swallowed by AOL-Time Warner. MP3.com is now owned by BMG. Kazaa and the other struck agreements not to properly distribute copyrighted music. We can’t even talk about where we can get DeCSS. All we have left is Gnutella, and the RIAA is after them. Even Microsoft got talked into sabotaging MP3 for their new Windows XP. This is a sad sad time for computer users. Welcome back to the real world.

4

Damn, thought this was a discussion of interactive porn.

5

psst… capacitator
The many napster alternatives are even more effective. But don’t tell anyone or we’ll have to turn to other ones. I had well over 1000 MP3s before Napster was a gleam in Sean Fanning’s eye. Peer to Peer file sharing programs are much older than Napster. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) had peer to peer file sharing capabilities long before anything else. It is huge, popular, decentralized and impossible to regulate. Unregulated content is plentiful on IRC and it has been since the mid 90’s. Hell, I downloaded my first MP3 in 1996 on IRC.

The record companies have been trying to get a “secure” laf file format off of the ground for 2 and half years. I first read about the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) in February of 1999. The real world says that MP3s and piracy are not going away.

[Links to MP3 sharing websites deleted. The Reader is a supporter of copyright law and the Napster clones are of questionable legality. Please do not post links or extensively discuss how to pirate MP3s. --Gaudere]

[Edited by Gaudere on 06-24-2001 at 09:30 AM]

6

You keep on referring to it as piracy, falling into the propaganda of the record/movie conglomerates. I and other refer it as fair use. Oh by the way, artists will get $0 from the Mp3.com case.

7

I think there will always be a way to “share” digitized media; and I also think that the quality of these pirated files will eventually improve.

That said <ducks>, I actually think it’s a good thing for corporations to attempt to prevent copyright infringement (and I do think it’s piracy). If it were possible, I’d prefer a system where bands and record labels offered downloads on a voluntary basis. This would give people an incentive to diversify their listening.

To me the whole Napster debate obscures the real media crimes being perpetrated today. Who cares if SONY or Time-Warner wants you to pony up for the likes of Britney Spears or Limp Bizkit. As far as I’m concerned, you should have to overpay to listen to such audio vomit. The crime isn’t that crap music like that is overpriced; the crime is that crap music like that dominates the airwaves, destroying people’s potential to cultivate one of the most exquisite human senses.

As far as I’m concerned, the very best thing that could happen would be if the corporate music industry did manage to perfect a non-piratable recording technology. Then they could undermine themselves by forcing young people to pay for the “product” that corporations spend billions of dollars forcing young people to hear on the radio and to see on TV ads and MTV. This might piss them off young people so badly that they’d check out indie websites and other places where samples of high-sound-quality music were being offered on a voluntary basis. Corporate music could then compete both by giving more stuff away themselves, and my producing better music (or maybe they could just go out of business, which would be fine too).

I can understand why people like Napster et.al. and, yes, I’ve used it myself. People also like boxes that rip off cable TV, free parking, tax dodges and many other things that help them to get stuff without paying for it. But that’s all it is. So I think all the principled defenses of Napster are misplaced. What would be better, I think, is a principled defense of the need for media diversity.

Although I know I’m hijackacking this thread unconscionably, I also think that the day will eventually come when even the Internet becomes, for many users, a space dominated by the most homogenized and commercial tripe. It’s already the case that approximately 80% of people who sign up for AOL never visit any but AOL’s own sites. Once the majority of people begin thinking of the Web as an adjunct of their television set, the surf-view-and-shop couch potato will, I fear, become the norm.

My point, again, is that free downloads, voluntary or otherwise, are nothing but chump change in the big media freedom picture. Without more diverse broadcasting and more vigilance about where the Internet is heading, it really seems trivial to me whether the largest number of people get shaken down for their mass-produced media fixes or if they download them on the sly.

8

Do the conclusions made by both sides of the Napster debate still hold hold for different media and file formats? Do both sides retain their position or either fair use or against the law when the informatio being exchanged being exachanged is music videos?

Are there more viariables to consider?

eg. The ability to view an uncensored version of the video or that it is not common policy to sell music videos to the fans.

Since music videos are in many senses a promotional tool for album sales, are they something that the record companies should be providing for free anyway?

What about the inability to see videos of songs that you enjoy, rather than what MTV, (or Much Music in Canada ) want to show you? Unless you happen to like shudder Brtiney or shudder N*Sync, videos that you enjoy are played very rarely.

9

You are asking a lot of questions at once, Utopia! But as to your last…

"What about the inability to see videos of songs that you enjoy, rather than what MTV, (or Much Music in Canada ) want to show you?

In the near future it will almost certainly get a lot easier to to choose one’s own programming from what’s out there: e.g., it’s already possible to select programming from various internet “radio” broadcasters–though to me that makes me feel as though I might as well just make myself a tape or listen to my own CDs. I wouldn’t be surprised if, a la TiVo, in the near future there’s a way for you to select the videos you prefer either by downloading them for some kind of pre-set fee, or by simply choosing from what’s out there as though you had programmed your VCR. Indeed, it might already exist.

OTOH, I think the real concern with these kinds of just-arrived or just-around-the-corner formats is, how hard will the major labels work to exclude more diverse offerings from the line-up? In other words, you may be able to tell Britney to get lost forevermore. But what about videos by bands that you won’t ever have heard of in the first place–much less videos that never got made because the bands weren’t commercial enough to get videos made in the first place? Have you ever thought about how your taste for music (and other stuff) gets developed in the first place? That’s what I mean by the larger problem.

Here, if you’re interested, is a link to an analysis of the ways in which the Internet is under threat of becoming as commercialized and homogenous a place as TV and radio currently are. It won’t answer any of the copyright-related questions you ask, but you might find it interesting anyway.

http://www.fair.org/extra/0003/aol-mcchesney.html