The Culture of CD Burning 820
An anonymous reader points to this "good article from the Boston Globe about the culture of CD burning, and how hard it will be for the RIAA to stop it. Some interesting quotes: 'There's a "sex appeal" to burning CDs, says [Sheryl] Crow, adding that it is a social event for young people, just as listening to 45s was once a social event for their parents.' An interesting one from Hilary Rosen: "I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?' So this sense of personal investment does ring true with people." Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copies (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets say you buy a 50 pack of CD's....
I might burn 5 music CD's from that.
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:2, Funny)
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:2)
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:2, Funny)
You people are Killing Kid Rock [216.239.33.100]!
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:2)
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 BLN copies. (Score:4, Insightful)
Next they're going to start bitching about how many gigs of hard drive space are being sold. Hillary's starting to become the new blink tag of the internet. People are just getting far too tired of her played out, immature antics. BTW, the biggest music "thieves"...people who work in the music industry. Mostly the interns they hire from local colleges.
Re:1.1 billion CD's doesn't mean 1.1 billion copie (Score:4, Funny)
Get yo hands offa mah CDs!
" That's the weird thing about 'N Sync and its rivals: It's impossible to appreciate their staying power, or fully fathom their genius, right down to the seemingly witless banter, unless they make you want to vomit."
--The Washington Post, 4/23/02
Hmmm.... (Score:3, Funny)
So is hilary saying that we are allowed to burn CD's of crappy artists?
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:2, Funny)
Can we copy artist's term papers? What if it's just photocopies, not burning the file to a CD?
Kierthos
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Insightful)
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and read it without paying you? Would that bug you?'
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't bother me that they get an easier start for their projects. It doesn't bother me because I learned a lot preparing my paper. It's not going to teach me any more sitting on my hard drive.
Are they shortchanging themselves by taking my paper? The professor knows they've seen my paper. She expects them to "carry the ball a little further". Then I get to see my project continued in a way I couldn't.
Perhaps this is off topic now. I just don't think Hilary Rosen knows how to share in an academic environment. Bad analogy.
She was probably the kind of kid who hid library books so no one else could get the information she was using so she could blow the curve for the rest of us.
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously this comment doesn't apply to me nor does it apply to most others. Who the fuck cares if the paper you wrote got taken by someone else? If they are going to take it and get a good grade on it, there is only one person losing out here, that's the "theif".
Even if the paper I wrote gets published and recieve royalties for it does it bother me that these people used it for themselves?
Re:Hmmm.... (Score:3)
Actually they don't lose out at all. They get an A grade. I'm not advocating cheating, but an A grade is an A grade and 99.9% of people aren't going to know they cheated.
You lose out because there is now one more person in the world with a A grade that they shouldn't really have. Which, once people find out how clueless they are, will significantly devalue your own grade A.
If I gave my grade A work to everyone so they could all get grade A then I'm giving to people who shouldn't really deserve that grade. Two things happen here:
Of course, you can argue that they should be found out at the interview process, but a lot don't. And when that happens, the chances of that dream job that you've rightfully worked hard on and got those A's fades away ...
Subnote: Having said this, I do advocate helping individuals but not just spoon feeding them the answers by allowing them to plagurise your work.
Sheryl Crow (Score:2)
Sexy and a rebel.
Nice.
Re:Sheryl Crow (Score:2)
Re:Sheryl Crow (Score:2)
It's really sad to see her get credit for the musical genius of Kevin Gilbert. While reading through the "Storytellers" liner notes (a VH1 compilation that I got the jewel case from. No disc, though), all of the other artists talk about what they were feeling or what was going through their minds when they wrote their songs... All of them except for Sheryl, who talked about how cool it was to work with Stevie Nicks and be on the cover of Rolling Stone. This is the artist that's going to tell me to stop burning CDs? I think not!
Re:Sheryl Crow (Score:4, Insightful)
She's jumping on a bandwagon which includes the RIAA. How is that a rebel? It's like saying a citizen in the Colonies that decided to help the English is a rebel. She isn't a rebel in any way, shape, or form -- she's siding with the record industry.
recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time (Score:4, Insightful)
I can buy 50 recordable cds for $19.99(b4 a 10 rebate
Recordable cds dont even come in 1 packs do they?
Re:recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time (Score:3, Insightful)
Kierthos
Re:recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time (Score:5, Funny)
paper outsold books.
Authors everwhere are outraged.
-xmod2@toolazytoolookupmypassword.com
For the last time..... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not the pirating...it's the music!
We don't have the bands of the 90's anymore....
We've got a couple big sellers, one hit wonders, trendy bands....nothing 'classic' lately
Go ahead, flamebait, redundant, offtopic
Yowzah! (Score:2)
Right next to the article, there's information on how to burn cds, ripping software, etc...
It would appear they are on our side.
Re:Yowzah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Stop, thief! (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be an accurate comparison if people were copying music and then selling them for profit, rather than giving them away for free.
She should have replied: "Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and show it to all their friends as an example of what they think is good writing?" To which I'd reply: Hell, yes. Anything that gets more people to read my columns, articles or books is a good thing for me as an author.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's one thing that's kind of strange. As I was reading her quote, it immediately jumped out at me that her analogy was fundamentally flawed. This took no time at all.
It makes me wonder, has she heard the flaw in this analogy pointed out, and ignored it? Or has she not had a real conversation with someone who is on the other side of the fence? Or is she trying to deliberately give a shoddy analogy in the hopes it gets by people?
mark
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:4, Funny)
She might think that she has to pay for advice of this quality.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
Outdated model. (Score:4, Insightful)
Musicians should get paid - before they start playing. Not everytime someone new hears it.
Re:Outdated model. (Score:3, Insightful)
musicians create their music, and they create one or several renditions of it that they record. they sell these renditions because people want to buy them (it's called a market).
musicians are allowed to choose whether they desire to sell or give away their music, just like programmers are allowed to decide whether to sell or give away their software.
if the musician didn't want to sell his/her music, then he/she would be a local bar act somewhere or even more likely a music teacher collecting $7.50 per lesson.
music on mp3 becomes soft like software... in other words it is intangible. It is just as intangible as the different expertise of a Doctor vs. a Nurse. Just because I can't touch it and feel its weight in my hand doesn't mean that I won't pay the few extra bucks for a doctor if I happen to get sick.
You pay for services every day. Music, whether you define it as a noun or a verb, a product or a service, still has value to people and will therefore be bought and sold in a society that permits such things.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Remove the middle man (Score:3, Insightful)
It will never be a viable business. Music is free now. You can't sell it.
What you CAN do is look at the expense of distributing your music online as a promotional expense. People get to know you. Eventually your music gets on P2P and you don't have to pay for THAT bandwidth.
The whole trick is getting people to hear your stuff so they want to go to your show. That's where money will be made by musicians in the future, NOT by selling the sound waves themselves.
Might take a few more years for musicians and the recording industry to grasp that, but mark my words, that's where we're going.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Would it bother you if some other legislature--say, the N.Y. state assembly, or the U.K. House of Commons--could prevent you from passing that law, because they wrote one like it last year, and now they own the statuatory language, the legal mechanisms, and underlying ideas?
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:4, Interesting)
Kintanon
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
1) Think of something where everyone has access to a technology that allows them to circumvent the system that makes what they want possible
2) You can either conclude that everyone who pays for that thing is:
a) too stupid to save money
b) able to understand that that thing would not be around were it not for people who paid for it.
Companies wish to convince us that the only time pepople pay for something when a free alternative is available is because they are dumb. However, this is not true. There tons of ways to scam the system, easily, undetected, and without possibility of getting caught. And yet, while some do (as always, a neccessary evil unless we wish to reseign to a future of microchip implants and tracking devices to catch that last, very clever cheater), many don't. I've really yet to meet someone who tries to get everything for free - it is a type of human companies wish to convince us that everyone is, so they can justify the restrictive technologies they wish to force on their consumer base in order to make everything quanitifiable. Would your dad have stolen the recordings of all his favorite artists? Would most Volvo enthousiasts seek out free Volvo's if they could, even if they knew that Volvo could not fund future developments and Volvo's if they did? It would be like evolution producing a species that cut off its own genetalia as its first action upon birth
At the base of all this is the assumption companies make - your behaviour is dependant 100% on the economics
I'll will try and drag up some specific studies, but to me its so clear
That, my friend, would be Free Hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
It would not destroy anything. The manufacturers would not be able to stay in business, just like any other obsolete company in a market economy - good riddance. The net gain to society would obviously be enormous. See it as Free Hardware (as in Free Hardware Foundation), people would be getting stuff for free and there would always be some people prepared to make new inventions for the others. Companies wanting to get profit out of that industry would have to rely on giving support and "business solutions". Sound familiar?
Duplication Device (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine that there was a "duplication device" that could clone whatever you put into it - a watch, a TV, a car, whatever. Imagine it only cost $.20 per use. This device could literally destroy our society. Think about how many people would be driving Porche Boxters or (insert your favorite car here) versus how many would actually sell. Your friend bought a brand new HDTV? Now you've got one too! How would any manufaturer or store stay in business? Does this seem bad to anyone other than me?
Interestingly enough, there was a science-fiction short story published in Analog more decades ago than I care to admit exactly along those lines. I don't remember the title, but in the story, some alien race dumped a matter duplicater and the plans for it on the human race, with the apparent intent of causing human society to self-destruct. Instead, the humans worked out the obvious solution: since anything could now be duplicated, the only thing that has value is unique originals, and the way to make a living is to design and create unique originals of things.
I think of this story a lot whenever the debates over digital copying and copyright infringement comes up. The Internet + computers are that matter duplicator, as far as anything digital (music, software, books, data) is concerned. The only question is, how do you get people to pay you the necessarily hefty fee for the unique original when they can wait for someone else to buy the original and get a copy for free? It used to be that the guys in charge of the "matter duplicators" (printing presses, film duplicators, record presses) charged a fee for each duplicate to cover the cost of buying the "unique original" (the manuscript, artist's studio tape, composer's score, etc.), but when everyone owns a "matter duplicator" (computer), who buys the original?
Re:Duplication Device (Score:4, Informative)
Destructionism (Score:5, Interesting)
Destroy, indeed. It would fundamentally change our society, but that's a far cry from wholesale destruction. Firstly, why should I cry about stores going out of business because we no longer need them? Because of all of the poor workers who don't have jobs any more? If they're the ones you're worried about, let me ask you, why would any of these poor people need their jobs any more? They'd use the machine to get what they need and want, just like I would. We'd all have to find jobs that don't involve manufacturing or transport (of goods), or we'd need to restructure society to compensate for not needing to make anything (although unless you had a REALLY BIG MACHINE you'd still need labor to build things like houses and cruise ships and spacecraft and such), but I can't see that as a bad thing on the balance. I mean, Porsche wouldn't make any money selling Boxsters any more, but people would still need the roads maintained, and there would always be a need for teenagers pumping gas. To extend to the digital music world, no artist would be able to sell CDs, but there would still be a huge demand for concerts (which is where the real money is in the music industry, anyway).
> Why doesn't the same logic apply to digital music? Sure CD's are way over priced, but that doesn't mean I'm going to go steal! Sorry to rant but I'm tired of people trying to justify what they know is not right!
The same logic does apply to digital music, but that's tangential to my problems with these people. The uses to which I wish to put my content are completely legitimate, but still I run afoul of their howling complaints that I'm stealing food from the mouths of these artists' children. For example, I want to watch DVDs on my high-powered Linux box. I bought the DVDs from my local Best Buy, and I don't copy them, but I'm not allowed to create, buy or use a DVD player for Linux because of the DMCA. For another example, I own a very high quality CD jukebox, which is attached to my multi-thousand dollar sound system. Because they say CDs need to be protected, they produce CDs which will not play on my CD player (note, not a computer, but a friggin' CD PLAYER!) and don't bother to warn me that they won't play, and won't let me return them if I should buy one and find that it's a coaster. For a third example, I can't play said same CD in my computer, but they provide digital tracks for computer use. Only, if you'll remember, my machine runs Linux, so I still can't listen to the tracks, because they require Windows Media Player. Again, finding my way around this so I can listen to a CD that I bought legitimately has been outlawed by the DMCA, so I'm stuck.
I'd be very interested to hear how any of this qualifies as justification for doing something wrong. It seems a lot more that a bunch of record companies and movie studios got together and decided that they could make a lot more money by enforcing a badly outdated business model on me, without any real concern as to whether they're screwing me in the process.
Virg
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
Sorry, wrong answer. You still have an economy, because you still have scarcity. There will be 2 (arguably 3) primary scarce resources in this future you envision...
1) Your time (as long as your life is finite, your time has value)
2) Land. Physical space is a limited resource. How do you pay for the land you want to put your duplicated house on? Where will you live?
3) I will assume our magical device still needs raw materials as input. You have to at least shovel in a load of dirt for it to use to make that copy of the HDTV set. See point 2 about how that is a scarce resource. And yes, with this discussion of "raw material" I can easily see people being forced to pay for air, because you can shove it through a compressor and use it as raw material for that device. (I'm a scuba diver, I'm used to paying for air...)
There will still be an economy, based on you providing the results of the use of your time. In other words, you'll still pay for stuff.
Re:Stop, thief! (Score:3, Insightful)
Pretty soon, it may be illegal to make our own artwork, since we might "steal" from the "real" artists. There is no shortage of local bands or talent to fill their void.
What about the culture of MP3 Ripping? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm trying to remember the last time I burned a CD for music, I think I only did it when a friend came over and asked if I could copy CD xyz for them. For the most part, I've just about allways ripped to MP3. Pop a disk in, click start, wait about 5 minutes and presto, with ID3 tags provided by CDDB i've just added their music to my collection.
Most of the kids I know with some computer skills (ages 12 and up) do the ripping thing more often than the burning thing. From a price standpoint you never have to use media other than a little hard disk space. With CD's you have to pay out 50cents for a blank every time you want to make one. Don't forget canada either, i'm sure with the new tariff's imposed on recordable media, MP3 ripping will get even more popular over there than ever before.
Nice metaphor, Hilary (Score:5, Insightful)
This issue will never go away (Score:2)
As for burning CD's and selling them, I think that is clearly illegal, but the same problem is how to curb that, while still allowing people to burn CD's for themselves (only).
Artists (Score:2)
Problems:
1) A lot of popular and/or good artists are entrenched in the current scheme, leaving only the small-fries to try this method, and a majority of them will fail to make money this way, seemingly proving that it just doesn't work.
2) Even if it worked very well, the high end artists would probably bank less than they do now, so they don't have much incentive.... but then again maybe I underestimate the cut of the production/distrubtion monopolies. Perhaps by going direct from studio to consumer and reaping all the money themselves, the actual net intake of the artist would remain the same.
Re:Artists (Score:3, Interesting)
Peer-to-peer in profit [progressiv...ishing.com]. Feel free to copy it if you think it will give you an A.
Phillip.
Re:Artists (Score:2)
Yeah your paper is fairly close to a what a real hashing out of the ideas in my 30-seconds-of-thought comment above would have been. The difference is that you seem to have an emphasis on payment being kinda automatic and built-in, with it left to the user to "hack out" the system if they dont want to pay. I prefer an opt-in setup where people continue to get their art/music completely for free, but there's an obvious and easy method for them to donate if they like doing so, tagged into the media much like your scheme.
Re:Artists (Score:4, Interesting)
(I couldn't get the paper... must be slashdotted)
Similar to the "donate $1 to odd todd."
Is it time for a nonprofit recording label?
Or perhaps it's time for a complete shift: News publishers, who already have mass market distribution mechanisms and brands for digital media (e.g., NYT, SJMN, etc.) could easily "publish" local bands and provide a payment mechanism for them. The cross-marketing possibilities and cross-selling of products becomes interesting, and most local metro papers already have people familiar with the local music scenes, so the best artists would float to the top more democratically.
what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Um... Sure. Try to find somebody who never taped something off of the radio or other medium. Most CD players came with a tape deck so you could tape off the CD to a tape to give it away or play it in your car or something.
I bought 1000 BLANKS last year here at work... (Score:2)
I bet CD's used for data distribution and storage push these numbers way up. Lies, damned lies.
Sex appeal to burning CDs? (Score:3, Funny)
Mix Tapes, etc... (Score:2, Insightful)
This brings me back to the buying CD Quality music by the track [slashdot.org]... But their greedy, etc etc...Heck I just throw away the cases and liner notes anyway so it's waste of money for me to have that junk anyway.
Get the Salon article right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Ptui! Read the article at Salon and you'll see that Byrd isn't claiming lots of people are swapping and burning his songs. He's irked at Sony because he hasn't seen a penny of artist royalties on either of his two albums which are still in the catalogue (though he started getting composer royalties after he was contacted to let another artist record one of his songs). He'd rather have the music available freely if the artist is never going to see any payment.
RIAA lies (Score:3, Informative)
Of course the big point that's missed in all of this is that the RIAA continues to mislead people and lie outright about the legality of copying. Non-commercial duplication of CDs is specifically allowed under current copyright law, and the CDs used in stand-alone CD copiers even include a royalty payment in their cost that goes to the RIAA. But Hillary Rosen continues to make it sound as though copying for your friends is illegal. But the mentions of the fact that it actually is legal gets only a short mention down at the bottom of the article.
Burning Mixes != Plagiarism (Score:2)
So you too got an A ? (Score:2, Funny)
-Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A?
-No sir, I wrote a paper and got Slashdotted.
Tax on blank CD's is... (Score:2)
Uh (Score:2)
'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'
The difference there is that someone is getting credit or compensation for that paper they "took." If I download an album off <favorite spyware fileshare app> and listen to it, that is in no way analgous to plagiarizing someone's paper/song/whatever. I'm not claiming I wrote the music, or that I performed it, or anything like that.
Nice try, Rosen, but that analogy is pretty damn flawed. Next!
Rosen is an idiot (Score:2)
A better analogy would be "How would you like it if somebody took your A paper, and made a photocopy of it for his friend to enjoy".
Gee, that analogy is *way* more accurate, but doesn't set off alarmist bells. Wonder why it wasn't made..
This is the dilemma (Score:3, Informative)
Actually it looks like they are taking some losses now - there's a very interesting (but long and a bit heavy on the piracy angle) article from the Observer newspaper in the UK [observer.co.uk], that used a net monitoring company to track how many downloads of music and movies are being done through KaZaA and similar. The article has a table of the top 10 downloads: number one was Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory with more than 5 million in a month - that's how many copies the album sold retail last year in total. You may not like the music industry, or agree with their tactics, but they gotta be hurting. Get ready for copy-protected music CDs, coming soon to every store near you.
From the article:
Top 10 downloaded movies
1 Black Hawk Down 169,000
2 The Fast and the Furious 168,000
3 The Lord of the Rings 165,000
4 Ocean's Eleven 154,000
5 Harry Potter 147,000
6 Monsters Inc 146,000
7 Collateral Damage 134,000
8 American Pie 2 126,000
9 A Beautiful Mind 125,000
10 Ali 100,000
Top 10 pirated albums downloaded last month
1 Linkin Park -Hybrid Theory 5,300,000
2 POD - Satellite 2,800,000
3 Creed - Weathered 2,600,000
4 Sum 41 - All Killer No Filler 2,500,000
5 Britney Spears - Britney 2,000,000
6 Nelly - Country Grammar 2,000,000
7 Nelly, et al - Training Day Soundtrack 1,800,000
8 Creed - Human Clay 1,600,000
9 Usher - 8701 1,500,000
10 Incubus - Make Yourself 1,500,000
Burning CDs = Making tapes (Score:3, Interesting)
What's the upshot of all of this (other than trying to get laid)? I've discovered a whole lot of new music from tapes others have given me. Sure, a huge chuck of it gets listened to once or twice, but a lot of the time I end up discovering something special. And I figure the same thing happens to people to whom I give tapes to.
Now, the record companies can do their best to squash this, and in a very abstract way I can see their point of view (lets ignore the fact that they screw over artists and want to destroy fair use in the country), but in the end they're just going to hurt themselves. Casual sharing of music (as opposed to outright, high volume piracy) I think is a bigger marketing tool than radio and MTV combined. How did Metallica (or the vast majority of bands who aren't marketed to the hilt the second they're signed) get so big in the 80s/90s? They had little to no radio airplay, no presence on MTV, and as far as I can remember no huge push from their record company? I'd wager mostly from social sharing, whether it be listening to it in your bud's car, or a tape your friend threw at you that he made. I know I've bought just as much (if not more) music due to stuff I've heard on small webcasts, friends apartments and mixed tapes as I've ever heard from commercial radio and marketing.
Salon Article, JWZ's DNA Lounge position (Score:3, Informative)
The Salon article is quite interesting...
- Joseph Byrd records two albums in the late 60s
- They're released on vinyl
- They're re-released on CD
- It's 35 years later, and he has yet to receive any royalties on it!
JWZ had this interesting little bit(Part of the trouble stems from a missing contract.)
Sony, having bought out Columbia Records ignores his requests for sales figures of his material -- no denials, no "we're looking into it," silence!
Re:Salon Article, JWZ's DNA Lounge position (Score:2)
Dammit, I missed the "Preview" button by a couple pixels!
I wanted to point out, after establishing the point of the Salon article, that Mr. Byrd is appealing to the RIAA vs. Napster judge to free his music. "Since Sony is stealing it, everyone should be able to!" is his basic point.
JWZ is railing against [dnalounge.com] (and rightfully so!) the fact that the royalties he pays never go to the artists who actually (wrote | recorded | etc.) the music he's playing in his club!
This is what she really said... (Score:5, Funny)
Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
That should read: Would if bother you if someone copied your paper instead of paying me for the paper I coerced you into giving me?
$1000 for a hard drive? (Score:2)
There's a difference (Score:4, Insightful)
How much does she make again? There seems to be a basic disconnect with the simplest elements of intellectual property laws here, and this isn't the first example.
sigh... 90% of debates seem to be teaching the ABCs of logic, argument and the definitions of words.
You're missing the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway, this isn't a legal argument, it's an appeal to emotion: "This thing which involves copying information produced by the artist upsets the artist. Would you like it if someone did a thing which involved copy produced by you which upsets you?" There is a consistent theme: that copying information without the producer's consent is wrong.
They (the distributors) know perfectly well that they can't make copying impossible, so they are doing everything possible to make it inconvenient and make people not want to do it.
People know they should pay the artist, that it's the right thing to do. The distributors' strategy then is to make them equate "paying the artist" with "buying the CD." It's their only choice, really; if they even admitted there are other ways of paying the artist that don't require the distributors at all, such as a busking model, they'd be cutting their own throats.
If your argument against them consists of pointing out the logical flaws in their argument, you'll just end up looking like a nitpicker to anyone who doesn't already agree with you completely. If you really want to help promote the move away from obsolete, expensive distribution systems, it would be better to point out other ways to support the artists.
The Problem of Fair Exchange (Score:2)
The Artist's royalties should go to the artists, or to an artists trust fund, separate from the record companies.
Then at least we can deal with the issues of copying with the problems of crooks getting in the way.
they muddy the water too much.
I think we could all agree on some sort of fair exchange for the artists, if nothing else.
hmmmmmmmmmm... (Score:2)
Seems like at least one musician thinks his A paper is being peddled all over town.
Poor guy. But there are two ways to prevent that kind of thing from happening to you:
1)Always enter into a favorable up-front royalty aggreement with any record company in contracts. Always. Even if you think the contracted work will come to nothing.
2)Join ASCAP [ascap.com] It is a lot easier for a record company to brush off the royalty statement requests of a burnt out hippie than a powerful organziation representing him. Generally speaking.
Have you seen anyone copying newspapers? (Score:3, Insightful)
My question then is who is stealing here?
Cheers.
Re:Have you seen anyone copying newspapers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Music CDs, on the other hand, aren't sponsored, and they're advertised one HELL of a lot more aggressively than most newspapers -- probably has to do with the audience being more subject to faddish obsessions. You don't see people wantonly swithcing newspaper subscriptions that often.
To Hillary I ask would ask: (Score:5, Insightful)
'What have you done this week?' She might say she bought a sweater because she liked it. So I'd tell her 'Oh, you bought a sweater? Would it bother you if you had to pay for that sweater again if you wanted to tie it around your waist when it got too warm to wear it? Would it bother you if you couldn't tie that sweater around your waist too? Would that bug you?'
Hillary Told Us to Rip Music. (Score:4, Interesting)
She's assuming that music listeners want to be moral when they're being entertained. They don't. Much music is meant to help people unwind, or even bring out their darker feelings that they accumulate in life, where it's taboo to discuss. The same goes for movies, video games, Slashdot, and other entertainment. Entertainment often glamourizes theft, sex and murder, so it should be no surprise that so many music fans enjoy the much milder crime of CD ripping and burning. Yet if she tells her artists to make morally correct music, she'll lose her customers.
Re:To Hillary I ask would ask: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're right, of course, but it doesn't matter. It should be the undesireable behavior that is illegal, not the technology that happens to enable it along with hundreds of other legitimate behaviors.
In fact, if you manage to get them to give a straight answer, they'll probably even tell you this kind of behavior is fine.
That has never and will never be the position of the RIAA. As far as they're concerned you purchase a licence to the recording on that particular medium. You might get them to admit that making a backup copy is ligit, but if you want the recording in a different format they think you should have to pay again. It is unfortunate for them that current law doesn't allow for that position, so they've resorted to lobbying for new laws that will indirectly give them that power.
Re:Xeroxing? (Score:3, Funny)
I own a lot of congressmen who support the DMCA.
pleased to meet you, won't you guess my name.
But what's puzzling you, is it's a liscense that I claim.
I'm the one you can thank
for the hip hop and swank.
I'm a corporate pimp
leaching off some young skank.
pleased to meet you
won't you guess my name.
But what's puzzling you, is it's a liscense that I claim.
Steal my A paper! (Score:2)
This pisses me off. (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes me so mad. I am not even much of a hacker, but I'd like to be, in the real sense of the word.
I take stuff apart.
I make my computer do what I want it to, even if it wasn't originally intended to do those things.
The hacker ethic is several orders of magnitude more beneficial to society than the RIAA.
Hackers got us on the moon.
Hackers made The Matrix [imdb.com].
Hackers made slashdot.
I, for one, hope the hacker ethic is here to stay, no matter what this prick has to say about it.
Moral Of The Story For Musicians (Score:2)
From the linked Salon piece: Byrd's failure to earn artist's royalties stems in part from his inability to find a copy of his contract. "I've looked everywhere," he says
The moral is obvious: Save the paperwork. Make copies. Get a safety deposit box and/or fireproof safe, etc. You never know when may need it.
same old stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't believe that anybody thinks that the record industry has the best interests of the artists at heart - if they did they'd incorporate as non-profit corporations and divide the profits among the artists.
The industry is there to make money - why can't they just be honest about it instead of claiming to be the best friend of the recording artist?
An important consideration (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Downloadable music/video/software/games
2. The freedom to burn CDs
3. The freedom to share (to a certain extent)
4. The freedom to switch formats and time/location shift
5. More reasonable prices ($.25 a song or so)
and so forth, that the people who enjoy this music/software/games/video etc. respond IN KIND and don't take that opportunity to deprive musicians/developers of the means to make a living by refusing to pay under any circumstances.
I think the loosening of the current restrictions is probably very likely. I also think people are basically honest and are willing to pay a fair price for a good product. I also think if people were able to do business on-line reliably enough to support themselves, we could very easily see an unemployment rate of 1%-2%, and an economic advance that would make the dot-com era look like the mid 70s, but without the bubble.
I certainly hope the net doesn't just become a warez wasteland, or we will have insulted the potential of the Internet and in the process wasted a spectacular opportunity to improve a lot of things.
The False Blank CD Sales Statistic & RIAA Spin (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
Last year, recordable discs outsold CDs for the first time.
I've seen this statistic before, and it's misleading as hell. The conclusion made in the article cited and previous articles I've found in the LA Times & NY Times, is that CD copying is exploding, with the recording industry losing out on what could have been a boost in sales. This, however, is a lie, and a wonderful example of using statistics to mislead people.
It's a lie because all the statistic shows is the number of individual blank CD-Rs sold. There is NO USE INFORMATION associated with this number. As is well-known on /., people burn CDs to back-up their work, store pictures and video, copy CDs they already own to reduce wear on their purchased CDs, burn ISOs of downloaded programs, etc, etc, etc. The use is limited only by the imagination of the person with the burner. Yet, RIAA would have us all believe that 90% or more are used to copy CDs. I don't buy it, and they don't have the information to prove it.
Lastly, there's this nugget:
Even Harvard Law School students are getting into the act. When Hilary Rosen, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, lectured at Harvard last week, she asked how many of the law students had illegally downloaded music. About one-third of them put their hands up. But when she asked how many had burned CDs for friends, the vast majority raised their hands.
''And some of these people are thinking of going into the entertainment industry,'' Rosen said afterward, shaking her head in disbelief. ''This is what we're up against.''
What Rosen is "up against" is called FAIR USE. The sort of CD copying for a friend is exactly what is protected, even under the current DMCA-clouded copyright landscape, under the home audio & recording act. You ARE permitted to copy & share your music, burn CDs for friends, etc. The law that allows you to make tape copies makes no differentiation between analog & digital media. So Rosen's head-shaking is so much dross & corporate lobbying. I agree on targeting people who sell copies, that's dirty. But sharing with friends & family? Gimme a break - that's free advertising.
"... a cruel and shallow money trench..." (Score:5, Funny)
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway, where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- Hunter S Thompson
I like this quote, but I think that Thompson was a little too positive. Maybe he was having an excessively good day.
On being nice to your customers (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because hard drive business has a better relationship with its customers. I don't recall Western Digital or Maxtor suing a customer because he tinkered with his drive. You could say that IBM screwed its customers with the DeskStar saga, but you can't blame Big Blue for N'Sync, 98 Degrees, etc. People are willing to spend a pretty penny for storage; they aren't willing to drop $18 for two singles and filler.
Boston Globe Author Seems Niave (Score:5, Insightful)
How can you draw any conclusions from comparing a product that costs $0.50 per unit to a product that costs $18 per unit? The above sentence shows that people are spending $550 million on blanck CDs and $17.4 BILLION on prerecorded CDs. This is a factor of 32 in favour of prerecorded CDs!
Why do I see everyone saying that piracy is the reason for the drop in record sales? I'm sure most
It's also notable where the people who still buy music are buying it. Chains like Tower and Virgin are down 8 to 9 percent, according to SoundScan, while mass merchants such as Wal-Mart and Target (that is, stores that sell many other products besides CDs) are up 6 percent.
Imagine, CD sales UP in stores that sell them cheaply!
Albhy Galuten, vice president of new media for Universal Records: "I find it incredibly ironic that some people will spend an extra $1,000 on their hard drives just so they can store more music, but they won't pay for the music."
Where does this guy buy hard drives? Seems to me that a 40G HD is $150 Canadian. That's enough to store about 10000 songs, or about 1000 albums. That would cost $18000 dollars to buy those albums new, though, so even if you were paying $1000 for your hard drive, I could still see why you were doing it.
I haven't gotten to the Salon article yet... maybe it will cheer me up.
Re:Boston Globe Author Seems Niave (Score:3, Funny)
The blank ones sound better than the recorded ones [billboard.com].
"Ironic" (Score:4, Interesting)
this just shows how out of touch these people are.
1. I didn't pay $1,000 for a hard drive, I paid $200.
2. I did it because the Hard Drive is a good deal. Selling us shitty music at $19.99 is not.
So Give Us Something We Can Use (Score:4, Funny)
Sure, some piracy is there because of the price (Only the industry's illegal price fixing to blame for that) but a hell of a lot more of it is simply due to the fact that the consumer can't get what he wants any other way. And the industry is clearly not willing to provide it.
You know what the industry wants, what it really wants? It wants to control your entire listening and viewing experience and it wants each person to pay every time he listens to a song or watches a movie. And they want the $30 up front charge which they insist is just for the media and not for the right to view or listen.
They wonder why their sales figures are dropping. Maybe it's because more people like me are becoming unwilling to pay those greedy pig fuckers a single god damned cent. I can't even remember the last time I bought a new CD for my collection (I don't download MP3s off the net either.) I can remember the last time I went to see a movie; Brotherhood of the Wolf (Sucked, but at least it sucked in French) and Mullholland Drive (Kicked ass) before that. Didn't see Harry Potter. Didn't see LOTR. Probably won't see Attack of the Clones. The industry can blow me!
I'm not inclined to be the least bit sympathetic until those whiney fucks get with the technological program and start offering consumers some choice, and I don't mean "Should I buy the latest Britney Spears album or the latest Backstreet Boys album?" They're here to serve us. Not the other way around.
Not all CD burning has music. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lets see. 100+ CDs I've burned in the last year to distribute reports and large files that were too big for email. 3 CDs I've burned in the last year to make mix-tapes for my freinds.
Sorry to burst that bubble, but from where I sit, a lot of the CD burning that goes on is for legitimate, business applications.
But if you listened to them, the CD burners we have at the office are tools of evil. And.. I'm supposed to pay additional taxes to cover the losses to the recording industry?
"Hey boss... the price of CD-Rs just went up." 'Why?' "Well, aparently our business has to pay Madonna and N'Sync because of some high school kids".
Lunacy. Pure Lunacy.
Reaping What They Sowed (Score:4, Insightful)
I was an active music consumer when CDs first came out in the USA. At the time, they were priced several dollars more than LPs (actually, the price, in some cases, was nearly double). The price increase, we were told by the labels, was due to low sales volume compared to LPs and lack of CD production facilities in the USA (the first CD production facility in the USA came online around 85 or 86, I believe) and that CDs would get cheaper once these factors abated.
Like idiots, we believed the labels and waited for the prices to come down. They didn't. They didn't come down when CDs overtook LP sales. They didn't come down when CDs overtook cassette sales. In fact, they kept going up. The labels liked the fat profits they were making with no effort when CD production costs plummetted and their prices remained the same.
Here we are 18 years later and the record labels are getting exactly what they deserve. They got fat and stupid off of their CD profits and were too slow to respond effectively once digital music became a force to be reckoned with. Did they make individual songs available for purchase and download so people wouldn't have to fork over $20 for a CD that contained one or two songs they liked? No. Did they make cheaper MP3 versions of albums available for people who didn't care about the quality, expense, and packaging of a full-priced CD? No.
The labels didn't respond to the market and so the market is running all over them. It's sad that the artists are the ones being screwed, though. The labels sowed the seeds of discontent and now the reaper has come to call.
"Piss on the leftover food" mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
"I ask them, 'What have you done last week?' They may say they wrote a paper on this or that. So I tell them, 'Oh, you wrote a paper, and you got an A? Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too? Would that bug you?'"
Well, disregarding the fact that taking the paper and getting an A devalues As and punishes the person who is doing the cheating (neither of which is pertinent to this discussion), my answer is "No, that wouldn't bother me at all. I would be glad to have helped someone."
If I get an apple and Johnny gets an apple too, that's a good thing, not a bad thing. For me to get an apple then burn the tree so Johnny can't get one is not helpful, it's not wise, and it's not right. It's also not terribly important right now while the apples are pop-music, but when we're talking about medical software that could save someone's life, or, in the not so distant future, code for a nanofactory that makes food or housing, it becomes very important.
The day is not so far away when these laws, which we make to satisfy piss-ant small-minded corporate drones who imagine that they have a right to profit by punishing others, will affect how many children in the world die of hunger and exposure, or how many people live in squalor and die of malaria.
That we should treat their arguments as anything other than the temper tantrums one would expect of a two year old is inexpressibly infuriating. Have we really learned nothing from millenia of two-bit dictators suppressing the masses for no reason other than it makes them feel important?
fraud vs. IP (Score:5, Insightful)
Similar reasoning can be applied to CD burning. If I burn a CD for a friend, and scrawl the title on it with a Sharpie and slip it in a paper sleeve, that's one thing. It's another thing if I make a master, and start running them off at a pressing facility, with perfect copies of the CD art and liner notes as well, and pass these off (for sale, in the market) as legit. Now, I'm not going to say here that one is moral and one isn't (although you can guess what I think), I'm just saying that on a certain moral level, these acts are
A quote from Hillary (Score:3)
Inaccurate metaphor (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's look at this metaphor more closely:
Would it bother you if somebody could just take that paper and get an A too?
On the music side, this is equivalent to taking another artists' music and passing it off as your own. However, this is not what's happening. The "problem" is that people are copying artists' music for free so they can play it at their convenience. The "A paper" equivalent to this would be:
Would it bother you if somebody could just photocopy your paper and read it whenever they want without having to pay you for making the copy?
I don't think many people would have a problem with this. In fact, most people would probably be honoured that their work is so respected. I am not saying that these artists do not deserve to be paid for their work, but this metaphor is poor.
Burn all you want, either way the artist loses... (Score:3, Informative)
Salon: Courtney Love Does The Math [salon.com]
And the essay that inspired the speech:
Negativland Official Site: The Problem With Music by Steve Albini [negativland.com]
The only people whose ox is getting gored from "the culture of CD burning" are the Five Families of the Record Business and the RIAA. The artists already get it up the butt, with no vaseline and definitely no reach-around.
If Sheryl Crow and Elvis Costello want to see more return from their music, then they should go indie and set up a site where people can download their music legally for a fair price. Unfortunately it's not so easy to get out of a record contract...it really is like indentured servitude at the moment [recordinga...lition.com].
So yeah, let Hilary Rosen, Vivendi, Sony, AOL-TW/WEA, Bertlesmann and EMI weep in their beer all they want. I have no sympathy for those bastards.
I will continue to buy my music used because I don't want them to make money off my musical tastes. If I want to rip my own mix CDs from CDs I bought, then that's my own damn business. I don't do P2P...I am naturally paranoid about my network and am not into opening up holes in it lightly.
Until artists get the fair shake they deserve, I do not see my actions as hurting them. They are suffering enough as it is at the hands of the same people who cry buckets of crocodile tears about "the poor artists" in the media.
Re:Personal Investment? (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the article. [salon.com]
Re:Hilary Rosen is confused ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Metaphor, peeps. Not a literal representation of the situation. Just metaphor.
She's saying, "Wouldn't you be pissed if somebody else gained from your hard work without you getting a damn thing?" And she's hoping people will say, "Yes."
Okay, counter-point time... I used the word "gained", and that, in Slashworld, implies profit. But that's not necessarily so. If somebody burns a CD, they've "gained" the benefit of not having a negative impact on their wallets, which surely would have happened had they paid for the music legally.
So the metaphor stands: somebody else using your work for their benefit without consideration for the investment of your time and energy is *similar* to somebody copying a CD without consideration for the machinery, both creative and economic, that went into its creation.
Jesus, people... Stretch your brains a little.
Re:Does she understand open source/GPL at all? (Score:4, Insightful)
Go to the URL right next to my 'user 580 info' there and you will find music you can download and KEEP, for free. Go to the artwork section and you'll find the COVERS for burning free CDs of the different albums. And all those 'buy now' buttons and crap are for ACTUAL RED BOOK COMPLIANT NEVER-BEEN-COMPRESSED HIGH-RESOLUTION-MASTER CDS. Real CDs done right.
And on every CD is written: please copy this CD for your friends.
The CDs have bonus tracks, every time- and why not? But I totally encourage people to rip the CDs in any format you'd like to see around- 256K mp3? Ogg Vorbis? WMA, which I despise? Go nuts, you are free to do so! And then share the fsckers on Gnutella or whatever else pleases you. I mean it.
There are some artists (while he lived, John Lennon was very much one of them) for whom living right is more important than kaching! Mind you, if I wanted to get economically raped, I'd solicit a major label contract instead of keeping rights to my own work ;) but you HAVE to be able to imagine where all this is heading.
In a world where digital information is completely fluid, trying to fix a representation of the information is absolutely pointless. It's fucking crazy is what it is, excuse the strong language. It is the equivalent of wanting to charge for individual electrons in the electricity that powers your house. It's wanting to charge for water molecules in a rainstorm in the middle of the ocean. (damn good analogy actually, as most of the water is undrinkable, the value of really good water is high, yet it's falling from the sky all around you anyhow)
When ultimate broadband, ultimate storage, ultimate compression and encoding and playback happen, what will we have then? You will log onto the internet and someone will put up a file on a website or whatever. "Recorded Music (235T)" Oh, it's the archive of the complete history of recorded music! 235 terabytes. Gee, that's only a five minute download, *click* and so you have the history of recorded music on your Holo-Uber-Optical-Drive.
Now what?
The kind of incredible, unbelievable liquidity of information we're headed for (quick question: over your current modem or broadband, how long does it take you to download more written text literature than you could ever possibly read in your life?) changes the whole concept of the entertainment industry. It is no longer a one-to-many situation. Information storage and processing is expanding so fast that the new problem is not distribution, but overchoice.
At Ampcast, I have an album that is 'noise' music. It's the raging shrieks and staticy roars of a processed shortwave radio picking up things like satellites and atmospheric disturbances. Some people really like this kind of stuff, but most sane people would hate it. Some people really hate Britney Spears but most sane people would acknowledge the cynical competence of her production and tap their foot along to the artifical pop tripe. Yet, in data form, both sorts of music take up about the same number of bytes. And not only that, but an increasingly manageable number of bytes- no sort of problem to keep around. The future will mean you will have every imaginable music and film at your fingertips- and the question will not be 'how can I get this', but 'what do I actually like?'
In the past it was difficult enough to deliver music, that you had to go with what would appeal to a broad cross-section of people. This problem is DEAD... so on the one hand the future contains an ever-widening bunch of genres and musical/artistic styles (try understanding modern electronic dance music forms! Incredible forking and proliferation of distinct stylized forms...) and on the other hand it becomes virtually impossible to sort out what actually interests you from the 20 million other musics and arts that don't do anything for you...
If the entertainment industry had any clue at all they'd be trying to get a handle on this. What they're actually doing, for instance by cracking down on webcasting that tries to intelligently predict listener tastes, is destroy it. But they CANNOT destroy the need for it- because with information as liquid as it's gonna be, the amount of overchoice produces a compelling need for this new approach.
We will end up with a succession of entirely synthetic (possibly CGI!) worldwide superstars- whose appeal is so relentlessly broad that it has no depth or staying power at all- and everything else will be CHAOS... and choice. And just a hint of that meritocracy that the entertainment industry's been outgrowing.
Music by this longwinded geek [ampcast.com]
Even less commercial music [ampcast.com]
Who told him he could sing? [ampcast.com]
Chris Johnson
Re:Social Events (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes people make bad career choices. That's a fact of life too. If you've chosen to sell canned content, you certainly picked a bad time to do it.
We cannot in good conscience use the freedom and potential of the Internet as license to shoplift every bit of value produced by people on the AGREEMENT that they will receive value in kind for their work.
What agreement? If you produce something that can be copied infinitely many times, you should make sure that you are paid before you ever release that thing.
All work has value.
No, it doesn't. Something only has value if someone wants that thing.
The sooner we get past this debate, the sooner we can have all the cool promised products.
Huh? What am I not getting now that you think I will get by blindly continuing to follow the current system?
Re:Social Events (Score:3, Interesting)
To what? If it's zero, bye-bye content.
Again (and again.. sigh...), I am not defending making $50M on plastic disks. I'm advocating the same thing that everyone else in this debate is advocating: compensating the artists, writers and developers fairly.
If the Internet is allowed to turn into the warez network, then these self-proclaimed supporters of the artists will have done nothing of the kind.
I think most people will pay a fair price for a good CD or book. I think those same people should frown on people who don't pay that fair price.