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Music Media

Helping Artists Online 286

Posted by JonKatz from the copyright-vs.compensation--vs.--free-culture dept.
Entertainment conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of copyright law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of artists, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits. They aren't the same thing. Most artists need more protection from media companies than from college kids downloading music online. How can the rights of artists be protected on the Net?

Lost in the Napster and free music legal brawling is the original purpose of copyright. Congress originally enacted copyright protection not so that ideas and intellectual property could be owned forever and licensed by big companies. These laws were enacted so that authors and artists would have an incentive to produce new works and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of ideas and opinions.

Congress reasoned that if anybody could steal anybody's work at any time, authors would have no motive to keep writing books and other works. And since books and documents were cumbersome and expensive to produce, copyright laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore. The Net produces high qualities copies of almost any text, audio and video you'd like -- quickly and usually for free.

Today, the purpose of copyright laws seems to be earning even bigger profits for media conglomerates hiding behind the mantra of protecting artists. But 18th-century notions of copyright doesn't make sense in the year 2000. Nobody can argue that the sharing of music online necessarily deprives the music industry (or artists) of any incentive to create music. And the Net is the greatest medium yet for ensuring the rapid dissemination of ideas and opinions, a boon that should be protected, not shut down.

There is more music making more money in more forms -- generating $15 billion in profit in l999 -- than at any time in world history. In fact, culture in many forms, from music to movies to several varieties of publishing, is flourishing. It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the Net before we even try and figure out how artists can get the protection and compensation they deserve. A study released last week by Jupiter, a Net commerce research firm, says that online music users are 45 per cent more likely than nonusers (http:www.nytimes.com, Thursday July 27, 2000) to have increased their total music purchases over the last six months. How, exactly, do artists benefit from reversing that trend?

The new purpose of copyright may be the reasonable protection of the rights of artists and other creative entities; namely to ensure that they be paid fairly for their work, although perhaps in new and different ways. (An equally important copyright trial concluded this week in Manhattan, where movie industry lawyers have filed suit challenging the online publication of DVD source code). Copyright laws also need to recognize that access to culture and music has become a tradition and right for tens of millions of people, mostly younger Americans who grew up using the Net, and who are now routinely branded "thieves" and "pirates" by corporate publicists and their close friends (corporations are the biggest contributors to political campaigns), congressional lawmakers. Music lovers also need some sort of fair-use protection, granted Americans offline but stripped by the DMCA (see below).

It's absurd to give giant conglomerates the right to speak for artists. Music companies are to artists what wolves are to sheep. If they could hire lobbyists, wolves would no doubt enact stringent legislation to to protect the rights of sheep to be controlled and devoured by them. That's more or less what the recording industry has sold to Congress.

In the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Congress made it a felony to write and sell software that circumvents copyright management schemes. In the judgment of Congress, regulating users would be nearly impossible, but regulating the code that users use would be a lot easier and more technically feasible. It simply isn't clear yet if they were right or not (if you're a college student losing or about to lose Napster, it might seem that they were.) The DMCA eliminates "fair use" provisions of law that would permit at least some sharing of music. Tracking software like that deployed by the recording industry against music fans in recent months makes no distinction between "fair" and reasonable use of content and theft.

The issue has been thrown out of whack, the law tilting sharply towards media conglomerates, in part because individual citizens and music fans have no lobbyists.

The question of artist's rights is complex and urgent. Many artists not under contract to large corporations can't get their work seen or published at all. Many artists who are under contract feel exploited by recording companies, who take a disproportionate share of profits, and who make enormous margins on conventional music sales. Millions of music lovers feel that they are overcharged and offered too few choices and controls about the music they want to hear.

The Net provides a marketplace of cultural exchange, benefiting new artists and to music lovers. It's not simply a matter of theft, but of creating an environment in which culture thrives. That needs to be legally and politically acknowledged. And many people in the music industry, though still a distinct minority, believe that the sharing of music online can generate enormous interest and revenue for artists, musicians -- and for record companies.

How can artists rights be protected on the Net? Maybe music-lovers could pay a flat fee to access music sites which share revenue with entertainment companies and artists. Perhaps artists can use the Net to begin selling their work directly to fans and the public. Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data. Maybe college students could pay a fraction of a cent for each song they downloaded on college sites, the overall volume generating a fair amount of revenue for artists and corporations.

How can artists be fairly compensated for the transmission of their work online? Until they can be, it's going to be difficult to get the free culture issue beyond the "you're-a-thief, no-I'm not" stage.
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Compensation vs. Copyright More

Compensation vs. Copyright

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  • What is needed: Artist Forum (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What we need to answer this question is an artist forum on the topic. How to answer freedom of information vs. copyrights is something the creators of art should help decide. A quote from Ani Difranco may help shed some light: "People used to make records As in a record of an event the event of people playing music in a room now everything is cross-marketing it's about sunglasses and shoes or guns and drugs you choose" --Song: Fuel. Album: Little Plastic Castles I personally feel that coorporate control of copyrights is generally hurtful to both consumers and artists. Yet many artists may feel differently, Nina Simone speaks very plainly of how she was hurt by the bootleg industry, which disseminated much of her music without her ever seeing a dime.(See her Autobiography: I Put a Spell on You). But the Grateful Dead openly encouraged bootlegging. This issue reaches far beyond music, it applies to all of the arts, and it is important that all artists speak out loudly and clearly regarding this issue. For myself, I am reluctant to post any of my own visual arts online, since I do not want them to be pirated, even for web page use. But then, if I knew that anyone using my images would either link back to my page or at least give me credit for the image, I would be less concerned, as long as no money was being made from my work, without being paid myself. Yet if someone took my images and made money off them, without ever telling me or paying me, I would be as furious as Nina Simone. Perhaps the answer lies in the difference of making money off someone else's work, without paying them, versus freely sharing someone else's work, giving the artist full credit in the process. I am against the first, and for the second, as an artist and as a consumer of art.

  • Re:Remember DAT? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Recording and broadcast studios still use DAT a lot. It didn't "fail".

    You're right, though. The music industry's whining and lobbying created a DAT tax which keeps the price of DAT machines too high for the average home user.

  • Re:Solution! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > The principle that the work you created belongs > to you and should be controlled by you is as
    > timeless as it is global. For centuries, new
    > inventions, from the printing press to the
    > Internet, have threatened that principle. For
    > centuries, advocates have resolutely defended
    > it. The RIAA is just such an advocate today.

    This is quite simply: PURE BULLSHIT.

    You have quite a bit of gall ending an article in which you actually quote the intellectual property clause of the US Constitution, with such contradictory drivel.

    The 'property' is merely a means to an end and is meant to enrich the population at large, not a few isolated interests.

  • Ick, 15 min to rip a CD? Only a pristine CD in a good drive has a chance of sounding good when ripped under those conditions. Ripping a CD tends to take at least as long as it does to listen to it when done properly (eg cdparanoia for unix users). I've heard too many poorly ripped mp3s to ever do anything less.

    Actually, one CD I ripped recently took maybe 2 hours. There was a bad scratch that I couldn't repair, and though you can hear the scratch in the mp3, it still hasn't skipped over that section of the song (you hear song and scratch intermingled).

  • doesn't matter if the destination of the rip is mp3 or cdrom, same thing really: you want the best possible quality rip. You must be ripping from good cds with a fairly good cdrom to be getting away with a 15 minute rip. I've had too many rips that needed help to trust anything faster than cdparanoia (dog slow, but it does a damn good job).
  • Every time I see a new Katz article, I'm drawn to it for the adrenaline rush I get out of being pissed off at his article

    You know, I wonder if that's why we get so many Katz bashers? You recognize it, and are honest enough with yourself to say so out loud. I wonder if the others are getting off on the rush, but don't know why?


    ...phil

  • I wonder whether or not "business" is the correct term for these guys. the only other 500%+ margin "companies" I can come up with are mafia or drug lords.
  • The music racket has stuck it to artists and consumers alike for decades while reaping extortionary profits. They bought the law and the law won. Now they are whining about Napster and such. Is righteousness for sale? Sure seems that way.

  • Well, actually the framers were the Congress when the Copyright Act of 1790 was passed. But yes, later Congresses did start extending copyright in various ways, seemingly with little concern for the original intent.

  • Here here, except one thing. Labels actually pay for you to play their music in stores. This has been going on for years, you get deals on what you buy if you agree to a certain amount of "in-store" time for whatever artists the distrib is promoting that month. Otherwise, I agree whole heartedly.

  • > I have a minidisk recorder, and it has the best of both worlds, plus it's more portable than either!

    Not really - it just seems that way. Minidisk technology uses an inferior, lossy compression scheme to record data to the disk - DAT does not. For recording quality live digital audio DAT is clearly the best solution. Of course minidisk recorders are smaller which can be an advantage in some situations, but don't think that you are getting the same recording as you would with a DAT.

  • Trend? - What trend? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A study released last week by Jupiter, a Net commerce research firm, says that online music users are 45 per cent more likely than nonusers (http:www.nytimes.com, Thursday July 27, 2000) to have increased their total music purchases over the last six months. How, exactly, do artists benefit from reversing that trend?

    What is cited here is a statistic, not a trend. By definition, this piece of information is static. The fact that "45% of on-line music users have been more likely to increase their total purchase of music in the last six months" may have more to do with the kind of people who are enjoying music on-line at this stage in the game, than it does have to do with the Internet's ability to promote music sales.

    Does this "trend" maintain itself when getting music off the Internet is as common (read here: done by the most technically illiterate) as using email has become?

    Obviously, that's a gamble that the music industry is not willing to take. And frankly, it's a statistic they deny. I agree with the basic premise that corporate profits and artists' interests are not one and the same (and, indeed, may be mutually exclusive), but it should be no surprise to any of us that the corporate world would not fight this movement to the bitter end. Unfortunately, the bitter end is more likely to come to a movement toward improved artists' rights, than to the preeminence of corporate power. Our society must undergo a fundamental change in the way we think of copyright and capitalism before true relief will come to this issue.

  • When did we leave the world where artist did their work because they enjoyed it regardless of what rewards they were going to recieve. People have always written books, but until the 20th century it was not a true for profit venture for most authors. Likewise, it was not until the 20th century when recorded music came about, yet until that time there were still musicians and composers who created great works. I guess what I'm getting at is that if we don't pay artists the way we do we are not going to end up with no artists but a smaller more passionate pool of artists; the kind of people who care about there work above all else. Their passion is what creates great works of art, not the media conglamorets(sp).
  • Just get to the part where we eat record company execs! ;)
  • Ironically, your point is quite strong. This is because the 'glitzy life' is a mirage- the majority of _platinum_ _sellers_ don't make as much money as they might make selling CD-Rs off their own website. Some file for bankruptcy. Roger McGuinn of the Byrds ended up putting his folk music on mp3.com because he couldn't feed his family from his major label career. This is the guy who controlled the band that did "Eight Miles High" and covered "Mr. Tangerine Man", songs that are still in rotation on radio stations _thirty_ years later.

    Help educate musicians to NOT SIGN WITH THE MUSIC INDUSTRY! As you say 'don't play the game their way!'. Talking about 'major labels' is deceptive as the same four companies own 95% of the _minor_ labels and 'indie' labels too. Have the musicians read the contracts- you can quickly identify which organisations are part of the music industry and which are not. The music industry contracts are the most brutally, obscenely unbalanced legal documents you'll ever see- genuine alternative resources (like mp3.com, at least so far) have contracts that are actually _fair_. It's _not_ hard to see the difference. Compare mp3.com's contract with farmclub.com's, for example.

  • Lots of questions. Here are some answers, in some order or other.

    Is a copyright implied and automatic?

    Yes. It used to be that in order to register a copyright, you had to deposit a copy of whatever it was with the copyright office. There was a change to the copyright laws a little while back, that gave you a copyright as soon as you created the work in a "tangible medium", which includes data formats. So, your picture of a fish is copyrighted by you, automatically.

    I snap a picture with my quickcam of my Pirhana swimming happily in his tank, and post it to rec.fish.with.big.teeth, and later find that same picture on some dudes webpage, do I have any legal recourse?

    Yes, but you'd better check with a lawyer first.

    I understand that there *are* copyrighted images... there are also a heck of a lot that *arent* copyrighted in any verifiable way.

    Regardless, they still are copyrighted. If the picture was published in a traditional medium, it's easier (look at a magazine some time - you'll see all kinds of identifing info on the pictures, you just have to dig). When you "publish" via the Internet, you have to take further steps to protect yourself, like imbedding a copyright statement in the picture itself. Some picture formats (.jpg? .png? anybody?) allow you to include copyright data in the picture. You could "publish" via Usenet, and then collect a copy of the original picture and keep it as proof that you did so, so you could then confront the person who swiped the picture.

    If you're serious about your pictures, then I'd consult with a copyright lawyer first, to find out how to protect your rights.


    ...phil

  • Take a deep breath, would you?

    I look at Jon Katz articles posted here as trial runs for articles that are going to appear in less technical publications, like maybe Rolling Stone. By putting them here, he gets technical people to look at the article and help him clean up the technical flaws. So, when you say

    The world needs to hear it, not slashdot.
    I personally believe he's doing that, you're just seeing it first.

    Of course, you always have the option of ignoring Jon Katz articles, since you're a logged-in user. Do you deliberately read the articles so that you can be offended and rant?


    ...phil

  • Its one thing for .Jpg's and .gif's to be posted, because they are typically a one time payment to the model/artist, but its *totally* different to post a song that is a retail commodity.

    Is it? How? Pictures are copyrighted also.


    ...phil

  • The (tobacco/drug/record) companies are greedy, yes. But they aren't evil, and they aren't conspiring against you. Get some perspective.

    Do have any idea how difficult it is to prove anything about corporations as large as the tobacco/drug/record corps are? People who try to point it out when these corps do something very bad often have their lives ruined in the process. They are sometimes smeared in the media, sued and accused of anything the corp can dig up on them, even threatened with everything, up to, and including bodily harm, harm to family, and death. Corporations ARE NOT ABOVE THESE KINDS OF TACTICS. Don't believe for a second that they will hesitate to lie, cheat, steal, or even worse to protect their profits and reputation, regardless of how bad their actions were. This is why we have whistleblower laws, because we've seen what can happen when you piss off a corporation. But even those don't always help. I'm not saying that every corporation does these kinds of things, but I am saying that you would be incredibly naive to simply assume that they don't, perhaps thinking that it would somehow leak out and become public knowledge. That attitude just makes it easier for them to get away with such things when they do choose to do them.

    That said, I think I agree with a lot of what you said. Obviously drug companies need a way to recoup their expenses and turn a profit. There are cases where other interests override those of profit though. Africa is a perfect example of this. They need the drugs because they are having a massive AIDS epidemic. There's no way they can afford to pay the price the drug companies want. They have little choice but to do whatever is necessary for survival, and I don't see that we have any right to stop them. This is something that I think we here in the US need to really examine as a country. There must be a way to continue drug research without having to charge prices that are prohibitive for many people, even though their lives depend on receiving the medicine. Maybe we do need a less capitalist health system in this country. Maybe the government should buy certain critical drugs outright from their creators and pay them a lump sum for the cost of development, plus a profit percentage or something like that. This could lead to many drugs becoming available for little more than the cost of production. In other words, dirt cheap. This would probably also lead to a fair amount of regulation on the industry, but that may be necessary in order to provide the best healthcare possible for people in this country.

  • And enforceing a copyright on it to try and retain some of that money is not the same as depriveing humanity from a life saveing drug.

    My, aren't we putting an innocent face on this? Retain some of that money? Try making $15 billion in profit last year. Gimme a break. What Jefferson said is important. Even England had managed to fight off the publishers who wanted perpetual control over copyrights. Just because you write and perform a song, you have no natural right to prevent anyone else from performing that same song. Then if you record the song, you still have no natural right to prevent anyone from making a copy of it. That's why we have copyright now. It's an artificial means to allow artists and creators to profit from their work so that they keep doing it. Unfortunately, we went from a reasonable length of time (14 years + 14 more on renewal) to the outrageously long term of life + 70 years, or 95 years for a work for hire (i.e. work created while under contract).

    Since the public has been screwed out of its end of the deal (the works becoming public domain after a reasonable period of time for the creator to profit), it's no wonder people don't have much respect for copyright. It just feels inherently unnatural. Something created solely for the profit of big publishers. Which is exactly what it's become. The media industry has done this to itself by trying to screw the public more and more over the years. They got too greedy, now it's payback time. I'd like nothing better than to laugh at their folly and watch them sink into bankruptcy. Not sure if that's how it'll play out, but it's a nice thought. :)

  • and forced companies to give away drugs to people who need them

    I'm not saying that drug companies should be forced to give away drugs. I'm saying that we should not use sanctions against African countries for violating patents when the produce the drugs themselves. They can't pay for them anyway, so drug companies aren't losing sales. The drugs are just helping people that would otherwise die because they can't afford to buy these drugs from American corporations. They seem to have worked out a deal of sorts now. The drug companies are now being paid, although at a much reduced rate, for the drugs that are being produced in Africa. This way they still make some money, and the drugs get used where they are needed the most.

    The problem (and many people will hate me for saying this) is that people (particularly Americans) attach too high a value to each human life.

    I understand what you're saying here. It's like when Spock died. The good of the many over the good of the one. But it's not always that simple or black and white.

    Now calculate the cost of the most expensive cutting-edge medical treatment for one person, and multiply that number by the population of the world. Call that number C. I do not doubt that C is far greater than W.

    I see what you're trying to do, but you left out so many factors that it's not even worthwhile to break out a calculator. I'm not saying that we should spare no expense to save everyone in the world. Many of these countries bring a lot of their woes on themselves, with Ethiopia and Eritria(sp?) being prime examples. But with the massive epidemic of AIDS taking place in Africa, we'd be stupid not to do something to help. These countries, and the citizens themselves especially, are extremely poor. They can't possibly afford to buy the drugs from the drug corporations, so there is little to no harm done to the corporations by allowing them to produce the drugs themselves by not forcing them to license patents (which the corporations won't license in the first place usually because they are too valuable when that company is the sole producer of a drug).

  • But I don't agree that "we'd be stupid not to do something to help." (assuming by "we" you mean the US government.) They're not our people, they're not our responsibility.

    I'm not saying we're responsible for taking care of their people. I'm saying it's not a good idea to ignore an epidemic of that size because sooner or later it will affect us too. Maybe not directly, but one way or another. If we stand by and let it happen without taking any action, we could very well regret that decision terribly later.

  • I run a small record label/studio. We have our own distribution channels, and we are involved iwth NARM (National Association for Recording Merchandisers), however we have no ties to the RIAA. The RIAA represents what used to be known as the big 7 (although some mergers have changed that), and represents the distribution channels more than the actual labels themselves (for all intents and purposes, WEA, aka Warner/Electra/Atlantic is not Warner Music). It's actually the distributer that rapes the artist the most, claiming they've invested the most into the process. Most of the money a label puts up for an album is recovered from the artists profits before the artist gts a dime. Almost every piece of equipment I own, from my 24 and 32 track 2" reel to reel units to my 32 track digital recordes, to my DATs, or even the SOFTWARE and hardware I use for mastering have some form of tariff on them. Almost a third of what I pay for a new reel is a tariff that gets paid to the RIAA. The RIAA is not the Recording Association of America, they are a puppet for what might as well be the evil empire of music. THey offer no help or protection to indies, and have always tried to leave the impression that they do. They will alway try to turn things into exorbanant amounts of money. I wouldn't be suprised, if much the same tactic are used for internet music. I doubt the RIAA wil accept anything less than what they feel is the equivalant value of a song on the street. And they'll viscously fight anyone who attempts to circumvent any copy protection they put in place.
  • If there were no copyright, the GPL would be unnecessary

    This couldn't be more wrong. If there were no copyright, then there would only be two types of source code:

    First, there would be public domain code. All open source projects would fall into this category. This code would be open, available, and owned nobody and controlled by noone. Anyone could use this code for any purpose.

    Second, there would be code that nobody ever sees. Individuals and organizations who wanted to produce closed-source software would have to shield, obscure, and otherwise protect their code with contracts, usage licenses, and security.

    The big difference would be that the public domain code would have no protection whatsoever from being absorbed by closed-source projects. There would be no protection for programmers who wished to enforce their choice of open source development on others.

    In a world without copyright (and therefore no GPL) there would be nothing to prevent Microsoft from using any and all of the Linux kernel code in their own closed-source products. Without copyright protection, if your code was open, it would have to be public domain.

    It is copyright law, and nothing else, that gives the GPL its teeth. Don't believe for a minute that the lack of copyright protection will somehow eliminate all closed-source software. The truth is, without the protection of copyright, there's no middle ground and we'd see less, not more open-source code.

    Anyone who was around and using software in the late seventies and early eighties knows exactly what the software world would look like without copyright. Back when nobody knew what "software" meant, it was very unclear exactly how much protection copyright offered for software. Copyright law took several years to mature and adapt to the computer revolution and during that period the growing pains were sharp and harsh.

    Would we really want to return to the days of dongles, hardware copy protection, usage contracts, and burdensome licenses? Without copyright, that's what software houses would have to fall back upon to protect their intellectual property. It wasn't until copyright established itself in the software world that we were finally able to move past those cumbersome and ineffecient methods.

    If this concept bothers you, ask yourself why? The foundation of the GPL is that programmers should have the right to dictate how their code is used. If you accept the GPL, you accept that a programmer has an inherent right of control over their code that they can then be able to say "this code should never be used in a closed-source program".

    How is it that programmers should have this right and musicians should not? Why should software have protections that music should not? Shouldn't a musician have the same degree of control and be able to say "this song shouldn't be made freely available"?

  • You say that the benefit typically doesn't go to the artist/creator. In the publishing industries whether music or book, the reason those benefits flow to a third party, is because they were sold to that party by the creator.

    It's a fairly well established rule, that when rights to anything are given, unless specifically not allowed, those rights can be transferred to a third party just like any other property can be transferred to a third party. When you own something, you have every right to sell it, and copyright law gives ownership of the works to the creators, who then sell some or all of the ownership rights to publishers in order to get the work the widest distribution.
  • 2 thoughts -

    - Anyone who suggests overhauling or abolishing copyright law should remember that it's the legal foundation for the GPL.

    - The world will not come crashing to a halt if it becomes impossible to charge people for an incremental copy of your work, which costs nothing or next to nothing to produce. You and the rest of the world will adjust to this new reality.
  • One problem is that audio media is no longer seperable from non-audio media.

    Yes. The Computer Industry was much, much smarter than the Recording Industry, which got caught with it's ass in the air and a big "sucker" sign firmly stapled to both cheeks. (PNG, anyone?)

    First off, the Computer Industry got themselves completely written out of the law. This law was an RIAA law, and the Computer Industry wanted no part of it. Thus, the media royalty payments are only required on CDR media that is marketed and intended for use as audio media. Hey, no problem. The computer industry sells CDR drives that are intended for storing computer data, that just so happen to also handle audio data perfectly well, thank you.

    Then, while the Recording Industry was attempting to sell special CD recorders that would only take $13.95 audio blanks, the Computer Industry was coming out with CDR drives that used 99 cent blanks.

    Guess who won.
  • If you can't write something original or credit your sources, go somewhere else.

    If you want to read the original document, see this page [riaa.com] at the RIAA web site.

  • Hey! How can artists protect themselves? By reading the bloody contracts presented to them by the recording industry.

    You would have a stronger argument if the recording industry was a free market. The major labels control distribution and promotion. It's their way or the highway.

    The situation reminds me of professional baseball in the "good old days". If you wanted to be a professional baseball player, you signed your soul over to one of a limited number of teams, who were owned and controlled by an old boys club. Players were "owned" by the teams. If you didn't like the contract and you were not a major star, too bad. Players were treated like property, to be bought and sold at the convenience of the owners.

  • Katz's proto-ideas about some sort of slush fund for artists doesn't take into account an artist's individuality: I don't want a predetermined fraction of all the profits, I want my profits from my songs.

    Fine. Then you can also do without the coercive power of the state, as expressed in copyright laws, a court system that enforces those laws, the people who investigate and prosecute copyright infringement, prisons and parole officers for those convicted of criminal copyright infringement.

    Copyright is a social contract. It does not grant you absolute rights to "intellectual property". The fact that you created a song does not give you absolute control over what other people do with "your song".

  • The original copyright laws, such as the Statute of Anne in England, were more about protecting publishers and the state than they were about protecting authors. If a publisher had purchased a manuscript, and had it set in type and printed, he didn't want the market for the book to be damaged by another publisher reprinting the book. A publisher had the exclusive right to publish a given title, even Greek and Roman classics that would be in the public domain under current law. The crown wanted control over the publishing industry, to prevent the publication of subversive or heretical literature. The publishers wanted to suppress competition and make money. Rhetoric about the "rights of the author" was used to justify a system that enriched publishers much more than authors. When an author sold a manuscript, the "rights of the author" were transferred to the publisher.
  • Uh, this is severely flawed logic (otherwise known as a copout excuse) on your part! Sure, the artist may no longer "own" the song, but the artist did own it before. The fact is is that the artist chose to sell it of his own free will, whether directly or indirectly. By denying the purchaser the right to profit from the song as they see fit, you are reducing the value of any future songs that the artist may choose to make.

    The fact of the matter here is that most of these artists enter into these contracts entirely voluntarily. It is not as if ANYONE is putting a gun to their head. What you see is the result of the choices of a rational human being (artist) who is looking out for his own well being. The choice boils down to: a) Sign the contract and get "screwed" by only recieving a fraction of the profits, but still get rich. b) Try to be greedy, go/stay Indy or whatever, and never sell enough records to turn a profit. Despite Napster, mp3.com, and your other theories, the people right there on the front lines, the artists, still choose A overwhelmingly.

    There may be some truth to the fact that there is something of a lock on the industry. On the other hand, I know, as in so many other areas on slashdot, the users fail to see the bigger economic picture. The fact that the labels take risks too totally escapes them.

    Don't just look at the profits on the individual CDs, look at their profits on the aggregate! How many albums are winners? How many are loosers? Promotional costs? Distribution? These aren't niggardly concerns, they matter to the artist too.

  • Uh, no. I'm sorry, but I happen to be in a related industry, medical devices. What you say is largly myth and misinterpretation.

    A) It is not as if these universities are robbed of their work. They mostly SELL it. The marketplace IS competetive, but that inititial research is just 1/10th the battle and is only worth so much.

    B) While the NYT may have quoted 20%, or even 40%, these numbers are easily distorted. If they aggregated the dollar figure of drug research and applied it against the whole industry, they'd get a scewed number. These programs are generally poorly run, they don't know their head from their ass. I know much of the money tends to go to professional academics who make their life burning through research money, not to the drug companies (though they do get some). Likewise, the universities are RESEARCH oriented and are totally inept when it comes to taking real risk and developing a viable product. Much of their "product" is frankly crap. They don't have what it takes to develop them, even though many of them are extremely wealthy. They bleed money because of this. Of both government and university research (which is payed through government dollars frequently) the drug, biotech, and medical device companies will cherry pick what little viable research is of some use. To then say government and universities spent 5b this year developing drugs, drug co's spent 25b, therefore government and universities are responsibile for 20% of research....well that'd simply be ridiculous. I can tell you from experience almost every dollar that counts comes from industry, not academia or government agencies.

    B) Bringing a drug to market is extremely expensive, marketing aside. Believe it. Between FDA requirements. Proving effectiveness. Animal testing. etc...it all adds up very rapidly. Not to mention the various liability costs. The costs of paying human subjects. Lab facilities.

    C) You neglect to mention that they're also in an extremely risky and volatile market. Those profit margins are necessary to obtain investment and to acquire debt, they're not nearly so high when compared to companies such as Intel, who have somewhat similar economics.

    D) It's not a zero sum game. They generate viable products where others tend to fail. These in turn generate taxable revenue. Share holder wealth, which is again taxed. Employee wealth...etc. In short, I'd rather see MORE dollars going to these companies than less.

  • Perhaps the artists need protecting from $$$ flashing in their eyes. Before an artist becomes famous, perhaps they do it because they love their art. And would carry on making art regardless. But relatively rich bands may find it hard (read: impossible) to forefit their income. The more money they get, the more they want.

    ... just an opinion.

  • And there's a good chance I am missing something, as I've done no research into the time period when copyright was 'invented', but this seems to ring wrong:

    These laws were enacted so that authors and artists would have an incentive to produce new works and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of ideas and opinions.

    Would ideas and opinions not circulate faster - or at least, no slower - if copyright was nonexistant?

    "It is a principle of American law that an author of a work may reap the fruits of his or her intellectual creativity for a limited period of time.", quoted from http://www.loc.gov/copyright/docs/cir c1a.html [loc.gov] seems to be a more accurate description of what a copyrights purpose is. (Not that earning major bucks isn't an incentive to produce new works...)

    Adam

  • That's an interesting example you brought up. I tried their thing a while back. It didn't work. Then I found the whole show, and donated my bandwidth and server space to sharing it because I thought it was a great show.

    If you like, I think it's over here [wahcentral.net].

    A buck a song seems fair, until a virus or a hard disk crash costs you $2,000 in very expensive one and zeros. Well then you just download them again, you say. Well then why can't I download them after I buy a cd? Charging people money directly for downloads will not work, IMHO. The only way to give the product any real value is to support it with massive IP police.

    Keep selling cds, playing live shows, make some cool shirts, and do jag commercials. And be creative with revenue streams, there are lots of ways to capitalize on mass attention. And subscriptions of one type or another will probably be real popular (i.e. the "band list" $5/mo. access to secure server, first dibs on tickets, etc)
    --
  • Unless you can correct these perceptions, I can't see any way they are threatening
    the potential of the net for unsigned artists.

    This is one aspect of the Napster argument that many RIAA apologists totally miss out on. Yes, the majority of their traffic is major issues from major studios (87% if you belive Napster's CEO, who gets server report logs), however, the service is extremely useful for listening to bands that you would never hear in another forum. I've done this for a number of bands that I've heard people mention.

    Now you say "oh, but look at how many N'Sync and Britney spears download there are.", but this is a side effect of thier rabid promotion, coupled with the general lack of variety on the teeny-bopper scene. Where do kids hear about new songs and artists? The MTV and radio. You know how much it costs to create a video and get decent airplay? Well, let's put it this way, the only way you'd have enough money is if you sign away your life's work to a major record company.

    So along comes a promotional vehicle that is completely out of control of the major studios, allows access to a huge variety of music on demand. All you need to know is the name of a band. This is where their actions are hurting small-time musicians. By destroying a promotional vehicle. How hard is it for a local or whatever musician to say "The band's name is X, song is X, you can check it out on Napster (or equiv.)" This gives anyone the chance to hear it without the artist having a cost, and achieving a benefit..another listener exposed to their music.

    Multiply this exponentially, which happens fairly often in this medium, and hopefully this is an example on how destoying distrubution systems hurts those that could use such institutions to garner the attention needed for radio airplay, or a decent recording contract. By leveraging the power of the network, an individual can bootstrap themselves into the mainstream consciousness. This hasn't happened yet in music, but it will given the chance. Until upwards of 30% of consumers have broadband though, it is very unlikely.
    --
  • the Desperately Intimidating Napster So Artists Underestimate Revenues Society or DINOSAURS for short...

  • Your statement is true (and I even agree with it), except for:
    And it's all from tax money and from raising your stamp rates
    The Post Office doesn't get any tax money. It's entirely self-funded. But yes, it should be run as any other business and shouldn't be protected by the government IMHO. Laissez-faire [webster.com]!

    ---------
  • First of all, Courney Love gave a very intelligent speech [salon.com] about music, MP3s, and how the recording industry is the real pirate. Reading it made me think Katz isn't too far off the mark in this case (wow! a first! :-)

    The solution? A site where you can buy plain old MP3s (no copy protection or wierd proprietary format crap) at whatever bitrate you want for a reasonable cost ($.20 - $1.00 a track). Throw in a few sample tracks... Artists always get half the take. Simple as that.

    Sure, there will still be piracy, but most people really don't want to screw over artists, and would really prefer to get MP3s they know are well encoded. The convenience+conscience factor will win out if the price is reasonable.

    Why haven't I gone out and started musicvana.net (instead of whining a la Katz)? It would take a lot of capital to pull it off, and I don't have the connections. If you do, or know someone who does, please contact me. I have a bunch more ideas for such a venture.
  • True. Also, the product that is released by the various Linux distributors often can *legally* be downloaded for free (bandwith can be expensive) and the different parts of the distro they're releasing were already free (beer and speach) before they repackaged them. Two things that don't apply to music distributors.

    Thimo
    --
  • taxes on blank audio cassettes and cds
    Source, please.

    Since KaiShin's posted e-mail address ends in .ca, I presume he's referring to the Canadian blank media tax [canthetax.com] (they call it a levy, but that's just standard political language [resort.com]).
    /.

  • Haha! The "small amount" is what makes me laughing. That is typical. Again he is declaring some kind of freedom at someone else's cost. Musicians pay the same rents, the same price for a car and the same price for a lunch. So why should they get "small amounts" of money?

    Do the math. Even if 100% of the price of a CD went to the artist, the payment of one consumer for one song is a small amount of money (definition: below what a credit card company wants to deal with -- several $US). If you're charging enough to make it worthwhile to take credit cards, then the system is already in place.
    /.

  • DAT isn't dead at all. It flourishes not only in the professional arena, but is well-represented in the artist-recording community and the "Tapers" community.

    If you've been to a Phish, Dave Matthews Band, Eddie from Ohio, Agents of Good Roots, or Medeski Martin Wood show, etc then you may have seen a group of folks with mic's flying in the air, recording the show for posterity, onto DAT. While DAT is by no means a suitable medium for long-term archival, it's great for actual recording. No flips or swaps of media for about 2-3 hours, depending on tape length. Thanks to manufacturers like Sony and Maxell and Fuji, as well as vendors like Terrapin Tapes [ttapes.com] and Tape House [tape.com] and others, we have a stable and ready supply of blank DAT media.

    Additionally, for artists, who don't have the budget to plunk down for a large block of expensive studio time, or the funds to drop on an ADAT unit, recording to DAT can be at cost-effective way to self-produce albums. Big Head Todd & the Monsters' Midnight Radio was recorded in such a manner, relatively inexpensively. Everything's original self-produced album Sol*id was also recorded using some material collected from their engineer's live DAT recordings of their early shows.

    The RIAA's draconian "Audio" dat tax, as well as requirement that "non-professional" decks have SCMS, effectively killed it for the consumer market. Professional decks can be had for less than 500 bucks these days though, putting it near the range of high-end consumers, as well as close to MiniDisc prices, with NO compression, no flips every 74 minutes, and a larger taping community with lower media cost per unit.

    The point is that DAT as a technology isn't dead (in fact new decks have been created in the last couple of years, and soundcard makers are building S/PDIF and AES/EBU i/o into their cards for transfer from DAT for Prosumers), it's merely become a "niche" technology, used by artists and tapers. Until portable harddrives which are capable of loss-less, skip-less recording with decent battery life and multiple sampling rates are built and reasonably priced, I'm sticking with DAT for my taping needs.

  • Nicely put, and in general I couldn't agree more, but there is an
    advantage in the formulation of the early legislative documents: the
    reasons and motivations were presented with reasonable clarity, and
    were thought to be things that you should establish by argument.
    Today bills pass as a result of complex political horse-trading, and
    is usually hard to unambiguously identify the idea that lies behind a
    law, let alone be confident that it has been subjected to much
    criticism.

    This isn't an attempt to whitewash the flaws of the constitution:
    to pick a controversial example, the second amendment is a horribly
    ambiguous and flawed document. But I don't think that the retroactive
    provision of the CTEA was subject to proper criticism, and, if I think
    it's hopeless, I like the idea of being able to challenge laws for
    being unconstitutional becuase it gives a chance to test the ideas
    that lie behind them.

  • OK, I admit it. I've taken some cheap shots at Katz before. I think some of his articles recently have been over the top, basically on the level of FUD.

    That said, I think that since folks like me are quick to point out his mistakes, that we owe him some credit. I think his last two articles on RIAA/Napster and related issues have been excellent. No "geekgeekgeek" and no post-Columbine.

    Way to go JK.
  • Well, you also have artists signing because it beats flipping burgers or pumping gas, at least for a few years.

    Does it beat g33king for a living? Hard to say. I'm in a fusion trio, and all of us are professional geeks. The majority of geeks I know are big fans of music, and a lot of them are musicians themselves.

    One of the most exciting prospects of this whole digital music thing is that we can probably find a way to turn our geek knowledge into a living as a musician...

    There are a few things that are scaring the crap out of the RIAA at the moment, but nothing scares them more than individually empowered musicians. If I can make a living pressing, marketing and selling my own CDs and live shows, they're screwed.

    And nothing in the world would make me happier. Trust me, they'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes. :]

    The whole piracy issue from my vantage point is legal right vs. moral right -- the RIAA has the legal right to ream the crap out of artists however they see fit, while my own personal support of the artist tends to circumvent the system of making the record companies wealthy.

    If I can legally and morally be happy with a system of music distribution, whether it's through downloads or just pressing and selling my own CDs, then my goals are accomplished and I'm not giving scumbags like David Geffen another penny.

    The major advantages to signing to a label are promotion, which doesn't exist 90% of the time, although it's usually an incentive to sign, and distribution.

    The distribution chain that these large record companies have is phenomenal -- try getting a local band's CD sold in Tower Records or Strawberries nationwide. But what is the return on investment? Artists don't seem to think about that.

    Selling a million copies of a CD and getting less than a penny from each of them gets you $10k. Selling only 1000 CDs at $10 apiece and keeping $9 from them gets you $9k. Which seems more realistic to you?

    The remaining issue is marketing for live shows, which is where, up to this point, most bands make the majority of their money. This is usually the argument that I see remaining after people have refuted the idea of making money from signing with a major.

    But really, how much marketing of live shows do you think is done by the larger record companies? It's usually minimal, if there is any effort at all. The effort is usually put in by the club you're playing at, whose interest it is to pack the place.

    There are also growing communities like Jambands [jambands.com] that are aiding immensely in marketing, and a lot of smaller management firms are growing rapidly and aiding smaller acts in getting national tours and recognition -- get a few gigs opening for the right bands and you're in. Hone your act, get in front of the right crowds and you're off and running.

    So it's up to you and me, the individual bands/artists to take this fucker by the reins and ride. Innovate both musically and economically. Chase your dreams, kids.
  • So what would be a decent price point for you?

    The thing is that there are handling/service fees for each transaction, so even if a band was doing distribution on their own without a record company this way, at say 75 cents per song they'd still lose most of it to fees, hosting, etc.

    Personally, I'd have trouble purchasing an mp3 file, as I hate the sound quality. If I was paying the $$, I'd rather get an .shn or an actual CD.
  • That is the same Idea that I have been thinking of for quite some time. I wonder if (because its so obvious to you and me) that perhaps it can hit the concrete block that the RIAA uses for a brain and use their amazingly large capital to get it started. I doubt this will happen though, simply because of the "50% goes to the artist" clause. I am sure that would make all the beancouters at the RIAA go crazy.

    the amuzing thing to me about this entire thing is how stupid the RIAA is being about a minor loss. They posted record sales figures, then they whine that they are losing money. The part that gets me is the quote I saw a while back from some executive saying that he couldn't belive that people would want to create things for free. I create stuff for free all the time. Artwork for my friends, web pages for organizations that need them badly, all kinds of stuff like that... maybe I am just being selfless, but I don't think I am that different from anyone else in this respect, especially where friends are concerned.
  • now this is quality troll ;-)

  • Thomas Jefferson wrote this at a time when the US cheerfully stole technology.

    Once I was a weaver in New England, heir to a labor tradition stretching back to the time when English settlers noticed lots of waterfalls, built lots of dams with water wheels, attached belts to the wheels, and looms to the belts, and found useful employment for surplus country kids. It's skilled labor, no real need for literacy, but skilled.

    Oh, and the technology was, in modern terms, pirated. Totally dependant on a millwright who learned his trade well, and illegally emigrated to New England (there were laws againg millwrights emigrating, a somewhat more drastic EULA) where he built looms and spinning jennies and most parts for them, which were then copied by all and sundry.

    You've heard of Yankee ingenuity. We stole it.

    Now, pretty quickly the mills expanded (and the local country folks split westward to where farming had a bit less to do with dragging rocks out of fields to make picturesque stone fences) and new help, anyone available, was hired. Despite efforts by mill owners to encourage diversity (and discourage organization) about halfway into the first generation enough people got English down well enough to have bitch sessions, shortly followed by attempts to organise unions and/or strikes. (I recommend going to the Bread and Roses Festival in Lowell, Massachusetts presuming it's still held. You can get the details there from a surprising variety of sources.)

    Eventually, the TVA made electricity cheap enough to move the mills south where unions had a much harder time organising. It turned out not to be impossible to organise unions in southern mills, though. There's no longer a domestic textile industry.

    But Jefferson was watching the adoption of pirated technology, and the results seemed, to him, good.

    It's only in recent memory that the US has bothered with foreign copyrights. The first paperback edition (Ace) of The Lord of the Rings in the US paid no royalties to J.R.R. Tolkein. A point noted prominantly by the author on the cover of the second (Ballentine) edition. Although I've read a few complaints prior to that about British authors being published without recompense in the US, those same authors toured the US to much acclaim, got a boost to their income, and generally had all-expnses paid vacations. Corporate control of authors' book tours seems to have made that perk a chore.

    And of course, Jefferson would have howled to see 'piracy' applied to "intellectual property". Jefferson knew (and the United States licensed) pirates.

  • I've stopped participating in Slashdot MP3 debates because I've become tired of reading posts that cannot see the forest because of the trees in their way.

    Basically, every post I've read simply boils down to exchanging a world where most artists are ripped off by record labels and some become rich to a world where artists are ripped off by fans and all of them stay broke. As long as Napster or something similar (i.e. free and easy to use) exists no online music distribution system will work.

    REASONS:
    • Why would anyone go to a website and go through the trouble of registering and/or entering credit card information simply to buy a song for a $1 that they can download for free off Napster in a shorter time? Remember all it takes is 1 person to buy it for it to get on Napster
    • Why would anyone use a client that charged money per download when a free alternative exists?
    • Every encryption scheme can be broken given time.



    PS: The problem is that Napster has now perpetuated the idea that music over the Internet should be free. Of course once home/car/personal MP3 players become cheap enough and popular enough this suddenly will mean that people will assume that all music should be free. Guess how many of today's artists would exist if there was no way to get a return of their investment of time and talent in their music?

  • n some alternative universe, is there a website where musicians extoll the virtues of General Public Music while blasting software distributors for not paying programmers or allowing them to copy software?

    What percentage of the artists at mp3.com do you think use only paid-in-full uncracked software?

  • Whilst the net is changing this, allowing artists to reach a potentially far larger audience without the "backing" of a major label, at the moment the key word is potential. Nobody denies that the net has potential, especially not the RIAA/MPAA, but people are still trying to work out workable models that benefit both artists and consumers. A lot of people are happy with MP3.com's business model, but I'm sure there will be a lot more progress in the next few years.

    Unfortunately for us, the RIAA/MPAA have realised this huge potential at a time when it is still vulnerable to pre-emptive legislation. They want to chain and guide this potential whilst they still can and their resources are up to the challenge.

    I'm sorry, but I'm missing a part of your logic here. What website, list or server that works purely to distribute the works of consenting artists has been attacked by the RIAA/MPAA? Where has an attempt to promote unsigned artists with the permission of all artists involved been threatened or shut down by one of these groups? What part of any of their arguments against napster could be used to shut down such a service?

    Yeah, so the big evil initials have been known to take advantage of artists they represent if they can, and don't try to make life easy for outsiders. But their actions towards Napster have so far been totally legitimate and in the interests of their artists, and largely orthogonal to the interests of unsigned artists. No precedent is being set which threatens the voluntary use of online distribution by an artist. The only attacks have been against third parties which distribute works they have no rights to, with small collateral damage to unsigned artists who use those channels. Unless you can correct these perceptions, I can't see any way they are threatening the potential of the net for unsigned artists.

    -Kahuna Burger

  • I don't get your argument. Current copyright laws are something different than the founders intended? So what? Civil rights laws are different also. Should we re-establish slavery because the founders were slave owners?

    The present copyright situation does suck. As if it was any better in the past. Shakespeare didn't even own the rights to his plays. His theater company did. (That's why he became a shareholder in the theater.)

    And even the theater couldn't control their property. Some time, when you're not worshipping the Constitution, read some of the 'foul' Hamlet manuscripts. They were created by unscrupulous publishers who wanted to sell the play, but they didn't have access to the script. So they got someone to go to the play, try to memorize it, then they would publish it illegally and keep the money. Shakespeare didn't make a dime off these books. [But we got great garbled speeches like, "The question is to be or not to be/Aye, there's the rub..."]

  • Recent years have seen the ever-increasing corporate-ownership convergence of the companies that make physical devices and media with those that constitute the "music industry". An example of this is Sony Music. When you play a disc by a Sony-signed artist on your Sony CD player, they have total control of your ability to use that music.

    I have just been wondering what happens when this convergence becomes total - when all large recording companies are co-owned with music hardware companies. What happens when a new digital media format is specifically designed by its manufacturers' consortium to force users to adhere to excessively restrictive use limitations? As much as people might like to tout Open-Source software and standards and Free (speech) software, I'm guessing few of you have the resources to manufacture an alternate physical media type which could be used instead of CD's/audio-DVD/whatever if the need arose.

    I would hate to live in a world where transnational corporations controlled not only information but the means for distributing it in such a fashion. Of course, one might say "Well, we'll just have to distribute digital copies on the internet through system foo-ster etc." but what if a) music becomes almost impossible to copy in the first place (heavy encryption), and b) there's no media which will accept the copies anyway?

  • Well i did deliberately cite those three because they were all supported in different ways.

    I have internet explorer 5 running on Solaris and IE 4.5 running on MacOS 8 without any windows in sight :)

    What I feel is that bands should tour more often. I'm perfectly happy to shell out the price of an album to see them live for an hour or two, and isn't that really what music is all about.

    MP3s can certainly help promote bands. I was at a Matchbox20 concert a month or two ago and heard people talking about the fact that they heard rob thomas singing on the santana song smooth, downloaded some more of his music then came along to the gig - doesn't sound unlikely either.

    I'm quite sure I recall (being told) that when record players came out, artists were afraid it would be the end of live performances.

    If Mp3 trading means an end to bands like oasis who do 3 concerts a year and feed their drug habits through album sales then you'll find me downloading. Equally if it gives bands more of a financial incentive to tour, you'll again find me downloading :)
  • Is this true? I've never met a CD player that didn't like a CD-R, and I've got some OLD players. On the other hand, CD-RWs, obviously, are a different story. I've found that CD-RWs aren't playable in any of my CD players, but my DVD player recognizes it just fine (which, I guess, you would expect.)

    The reason behind this is that CDRWs reflect less light and thus require slightly different methods of using the laser light to read the disc. Standard CD players are not able to do this; therefore, they are not able to read CDRWs.


    =================================

  • Here here!

    Jon Katz may not be your favorite writer. Fine. He's not mine, either, but he's not a bad writer, and he sure as hell is taking your side in most of these big issues and arguments. If he's going to work to write all these articles, exposing the masses to issues that are all so apparent to you and I, I think the least you could do would be to have a little respect for the effort. Plus, he doesn't feel the need to hack the English language up with stupid adolescent misspellings for normal words like "elite," nor does he use the word "fucking" in every other sentence.

    Get a clue and get some class. Represent your species with some dignity.

  • Copyright law all started with the "The Statute of Anne," the world's first copyright law passed by the British Parliament in 1709. Yet the principle of protecting the rights of artists predates this. It may sound like dry history at first blush, but since there was precedent to establish and rights to protect, much time, effort, and money has been spent in legal battles over the centuries.

    I think that's either the most clueless, or the most willful distortion of history I've ever seen.

    While it's correct to note that the Statute of Anne was the first modern copyright law, it was introduced as a response to serious problems - an unlimited printer's monopoly combined with oppressive government censorship. Before the Statute of Anne, the right to print (anything!) was a monopoly controlled by a trade guild, the Stationer's Company. This situation arose in part with the support of Crown, particularly Queen Mary, as a means of controlling the political dialogue (and resulted in large numbers of "dissenting" printers setting up in the Netherlands). The Stationer's Company enforced a "perpetual" monopoly on printed works - each printer registered the works he was printing and no other printer could print them. They also enforced import restrictions - primarily designed to dissuade heresy and dissent, but also to enforce the printer's guild's monopoly.

    After over a hundred years of this monopoly, the printers were rudely suprised by the Statute of Anne, which allowed anyone (who could afford it) to become a printer, and which, for the first time, gave authors a copyright, for 14 years (renewable for another 14).

    Before free speech, before freedom of assembly, before freedom of religion, there was copyright protection in our Constitution. The founding fathers knew copyright protection could improve society by preserving the economic incentive for people to come up with brilliant ideas and inventions.

    The founding fathers knew the history when publishers controlled ideas (as a surrogate for governments), and were trying to prevent it from happening, again.

    Links:

  • I think the recent offering by Stephen King of his serialized novel at $1 per chapter will be a good laboratory for the future of distribution of intellectual works. Once artists become well known, it may be that they can bypass the major media outlets and go to their audiences directly. If so, the marketplace will sort all of this out without the need for government involvement. That would be the more desireable path than future abortions like the DMCA.
  • "corporatism is the enemy of true creativity and freedom. "

    Not applicable. Private businesses are in the business of making money. Signing, naive, impatient young people with a modicum of talent to produce maybe one successful single on an overpriced CD has proven to be a successful enterprise for companies like Time Warner, Seagrams, Sony and so forth.

    Don't count on some recording executive waking up one day and changing things.

    Don't hope the government will step in with some amazing new set of rules; they are making good money off the current methodology in the form of tax revenues.

    Artists have to stop providing the fodder and content for the machine. Thats it. Quit feeding the beast and the beast will die.

  • Check that link and try again.
  • "You would have a stronger argument if the recording industry was a free market. The major labels control distribution and promotion. It's their way or the highway."

    Thanks for bolstering my already strong argument.

    Most artists *want* that world created and maintained by the big recording industry. That world includes the distibution, promotion, videos, parties and BS. That is why they sign. But once they do, they can no longer complain about the Terms of Service.

    Independent, free thinking artists say, "No Thanks". They give up access to the distribution and promotion channels *built and owned* by the recording industry and find their own way. They say no thanks to the glitz, glammor and fake lifestyle and live like normal people on their own terms.

    It is not slavery. Slaves are captured, sold and forced to work. Artists who sign contracts do so by choice. They want that glitzy life they see on VH1 and Entertainment Tonight and have to deal with the consequences of their actions. It is no different than the "signing your soul to the devil".

    Don't play the game their way!

  • Because, Mr. Katz has fallen into an all to common attitude prevalent today. There is some imaginary line which allows for a company to be successful (profitable) but not too profitable and therefore, greedy.

    This mindset prescribes that profits are fine for corporations as long as profits are "shared" with employees to some degree, are "donated" back to an imaginary place called "community" in some form, and are not made at the expense of offending any person, animal, plant or culture.

    Any profits that are paid out to stockholders (greedy speculators and profiteers) or in the form of salaries or bonuses to top performers and leaders are not acceptable. Nor should employee compensation be tied to profitability - pay and bonues should be based upon tenure and title of employees rather than effort and financial condition of the corporation.

    Taxes must be paid on all profits by the corporation, shareholders and employees in order to compensate the state for providing an environment in which those profits were derived.

    According to proponents of this vaguely defined world, private business would thrive under this ideal condition and all would fairly benefit.

  • Entertainment conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of copyright law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of artists, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits.

    Jon, perhaps you could define for us exactly how much people (yes, people -- people own corporations, they are not alive) have a right to profit.

    You seem to imply that corporation do not have a right to "exorbitant" profits, and that is just an incredibly foolish attitude. When government jack-boots its way into private business, and starts dictating profits -- in other words, legislating prices -- you are on the road to economic ruin.

    I hope I am just misinterpreting what you are saying. If not, please review the history of the Soviet Union for lessons in what happens when government removes the right to profit.


    --

  • As a musician and a writer I believe very strongly in the Copyright system. All of my work is Copyrighted. On the other hand, I have been unable to get my music published, and very little of my writing has been published. I like to think that it's because I'm a talentless hack, but who knows.

    I believe that the music industry needs to see the internet for what it is, a marketing tool. The internet is just like radio or television. Yes, people make tapes of videos, and of songs off the radio, and download MP3s off the internet, but without exposure to the music, there is no way to get them excited about it enough to buy the music.

    And, yes, the industry takes advantage of the artist. Unless the artist is very business savvy, the industry gets the lion share of the profits. But, the industry does provide a service. It provides the dream. A hundred years ago, just as many people played music (percentage wise, obviously there were less people then), maybe more, but few performed publicly, fewer still performed for a living, and fewer still composed, and were well known. The life of a performer was not seen as a very desirable one, as performers made very little money and received very little fame. The recording industry changed all that. Mega stars are created through hype and marketing, not talent. It's the golden apple that has created untold thousands of garage bands seeking stardom. There has to be a balance, where the artists are treated fair without compromising the dream. Maybe we need a new Copyright law that dictates the terms of artist contracts, what the artist gets, and what the publisher gets.
  • A while back the media companies (that is, the companies that make physical media like Sony) tried to create a standard named DAT. It failed precisely because the music industry thought it would encourage copying. If you can make a perfect sound quality copy, what's to stop widespread piracy?

    The music industry still remembers tapes, that's what. I'd say that more piracy occured because of standard audio tapes than anything else. Artists had a horrible time selling tapes, and the industry was hurt terribly because of it.

    Burning a CD copy is still clumsy and slow; older CD players won't even play CDR's. But MP3's offer the solution akin to tapes - fast, cheap, and portable. Now, I still prefer my CD player - it would cost me too much to carry around CFlash cards equivalent to what I can carry around in a CD wallet. But many people are happy with their Rio's, and it scares the industry.

    For the first time since audio tapes the technology is there to make a fast copy of an album and share it with your friends.

    This isn't about digital rights. This is about an industry scarred by horrible memories of tapes - of consumers who would trade albums instead of buying one.

  • Being Some Reflections Inspired by Mr Katz, Demagogue of This Parish

    With Learned Comment And Precepts For The Wise

    Grocery conglomerates have skillfully -- and at great cost -- distorted the purpose of contract law and are jumbling two very different issues: the rights of farmers, and the rights to exorbitant corporate profits. They aren't the same thing. Most farmers need more protection from grocery companies than from college kids harvesting fields under cover of darkness. How can the rights of farmers be protected out in the fields?

    Lost in the legal brawling is the original purpose of contract law. The Common Law originally developed a theory of contracts not so that the means of production and distribution could be owned forever and licensed by big companies. These laws were enacted so that farmers and other producers would have an incentive to produce new goods and to encourage the free and rapid circulation of wealth.

    Those judges in olden times reasoned that if anybody could steal anybody's produce at any time, farmers and manufacturers would have no motive to keep growing crops and making things. And since farms were small and local communities vigilant, those laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore. Big farms and rural isolation mean that anyone with a torch and a sickle can fill up his car with produce at harvest time, and modern home freezer technology means it can be kept in cold store for months.

    Today, the purpose of contract laws seems to be earning even bigger profits for grocery conglomerates hiding behind the mantra of protecting farmers. But 18th-century notions of contract doesn't (sic) make sense in the year 2000. Nobody can argue that the sharing of food by "unofficial harvesting" necessarily deprives the food industry (or farmers) of any incentive to grow food. And the modern economy is the greatest medium yet for ensuring the rapid dissemination of goods and services, a boon that should be protected, not shut down.

    There is more food making more money in more forms -- generating $15 billion in profit in l999 -- than at any time in world history. In fact, comestibles in many forms, from turnips to alfalfa sprouts to pork bellies, is (sic again) flourishing. It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the modern economy before we even try and figure out how farmers can get the protection and compensation they deserve. A study released last week by Jupiter, a grocery commerce research firm, says that "unoffical harvesters" are 45 per cent more likely than non-harvesters to have increased their total grocert purchases over the last six months. How, exactly, do farmers benefit from reversing that trend?

    The new purpose of contract may be the reasonable protection of the rights of farmers and other productive entities; namely to ensure that they be paid fairly for their work, although perhaps in new and different ways. (An equally important contract trial concluded this week in Manhattan, where grocery industry lawyers have filed suit challenging the right to own and drive a car at night, and to own a torch at all).

    Contract laws also need to recognize that access to free food has become a tradition and right for tens of millions of people, mostly younger Americans who grew up filching produce from fields at night, and who are now routinely branded "thieves" and "pirates" by corporate publicists and their close friends (corporations are the biggest contributors to political campaigns), congressional lawmakers. Gourmets also need some sort of fair-use protection. It's absurd to give giant conglomerates and commodities brokers the right to speak for farmers. Commodities brokerages are to farmers what wolves are to sheep.

    Et cetera. Further instalments must await the replenishment of my sarcasm reservoir.

  • As the RIAA clamps down on the sharing of music in all forms, taxes on blank audio cassettes and cds, using its legal power to shut down napster, trying to force music stores to pay royalties for the music it plays in its own stores, one must wonder where all this is going. It seems as though the RIAA wants the right to feed us the music it wants us to hear, and only the music its wants us to hear. Everyone else is talentless anyway right? Let the RIAA decide what is good for you!

    An article in the paper today talked about how people at live concerts were taking advantage of the equipment provided for the hearing impaired to produce high quality bootlegs of concerts. The equpiment, which is required to be available by US law, pipes a direct feed from the soundboard to a receiver and headphone set, which is then recorded by the bootlegger. Elimination of crowd noise and distortion make the bootlegged copy of far higher quality than normally associated with bootlegs.

    Hearing impaired people have expressed fears that this service will stop being made available because of this bootlegging. Should they be fearful? Should such a great service be discontinued because of some perceived threat to the music industry from these bootlegs? Should fast and efficient file sharing be stopped because of a perceived threat to the music industry? Comne on RIAA, you're only pissing off more people.
  • While none of this seems untterly clueless, it also doesn't seem very new. Katz's article would be a good peice to introduce someone to the issue, but for those who have been following it[i.e. /. readers] the article is a tad... stale.


    -={(Astynax)}=-

  • SLASHDOT REJECT (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:41AM (#892426)
    http://www.smh.com.au/breaking/0007/31/A40420-2000 Jul31.shtml http://www.smh.com.au/breaking/0007/31/A40420-2000 Jul31.shtml
    reject [smh.com.au]
    can you say RIAA challenges federal disabilities act??????

  • Re:"free culture"??? (Score:3)

    by phil reed ( 626 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:36AM (#892427) Homepage
    The normal (read: in the past) way picture copyrights worked is pretty much the same as a record. The copyright owner of a given picture is supposed to be reimbursed when the picture is published. The difference is that all copies of a particular publication count as one use. The payment is usually based on things like how widely distributed the publication is (an internal magazine that goes only to, say, retirees of IBM will have to pay less for publication rights than, say, Time Magazine); you don't get royalties for each copy of Time printed. There are lots of places that manage publication's use of images; they're called stock photography houses. Some photos have been resold hundreds of times.

    You have to keep this straight, however - just because a photo has been published doesn't mean it's fair game. If you want to use a picture from Time Magazine, you still have to go get your own pub rights for it. Oh, and p0rn is copyrighted too, and operates under the same rules.

    So, when you say

    one time modeling payments, and therefore paid for at the beginning
    you are actually incorrect. That was a payment to the MODEL, not to the copyright holder of the picture. The model could have gotten a per-publication royalty, but generally they don't. In that sense, they would be the same as a studio musician, in that the musician gets paid a fixed amount to show up and play for a day on the recording, and that's it as far as the musician goes. A studio musician is not considered an "artist" so much as a worker.


    ...phil

  • Artists need saving? (Score:3)

    by unicorn ( 8060 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @06:43AM (#892428)
    Most artists need more protection from media companies than from college kids downloading music online. How can the rights of artists be protected on the Net?

    Artists need saving from the representatives that they have contractually agreed to work with? No one held a gun to any musicians head, and forced them to sign with a particular label. Money was given to the artist, and if they felt so strongly that they wanted to retain complete control they should have never given that control away.

    And since books and documents were cumbersome and expensive to produce, copyright laws were easy to police. They aren't easy to police anymore.

    Apparently, since it's not easy to police anymore, then all enforcement should be totally discarded? Just because something isn't easy, doesn't mean that it's inherently wrong.

    The question of artist's rights is complex and urgent. Many artists not under contract to large corporations can't get their work seen or published at all.

    Which is exactly why many artists chose to work with labels. Only a large corporation can devote the marketing dollars necessary to make a musician as successful as many manage to get.

    Many artists who are under contract feel exploited by recording companies, who take a disproportionate share of profits, and who make enormous margins on conventional music sales.

    And those artists are more than welcome to not work with a recording company. The net allows them to spread their music far and wide, under whatever terms they desire.

    Millions of music lovers feel that they are overcharged...

    If you feel overcharged, vote with your feet, and don't buy music from the companies that are overcharging you. Music is not necessary for life, and if you don't buy popular culture, you'll still survive quite nicely.

    and offered too few choices and controls about the music they want to hear.

    The record companies aren't preventing artists from creating music. They are merely distributing those artists that they feel have the most potential. The other artists are still out there, and can be found. Getting rid of labels won't make the marginal artists more successful, since they aren't being handled by the majors anyhow.

    The Net provides a marketplace of cultural exchange, benefiting new artists and to music lovers. It's not simply a matter of theft, but of creating an environment in which culture thrives. That needs to be legally and politically acknowledged.

    This is more of Jon's normal rhetoric about how the rights of the consumer are absolute. And the rights of the artsits/owners should be trampled as necessary for the consumers sake.

  • Re:Remember DAT? (Score:3)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @09:52AM (#892429)
    An unfortunate bit of shortsightedness on the part of the Recording Industry.

    However, they have quietly collected royalties for 8 years on all blank digital audio media, so you can't say that they haven't been paid. If anything, they have been overpaid.

    When the law was passed, most DAT tapes (Digital Audio Tape was the issue in 1992; There were no recordable CDRs) were not being used to make copies of Garth Brooks and Bruce Springsteen albums -- they were being used by Grateful Dead tapers and garage bands and the like. Many of us bitterly resented that henceforth, up and coming bands would be forced to pay a "RIAA Tax" for the privilege of recording their own music, themselves, on digital media. This unfairness didn't stop the RIAA from collecting the royalties though, so the argument, that now that people finally have the technology to use digital audio recorders, media, and computers in the way that the law intended them to somehow makes music sharing immoral, doesn't really elicit a lot of sympathy.

    None of this changes the fact that Congress changed copyright law in 1992 to permit ALL non-commercial audio taping. It simply isn't
    illegal, and it isn't immoral either.

  • Re:Remember DAT? (Score:3)

    by jms ( 11418 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @07:41AM (#892430)
    What Congress needs to do is sit down and pass a law that says that:

    1) The record companies receive a royalty for each piece of blank digital audio media sold, to compensate for the effect home copying has on their sales.

    2) All non-commercial copying is allowed and defined as non-infringing, so that things like making mix tapes, and facilities like Napster are legal.

    Oh, wait a minute, Congress did EXACTLY that in 1992, when they passed the Audio Home Recording Act.

    Don't believe me? Check out USC Title 17, Chapter 10. [cornell.edu] Paragraph 1008 is particularly interesting!

  • What 18th-century copyright law seems to have disregarded - and I can't know how intrusive of an influence this was back then - was that art and science is not only about commerce and making big bucks -- it's also about fame.

    Now sure, n'Synch n' Spears n' Hansen are bloody rich, but they're also famous -- and let's not forget, one reason why they ARE so rich is because they have been formulated to LOOK FAMOUS wherever they go (i.e., it all started when the record companies "planted" groupies to yell and scream and cry when the stars get off their lear jet ... but I digress); and whether they deny it or not, the aspect of FAME is one of the rewards these "artists" were seeking.

    You've heard the old saying, "there's no such thing as bad publicity," right? Metalica's big problem is their image -- if all they were inteserested in was their purses (which seems to have been the case), they should've just said so. But now, they're still fanous, alright -- famous for being out-of-synch with the technology, and therefore, looking like idiots.

    It's interesting to me that the above-mentioned artists aren't complaining very loudly about Napster, et. al. ... it's MY guess that they aren't because their fame is not being being jeopardized. Sure, maybe their album sales have been dented (and even this I doubt, since most young fans NEED as many photos of their artists as possible, and there are photos included with the CD's)... and of course, they're getting more exposure than ever, thanks to Napster. And it would seem that since they're getting SO MUCH MORE exposure, they have MORE pressure than ever to produce more work (notice, I didn't call it "music" or "art" -- but "work") ... isn't THAT the intention of Copyright Law?

    Those who don't study history are destined to re-implement it.

  • Re:Remember DAT? (Score:3)

    by gorilla ( 36491 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @09:03AM (#892432)
    One problem is that audio media is no longer seperable from non-audio media.

    Almost all of the new recording media introduced in the last 20 years or so has been used by both data & non-data uses, as both markets have shared their R&D & production costs.

  • Maybe... (Score:3)

    by EEEthan ( 41747 ) <emh26NO@SPAMcolumbia.edu> on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:02AM (#892433) Homepage
    This quote:
    "Nobody can argue that the sharing of music online necessarily deprives the music industry (or artists) of any incentive to create music."
    Why would it deprive the music industry of incentive? Because even more people are hearing music than before?
    Our gov't. tends to believe that without money, there's no reason to do anything. But as a musician it's obvious that having an audience is just as big a draw. Music isn't about money, unless you're the recording industry. Musicians obviously don't care about money as much as they do music: they've been making music for very little money(with the help of the industry)for a while now.
    I don't know...it's a decent piece, but JonKatz's rants only get you so far. Let's keep music free; let's make more good, free music. Ultimately, the industry and its lawsuits are secondary to just making music and art...so screw it. Let's just rock out.

  • Slashdot Reject (Score:3)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @08:44AM (#892434)
    Hey, that's a pretty coll way to make a bootleg.

    I'd really love to see the RIAA get a PR smack down for attacking the federal disabilities act, but I think they oftin tollerate bootlegs with small distribution, so I would not expect to see them try to stop this bootleging.

    Also, I would not expect Slashdot to post this story unless the RIAA did something. It's not really Slashdt's job to keep up with the latest ways of making concert bootlegs.

    The thing I don't understand is why Slashdot ran that story about Mojo, but did not run a story about Fairtunes [fairtunes.com]. Fairtunes and it's cousins have much more potential for really creating the tipping based system of music distribution we all want, but Slashdot posts a story about a system which probable pays off the RIAA.

  • Re:Corrupted Artists (Score:3)

    by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:51AM (#892435)
    Still, it is a very scratchy existence trying to survive as a musician.

    It's funny, most religions don't even require a vow of celibacy for their ministers anymore, but everyone still expects musicians to take a vow of poverty.

  • Re:Theft is... (Score:3)

    by Maeryk ( 87865 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:57AM (#892436) Journal
    **Depriving someone of the use of something they own. Copying an mp3 doesn't deprive anyone of the use of it, therefore it isn't theft**

    Thou art mistaken, M'lord.. if you go to a consignment store, and take something out of the store that they dont own, but are merely holding, you are stealing from that store. You are depriving someone of royalties when you download their music without paying the appropriate fees.. whether or not you choose to admit it. Music costs money.. everywhere you hear it. One of Katz' first pieces was about "free music" that you hear.. he wasnt totally right.. if you hear music in an elevator, a hotel lobby, a grocery store, etc, more than likely that place has *PAID* for the right to use/broadcast this music over their loudspeakers. (legally, they are supposed to). So music isnt free.. someone is *giving* that music to you in that case. But if you just rip it off the net, it is theft, plain and simple. If you dont like it, get the laws changed.. but as of now, its theft.

    Maeryk,

  • I dare you to be the role model, Katz (Score:3)

    by VAXman ( 96870 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:54AM (#892437)
    You expect others to figure out how to make money off of their art online, but you can't figure out how to make money off of your writing, except by selling dead trees, even though your book would be completely amenable to distribution online.

    Instead of sitting in your pearly white ivory tower on slashdot, and instead of preaching to the world about how things should be, why don't you actually act on it and show the world it can be done?

    It's awfully easy to sit up in your little nest, and tell other people what they should and should not be doing, but it's a lot harder to actually take action on your words, and change the world. If you expect anybody who has graduated junior high to even consider what you write about the "new media", "free culture", "corporatism", blah, blah, blah, then you need to get off your high horse and actually demonstrate that it can be done.

    You are in a perfect position to do this. I dare you to. Of course, it's a moot point now, because you have already garned several million dollars at obscenely high margins, so it wouldn't hurt too much to stop that income. The only solution is to write a new book, and publish it online. You believe it would work. Why don't you do it?

  • Re:Now is the time (Score:3)

    by bfree ( 113420 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @06:20AM (#892438)
    You raise some key points about the requirements for backing. However, there is no nead for the backing to be from a record company as such. The old act of patronage is not illegal, and I would suspect that we shall see many such arrangements arriving over the next few years.
    Take the large mega-star as an example, there are a number of musical superstars who have more money than they can ever need, who could easily afford the "risk" of not resigning with a record company and buying a server-farm. Then they can build a studio and tender for merchandisers (what lengerie manufacturer would not want to sell Madonna basques from her site). When they release their music (and especially videos) they "could" slow down the net enough to be noticed and get some free publicity there. The net will spread the word if the artist is sufficient. On the back of their resources they can help out other acts. Some would be gready, some would look for musical integretty and some would be straight rebelious about it, but they would use their wealth and resources to carry the little guys to their markets.
    Add in the potential for radio stations (WKRN the people who bring you RadioHead), computer companies, famous business men and sportsmen to help and the potential for no record companies is easy to see. All it takes is some communal effort from the people who can make it happen. Once any weight develops on the pile, the era of musical depravity (the 90s was the decade of the remix for fscks sake) will end as we all start to listen to the music we want to, and we will all help pay for the music we all listen to.
    I say buy-cot, the less use the label is to an artist the sooner they will bolt to the brave new world.

  • Flat Fee Music (Score:3)

    by jcsmith ( 124970 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:59AM (#892439)
    I've already mentioned this a couple of times in previous discussions, but it seems it hasn't been seen by many people so at the risk of repeating myself too often I'm going to post it again.

    Try emusic.com they have flat rate plans ranging from $9.99/month to $19.99/month (depending on length of contract) for unlimited legal mp3 downloads. They don't have much in the way of top 40 stuff but that's fine for me.

    This is a nice system because I get my music cheaply and the artists/labels get some money for their work. If this could continue on a larger scale with emusic continuing to sign new labels/artists this could be an important piece of the future of internet distribution of music.

    No I don't work for them, I'm just a happy customer who downloaded about 10 gigs of legal mp3's over the weekend and only paid $9.99.

  • Linux Distributors == Recording Companies. (Score:3)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:57AM (#892440) Journal

    Does anybody here see the similarity between Linux distributors and recording companies?

    The recording companies at least pretend to be interested in paying the artists, even though many of them manipulate contracts so that it doesn't happen, and many artists don't see a dime. Linux Distributors may talk about "giving back to the community" but few programmers see much of anything.

    Yet the recording labels are monsters while the Linux distros are perceived as "getting it" and being "cool", "hip" or whatever teenagers say these days.

    This is not a troll. Can anybody explain the difference? In some alternative universe, is there a website where musicians extoll the virtues of General Public Music while blasting software distributors for not paying programmers or allowing them to copy software?

  • I'd estimate now that what the artists make from CD sales is starting to pale in comparison to other licensing arrangements.

    Certainly in the case of Moby he's made far more money licensing his latest album for films & tv commercials than from album sales. I believe he's licensed every track on the album and many times over.

    Added to this he must make money from touring - I paid 80 ukpounds for a music festival and on account of the rain (and my wastedness :) he was the only band i saw.

    Certainly artists could do without the RIAA - sure they would need a means for promoting themselves but I see no reason why it should be as costly to them as signing with a record label.

    Consider the software world. Some of the worlds most used software is given away free: Internet Explorer, Napster & Linux to cite just a few. The companies behind those products do seem to make money.

    Creators of music however should be given some choice as to what distribution model they want to choose - perhaps they'll follow the now common model of giving some stuff free and others not.

    I dont see why artists should have to tolerate their stuff being distributed for free but i'm sure we could do without the RIAA and them imposing american laws on the rest of the world.

  • Artist Representation (Score:3)

    by MattLesko ( 155081 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:43AM (#892442)
    Do music artists have some sort of orginization that allows them (the artists *NOT* the music barons) to lobby, work, etc. in their benefit? Maybe musicians should team up to begin a digital distribution method like Napster, make sure *THEY* get paid, not the corporations.

    You are more than the sum of what you consume.

  • Constitutional Intent of Copyright (Score:4)

    by coats ( 1068 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:54AM (#892443) Homepage
    The Constitutional authority for copyright follows from the following clause:
    Article I
    Section 8. The Congress shall have power...
    To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; ...
    The right to copyright as property was not regarded as a fundamental property right by the founders, nor was it such under Common Law. The Constitution established that Congress had the authority to create this right subject to several criteria. The present copyright regime does not in any realistic fashion fit under those criteria:
    • Present copyright term is not a "limited" term -- at least not in terms meaningful to a human being.
    • Present copyright benefit does not go to "authors and inventors" as the founders would have understood those terms, but to some rather-removed third party.
    The present situation is one where the publishing industry is engaged in wholesale theft--first, theft of the works from their true authors; then theft of what should be in the public domain (and thus the property of all of us) from us as a society. It is a vast leap from the originally-passed copyright term of 14 years to today's life plus 70 years!

    There is in fact a currently-active suit denouncing the latest copyright act as unconstitutional -- see URL http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/complain t.html [mediaone.net]

  • Solutions anyone? (Score:4)

    by jyuter ( 48936 ) <<jyuter> <at> <gmail.com>> on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:41AM (#892444) Homepage Journal
    It would be tragic to create a more restrictive environment around the Net before we even try and figure out how artists can get the protection and compensation they deserve.

    Unfortunately, all we get from Katz is a list of "maybes" with little analysis. It's always easier to say "X is bad" but it's considerably harder to offer legitimate realisic viable solutions.

    Instead of constantly slamming the music industry, can we get a full analysis of how things should work taking in to consideration all parties involved?



    Being with you, it's just one epiphany after another

  • There's some decent stuff. (Score:4)

    by AugstWest ( 79042 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:43AM (#892445)
    When Phish was playing their NYE show in Big Cypress, they were relasing a couple of tracks from the show every couple of hours as mp3s.

    They used eLicense. Yes, it can be gotten around, but not by everyone.

    Essentially, you downloaded an mp3 and could listen to it 3 times before purchasing. After the third listen it was $1 to purchase it.

    A buck a song seems fair to me. Get some decent traffic through your websites posting mp3s and it could be a decent revenue stream.

  • hmmm (Score:4)

    by cybercuzco ( 100904 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:48AM (#892446) Homepage Journal
    how bout the Lars Ulrich Digital Document Internet Transmission Enactment, or LUDDITE for short

  • There is a difference - mainly, most programmers writing Open Source stuff expect it to remain open, and benifit some others. They don't expect any other sort of return, except maybe the gratitude of creating something useful to others. Most musicians actually feel the same way, they just want to be appreciated. At least until they "hit it big" or whatever.

    Actually, most of the Linux distros are realatively harmless in this way. Although they include software written by people for free, they don't directly profit on that. After all, you could always go out and download all of it for free. What do they provide, then? A way to bundle it all together, so that it's gotten from one source. A way to install it from one source with some form of documentation. And, for those who want it, a place to go for guaranteed support.

    How is this better? What are they giving back to the community? Well, by having RedHat, for instance, I was able to download RedHat 6.2 and burn it to a CD-ROM under Windows. Then I was able to install it, all for free, all realitively easily. What does that mean? Linux now has one more supporter. The distributions get more people into Linux, by providing and important service. In this way, they give back to the community simply by building interest, even if they do nothing else. Likewise, Corell Linux is getting my mother interested in Linux, and my brother is now becoming more interested in Open Source software then he was before.

    What does the RIAA do? Well, they hype music (and distros similarly hype Linux), and they distribute it. Linux distros usually distribute some version for free. Does the RIAA? Nope. Does the RIAA want people to be able to sample the music first? Evidently not, they seem to think that the only use someone who owns a CD is is to listen to the music themselves. The only other thing the RIAA does it to try and force people through one channel of distribution - the RIAA themselves. Do any Linux distros do this? Not yet... The RIAA is more comparable to Microsoft than a Linux distro - they want (and seem to have) a monopoly, and are trying to crush anything that might topple their empire. I'd much rather see the RIAA declared illegal and let all the labels start actually competeing against each other.

  • Jefferson's thoughts on the matter (Score:5)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:49AM (#892448)
    Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
    13 Aug. 1813Writings 13:333--34
    It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction ofman, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

    <rant> Think about that, and ask yourself if the public is being served when drug companies 1) pay off smaller companies so they won't produce that drug which will do the exact same thing as the major company's drug, but is much cheaper, and 2) whenever a patent is about to expire, they subtley and trivially change the chemical so that it is technically a different drug, but still has no benefit over the original, so that they can extend their patent-granted control. Should indigenous people's genes, or purely the concept of "one-click shopping" be able to be patented? </rant>

  • 18th-century notions... (Score:5)

    by klund ( 53347 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:49AM (#892449)
    But 18th-century notions of copyright doesn't make sense in the year 2000...

    I would argue the opposite. The 18th-century notion of copyright DOES make sense today: To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

    Get it? In my opinion, the 18th-century notion has two key words here: "promote" and "limited". Copyrights used to be 14 years, renewable for another 14 years.

    It's the corrupted 20th-century notion that is fscked. The Sonny Bono "Screw The Public" Act had two clauses: (1) The Mickey Mouse clause, preventing anything Disney has even done from entering the public domain (95 years for works-for-hire), and (2) The Gershwin Heirs clause, keeping the Gershwins rich (life+70 years for works of individuals).

    How does this promote useful arts? It doesn't. It promotes individual gains. Disney has borrowed greatly from the Public Domain and returned nothing. Bach's heirs didn't expect to be rich from their father's work; they wrote their own. The Congress has been bought and paid for. Art and science used to belong to the people (after 28 years). Now it belongs only to the richest campaign donor.

    We have a moral obligation to fight the current copyright system. We must take back the public domain. A society with no public domain art is bankrupt.
    --

  • Re:The most dangerous attitude I can imagine (Score:5)

    by jheinen ( 82399 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:55AM (#892450) Homepage
    No one has a "right" to profit. Nowhere in the constitution is such a right given to anyone. You do have a right to try and make a profit by engaging in business, but succeeding and making money is not gauranteed. In a changing economy, the recording industry should have no expectation to continue making as much money as they currently do, nor should they have any expectation to be around five years from now. All they can hope to do is change the way they do business in order to adapt to the situation. If they fail at this, they should fall by the wayside to make room for others who do understand the new economy. This is the way the free market has always worked. Adapt or die.
    -Vercingetorix

  • TINSTAAFL (Score:5)

    by Raunchola ( 129755 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:17AM (#892451)
    "The Net provides a marketplace of cultural exchange, benefiting new artists and to music lovers. It's not simply a matter of theft, but of creating an environment in which culture thrives."

    Jon, here's something for you to chew on, there is no such thing as a free lunch.

    That aside, this is a matter of theft Jon. Yes, Napster is a great promotional tool. Yes, Napster has helped a lot of artists get recognized. And that's all fine and dandy. But your candy-coating everything with "It's net culture!" doesn't work. The musicians need to get paid like the rest of us, and while some people buy the music they get off Napster, others don't. But let me guess, they're only participating in this "culture" thing you rant on, right?

    "Maybe music-lovers could pay a flat fee to access music sites which share revenue with entertainment companies and artists. Perhaps artists can use the Net to begin selling their work directly to fans and the public. Maybe debit and other forms of transactional software can be used to charge small amounts of money for downloaded music, using some system that measures time or data. Maybe college students could pay a fraction of a cent for each song they downloaded on college sites, the overall volume generating a fair amount of revenue for artists and corporations."

    And maybe I could stand on my roof and shout nonsense. You know, with the methods you advocate above (excluding one), it's still in a zero-sum situation. Sure, we're selling CDs in MP3 format online, and that's fine and dandy. It's just too bad that the same amount of money will still be going to the record companies. And that's a Bad Thing(tm), correct Jon?

    We all know that record companies are getting a really big piece of the pie, but there's nothing that we, the music fans, can do about it. Sure, we can all take up the Jon Katz rallying cry of "Culture! Free music! Culture!" But that's just plain bullshit. What good is downloading music off Napster going to do? It's not going to make the industry think "Hey, we're screwing these musicians in the ass," it's going to make them say, "See, nothing but pirates out there!" If anything is going to happen, it's going to happen due to action from the musicians themselves. They're the ones who are directly affected by the industry's ways. They're the ones getting pennies on the dollar. If more artists could speak out and say "Look what they're doing to us," I think it would work better than just having a bunch of Katz groupies downloading music off Napster, because at least it's genuine first-hand experience. Just downloading music under the shield of "Culture!" is going to do more harm than good IMHO.

    --

  • Legal comments pending (Score:5)

    by thesparkle ( 174382 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @05:21AM (#892452) Homepage
    Hey! How can artists protect themselves? By reading the bloody contracts presented to them by the recording industry.

    Real simple. You sign, they own you. You want to be on MTV, hang out with Britainy Spears, open up for the Who, and snort cocaine in the back of a limo with a leggy supermodel? Sign the contract.

    You want to maintain your independence and creative control and not have to sing songs penned for you by some numbnuts you never met? Don't sign. It is that simple.

    Who protects the artists' rights, Jon? They do. They are grownups who should know better. They protect themselves the same way every successful entertainer, actor and athelete does: With a good lawyer, agent and accountant.

    Don't like and want to change the system? Try this.

    Don't buy new CD's or tapes.
    Don't listen to commercial radio stations or support advertisers (if at all possible) who advertise on commercial radio stations.
    Don't buy concert tickets.
    Convince future artists not to sing contracts and contribute to the ongoing fodder.
    (Don't be surprised when you find out this takes time and committment).

    You can dream all you want about some imaginary utopia, you can imagine some warm, squishy world where artists and listeners/viewers/appreciators live together in peaceful, non-economic controlled state, but here is reality: the recording industry is a business which does this for the money. Deny the money enough and things change.

    The fact that I have to remind you of this (yep you! The guy who gets a paycheck from a publicly traded, capitalistic, corporation) befuddles me to no end.

  • I'm the real katzy... (Score:5)

    by KatzKrazy ( 206072 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:42AM (#892453) Homepage
    (Talking)
    May I have your attention please, may I have your attention please, will the real jonkatz please stand up,
    I repeat will the real jonkatz please stand up.....we're gonna have a problem here.........

    (Verse 1)
    Ya'll act like you never seen a editor troll before
    jaws all on the floor
    like sengan just burst in the door
    and started whoopin your ass worse than before
    they first were divorced
    locking out all posters (aaaaaah)
    It's the return of the...
    "awww..wait, no wait, you're kidding,
    he didn't just say what I think he did,
    did he?"
    and CmdrTaco said...
    nothing you idiots, Cmdr Taco's dead
    he's locked in the Geek House
    long time /.'ers love jonnykatz
    chicka chicka chicka jonkatz,
    "I'm sick of him, lookit him
    walkin around, trollin for who knows what
    talking about not really much"
    "yeah, but he's such a good writer though"
    yeah, I probably got a more than a few screws up in my head loose
    but no worse than what's goin on in your parents bedroom (eheheheh)
    sometimes, I wanna get on /. and just let loose
    and can, but it's not cool for people to talk shit about my posts
    My bum is on your lips, My bum is on your lips
    and if I'm lucky, you might just give it a little kiss
    and that's the message that I deliver to little trolls
    and expect them not to know what a dictionary is
    of course they're gonna know what thesaurus is
    by the time they hit 9th grade
    they got the "Hellmouth", dont they?
    we ain't nothing but morons
    well, some of us panderes
    have troll-armies who cut posts open like cantelopes
    but if we can rework dead points and hype a lot
    then there's no reason that I can't keep spewing the same rot
    but if you feel like I feel, I got the antedote
    geeks wave your cash around, sing the chorus and it goes..............

    (Chorus)
    I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
    cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up

    (Verse 2)
    Real writers are generally lucid and understand english
    well I'm not, so fuck Webster and fuck you too
    you think I give a damn about a webby
    half of you critics can't even stomach me, let alone stand me
    "but jon, what if you win, wouldn't it be weird"
    why? so you guys can just lie to get me here
    so you can sit me here next to timothy
    shit, michaeal better switch me chairs
    so I can sit next to CmdrTaco and Hemos
    and hear em argue over who he gave head to first
    little bitch, put me on blast on /. see
    "yeah, he's cute, but I think he violated my rights, whee hee"
    I should download the audio on MP3
    and show the world how you invaded MY privacy (aaaaaah)
    I'm sick of you little girl and boy posts
    all you do is annoy me
    so I have been sent here to destroy you
    and there's a million of us just like me
    who post like me, who just don't make much sense like me
    who troll like me, walk, talk and blather like me
    and just might be the next best thing, but not quite me.................

    (Chorus)
    I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
    cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up

    (Verse 3)
    I'm like a head trip to try to understand
    cause my rants attract nerd-boy wannabe fans
    you preach about to your friends inside you AD&D club
    the only difference is I got the balls to bullshit it
    in front of ya'll and I aint gotta be correct or accurateat all
    I just get on the board and spit it
    and whether you like to admit it (riiip)
    I just bullshit it better than 90% you wannabes out can
    then you wonder how can
    trolls eat up these albums like valiums
    it's funny,cause at the rate I'm going when I'm ninety
    I'll be the only person left at slashdot flirting
    pinchin Signal 11's ass when I'm jackin off with jergen's
    and I'm jerkin' but this whole bag of viagra isn't working
    in every single person there's a jonkatz lurkin
    I am workin at burger king, drooling on your onion rings
    or wandering around senseless in the parking lot, screamin I dont give a fuck
    with his windows up and his system down
    so will the real katzy please stand up
    and put 1 of those fingers on each hand up
    and be proud to be outta your mind and outta control
    and 1 more time, loud as you can, how does it go? .................

    (Chorus)
    I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
    cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up

    cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up
    cause I'm jonkatz, yes, I'm the real katzy
    all you other jonkatzs are just imitating
    so wont the real jonkatz please stand up, please stand up, please stand up

    (Talking)
    haha guess it's a jonkatz in all of us........ fuck it let's all stand up

  • Now is the time (Score:5)

    by Dan Hayes ( 212400 ) on Monday July 31, 2000 @04:48AM (#892454)

    Well, unfortunately the current model on which the music industry is run means that an artist requires the backing of a major label to reach an audience of more than a couple of thousand. Thanks to the way in which they've sown up the market from recording to distribution, an artist who is outside of their hegemony is going to find it extremely hard to gain popularity or even just exposure.

    Whilst the net is changing this, allowing artists to reach a potentially far larger audience without the "backing" of a major label, at the moment the key word is potential. Nobody denies that the net has potential, especially not the RIAA/MPAA, but people are still trying to work out workable models that benefit both artists and consumers. A lot of people are happy with MP3.com's business model, but I'm sure there will be a lot more progress in the next few years.

    Unfortunately for us, the RIAA/MPAA have realised this huge potential at a time when it is still vulnerable to pre-emptive legislation. They want to chain and guide this potential whilst they still can and their resources are up to the challenge.

    What does this mean? Basically, if the uptake of the net as a tool for artists takes off over the next couple of years, it will become next to impossible for the conglomerates to stop. We just need to get through these challenges.

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