Another link for consideration–seems the Oregon DA is sticking up for some students.
Basically, the Oregon DA is siding with the university’s privacy policies and is against some of the data mining practices of a RIAA-hired investigation agency.
Tripler
Just some more food for thought.
Fair enough.
I think the recording industry is doing a lot of hand-waving and hand-wringing to attempt to distract us from the fact that they are not able to control artists and their products as they always have. The recording industry should be rejoicing and busting their butts to figure out how to benefit from their unprecedented access to virtually everyone in the world, instead of doing this dog in the manger act.
It seems a bunch of folks are blaming the RIAA for making us buy a lot of undesired product (or at least product we’re initially indifferent about) along with the few songs we really want, and making a killing on that, which, from one perspective I suppose is true.
I also think that it’s important to note that no artist writes only hit singles, and if hit singles were all that were available or all that made money, I think that would be bad for music. While albums might serve the RIAA’s pocketbook, I think they also serve to create a wider variety of music.
If people are taking the product for free, they cannot profit. That’s like saying WalMart should put all their merchandise out in the parking lot, unguarded, and then learn how to benefit from it. 
The point is that you use the new technology to get people to pay for the product, rather than hammering the fuck out of everyone who wants to move into the 21st century.
How many years did these idiots watch people share stuff over Napster before agreeing to sell recordings over iTunes? Instead of pushing the internet medium as a new channel to sell their product through, they still want everyone to drive to the mall to buy a $16 CD from the store’s shitty collection.
What it’s really like is WalMart finding half of their product out in the parking lot, and wondering why people take it instead of paying for it in the store. Then their response is to take down license plates and sue people based on the assumption they’ve taken merchandise, instead of maybe putting up a fence and trying to sell what’s already out there.
Music is different than other intellectual material. After a few good listens to a song on the radio, I have it pretty much memorized. After a week of hearing it I can play it through well enough to cover it. It’s already bad enough that if I want to cover a song I have to GIVE it away as bonus material to avoid having to pay royalties. Frankly, I feel that any song put for release on the radio ought to become public domain. Let the consumer pay for the REST of the material and any band of quality will produce a decent album worth paying for. The RIAA makes a fortune in selling one hit wonder albums.
That’s a weird distinction to make. Hundreds of thousands of people have memorized the entire works of Shakespeare. People who love certain movies easily memorize the screenplays.
If it’s so damn easy, then why are you doing covers? Write your own original material every single time.
Where does the composer – the original creator – fit into this lovely scheme?
iTunes exists, doesn’t it? I have purchased many a song, legally, over the internet.
So your argument is that since they are somewhat slow to embrace new technology, that you are entitled to steal their product?
What is this “fence” in the analogy? How do you put up a fence on the internet? If there were another way to stop people from illegal file-sharing, other than suing the people who do it, I rather imagine the RIAA would be right on that. What is this other way?
I may be wrong, but I think this might have been a proposal for a tax on digital audio tapes (DATs) around 1993-95. (These were the writeable digital media that was most commonly used before writeable CDs became affordable. They never achieved large-scale commercial penetration *). I bought a DAT recorder because I was doing songs for radio (lots of radio stations had them). The tapes looked sort of like miniature VHS tapes.
The reason I believe the case you’re talking about involved DATs is that a composer friend of mine contacted all his musician friends and asked us to send letters to our congressmen criticizing this proposed tax.
As I said, though, I may be wrong – can someone confirm or deny that a percentage of the price of analog audio cassette tapes goes to the RIAA or some such?
I do write my own material. When I do a cover it’s because I like the song and think that it would be an interesting piece to cover. I do it as an homage to a band whose material I enjoy. What I didn’t clarify before, and I ought to have, is that to be fully compliant, I cannot even record the covered material on the same disc as the album. I have to literally GIVE away an entire second disc for cover material, and I’m not allowed to advertise it, nor list it on the album cover or jewel case as anything other than “bonus material”. You can’t put it in your set lists either. Digital medium allows me to send the bonus material out to the fans at no extra cost to myself.
Frankly, I don’t feel that art ought to be able to be copyrighted at all; and that is coming from someone who works in the arts creating original material. (sculpture as primary, music as hobby and secondary income). A copyright should serve as a stamp of origination, to prevent other people from MAKING MONEY off of it, from selling your material, not to protect you against losses on a possible perceived income. Keep a better handle on the release of material instead. I’m sure it can’t be that hard to make digital material unable to be copied without hacking it. Then you have a clear cut case of hacking and piracy, instead of some ambiguous line regarding personal use.
The bottom line though is that people will always find a way to share music for free. I fail to see any difference between listening to song on the radio, or sending it as a file to a friend; it’s just more convenient to be able to access a file is all. Music is a part of our cultural history. You can call it stealing if you like, but I would rather have everyone hear my tunes for free, than 1/10 th of the people hear it because of restrictions.
No, you don’t have to do all that. You could pay the person who actually wrote the song you’re using. You just don’t want to pay for it.
Rather convenient, considering that your primary vocation is tangible. Music is only your hobby, but for many it is their living. They don’t write songs just for fun like you do, they actually do it to put food in their mouths.
If you put it on your album, and you sell the album, then you are making money off it. I don’t get your argument.
I dunno. When they try to copy-protect things, everyone whinges about that as well.
I see a huge difference. When you hear a song on the radio, you don’t own it. You can’t hear it again any time you want. Many people hear songs on the radio and then go out and purchase the album.
But again, music is only a hobby for you. Many artists do it seriously for a living, not just for fun.
Why is this such a difficult concept for people, anyway? As a musician, I often have people want me to work for free, or work longer hours than what was agreed to, without extra pay. It’s like they have this attitude that we’re just doing it for fun and it’s not like a “real” job. Why is it that lawyers, doctors, accountants, clerks, construction workers, etc. all get paid for the work they do, but somehow people think it should be “different” for musicians?
I’m sure you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. If this was actually possible, don’t you think that maybe the people distributing commercial music would have already done so?
I had resisted using filesharing until I bought a CD that refuses to be played in my music player. It says “aaah, you’re trying to rip me! Ripping me is illegal!” (actually it isn’t, in Spain - the judges said so). Well, I’ve been living on the road for 7 years, my music player happens to be my laptop, and if not only do I have to pay a quota to the SGAE for the music I buy but I also have to buy a non-computer player to be able to play the records I’ve paid for… emule is, finally, my friend.
The quota is now in the process of being extended to “any medium that can be used as a support for music.” MP3, cellphones, external HDs, you name it. And people are asking things like “if my laptop is a Sony and the CD is a Sony, why is Sony angry that I’m using my Sony laptop to play or rip my Sony CD, and the Sony DVD burner on the Sony laptop to burn a virgin Sony DVD with MP3 so I can listen to them in the car, which isn’t a Sony by the way?” and “since the SGAE only represents Spanish composers and I only listen to foreign music, why should I pay the SGAE?”
12/30/07 Foxtrot has something to say about this matter.
Actually, my argument is that when you’re this slow in embracing new technology, it is inevitable that people will steal your product. The RIAA is the drunkard who passes out on the street with a $100 bill in his hand. Sure, it’s illegal to take the bill, but let’s not act surprised and outraged when it happens.
The “fence” is simply setting up a store of sorts in the parking lot, where people want to get the product, rather than forcing everyone to walk into the building. iTunes is a great start, but we wouldn’t even have that if the iPod wasn’t a huge success. The RIAA is not embracing other options because they are dinosaurs who want customers to embrace the 1950’s marketing model they prefer.
Maybe so, but if artists want to get music that isn’t hit singles out to a wider audience, it’s up to them to figure out a way to do it, rather than forcing us to buy it at absurd prices because we should do the musical equivalent of eating our broccoli.
One way to do this is to price the album at a way that implicitly prices the rest of the songs at a much lower price than that of the hit singles.
For example, consider the pricing when I was in my teens: 79¢ for a 45-RPM single, $3.99 for the album, which would typically have 11 or 12 songs. If the album had 2 or 3 hit singles, then the implicit price of all the other songs was $2.41 or $1.52, respectively, pricing the rest of the music at between 17¢ and 27¢ per song, or between 21% and 34% of the price of the hit single.
This gave people a good reason to buy the albums.
To do the same thing now, you’d have to price the albums at five or six bucks. I personally might still buy the album at $7, maybe even $8. But unless I am familiar with an artist or group, and know the quality of the whole album is going to be pretty high, even $9 is enough to tip my personal balance pretty heavily towards just buying the two or three songs l like from Amazon.
Funny, I could have sworn that this was already being done…
Part of the problem of course is that people don’t want DRM on their media because it interferes with their freedom to listen to/watch it. The average person wants at least two copies of their music–the one they listen to, and a backup. Some people want more copies for personal use. When the music labels come along and say “Hey, you can’t do that” people get pissy. And in some cases, people who weren’t looking to go outside accepted channels are going to turn to filesharing and DRM hacking to accomplish what they see as legitimate use of a product they already paid for.
In short, the music industry spends way too much time pissing off their customers and not enough time trying to figure out the best way to give their customers what they want–isn’t that how commercial enterprise is supposed to work?
I’m confused about the lawsuits. From what I can tell, morally flexible people can download and upload thousands of songs non-stop, but as long as they move the files to a non-shared folder before powering down each night, they are immune from prosecution.
It can’t be that simple, so what am I missing?
I can’t answer that question, but I’ll add one of my own.
There’s all sorts of copyrighted music on YouTube. There’s also websites and software that enable one to turn a YouTube recording into an mp3 file on one’s own computer.
Has the person who uploaded the copyrighted music to YouTube violated the law?
Has YouTube violated the law by not removing copyrighted music and videos from its site?
Has the person who, while playing a YouTube video of copyrighted music, records what’s playing on their computer and converts it into an mp3, violated the law?
I mean, it looks the same as file-sharing, just with intermediate steps. But nobody’s going after YouTube or the persons who upload music videos there, although every now and then a video is removed at the request of someone with an economic stake in the music. And some of these websites that enable one to turn a YouTube into an mp3 have been around awhile, so it doesn’t seem that the RIAA is trying very hard to track them down and shut them down. (My hunch is that the mods would object to my naming any such site, so I won’t do so here.)
So are all these steps legal? All illegal? Some legal and some illegal? And if the latter, which ones are which?
I’m not sure, either, so I hope we have some experts here that can tell us.
BTW, maybe it was mentioned already in this thread…if you buy “Music” CD blanks, there is a royalty fee imposed for exactly that purpose. They are not any different physically, and certainly the data-recording device doesn’t know if you are writing music, text, or computer programs on them. But the intention was to compensate artists for home copying, and the newer standalone CD players (not computer units) will refuse to play CDs that are not marked as “music”, as someone else mentioned already.