An anonymous reader writes "The music industry is still pushing Choruss, a controversial blanket-licensing scheme, but it is far less innovative than first described. Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their names released because the issue is a political landmine — and who wants to be associated with the recording industry?"
What's retarded is that is secret? Why is this secret? Why is the copyright treaty secret? The only conclusion I can come up with is that they're up to no good.
a) No suing or prosecuting of non-commercial pirates.
b) No DRM, No laws forbidding circumvention tools.
c) Copyright terms that last no more than 30 years.
d) Don't attempt to shakedown or otherwise control radio in any form (terrestrial, sat or net).
Don't give me the impression that I am building my own gallows if I give them my money.
The Canadians have their blank CD tax ostensibly because blank CDs are used to copy music. Great. But is it then legal to copy music in Canada? No. How does that even work?!
Doing this other blanket licensing stuff will enjoy similar respect in that anything acquired will be decidedly illegal until proven otherwise and even with proof, there is little doubt in my mind the recording industry will respect it as legal.
The music industry created a loophole in Canadian copyright laws when it asked for a levy on blank audio media. These $0.21 to $0.24 levies on blank media raised millions of dollars for music publishers, but also legalized copying in the digital age, to the consternation of the music industry. Canadian courts have ruled that consumers have the right to copy any recording from the original copy even those they do not personally own. This consumer right has been extended by the courts to include peer-to-peer downloads.
Canadian Copyright Law [wikipedia.org]
So Canadians are allowed to make copies regardless of ownership because they are already taxed for it.
I think it only applies to music that's put onto media covered by the levies, it's ambiguous whether it covers p2p downloaded content on your iPod and it remains illegal to upload music so no seeding.
And roads are funded by gasoline tax NOT the compact disc tax, so your example is completely and totally irrelevant.
Um, actually that makes GP's example very relevant.
"Why do people think taxes are used for what they say they are?"
"Because other taxes, such as road use taxes, actually go towards road repairs."
Now if you had said that the taxes collected via the road use tax just ends up in a bucket with all the other taxes, which gets spent on things like roads, police, garbage collection, recycling, etc, regardless of how much each one brought into the bucket, then you'd have had a point.
Also I paid nearly $25,000 in taxes last year.
That figure is meaningless without some idea of your pre-tax income. For all I know that may only be half your weekly income.
No, really! Are we really so weak and pathetic to care, whenever the designated crazy person of the world goes on again, declaring him a new set of rights?
I don't see this ever happening.
Oh, those who have a very twisted view of what is "politically correct", and the weakest spines in the whole universe, will cave in so the dwarf.
But unofficially, everyone will simply ignore them. Hell, look at Sarkozy. Officially: "Oh hell yeah, we need the 3 strikes law". Unofficially he shares so much mus
Oh boy... I'm sorry for the typos. I swear, I proofread it. It's just that this is the first thing I did in the morning. I should have proofeaten my breakfast first, perhaps. ^^
Individuals do not have access to government. Government is influenced by money. The corruption is plain and obvious for all to see and neither the government nor those who are influencing government with money are the slightest bit ashamed.
In Canada it is legal, under Section 80 of the Copyright Act [justice.gc.ca], to copy a recording for one's personal use. It is not legal to distribute copies.
the cd tax is so flawed it's not funny. only artists who sell over a certain number of cd's ever see a cent, so if i'm a local band who produces an album, burns it to 3000 cd's to try get some kind of exposure, your album is actually taxed and some cocksucker affliated with *AA profits off it via the tax you paid....
3000 is probably the wrong number to use in that argument, you can get 1000 cds stamped (and printed and shipped) for $750, your sales better be awful incremental if burning blanks a few at a time makes more sense than risking the $750 for nice looking stamped discs. $1100 gets you retail ready packages.
As an artist, no way would I let someone download my entire library of songs for a monthly fee. It's simply not fair.
Why not? Serious question. If I subscribe to a service with a monthly fee, it's because I want to be able to listen to lots of new stuff. If you're not producing new stuff, then once I've downloaded everything from you that I want then I won't pay you any more. How is this different to buying a CD? You don't get paid every time I listen to a CD and you don't get paid if I sell the CD to someone else later. If your music is good, then I'll want to download your next album, so I'll keep paying the subscription and when you release something new I'll download that too and you'll get more money. If it's not good then I won't download anything else from you.
The problem with the Canadian system is that there's a disconnect between the music people copy and the people who get paid. If someone likes a band and gives a copy to their friend, this is not recorded anywhere. If they sent a link to download it, covered by their monthly subscription, then it would be and the bands that produce the music people download would get more money.
The problem with the monthly subscription is that barely any of that would go to the artist directly- essentially you'd be downloading my music for a fraction of the retail cost. It makes no sense for me other then for promotion to give massive discounts on music. Hell music in general is already discounted so much as it is.
I think a monthly subscription is only fair if when the subscription ends you lose access to my music.
It's a long discussion whether musicians should give away money to promote thems
You're confusing two issues then. Not paying the musicians is not fair, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the monthly subscription model. If 90% of revenues from the subscription went to the musicians and was divided amongst the ones that had been downloaded, would that be unfair? You are making blanket statements that you would never consider the monthly fee model for your music and in doing so are being as guilty as the RIAA in your unwillingness to adapt to more appropriate business models.
Well if they were just offering a streaming service then all you'd have to worry about is Performance royalties.
But in this case they're offering to give you the file. If this Choruss company is going to give me my Mechanical royalties (9.1 cents) on every song distributed then I'm happy, but if it's a blanket just to save them money as music resalers- then it's pointless. I can already get everything off itunes and the royalties are paid out properly.
The Canadian Private Copying Collective has developed a methodology by which the proceeds are distributed to rights holders based on commercial radio airplay and commercial sales samples, ignoring radio/college airplay and independent record sales not logged by Soundscan.
Which means that if I copy your music, and you don't get played on radio, you don't get a cent from it. Celine Dion does though. Which IMO is completely bizarre an
Well to be honest, if you don't get played on the radio- then you're not at the level to care about how important royalties are to an artist. That's fine.
Indie artists and Niche artists have their following too, but generally to make a living off music you need it on the radio/charts.
A correction on the SOCAN payouts- If you do get played, and counted by Neilson, your money sits with SOCAN until you sign up- if you haven't already. Your money doesn't go to another artist like you mentioned. They'll get p
Well to be honest, if you don't get played on the radio- then you're not at the level to care about how important royalties are to an artist. That's fine. Indie artists and Niche artists have their following too, but generally to make a living off music you need it on the radio/charts
Radio stats don't necessarily match the popularity in other mediums though. Here radio stations keep playing various 80s stuff everybody heard 500 times before. So long radio stations keep playing ancient hits those people will
Sure they're scared of being sued! Just look at the track record.
You know, this wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD that costs them a few cents to make. You know... a CD with 7 songs on it where 5 of the songs suck, 1 song is ok, and you really only wanted that 1 song you paid the $30 bucks for.
Instead, they want to sue Apple over royalties for the 30 second song previews on iTunes.
wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD
I don't think that $12-$15 (or a buck or two per track) is really an unfair price for even a half-decent CD, really (and I don't think many people pay $30). It may be vanishingly cheap to transmit bits or print them into plastic and foil discs, but it's a lot of work to create music. Paying for it is one good way to make sure the people who make it can keep doing it. Not that it's not good for artists to sometimes sell lower or even give music away, and not that I don't agree there's a lot of crap out there that isn't worth paying for. Just that the most common prices don't seem unreasonable to me given the work involved in making music.
The labels and publishers, on the other hand... increasingly irrelevant middlemen and control freaks who add a lot of overhead and a questionable amount of value.
Fair price is a misleading question. The real question is whether they are pricing their product in the best way to maximise profits and I strongly suspect that they are not. I pay about the cost of an album every month to a company that lets me rent DVDs (two at once, as fast as I can watch them and post them back) and stream an unlimited number of TV shows and films. In comparison with this, an album seems stupidly expensive. According to iTunes, I haven't listened to any of my albums more than 128 times and very few more than 30 times. There aren't any that I've been listening to with 100% of my attention, so in terms of money per time spent entertained, music is much more expensive than video.
At the current prices, I'll buy 2-6 albums per year. If you priced an album at $1-2 then it would be an impulse purchase. If I heard a song I liked on Radio Paradise, then I'd buy the rest of the album to see if I liked it. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I suspect that I'm no. The cost of producing music has dropped a lot in the last few decades, but the cost of buying it has not. Meanwhile, the cost of other forms of entertainment has dropped a lot and music seems proportionally much more expensive. I've read a couple of studies indicating that around 5-15/track is the optimum price for maximising profit when selling music but the music industry seems to think that 99/track is the right price (which is fine) and that they should expect the same number of sales that they'd get with 5/track (which is completely unreasonable) and then blame piracy for their failure to adapt.
I don't think that $12-$15 (or a buck or two per track) is really an unfair price for even a half-decent CD, really (and I don't think many people pay $30).
/me raises hand...
Normal CD price here is 20€ which at current rates is $29.5. Add to the insult the fact that there are no web stores that would sell non-DRM music to a linux user in Finland (I'd love it if someone proves me wrong, btw).
If we had a free market and sane copyright terms I would agree with you. The way I usually end any argument about "artists rights" and the *.A.As is this-
Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright. The man has been worm food (or a Popsicle, depending on whom you believe) for going on half a century but one of his FIRST works, one made when airplanes were made out of cloth and antibiotics were still but a dream, is STILL under copyright.
If we hadn't had the public domain stolen from us thanks to treasonous bribery we all could go to a nice public domain website and download all the music up to the mid 70s for absolutely free. Artists could use that material to create new and exciting works by remixing, sampling, and using snippets in their original compositions. Instead thanks to treasonous bribery in all likelihood your grandchildren, if they are very lucky and live to be VERY old, might actually one day see the music of Jimi Hendrix and the Stones make it into the public domain. That is of course if that damned mouse doesn't cause copyrights to simply be extended forever, again thanks to bribery.
So while I haven't heard shit from an RIAA artist I would bother even stealing, I say if you like it please steal the fuckers. After all they have stolen from you, me, our children, our families, by robbing our public domain from us to fill their greedy pockets. The copyright system was a CONTRACT nothing more. In return for a LIMITED copyright We, The People, got a richer public domain. But the contract has been broken, and until We, The People, are again allowed a place at the bargaining table all rights granted by that contract should be ignored. Considering they are ignoring our end of the contract, why shouldn't we do the same?
How's this for an idea. A band signs with a college instead of a record label. The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
Yeah, probably not the greatest of plans, but much better than a college handing it's own students over to the RIAA.
How's this for an idea. A band signs with a college instead of a record label. The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
Awesome. And the band gets an education from the college, instead of the record industry!
Though to be fair, I'm sure the record industry is a very educational experience...
The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
You have a strange definition of 'free'. Plus, that's just one band. This is nothing like the college handing its students to the RIAA. Read the article.. the spokesperson actually speaks some sense, apart from his bullshit about "being excited which price point is optimal for the recording artist" or whatever he said. Presumably that means the cheapest they can pay them while still keeping them onboard.
This kind of service is a *good* idea, it's just the fact that it's being controlled by the RIAA that is
...the people who don't listen to music, or don't want to financially support the RIAA, or have any other reason to not want to pay for this license?
Is there an opt-out option? A quick glance through TFA didn't say so either way.
There are people who don't listen to music? That's probably the saddest thing I've ever heard.
As for the rest of it, that's the nature of Taxation. Everyone pays because everyone can benefit, and it's up to them if they choose to. The cost won't be covered by only some paying. Plus, there's the deficit to be made up from people unable to pay.
Tax isn't bad when it's done right; I.e., when the revenue raised is appropriated appropriately.
The most unusual feature of Choruss is that users would be able to download any song in the collection to their own computers, with no restrictions. Unlike Apple's iTunes, which charges about a dollar per song for unrestricted downloads, this would be an all-you-can-grab song buffet. Want to make CD's? Sure.
What if they want to make CDs, and then they want to sell those CDs? Copyright only governs the creation of a copy, but once a copy is created you're generally allowed to sell it. Does the license forbid such reselling? Is it enforceable?
I attended an IT conference last year where Choruss was discussed. Given the regard we/.ers have for the technically-minded, I was surprised at the attitudes other college's IT directors had towards this system.
The main complaints they had about music piracy were having to deal with RIAA notices and bandwidth sucked up by P2P. My own campus is fairly enlightened - not-too-terrible packet shaping and a per-MAC address bandwidth cap. Each student gets 1 Mb/s and any relevant RIAA bitch notes.
Another substantial change from the early days of the proj ect is that the licenses now would be with individual students rather than with colleges—although on some campuses, student governments or other groups may agree to pay the fee on behalf of students.
It's not a direct answer, but could be relevant. If the licensing scheme is with individual students now, I would bet that the students have to sign or agree to something in order to participate. Thus, if they don't want to participate, ideally they just could avoid that license agreement. But you are right, the article is scant on details regarding that particular aspect and it wouldn't surprise me if any opt-out option that was there got mired and intertwined with some other form of student regi
Noank Media, a company based on a Harvard University research proposal, is working on a blanket-license program that would charge colleges and other institutions a flat fee. Users would install software that would count every time they played a song, for the purpose of distributing royalties to the musicians.
What? How do they expect that to work? Are service providers going to force me to install some metering software? How will it count plays on portable music players?
Whether they have some kind of intrusive metering software or not, what I'm wondering is how they think they can pull off paying out per-play royalties to artists from a flat-fee, unlimited-download subscription model. The maths, they don't add up.
Imagine an ideal world where artists make their own music; they pay for their own recording and mixing. If they want to make a million dollar music video, they get a loan from a financial institution. Music distributors like MTV and radio stations go out and find music rather than contractually accepting whatever the large recording companies decide will be popular. Whenever I pay $10 for an album, it all goes to the band.
And, since we're talking about hypothetical ideal worlds, I'd wave a magic wand so that modern music wouldn't suck.
If they want to make a million dollar music video, they get a loan from a financial institution.
Interesting thought, but you just come right back to a record company model. Let's say you're a financial institution in the business of giving out loans. An artist comes to you saying that they want to shoot a music video to promote their debut album. You are likely not going to give this artist any money unless you can be convinced that this artist will be profitable and be able to repay the loan. So what
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday November 05, @04:28AM (#29992464)
Won't most of the students get sued the day after graduation, when they are no longer associated with the college and haven't deleted their music collections?
I know no one RTFA but you could at least make an exception for a story about parts of the recording industry attempting to update their business model (the mantra we have been chanting for how long now?)
No problem. Even after students stop paying the Choruss subscription fee, they will be able to keep all the songs they have downloaded. "They get to keep them the rest of their lives," as Mr. Griffin put it. That differs from some subscription music services, which allow access only while users are active members of the service.
What's to stop students from paying for one month and downloading the whole collection? "Nothing," said Mr. Griffin.
Other folks at other companies considering similar models even go on to say:
"We're not going to stop file sharing—it's probably going to happen in one form or another, and it's probably folly to try and stop it," said Charlie Moore, a Noank official who has traveled to campuses in the past few months to drum up interest. "If we're able to use consumption data to compensate the rights holders of a particular recording, then we think we've got a handle on a fair and equitable model for rights going forward."
That is a beautiful bit of reality right there and a much improved level of insight regarding the file sharing world by recording industry insiders. This may not be the best solution yet, I don't know, but at least these folks are trying to do something productive for both their business and their customer base (college students) rather than attempting to bankrupt the latter while clinging to an outdated version of the former. I find the attitude quite refreshing myself.
Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their names released
The music industry says there are six colleges, but the six won't let their names out? How are they supposed to keep a service used by all their students secret?
I call bullshit on these lying bastards. Everything the RIAA labels do is based on a lie, starting with the lie that P2P costs sales when every study says "pirates" spend more on music than anybody. Well, P2P does cost RIAA labels sales; if you buy two or three indie CDs, that's money you don't have to buy an RIAA CD.
And thank you, reverendbeer, for pointing out that these lying bastards DON'T own rights to all music. They don't. We need to call these lying sociopaths out at every opportunity.
The music industry is retarded (Score:2, Funny)
and that is no secret
Re:The music industry is retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:The music industry is retarded (Score:5, Insightful)
What do I want from them?
a) No suing or prosecuting of non-commercial pirates.
b) No DRM, No laws forbidding circumvention tools.
c) Copyright terms that last no more than 30 years.
d) Don't attempt to shakedown or otherwise control radio in any form (terrestrial, sat or net).
Don't give me the impression that I am building my own gallows if I give them my money.
Parent
Blanket licensing is never legal (Score:5, Insightful)
The Canadians have their blank CD tax ostensibly because blank CDs are used to copy music. Great. But is it then legal to copy music in Canada? No. How does that even work?!
Doing this other blanket licensing stuff will enjoy similar respect in that anything acquired will be decidedly illegal until proven otherwise and even with proof, there is little doubt in my mind the recording industry will respect it as legal.
Re:Blanket licensing is never legal (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Blanket licensing is never legal (Score:5, Informative)
The music industry created a loophole in Canadian copyright laws when it asked for a levy on blank audio media. These $0.21 to $0.24 levies on blank media raised millions of dollars for music publishers, but also legalized copying in the digital age, to the consternation of the music industry. Canadian courts have ruled that consumers have the right to copy any recording from the original copy even those they do not personally own. This consumer right has been extended by the courts to include peer-to-peer downloads.
Canadian Copyright Law [wikipedia.org]
So Canadians are allowed to make copies regardless of ownership because they are already taxed for it.
Parent
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Re:Man, silly world... (Score:4, Informative)
And roads are funded by gasoline tax NOT the compact disc tax, so your example is completely and totally irrelevant.
Um, actually that makes GP's example very relevant.
"Why do people think taxes are used for what they say they are?"
"Because other taxes, such as road use taxes, actually go towards road repairs."
Now if you had said that the taxes collected via the road use tax just ends up in a bucket with all the other taxes, which gets spent on things like roads, police, garbage collection, recycling, etc, regardless of how much each one brought into the bucket, then you'd have had a point.
Also I paid nearly $25,000 in taxes last year.
That figure is meaningless without some idea of your pre-tax income. For all I know that may only be half your weekly income.
Parent
Re:Man, silly world... (Score:4, Funny)
Man, if we come up with one or two more anecdotes, we might have some data!
Parent
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I do think it's made burning dubs de facto legal though...
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But: Do we care?
No, really! Are we really so weak and pathetic to care, whenever the designated crazy person of the world goes on again, declaring him a new set of rights?
I don't see this ever happening.
Oh, those who have a very twisted view of what is "politically correct", and the weakest spines in the whole universe, will cave in so the dwarf.
But unofficially, everyone will simply ignore them. Hell, look at Sarkozy. Officially: "Oh hell yeah, we need the 3 strikes law". Unofficially he shares so much mus
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Oh boy... I'm sorry for the typos. I swear, I proofread it. It's just that this is the first thing I did in the morning. I should have proofeaten my breakfast first, perhaps. ^^
Re:Blanket licensing is never legal (Score:5, Insightful)
Individuals do not have access to government. Government is influenced by money. The corruption is plain and obvious for all to see and neither the government nor those who are influencing government with money are the slightest bit ashamed.
Parent
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In Canada it is legal, under Section 80 of the Copyright Act [justice.gc.ca], to copy a recording for one's personal use. It is not legal to distribute copies.
Re:Blanket licensing is never legal (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
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3000 is probably the wrong number to use in that argument, you can get 1000 cds stamped (and printed and shipped) for $750, your sales better be awful incremental if burning blanks a few at a time makes more sense than risking the $750 for nice looking stamped discs. $1100 gets you retail ready packages.
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commenting to undo an erroneous mod
Re:Blanket licensing is never legal (Score:4, Insightful)
As an artist, no way would I let someone download my entire library of songs for a monthly fee. It's simply not fair.
Why not? Serious question. If I subscribe to a service with a monthly fee, it's because I want to be able to listen to lots of new stuff. If you're not producing new stuff, then once I've downloaded everything from you that I want then I won't pay you any more. How is this different to buying a CD? You don't get paid every time I listen to a CD and you don't get paid if I sell the CD to someone else later. If your music is good, then I'll want to download your next album, so I'll keep paying the subscription and when you release something new I'll download that too and you'll get more money. If it's not good then I won't download anything else from you.
The problem with the Canadian system is that there's a disconnect between the music people copy and the people who get paid. If someone likes a band and gives a copy to their friend, this is not recorded anywhere. If they sent a link to download it, covered by their monthly subscription, then it would be and the bands that produce the music people download would get more money.
Parent
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Re:Blanket licensing is never legal (Score:5, Insightful)
essentially you'd be downloading my music for a fraction of the retail cost.
Since there's no packaging, no physical media, no cover art, not shipping, no retail overshead, it should be a fraction of the retail cost.
Parent
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No, it doesn't. Wikipedia says this:
Which means that if I copy your music, and you don't get played on radio, you don't get a cent from it. Celine Dion does though. Which IMO is completely bizarre an
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Radio stats don't necessarily match the popularity in other mediums though. Here radio stations keep playing various 80s stuff everybody heard 500 times before. So long radio stations keep playing ancient hits those people will
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I buy CDs pretty much exclusively to burn Linux distros
Most distros can install from USB these days... it's way faster!
An older computer that can't boot from USB will need a CD, but that's the only reason not to use USB.
Anonymous Cowards? (Score:3, Interesting)
You know, this wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD that costs them a few cents to make. You know... a CD with 7 songs on it where 5 of the songs suck, 1 song is ok, and you really only wanted that 1 song you paid the $30 bucks for.
Instead, they want to sue Apple over royalties for the 30 second song previews on iTunes.
Music's worth it; labels aren't. (Score:4, Interesting)
wouldn't even be so much of a problem if the music industry (these publishers) charged a reasonable price for a CD
I don't think that $12-$15 (or a buck or two per track) is really an unfair price for even a half-decent CD, really (and I don't think many people pay $30). It may be vanishingly cheap to transmit bits or print them into plastic and foil discs, but it's a lot of work to create music. Paying for it is one good way to make sure the people who make it can keep doing it. Not that it's not good for artists to sometimes sell lower or even give music away, and not that I don't agree there's a lot of crap out there that isn't worth paying for. Just that the most common prices don't seem unreasonable to me given the work involved in making music.
The labels and publishers, on the other hand... increasingly irrelevant middlemen and control freaks who add a lot of overhead and a questionable amount of value.
Parent
Re:Music's worth it; labels aren't. (Score:5, Interesting)
Fair price is a misleading question. The real question is whether they are pricing their product in the best way to maximise profits and I strongly suspect that they are not. I pay about the cost of an album every month to a company that lets me rent DVDs (two at once, as fast as I can watch them and post them back) and stream an unlimited number of TV shows and films. In comparison with this, an album seems stupidly expensive. According to iTunes, I haven't listened to any of my albums more than 128 times and very few more than 30 times. There aren't any that I've been listening to with 100% of my attention, so in terms of money per time spent entertained, music is much more expensive than video.
At the current prices, I'll buy 2-6 albums per year. If you priced an album at $1-2 then it would be an impulse purchase. If I heard a song I liked on Radio Paradise, then I'd buy the rest of the album to see if I liked it. Perhaps I'm unusual, but I suspect that I'm no. The cost of producing music has dropped a lot in the last few decades, but the cost of buying it has not. Meanwhile, the cost of other forms of entertainment has dropped a lot and music seems proportionally much more expensive. I've read a couple of studies indicating that around 5-15/track is the optimum price for maximising profit when selling music but the music industry seems to think that 99/track is the right price (which is fine) and that they should expect the same number of sales that they'd get with 5/track (which is completely unreasonable) and then blame piracy for their failure to adapt.
Coincidentally, Ars published quite a nice round up on this subject today [arstechnica.com].
Parent
Re:Music's worth it; labels aren't. (Score:4, Interesting)
Normal CD price here is 20€ which at current rates is $29.5. Add to the insult the fact that there are no web stores that would sell non-DRM music to a linux user in Finland (I'd love it if someone proves me wrong, btw).
Parent
Re:Music's worth it; labels aren't. (Score:5, Insightful)
If we had a free market and sane copyright terms I would agree with you. The way I usually end any argument about "artists rights" and the *.A.As is this-
Steamboat Willie is STILL under copyright. The man has been worm food (or a Popsicle, depending on whom you believe) for going on half a century but one of his FIRST works, one made when airplanes were made out of cloth and antibiotics were still but a dream, is STILL under copyright.
If we hadn't had the public domain stolen from us thanks to treasonous bribery we all could go to a nice public domain website and download all the music up to the mid 70s for absolutely free. Artists could use that material to create new and exciting works by remixing, sampling, and using snippets in their original compositions. Instead thanks to treasonous bribery in all likelihood your grandchildren, if they are very lucky and live to be VERY old, might actually one day see the music of Jimi Hendrix and the Stones make it into the public domain. That is of course if that damned mouse doesn't cause copyrights to simply be extended forever, again thanks to bribery.
So while I haven't heard shit from an RIAA artist I would bother even stealing, I say if you like it please steal the fuckers. After all they have stolen from you, me, our children, our families, by robbing our public domain from us to fill their greedy pockets. The copyright system was a CONTRACT nothing more. In return for a LIMITED copyright We, The People, got a richer public domain. But the contract has been broken, and until We, The People, are again allowed a place at the bargaining table all rights granted by that contract should be ignored. Considering they are ignoring our end of the contract, why shouldn't we do the same?
Parent
Let's turn it around. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, probably not the greatest of plans, but much better than a college handing it's own students over to the RIAA.
Awesome. (Score:2)
How's this for an idea. A band signs with a college instead of a record label. The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
Awesome. And the band gets an education from the college, instead of the record industry!
Though to be fair, I'm sure the record industry is a very educational experience...
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The college pays the band, everyone at the college gets their music for free.
You have a strange definition of 'free'. Plus, that's just one band. This is nothing like the college handing its students to the RIAA. Read the article.. the spokesperson actually speaks some sense, apart from his bullshit about "being excited which price point is optimal for the recording artist" or whatever he said. Presumably that means the cheapest they can pay them while still keeping them onboard.
This kind of service is a *good* idea, it's just the fact that it's being controlled by the RIAA that is
What about... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
As for the rest of it, that's the nature of Taxation. Everyone pays because everyone can benefit, and it's up to them if they choose to. The cost won't be covered by only some paying. Plus, there's the deficit to be made up from people unable to pay.
Tax isn't bad when it's done right; I.e., when the revenue raised is appropriated appropriately.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What about this:
The most unusual feature of Choruss is that users would be able to download any song in the collection to their own computers, with no restrictions. Unlike Apple's iTunes, which charges about a dollar per song for unrestricted downloads, this would be an all-you-can-grab song buffet. Want to make CD's? Sure.
What if they want to make CDs, and then they want to sell those CDs? Copyright only governs the creation of a copy, but once a copy is created you're generally allowed to sell it. Does the license forbid such reselling? Is it enforceable?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I attended an IT conference last year where Choruss was discussed. Given the regard we /.ers have for the technically-minded, I was surprised at the attitudes other college's IT directors had towards this system.
The main complaints they had about music piracy were having to deal with RIAA notices and bandwidth sucked up by P2P. My own campus is fairly enlightened - not-too-terrible packet shaping and a per-MAC address bandwidth cap. Each student gets 1 Mb/s and any relevant RIAA bitch notes.
Other campuse
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Another substantial change from the early days of the proj ect is that the licenses now would be with individual students rather than with colleges—although on some campuses, student governments or other groups may agree to pay the fee on behalf of students.
It's not a direct answer, but could be relevant. If the licensing scheme is with individual students now, I would bet that the students have to sign or agree to something in order to participate. Thus, if they don't want to participate, ideally they just could avoid that license agreement. But you are right, the article is scant on details regarding that particular aspect and it wouldn't surprise me if any opt-out option that was there got mired and intertwined with some other form of student regi
RIAA is more hated than IRS (Score:2, Insightful)
And music was supposed to be entertainment..
The really interesting part of the article... (Score:3, Interesting)
What? How do they expect that to work? Are service providers going to force me to install some metering software? How will it count plays on portable music players?
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The really interesting part of the article... (Score:4, Insightful)
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evil (Score:2)
figures.
I have a dream... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting thought, but you just come right back to a record company model. Let's say you're a financial institution in the business of giving out loans. An artist comes to you saying that they want to shoot a music video to promote their debut album. You are likely not going to give this artist any money unless you can be convinced that this artist will be profitable and be able to repay the loan. So what
Re:infinite, free music for a one time fee? (Score:4, Insightful)
Won't most of the students get sued the day after graduation, when they are no longer associated with the college and haven't deleted their music collections?
Parent
Re:infinite, free music for a one time fee? (Score:4, Insightful)
No problem. Even after students stop paying the Choruss subscription fee, they will be able to keep all the songs they have downloaded. "They get to keep them the rest of their lives," as Mr. Griffin put it. That differs from some subscription music services, which allow access only while users are active members of the service. What's to stop students from paying for one month and downloading the whole collection? "Nothing," said Mr. Griffin.
Other folks at other companies considering similar models even go on to say:
"We're not going to stop file sharing—it's probably going to happen in one form or another, and it's probably folly to try and stop it," said Charlie Moore, a Noank official who has traveled to campuses in the past few months to drum up interest. "If we're able to use consumption data to compensate the rights holders of a particular recording, then we think we've got a handle on a fair and equitable model for rights going forward."
That is a beautiful bit of reality right there and a much improved level of insight regarding the file sharing world by recording industry insiders. This may not be the best solution yet, I don't know, but at least these folks are trying to do something productive for both their business and their customer base (college students) rather than attempting to bankrupt the latter while clinging to an outdated version of the former. I find the attitude quite refreshing myself.
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Re:Thank you, RIAA... (Score:5, Insightful)
Six colleges are setting it up now, but they refuse to have their names released
The music industry says there are six colleges, but the six won't let their names out? How are they supposed to keep a service used by all their students secret?
I call bullshit on these lying bastards. Everything the RIAA labels do is based on a lie, starting with the lie that P2P costs sales when every study says "pirates" spend more on music than anybody. Well, P2P does cost RIAA labels sales; if you buy two or three indie CDs, that's money you don't have to buy an RIAA CD.
And thank you, reverendbeer, for pointing out that these lying bastards DON'T own rights to all music. They don't. We need to call these lying sociopaths out at every opportunity.
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Re:Still feeds the beast (Score:4, Interesting)
Don T. Knowe and the Hoocares, I believe.
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