DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA 239
An anonymous reader writes "DMCA architect Bruce Lehman has admitted
that "our Clinton administration
policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright
control have not been successful". Speaking at conference in
Montreal (video
at 11:00), Lehman lay much
of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to
adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."
Finally!! (Score:2, Interesting)
Good comments for the FTC (Score:5, Interesting)
An open Letter to the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which was blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no vinyl nostalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto apartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s recession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my late 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $100 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
A reasonable service at a reasonable price. Look to the Russian sites. I select the quality and pay a reasonable price for it. The bottom line here is that I'll pay up to 4 bucks for a CD encoded at 256k VBR with no obnoxious DRM crap - no less quality and no more money.
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
Ease my conscious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s off Russian websites. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
This would keep me from downloading music "illegally" - I prom
Re:Passing the buck (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to say I agree.... Congress isn't exactly intended to represent the RIAA. And now that they've gone down that path and realized it was a mistake, they want to blame the RIAA?
That makes even less sense because it was clearly in the RIAA's best interest to promote the DMCA and that's why they pushed it so hard. In the end, even the RIAA has a right to lobby Congress (for all their other faults). It is entirely Congress, and more specifically Lehman's, fault that this happened and that everything got screwed up (and that it hurt the American public so much).
You know, this reminds me of the fact that in the 1920s, the politicians passed laws which only helped really large, often shady corporations. What ensued was the Great Depression....
Re:This is most certainly ironic... (Score:2, Interesting)
What?! Come on... seriously...
I make a point of not being political - politics makes people stupid. It does. I am certainly NOT a Republican.
Passing the buck? What is the biggest issue of all that is the locus of hatred of Republican policy in this day? Iraq.
Who voted for it? Which party (that voted for it) now tries to jockey with one another over how "anti-war" they are? Joe Lieberman (one time Vice Presidential candidate) retains intellectual honesty by standing by his vote and what do you know? The Party ostracizes him. John Kerry, who voted for it, runs for President as "anti-war". Hillary Clinton, who voted for it, now wants the Party nomination to run for President whilst paying lip-service to the "anti-war" crowd. If you still see things in black-and-white and not see the outrageous contradictions that politicians (of either party) are forced into by partisan politics, you'll probably never make the conscious decision to support a party on principle. That is, you probably don't think for yourself. And this kind of ridiculous comment gets modded +5 INFORMATIVE? How about propaganda?
I'll say it again: Politics makes people stupid.
***I say "anti-war" in scare-quotes since these people are not actually "anti-war" - they were happy to bomb the shit out of Iraq in 1998 (over WMD) and Serbia in 1999 (over a genocide that pales in comparison to that of Saddam Hussein). Maybe it's because Serbs are white people? I'll just throw that out there, not that I actually think so.
Re:This is most certainly ironic... (Score:5, Interesting)
That troll Orrin Hatch may have initiated the bill, but it was passed under Clinton's watch. I am not an american, but I do know he has something called a VETO which is pretty damned hard to override if he had used it. At very least it would have been a strong symbolic guesture of disapproval. No veto = Clinton approves.
If you go to opensecrets.org and look at where the $$$ for both parties comes from, you will see the #1 contributor to the Democratic party is Hollywood.
Re:An open Letter to the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally I am not one to promote any online stores, but I think you might enjoy cdbaby.com. They currently have a 5$ per CD sale, mostly unsigned and unknown bands but absolutely great music from many different genres and you get the physical media which you may rip / encode to your liking. No DRM, no copy protection,
Disclaimer: I do not work for this store, I am just a happy customer. And pleeez excuse ze bad English, I normally talk German or French.
More Lehmann Doublespeak (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is USPTO Lehmann, then IMO he's a total joke, and a lackey for the legal industry to create law which taxes other industries to the benefit of... the legal industry.
So, he did the DMCA too? Amazing. He is "the architect of the WIPO Internet Treaties". Wow. I didn't know he also "did" the DMCA and WIPO (cast US patent law into global stone), but it makes sense. And I didn't know he was still "in business" ("who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute"). The more things change, the more they stay the same. I guess Lehmann is getting his dues from the legal industry for all the "work" he did on behalf of the legal industry.
Good to know he's still out there. Amazing to know he did the DMCA, WIPO, _and_ institutionalized software patents. What a joke.
I suggest taking anything Lehmann says with a huge grain of salt, even any apologies. He has known what he has been doing for decades, and to feign ignorance now is unconscionable IMO. I do not buy it, and it's not his style. He's more of a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of policy-maker, which is to say he'll ignore the obvious to forcefeed policy despite all public interest(s), IMO. Again, I'm not buying.
Re:To bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Where is the contradiction? Bush is an evil* president. Before that, Clinton tried his best to be evil**, and often succeeded, but fortunately he was stuck with a Republican Congress so he couldn't do as much damage as he might have liked. The fact that one president sucks does not exonerate the other.
*Iraq, PATRIOT Act, Guantanamo, "unlawful combatants", wiretapping, national security letters, the budget, Kyoto, stem cell research
**Clipper, DMCA, Copyright Extension Act, CDA, COPA, extraordinary renditions, bombing random countries to distract Congress, assault weapons ban
Here's where you lost them (and me) (Score:3, Interesting)
Burning a CD of songs for my friends is fucking fair use to me.
Think about that for a minute. You've got such a convenient way to rationalize this:
but that is usually stuff that they wouldn't have bought anyway.
You sound as if you're nothing more than a spoiled child, screaming that "it's not fair" that you can't get what you want. Then you're attempting to justify it on economic (not moral or ethical) grounds. Think about how this could be abuse. Consider a philanthropist deciding that all relatives, in-laws, co-workers, and so forth are "friends" and that the entire population of Berkeley were really just extended "friends" and distributing a record to all of them, or the entire state, or perhaps even the entire country or world should be fair use. That would obviously put this person is direct competition with the labels (negating the economic affects you think you're using to justify your position) yet that person (under your ideals) has exactly zero obligation to reimburse the artists or anyone else involved in creating the work in the first place. Yet if you had your way this would be perfectly fine.
Sure, this is a "slippery slope" argument but I can only hope you'll be able to grasp the bigger picture. You're making what you see as a responsible fair use, but there's no meaningful way to codify this approach. Further, you don't know what your friends are doing with the copies you gave them. Suppose they made "fair use" copies for all their friends, and they made "fair use" copies in turn. Your morality may be offended by these scenarios, but I'm hoping to reach your rationality.
I'm guessing you'll still justify it all by saying you're "advertising" for the labels and that the lost sales are more than made up by those of your friends who actually then buy more than they would, because you exposed them to these copies.
However, the underlying problem is that you feel entitled to something for you have absolutely no rights. Fair Use never has (and never should) have anything to do with making copies for others. It has to do with satire and some academic uses. It also has to do with allowing you to make a backup (for yourself!) and arguably to time-shift, location-shift, and device-shift the content for your own personal use.
You should certainly be allowed to play these songs for your friends, and because of the shifting you can do this at your place, their place, or anywhere else. You can let them borrow the songs for a while, or even sell (or give) them to your friends. However, you can't keep your copies as well. If your friend borrows a few songs for a weekend, you have no place listening to those same songs that weekend. You've temporarily assigned your rights to another, so you can't have your cake and eat it (the backup) too.
I'm trying to keep this from being personal, but it's people like you who cause people like me to lose credibility when fighting for actual reasonable fair use. I just want at least the same rights for music that I have with physical content (think books)--plus the various shifting concepts noted above--and nothing more. Note that shifting is conceptually a "move" not a "copy" even though the practicality of convenience means you make an actual copy.
But your position is absolutely untenable, not just to the industry, but to people like me! I had DRM as much as anybody else, and perhaps more, but I would call you out as bastardizing the very concept of "fair use" (and yes, that's even if it didn't affect me at all). It's definitely not within the spirit or letter of any related laws, yet you flaunt your disregard as if waving the flag in the name of justice for all. Most of the pre-DMCA laws and doctrines (such as that of first sale) were working perfectly fine.
Unfortunately, so many of us can't make a stand for extending reasonable rights because of extremists like you (sound familiar?). I want to make a difference, so I'd simply and respectfu
The DMCA, the CTEA and the fucking NET Act. (Score:5, Interesting)
How did that happen again? Any exchange of any value instantaneously became defined as commercial exchange because some bought and paid for Republican congressman tagged a little note onto a bill right before it was voted on? This completely fails the test of logic. Dozens of simple analogies can easily show that this is an absurd proposition. Any exchange of value is a commercial exchange? That is sick.
Congress is indeed evil. Perhaps not as evil as the Bush administration but just as insidious and bought off.
Re:On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be forgetting SACD and DVD-Audio, both heavily-laden with DRM. The market rejected them in favor of regular Audio CDs, and I would say the presence of DRM was an important factor in this rejection, since geeks knew to stay far away from those formats. DVDs were successful due to the drastic improvement in convenience and picture quality over VHS, despite the DRM. BluRay and HD-DVD won't have it so easy since they're not such a drastic improvement over DVDs as DVDs were to VHS, combined with the rise in popularity of electronic distribution in favor of shipping shiny discs... I guess my point is that DMCA or no, content distributors seem to have forgotten on which side their bread is buttered.
Re:Welcome to the dawn of the totalitarian era (Score:3, Interesting)
But it's important to remember that the "limited term monopoly" is there to encourage continued invention and artistic creation. It's equally important to remember that "old" inventions and artistic works are supposed to go into the public domain as fodder for the future. The "limited term monopolies" are not supposed to be a revenue model, and these things are where we've lost it.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Re:Wooo! (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow you just discovered how most music is made. Every time an artist picks a "style" of music to compose, even if it's with a twist, he is in fact borrowing from the past. The "original" music you so loved from your youth just means that you were too young to remember or notice what came before.
Musically, getting old means noticing this process.
As an aside, since music can be traced, musical genealogy is an absolutely fascinating subject. Try looking into it sometime.
Re:at least they got radio deregulation right (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in the real world - we've never really had a truly independent press. They've always been beholden to their advertisers. The situation now for the mass media is truly better than it was - as little as thirty to forty years ago they were also much more heavily beholden to political interests than they are today. It's also worth noting that today's 'independent' press (blogs, websites) are in fact *much* more heavily slanted and filtered than the mass media has been at practically any time.
When I voted last year - I had a choice of multiple political parties, few of whom were 'two sides of the same coin'. Heck, for my State House representative, it wasn't a matter of choosing between the lesser of two evils, I had six evils to decide between.
Bottom line: What's really strangling this country is individual who are not only ignorant of history and politics - they seem proud of it.
Anyone who thinks the US is even remotely totalitarian hasn't a clue, and likely hasn't a functioning brain cell. (As well as being a large part of the problem.)