Greene's Grammy Speech Debunked

jonerik writes: "Today's New York Times has this article which debunks at least part of NARAS president Michael Greene's much-publicized speech at last week's Grammy Awards ceremony in which Greene claimed that he had hired three students to download a whopping 6,000 songs "from easily accessible Web sites" over two days. Leaving aside for a moment Greene's bizarre admission on national TV that he'd hired three students (at least one of whom, Numair Faraz, is a minor) to break the law (the No Electronic Theft Act), Faraz has been interviewed by the Times, saying that they spent more like three days on the project and that the other two students (both unnamed, though both are apparently attending U.C.L.A.) barely used P2P file-sharing programs at all. Instead, they used AOL's popular Instant Messenger to receive song files from friends."

news?

[edrugtrader]

3 college students download songs off the internet... call CNN, make sure /. is notified!!

I must be slacking...

[magic]

I don't have nearly 6,000 MP3's.

Maybe I have the wrong IM friends. Hey... I wonder if those UCLA students are still for hire!

-magic

You think that's bad?!

[chrysrobyn]

You think that's bad? Just the other day, my wife downloaded 5 gigs of songs [apple.com] in under a half hour! Talk about thinking you know someone!

Yeah, let's do the math here

[jcsehak]

Let's say it takes 1.5 minutes to download a song. Let's say each kid has a seperate computer with a dedicated connection.

45 songs/hour * 48 hrs * 3 kids = 6,480 songs.

That's IF they spent no time searching and downloaded for 2 days straight. Aren't minors required by law to work something less than 24 hrs a day, anyway?

Re:life and death issue??

[corbettw]

"How can anyone compare death to music piracy with a straight face? "

Of course it's life or death! Don't you remember when Kid Rock starved to death because of MP3s? [theonion.com]

Re:Call the FBI.

[Zach Garner]

Give 'em the Hemlock!!

What about the students

[rewdpost]

Can you imagine how much people are going to hate them when they show back up on campus? I mean the look of fear on their faces when they were put on camera was priceless. "Hi kids, these are your peers and they're working for us to stop you from trading music, please don't hurt them" (now get a nice clear shot of all of their faces)

Hmmm...

[leviramsey]

I wonder which OS he was using?

Speaking about Mr. Greene, Mr. Faraz said, "He said it took two days to do all the stuff, and we did it for three days from 9 to 6 and left the computers on all night long, except we'd come back and the computers would be frozen."

New math

[An. (Coward)]

"He added that in two days the three students downloaded nearly 6,000 songs.

"'Now multiply that by millions of students and other computer users, and the problem comes into sharp focus,' he said."

Let's see, three students downloading 6,000 songs in two days...that's a thousand songs per student per day, or 365,000 songs per student per year...times millions of students (say fifty million, which was the last figure I recall hearing for the number of Napster users back before the RIAA killed it)...that's 18 and a quarter trillion songs per year!

CD prices are approaching $20 for a disc that typically contains ten songs or so. So the music industry must be missing out on $36.5 trillion dollars in sales every year. Since their actual revenues are closer to $10 billion—a mere one three-thousandth of their potential—it's no wonder they're so upset about file sharing.

Re:life and death issue??

[JordoCrouse]

I think it pissed me off more that no one booed him off stage.

He could have defiled a young maiden on stage, and nobody would have booed him off. Sadly, the President/CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences has way too many of the people in the audience that night by the short and curlies.

Downloading music is WRONG

[interstellar_donkey]

Whats worse is, none of my freinds belive how easy it is! I have to download music all the time on to my hard drive just to demonstrate to them how far this has gone.

I even have to listen to the songs I've downloaded all the time just to be sure these are in fact illegal songs.

I think I should ask the music industry to help me out with a few bucks so I can continue educating the general public about this.

Re:6000 WOW

[The MoMo King]

I've had some heavy pr0n downloading sprees ... so anything is possible.

Missed my 45 seconds of fame!

[ackthpt]

Dang. I was supposed to be there, too, but I received all my songs through a model 14 Teletype, and am still running them off on paper tape.

Chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka-chucka--

Hmm, maybe lower sampling rate next time...

how to torture musicians (Mac version)

[Dr. Awktagon]

This is like a modern voodoo doll:

1. Select an MP3 (Metallica is usually the best choice)
2. Create a new folder on your desktop, and put the MP3 in that folder.
3. Open the folder, hit command-A (select all) and then command-D (duplicate selected files)
4. Repeat the previous step until your hard drive fills up.

You should be left with hundreds or more copies of the MP3. With each copy, you have STOLEN from the artist. With each copy, your artist LOSES MORE AND MORE MONEY. By the time you get to the end, each keystroke should be DRAINING THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS of THOUSANDS of DOLLARS!!

If we all did this, we could instantly bankrupt any artist. For even more damage, move the MP3s to a CDR and repeat.

Re:Correllation != Causation

[Anonymous Coward]

That's partially true. For example, the first Britney album was out (as well as No Strings Attached by N'SYNC) then when Napster was around and these albums were much better than their recent efforts.

The recent song 'Pop' by N'SYNC just plain sucks. As for Britney, 'Lucky' is kind of catchy, but the remaining songs on just suck as well.

Am I the only one that feels this way?

Worst

[Pac]

Think about how much the people who make the phisical CDs are losing. If all these misguided students were actually buying the CDs they steal, we would probably be mining the Moon, Mars and the Asteroids Belt for raw materials to make all these discs.

And don't even get me started about the potential losses of the transport industry.

Uncrackable digital format

[tutal]

I've got a new format for the music industry. Make CD's a bit larger, for example approx 12" Since the digital stream is so easy to copy, just make the bumps on this new disc at different levels to accompany different volumes, pitches, waveforms etc. To read this a conventional laser would not be useful, so a needle would have to be used instead. You could also save quite a bit of machine wear and tear by slowing the rotation of the disc to, oh about 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.

What's that Mr Edison, its already been done. Oh well vinyl sounds better anyways.

Re:life and death issue??

[Graspee_Leemoor]

If I had been there I would have shouted very loudly:

"minus one, troll!"

graspee

Re:Yeah, let's do the math here

[scotch]

"... except we'd come back and the computers would be frozen."

At least we know what operating system they were using ;)

Say it with music!

[Jay Carlson]

I was daydreaming in a meeting the other day. Somehow, the complaints about the length of the show and the finger-pointing sermon collided. So I had this vision:

Rosen and Valenti's corporate masters suggest that because it's a music show, next year's rant should be a musical number. They've even got the rights lined up for the appropriate song, with a few modifications.

A band launches into the Squirrel Nut Zippers [snzippers.com] song "Hell" [allmusic.com]; the two mouthpieces bound onto stage, dressed in tuxes, carrying canes. They sing:

(Cue swing/calypso music)

Hell
Innnn the afterlife
You could be headed for the serious strife
Now you make the scene all day
But tomorrow there'll be hell to pay [...]
Oh, the D and the M and the C and the A,
And the S and the S and the S-C-A
Lose your net, lose your games
Then get fitted for a suit of flames!

(The committee in charge of coming up with this was delighted by how little they had to change, but they couldn't quite figure out how to change "suit" to "lawsuit" and still have it sound right.)

Using RIAA's methods

[AndyChrist]

Using their methods for calculating estimated losses to piracy:

3 people grabbed 6000 songs in 3 days. So that's about 666 per person per day.

If we just for the sake of argument say that 10 million people are trading MP3s, that's

10,000,000 x 666 = 6,660,000,000

Songs illegally downloaded EVERY DAY!
So, assuming 18 dollars per song, since people are only downloading decent songs and the industry standard is one good song per album...losses to the industry are:

6,660,000,000
x
$18
------
$119,880,000,000

EVERY DAY!

$43,756,200,000,000 every year!

We can't let them get away with robbing THE ARTISTS of FORTY THREE TRILLION DOLLARS!

Re:how to torture movie studios

[sam_handelman]

It's even more fun to do this to the movie industry.

Here's a list of instructions, much like the ones you just gave, although they are written in a context-free language so that they can be interpreted directly by a computer as well as a person, to unencrypt the contents of a DVD - ugh, my head.

THE POSTER'S BRAIN CONTAINS THOUGHTS WHICH QUALIFY AS CIRCUMVENTION DEVICES UNDER THE DMCA. THEREFORE, IT HAS BEEN ERASED. - YOUR FRIENDS, THE MPAA.

What was I talking about? Oh, 40 days and 40 nights was such a great movie!

Re:Odd connections in the mind

[Bob McCown]

later i the plane i notice the lady in front of me is knitting. to those of you who don't have grandmas, knitting needs are about a foot long huge needles. back to the music industry, WHATEVER they do to try to stop music distribution, an old lady with knitting needles will always get through

Good lord, that lady needs to be stopped, she might knit an Afghan!

Breaking News: File transfers banned from Internet

[Tokerat]

WASHINGTON - In a startling move today, legislators in Washington voted to pass the new and controversial File-transfer Universal Contraban Treaty. Under this new law, any and all transfer of data across the Internet that can be catagorized as a "file" is hereby banned. This will effectively end such file-sharing nusances such as Napster, Gnutella, and the blatantly-illegal File Transfer Protocol.

In related news, the RIAA and MPAA jointly announced the grand opening of their online digital movie/music store today, before being fined and having their equipment confiscated under violation of the recently-passed FUCT bill. "We're going to loose millions on this deal, it's an outrage!" said Jack Valenti, fresh out of the hospital after recovering from a carpal-tunnel injury sustained while signing lobbyists' checks. "We will fight this in the highest courts until justice is served"...

This will never end.

Re:oh great...

[Anonymous Coward]

18 Cents??

Well in order for CD's to cost about $20 bux, that would mean that the transportation costs and store markup would be $19.82.

We're after the wrong People, the RIAA are our friends.... They wouldn't be taking $15 bux a CD.... No.. never...

It must be the evil Transportation industry. All those truck-drivers with their plush reclining leather seats, Gold chromed hubcaps and of course the trucks that drive themselves.

We must stop this at all costs.. I plan a call to arms.. Tonight every driver on the way home, cut in front of the nearest big rig and slow down to 7 mph. That'll teach 'em...