Greene's Grammy Speech Debunked 408
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."
NYT Article without the registration (Score:3, Informative)
http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://
I'm not karma-whoring, I've already hit the cap.
Recording Artists Coalition (Score:5, Informative)
Recording Artists Coalition [recordinga...lition.com]
(take a look, you'll be suprized who's there)
ps. I think I did hear one person boo... I'm sure he/she got to enjoy the remainder of the grammays outside.
Yay (Score:2, Informative)
6000 mp3's/2 days = 3000 a day
3000 a day / 3 peeps = 1000 a day per person
1000 a day / 8 hours = 125 mp3's an hour
which means about 2 mp3's a minute (on average) for 8 hours! I'm guessing they were on a bit more than the average speed of a DSL or Cable line. Anyways, glad to see it got out in the public.
Re:life and death issue?? (Score:3, Informative)
Just post the whole article (Score:3, Informative)
Every year Michael Greene, the president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, stands onstage during the show he runs, the Grammy Awards, and delivers a speech about an issue that pertains to the music world. On the broadcast last week, however, he chose a strange way to make his point.
The issue he addressed was the unauthorized trading of songs on the Internet. During the awards show he showed clips of what he said were three students downloading "as many music files as possible from easily accessible Web sites." 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. As he made his point, the cameras zeroed in on the three students, all looking very sheepish.
His speech, as anticipated, ignited much discussion and controversy among music fans and those in the industry. But in addition, it seems strange that he would admit on national television that he hired three people to break the law (the Electronic Theft Act) and then show them in the process of doing this, especially since one is a minor.
And now one of these downloaders for hire (at about $12 an hour), Numair Faraz, has stepped forward to say that Mr. Greene's claim that three students downloaded 6,000 files from easily accessible Web sites isn't even true. For starters, Mr. Faraz, 17, isn't a student: he left school to start his own technology business. But more to the point, he says that the group didn't spend two days downloading music; they spent three. And most revealing, he says that most of the music wasn't even downloaded from publicly accessible Web sites.
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."
"I was the only one who used Bearshare and Kazaa extensively," he continued, referring to two popular file-exchanging programs. "And half of my files never completed: they were halfway downloaded or not downloaded at all."
As for the two others, both students at the University of California at Los Angeles, he said they hardly even used file-sharing sites. Instead, he said, they used AOL Instant Messenger, a chat program, to receive songs, which friends sent them from their hard drives. This not only means that the songs weren't on public Web sites, but also that there is no guarantee that they were ever illegally downloaded, since some could have been from CD's purchased by students and ripped into their hard drives.
Mr. Faraz estimated that 4,000 of the songs were sent as private messages using Instant Messenger, and a few songs were legitimate authorized downloads from the Web site MP3.com.
Barb Dehgan, a spokeswoman for the recording academy, said, "The kids were asked to download as many songs as possible off the World Wide Web, specifically, publicly accessible Web sites." She added that they worked two half-days and one full day. She did not comment about the legality of the project.
While some in the music business applauded Mr. Greene's speech, others criticized it and wondered what point he was trying to make.
"Burning, ripping and sharing is not killing music," Ken Waagner, a digital-media consultant in Chicago who was part of the recording academy's board of governors for four years, wrote in a letter to Mr. Greene. While admitting users of popular file sharing software were "cheap and greedy thieves," he said they are not a real threat to the music industry. "Greed, stupidity and ignorance on the part of the policy wonks and further alienating the listener is the real threat to the business, and ultimately the artist's ability to be heard."
So why, then, when Mr. Faraz knew that the whole project was ridiculous did he go along with it? "I got free hotel in the Biltmore," he said. "That's one reason to stick with it."
Unzipped
Audiogalaxy, a free music-sharing software and Internet site where MP3 files of songs are exchanged, was once the center of a small subculture of music fans who traded zip files of entire albums as well. These files packaged every song on a CD, plus images from the artwork, into a single convenient, easy-to-download file. Because Audiogalaxy was created only for the transfer of MP3 songs, these elaborate zip files were disguised by users to look like MP3 files to computers.
But after this column on Feb. 25 detailed this practice, Audiogalaxy disabled the word "zip" from its search engine. Where previously searching for files with the word zip in them turned up thousands of full albums, now the search turns up nothing, not even song titles with the actual word zip in them.
What happened? Michael Merhej, a spokesman for Audiogalaxy, said that there was such a large amount of traffic on the site and so many different things happening in the company that executives had been unaware of zip trading. Once company employees tried it for themselves, "we did block the word zip," he said.
"The purpose of Audiogalaxy is not to download complete albums that you can go buy," he added. "The system is not made to handle this, but people contrive things to make it work."
Though the word zip is now blocked in the Audiogalaxy search engine, those zip files of entire albums still exist. One just has to find a different word to use to search for them or try the Usenet, where a whole news group is dedicated to full album downloads.
Re:6000 WOW (Score:5, Informative)
6000 mp3's @ approx. 3.5 - 4 mb per song / 3 Students for two days (48 hrs)
(6000 * 3.5 * 1024)/(3 * 48 * 60^2) = kB/s
Sustained data rates between 41 and 47 kB per second would be required to support the claim.
Now, most of these "easily accessible Web sites" wouldn't sustain those rates to an individual user. And P2P definitely never gets close. The only real way to get that much data would be from other computers on the campus LAN not said web sites.
So, now we know he lied in his speech apart from his ridiculus extrapolation to millions of students (when was the last time you skipped a month's worth of classes just so you could download all that pirate music?)
My question is, why can't the broadcast media crunch these simple numbers and figure out that this guy is full of sh*t?
oh great... (Score:4, Informative)
At 4 minutes per song, that's...
(wait a sec...)
over 16 days of nonstop music.
At 75 minutes per CD, that's 320 CDs.
At 15 bucks per CD that's $4800 in revenue
(or $4500 in profit) that the record company
has had stolen from them!
My brother has worked at an independent CD maufacturing plant for 13 years (they used to do tapes). He repairs the duplication machines
They handle programs, music CDs, etc. They often make shipments directly to the consumer.
I recently asked him how much they charged to produce a CD today.
He said "18 cents."
I said "No, I mean with the case"
He said "18 cents."
I said "No, I mean with all the inserts and stuff."
He said "That's included in the 18 cents."
He wasn't kidding.
seemingly positive effect... (Score:2, Informative)
Just becuase two things happen at once doesn't mean they are related. If that were true, people might start claiming things like the El Nino effect increases purchases of gaming systems, etc..
downloading via WWW -- Was FUD (Score:3, Informative)
Windows version (Score:2, Informative)
Recording music for friends is legal (Score:2, Informative)
This issue was raised on Dmusic on March 1st (Score:3, Informative)
They suspected that the test was faked, or done from dedicated servers, as even with broadband connections P2P filesharing is often much much slower. It was obvious from the beginning that the numbers didn't add up....
Re:oh great... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:NARAS != labels; the songwriters (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pirates (Score:5, Informative)
This is simply untrue. For example, Webster's 7th New Collegiate Dictionary contains:
pi.ra.cy
('p{i-}-r*-s{e-})
...
2) n, the unauthorized use of another's production, invention, or
conception esp. in infringement of a copyright
If you consult the OED, you'll see that the first recorded use of piracy in this sense is hundreds of years ago, only a few years after Britain enacted its first copyright laws. The idea that anyone today is trying to evoke brigandage on the high seas when they use piracy to refer to unauthorised reproduction of copyright material is not very credible.
Re:Free Reg Required (Score:3, Informative)
Try this:
1. Click the link [nytimes.com] from the main page.
2. This brings you to the redirect URL:w .n ytimes.com/2002/03/07/arts/music/07POPL.html
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://ww
3. Replace the first "www" with the word "college" (or the word "archive").
So it now looks like:
http://college.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://w ww.nytimes.com/2002/03/07/arts/music/07POPL.html
Then go to that page. Voila, no registration required.
Re:Corrupting the youth, and other crimes (Score:2, Informative)
Arn't the classics fun?
Some info on Michael Greene. (The Guy's a Crook!) (Score:1, Informative)
Also, any of you living in Chicago may want to tune into to an excellent radio talk show called Sound Opinions [soundopinions.net]. It's aired weekly on WXRT (93.1 FM), Tuesday nights from 10pm-midnight, hosted by rock critics from the Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Anyway, they interviewed Michael Greene a few months back, and he hung up on them when they brought up the L.A. Times piece. Since last Tuesday was the first show after the Grammys, they spent the first 30 or so ripping on the Grammys. In particular, they talked about Michael Greene and replayed a clip of when Michael Greene hung up on him.
It doesn't look like the archives [soundopinions.net] have been updated to include this week's show, but check back later.
Re:The DOJ should now be forced to prosecute him (Score:3, Informative)
Once again a logical fallacy regarding this law. Just because this law cannot be used to bring action against copyright violations, does not mean that there are no other laws that can bring action against copyright violators.
The so called "fair use" provision is not there. They just wanted to restrain the scope of the law so it would not be abused. It says nothing about existing copyright law. (BTW: I believe in fair use, I just don't see it here).
Search with Lycos (Score:1, Informative)
(And not just for mp3s; Lycos is where to go if you want to find, say, old infocom games)