68 new of 134 responses total.
Re 66. Because the likelihood that the line will be that long is infinitesimal from the standpoint of the average musician.
re #66: Again, that is not how it works. The contracts available to
most artists are carefully constructed so that the record company can
claim to lose money, no matter how many copies are sold. "'A band will
make more money by giving away 500,000 copies of an album - if that
helps them sell more forty-dollar concert tickets and twenty-five-dollar
T-shirts - than it would by not giving away a single album and selling
only 200,000 copies,' says an agent at a high-powered talent agency."
Rolling Stone, "World War MP3", June 17, 1999. Here's a bitter account
of how a $250,000 "advance" can translate into barely more than $4,000
per band member - http://www.arancidamoeba.com/mrr/problemwithmusic.html
.
For an examination of the same type of contract in a related industry
(motion pictures), see "Less Than Zero - Studio Accounting Practices in
Hollywood" - http://www.hollywoodnetwork.com/Law/Hart/columns/index.html
("The accounting provisions which are contained in the studios' SPDs
make it difficult, if not mathematically impossible in many cases, for
net profits ever to be achieved."), and "Where's The Profit" -
http://www.college.hmco.com/accounting/readings/12-bengei.html ("What do
Rain Man, Batman, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? have in common? At the
box office, all three are among the 40 most successful films of all
time, but each as remained in the red for those performers, writers, and
other filmmakers whose contracts provide a share in the film’s net
profits. And these three films are not unique in this respect. Fewer
than 5% of released films show a profit for net profit participation
purposes.") For the record, the movie industry based its accounting
model on the record industry's model. See T. Connors, "Beleaguered
Accounting", 70 S. Cal. L. Rev. 841, 847 (1997).
Quibbling over whether performers directly see any of the money paid for the recording strikes me as somewhat pointless. The more important questions are wehther they get paid, and to a lesser extent whether how well their recording does determines their wealth. If somebody buys services from my employer, and I then do the engineering work required for whatever they've bought, you could argue that I never see a penny of the money they're paying my employer. By the standards being used in this argument, you'd be right. I'm not paid on commission. Even if I spend this week bringing in more revenue than everybody else in the company combined, what I get paid for this week will be no different than if I'd spent the time sitting in my chair and staring at the wall. However, that's not to say that I'm not being compensated for what I do, or that getting work done doesn't benefit me personally. My employer pays my sallary on the assumption that I will be doing work, rather than staring at the wall. If I weren't getting work done, I probably wouldn't continue to receive that sallary for all that long. If I do good work, in theory the sallary will go up, or at least it will look good on a resume and cause me to get paid more by somebody else, eventually. Likewise, wheter recording artists are paid on commission provides a less than full answer to whether they are being compensated. If a recording artist is being paid only on commission, and the commission contract is rigged such that the artist won't possibly be able to make a cent, then the artist probably isn't making anything off that recording. If, on the other hand, the artist is getting a million dollar advance on the recording, and then not earning any royalties on it, the artist is still doing pretty well. It should also be noted that there are other reasons for doing things, beyond immediate payment and pure enjoyment. If an artist is getting a $100 advance and almost no chance for commissions on their first CD, but will then be in a position to do much better financially on their second CD if their first one does well, then releasing a first CD for no money can still have great benefits for the artists. How likely these benefits are to happen, and whether it's worth it, are things the artist has to decide. As such the first CD can be seen as a high risk investment -- something that will likely cause the loss of whatever resources are put into it, but which has some small chance of bringing extreme riches. There are also ways to make money off publishing that don't involve getting money from the publisher at all. I don't know how this works for the music industry, but there are certainly some fields where the prestige of having published a book can increase peoples' sallaries in their other jobs.
((response cloned from M-net:)) We seem to be into really subtle territory here in the difference between the trial court judge Patel's original ruling, and what the appeals court has directed. Based on the news reports I'm seeing, Judge Patel ordered Napster to police itself to ensure that copyrighted material is not traded using its system; the Court of Appeals directive is (if I'm reading this right) that the policing of Napster is to be done by the copyright holders; they are to send complaints to Napster, and Napster is only responsible for copyright infringement after they have been notified about it. This sounds like the DCMA's "notice and take down" rules, which is Napster's current policy!! I refer to it as the "nudge, nudge, wink, wink" school of copyright enforcement. On the other hand, the appeals court clearly said that Napster's file trading does not fall under the protection of fair use. So I really don't know what to make of it... and this is all over a preliminary injunction anyway, the actualcopyright infringement trial starts this spring, and Patel has made it clear she's about as hostile to Napster as a judge can get towards a civil defendant. (Maybe the appeals court is telling the music industry that if they want genuine, effective relief, they'll have to start suing the individual Napster users?)
#67, 68> *shrug* We disagree. I'm moving on.
What is the purpose of Napster? Is it to allow general users to download non-copyright material? No. Is it to allow me who buys a CD of a 'band' to 'record' a specific song from that CD and personally use it how I see fit? No. (plenty programs to do that on me own machine) (I zap copies of Mary Wilson's Music and computer CDs so that when she destroys them (she never has originals) I can give her another copy. Wish I did the same for vhs cassettes (three copies of pocohontas and counting....)). The primary use of Napster is in fact to allow a user to download and record 'songs' he/she hasn't 'paid for' no matter how you look at it and no matter how Napster wants you to look at it. In the real world thats the way Napster is used (or mis-used). I frankly don't see the 'business model' for Napster that generate profit for investors even right now much less originally. If Napster's 'business model' was instead to facilitate the distribution of child porno instead of 'bootleg' recordings I don't think there would be any question about shutting it down. As for it only really hurting the 'big bad' record companies instead of the 'original artists', well... I would suggest that if it were not for the original 'record companies' -despite their extremely predatory practices - you would likely as not have never even 'heard' of the 'original artists'. The 'record company' *did* get the Beatles out there and last I heard with the exception of the dead one they weren't exactly on welfare... For every 'success' how many unbelievably stupid 'records' or 'films' were released by a 'major studio' and perhaps the 'creative accounting' on the part of the studios is in order to have the 'one' success subsidize the 400 major abject and outright failures each year in order for the studios to 'make money' for their investors so they can stay in business. After all, nobody forces the 'author' to take a percentage of the 'net' instead of the 'gross'. How many movie 'classics' now were considered 'box office disasters' upon their release? _Its a Wonderful Life_ I seem to recall was a 'box office disaster' comes to mind. No, Napster is clearly in the business of 'bootleg'-ing and ought to be shut down. Oh, I am looking for the english version of _Shanghai Noon_. I will gladly trade you a copy of the 'files' (two) on two CDs for the same in english. I have the VCD set with Mandarin in one channel and Cantonese in another with three other language 'subtitles' in the video...Mary Wilson and Nai-Nai enjoy it, but I would like to have one in english... (Is _Shanghai Noon_ even on DVD release yet? I bought the two cd (VCD) set in very professional package for less than a dollar in Hu Fei, An Wei province last year from a street vendor (I coulda probably got it for less except on account I look like I have money - am 'epicanthaly challenged')). Please to send me e-mail at bdh@bdh.nu.
Re 69. The issue is not whether somebody is getting compensated at all. The issue, for me, as I originally stated it, is that the cost of a new CD in a store is so outlandishly high that I'm not really interested in buying any at that price. The fact that none of that large amount of money benefits the artist, except very indirectly and speculatively, only reinforces this. Buying a CD at a concert is slightly different. It's almost like a donation toward the living expenses of someone who is doing music because they love doing it, given that they could enjoy a higher income doing almost anything else. In fact, at the kind of concerts I go to, usually it's the performer himself/herself, or a band member, at the CD table taking the money.
So for those who are against napster, and I'll admit freely that some use it for getting all they can, aren't we splitting hairs because the courts feel that a computer does not constitute a home recording device (even though I have a program like Adaptec's Disc Jockey where I can import my vinyl and tapes into it) therefore it's not protected like your dual cassette recorder is? I'm more offended that Eminem and other artists feel that "If you can afford a computer you can afford the $16 to buy my ...CD" I am COMPLETELY offended by that. I DO buy thier overpriced CD's. What you see coming out of the woodwork on this issue are hippocrites and money grubbing artists against this system. Case in Point, Metallica, who advocated bootlegging not only the albums, but the concerts they did, who now have been vocal about napster and equally as tightfisted with their concert material. they saw $$$. They had a big enough fan base. So they changed their mind. So that means that every other artist has to as well, right? Big bad metallica has offically spoken out of both sides of their face. I'm especially angry that the shift after Frampton Comes Alive is for MONEY to rule the recording industry. I am all for the little people who do what they can and produce their own, like Ani Defranco. But now you have MBA's dictating what the public will like, wanting cookie cutter bands, and warping any idea of "music" as played by the musician. The RIAA has made the artist a comodity of the Record Company, similiar to Slave Labor, and some of us might actually LIKE to hear something GOOD. If you go after napster, by all rights you should go after ever kid who gives his friend or his sweetheart a tape of "their songs". But because of all the BS that happened 20-30 years ago, you can't. It's just a matter of setting precident with a computer as a recording device. I wonder if I should send the appelate court judges a copy of one of the several computer programs that COMPOSE music?
(#73> Having reread the thread, I do admit that I took a side comment of Larry's and made a major thread out of it, and then, having forgotten it was a side note of his, commented as if it had been the crux of his argument. My apologies for that; it was inadvertant, not malicious, but it was still inappropraite.) #72> Beady, all the rest of your comments aside, child porn is illegal. Metallica songs aren't. There's a HUGE difference between the illegal exchange of legal material and the exchange of illegal material. While I think the former is still inappropriate, in the "Grand Sheme," your comparison sucks wad. If anything, it represents those of us who are opposed to Napster on solid moral grounds as fruitcakes who don't know the difference between Metallica and kiddie porn.
#74> The most apropos comparison to Napster in the non-virtual world would be someone standing at a concert with a crate full of home-burned CDs, giving them away to people for $1/per to cover costs. Someone giving copies to all their friends isn't a "large enough" example. The point being: You may have five or six friends that you regularly give pirated music to. Napster gives far far more than five or six people access to your HD.
Well, for an example, NO ONE has access to my hard drive. I don't allow downloads when I'm online. It slows down the process. Another thing, it is an urealistic expectation that a preson is going to do that, have a crate and sell them. First off, nothing is being sold, and secondly, those are the SAME fears that came with dual tape copies. And tapes from vinyl. Tapes were EVIL remember? It is the SAME thing, only we have the ability to make a cd, not just a tape. I think the problems are unfounded.
I think the big question with recording industry practices is "is there any alternative?" The problem is there really isn't. They control all the distribution channels, so they can conspire to make the contracts as bad as they want and it'll be a matter of "my way or the highway." At one point they even made a nearly-successful attempt to keep stores from selling used CDs. The syndicates that handle newspaper comic strips are in a similar situation. There's only about five of them, and if you're a cartoonist and you don't like the terms they offer you, well, too bad. They've locked up the market for newspaper comic page space. There's no room for independents.
Sun/ashke in resp:74 :: "aren't we splitting hairs because the courts feel that a computer does not constitute a home recording device (even though I have a program like Adaptec's Disc Jockey where I can import my vinyl and tapes into it) therefore it's not protected like your dual cassette recorder is?" This isn't the courts splitting hairs. This is the courts applying the definitions -- pretty clear ones -- laid down by Congress in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. These are the same definitions which the courts interpreted to allow MP3 players to be sold, even though they do not incorporate SCMS. Yes, at some level it's splitting hairs, in the sense that most laws eventually end up splitting hairs somewhere. On the other hand, the AHRA was also one of those grand compromises which tried to balance the competing interests of the copyright industry, the electronics industry, and the consumers, and like it or not, resolutions like this are what Congress is for. See http://www.hrrc.org (Home Recording Rights Coalition) for a good background on the law. ((I have more to pass along about the Napster ruling and will hope to get it cranked out later today.))
But that definition was laid down BEFORE mass applications for computers were truly used....correct? The leaps and bounds in computer technology and home pc technology are amazing. If you had told me in 91 that I'd be playing music on a computer, I'd have called you crazy. Now? I use it as much as my stereo.
I was playing music on the computer in 1991. I was playing music on the computer in 1984. Mass reproduction has been available for quite some time. The law is plain: Reproduce a few times, and we won't prosecute, even though it's illegal. Reproduce a few thousand times, and we'll prosecute. This isn't a matter of new v. old technology. The only way that new technology is relevant is that it's now easier to break the law. That doesn't mean you're not breaking the law anymore.
Re #80, 81: Actually, the law says, "reproduce a few times, using a stand-alone audio CD burner and audio CD blanks, and we won't prosecute. Reproduce a few times, using a computer and data CD blanks, and we might." It does sort of split hairs. Stand-alone audio burners are considered "home recording devices" and computers aren't.
Brighn is somewhat mistaken in #81: he's describing prosecutorial discretion and allocation of resources, not the law, and we are generally concerned with civil copyright infringement here, not criminal. And so far no individual users of Napster have been sued. Gull in resp:82 :: yes, that's the law. In exchange for the extra royalties one pays for the audio CD burner and the audio CD blanks, Congress rules that you are immune from copyright suit for the non-commercial use of those things, even if you are duplicating copyrighted material. There's no technical difference between an audio blank and a data blank, merely a legal/royalty difference. You could be sued for copyright infringement for the use of your computer to clone CDs on data discs, and if you did it often enough the felony provisions of the No Electronic Theft Act would apply.
This response has been erased.
>Somebody somewhere here a long time ago referred to a law that limited home >copies to a certain number. There was some discussion at that point as to >whether or not that was a law or just a practice, but I thought that it had >ultimately come down that it was a law.
Re #83: Who decides who gets the royalties? Do they just go to the record companies? (Interestingly, it's also *impossible* to use the legal, audio blanks in a computer. You get an 'application code' error.)
OOC, I've been archiving my old vinyls onto CD via computer. Not that I'm going to stop or anything, but I assume that's legal... is it? (It's for my own usage, recording LPs I own into CDs I own). #85> I recall now that it was determined that it wasn't law, but rather a legal guideline agreed to by some grand power like the RIAA or other... details remain sketchy in my head, though. *shrug* This is why I keep trying to remind myself to stay out of legal discussions and keep to moral discussions. The law is overly intricate and pointless, in many ways.
Re #87: It's technically illegal, but the chances of getting sued over it are nonexistant.
In theory it is also impossible to use data blanks on home audio CD recorders, but some can be fooled and anything can be hacked. I've been prowling through Napster a bit. It is a good place to pick up those goofy fringe recordings of horrible things happening to a purple reptile or to mutants with video displays embedded into thier digestive systems, or other oddball things that you won't find on a mass-produced audio format. And if Napster does get heavily modified, as has been pointed out, alernatives exist already, including servers using Napster protocol that will work with clients that can be given specified servers. (I don't know what a real Napster client is like, so I don't know if this is easy/hard/impossible on them.)
The technological cat's out of the bag, re: Napster. Frankly, the best the Majors and the RIAA can hope for is maintaining enough of a PR image that some of us actually respect them enough to keep from ripping them off. I think that's Bertelmann's strategy. Of course, they could ALWAYS restructure how they pay artists so those of us who don't respect them begin to again. If anything, that's one really good thing that could come out of this mess, once the dust settles. Personally, I'm not going to hold my breath, but that DOES seem to be a motivator that I've heard a lot -- the first is that CDs are too pricey, but the second is that none or little of that money goes to the artists (directly, at least, and the indirectly is clearly too "indirectly" for some people's tastes).
Their best response, barring an unforeseen advance in encryption and pay-per-download technology, would probably be to offer affordable blanket licenses for various libraries of downloadable music (akin to what is available to commercial enterprises through BMI and ASCAP), while pursuing legal remedies against those responsible for any significant level of piracy.
Re 75 re 73. Many thanks for this acknowledgement. I appreciate it.
Back to my resp:0, second paragraph... today we have a wire service story about a Napster statement that they are continuing to work on developing their subscription service: http://www.latimes.com/wires/20010216/tCB00a6683.html "The new business model and technology enables digital music files to be transferred from computer user to computer user -- so-called peer-to-peer sharing -- but restrictions such as limiting the ability to copy files on a CD will be placed on the transferred files, Napster said." So I guess my first thought was correct: they must be planning on having either the sending or receiving program put a Digital Rights Management wrapper around the vanilla MP3 file. ???
Stanford University, where I work, has instituted network routines to put Napster and several other such services at the bottom priority of network processing. They've been eating up so much network resources it slows everybody down. There is no prohibition, and in fact they recommend certain times of day when other network traffic is low. As I suspected, it's the bandwidth. Response among students has been mixed. Some whine that they can't get everything they want RIGHT NOW. Others suggest that perhaps this move will improve the dating scene on campus, as students will be impelled to go out instead of spending all their evenings downloading music from the Web. A list of things that _I_ would prefer doing to watching little completion percentage bars crawl across my computer screen would be a very long list indeed.
At Michigan Tech they banned Napster use because they found the usage pattern it created was aggravating a problem with their backbone switch. (A problem that the switch's manufacturer had, at the time I left, been utterly unable to fix over a period of two or three months.) It wasn't a bandwidth usage problem, exactly; something about the rapid-fire way Napster makes connections was triggering the switch to drop whole network segments for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
News item: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010215/tc/belgium_napsster_1.html "Belgian Cops Raid Music-Sharers." The raids of users homes were primarily aimed at a web site. However, the prosecution spokesman says, "four cases against Napster users were currently under review."
I much preferred the hysterical Slashdot extrapolations (jackbooted Belgian stormtroopers conducting mass arrests) to the actual story, which involves police seizing computers from several people who operated an MP3 download site, but this could indeed turn into a trend to watch..
www.inside.com has the best explanation I've seen of how a Digital Rights Management Napster is supposed to work. Grab the story quick before they move it from the "free" section to the "members" section. New Scientist has a piece on SDMI and watermarking. http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns22782 Like most good stuff, this is indexed from the http://www.mp3.com/news index page.
And the latest news is Napster wants to try to settel with all the record companies including the indies for a cool billion dollars. This works out to 20 dollars a subscriber for napsters current 50 million subscribers, assuming most of them stay signed up for a subscriber service which is a big if, with open nap, guntella, etc, available for free. Seems like a sketchy business model, but it could way to reach the win win solution of unlimited aqccess to music while assuring the record companies and more importantly the artisits their cut.
The artists? Doubtful even in the most optimistic model.
resp:96, resp:97 :: ZDnet(UK) runs a story that the IFPI (the global version of the RIAA) is pushing hard for raids on Napster users in Belgium. "The head of IFPI in Belgium, Marcel Heymans, claimed Thursday that Belgian police were poised to raid the homes of hundreds of Napster users." http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2687923,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnew s01 or some URL like that. As for the billion dollar settlement offer, it smacks of desperation to me. If the four major labels (other than BMG) wanted Napster to continue to exist, and if they thought it could produce a billion dollars in revenue, then they could just continue their lawsuit, win, and collect all Napster assets in the judgement; then they would own Napster and its potential revenues forever. Several of the pieces I read yesterday -- there was a huge flurry of them prompted by the billion dollar offer -- suggest the most likely outcome will be that someone sets up a Napster-ish directory server in one of the countries which currently host off-shore gambling sites. Revenue? One could probably get millions of Napster users to pay a small monthly fee for access to the directory server if the files traded were unrestricted MP3 files, rather than the restricted-use files planned for Napster II.
#110, 99> Even fairly optimistic lil ol' me isn't naive enough to think any noticable amount of Napster's settlement with the RIAA and the Majors will go to the artists. (er, that was 100, not 110)
Couple of fascinating (to me, anyway) news items. Slashdot's "YRO" (Your Rights Online) section links to a story at www.law.com about Dave Powell and Copyright Control Services, who hunt down copyright infringers on the net. So far his business has been mostly defending expensive software packages for pro audio, but he's just chomping at the bit to start working over Napster users. What's holding him back, so far, is the PR concerns of the record labels. The www.law.com URL is just too mindboggling to transcribe, sorry. And Congress, most notably Senator Orrin Hatch (R, Utah), continues to make noises. A story I missed at the Washington Post last Thursday quotes Hatch as raising the possibility that Congress could enact a "compulsory license" for the Internet sale of music. A compulsory license would mean that the copyright holder would lose veto power over the ability of a company to use or sell its music; it's similar to what exists today for radio, I think. The record company screams would be heard for miles. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va) criticizes the record labels for their reluctance to allow sales of individual songs, rather than complete albums. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12511-2001Feb15.html Non-original thoughts: Hatch, in particular, seems particularly irked because he was a principal author of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. The act, which gave the copyright industry just about everything it wanted, was supposed to speed the arrival of an online music business, but here we are, years later, and there's no real online music business, just lawsuits galore. I've lost the essay which claimed that the major labels are still in "deep denial" about the Internet and its implications for their business. And I haven't mentioned a piece from www.musicdish.com, which put forth the proposal that the promotion and distribution sides of the music business converge on the Net... later this afternoon maybe.
(Side note. question: I'd also heard about ten years back or so that there were laws drafted or transcribed that would allow anyone who wants to *cover* a song to do so despite the wishes of the copyright holder, so long as they pay a royalty fee. Is that accurate, or was some media source confused about what was going on?)
I thought that was already the case..
That's essentially correct, as I understand it. The right to make a first recording is under the control of the copyright holder, but to make subsequent recordings, all a performer has to do is pay the statutory licensing fees, and the copyright holder has nothing to say about it. I am not aware that there was any recent change to these rules.
News item: "Next on record industry's hit list -- Napster clones"
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2689187,00.html
(or find it at http://www.mp3.com/news)
With the Court of Appeals ruling against Napster as a precedent,
the RIAA has fired off 60 legal notices to the ISPs of people who
are running "Open Napster" servers. Presumably this is the
DMCA "notice and take down" form letter, in which the ISP has to cut
off the user to protect its own immunity from copyright lawsuit.
What's not mentioned in the story, but what I think I remember from
the Scientology cases, is that the copyright holder has to follow
up with a lawsuit against the user within a short period of time,
or else the ISP and the user are free to continue as before.
The story mentions the difficulties with Open Napster servers located
outside the USA.
The RIAA's lawyer says they have ideas about how to attack Gnutella,
but he declined to discuss them.
Sounds like a losing battle to me. As soon as one program or service is beaten down, two will spring up to take its place. And that's not even taking into account websites outside the US.
Napster's next court date with Judge Marilyn Patel is tomorrow. She's supposed to be working on the injunction to force Napster to cease exchanging copyrighted material, under the direction she was given by the appeals court panel. Does this mean Napster will shut down tomorrow? Seems iffy, since Napster would probably appeal the ruling just to play out the string. But don't be surprised if the survival of Napster-as-we-know-it is measured in days or weeks. Watch online news media for breaking reports of whatever happens. Napster has urged its users to take its cause to Congress, and in response the RIAA has been stocking up on Republican lobbyists. Their most prominent signing is Bob Dole, and this one brings warmth to my heart: I can think of no better Republican representative of the Old Regime, the pre-Internet years, than Bob Dole, Yesterday's Man. The RIAA has also signed up Governor Marc Racicot, who is quoted in a wide variety of news stories that he sees his role as educating Congress as to the role of intellectual property. He specifically names Sen. Orrin Hatch as someone who needs to be educated; I hope Hatch, who co-authored the last major revision of copyright law and who is also a independent songwriter in his spare time, bops Racicot on the head. :)
This isn't directly a Napster-related news item but I'll stick it in here anyway, since some of the players and arguments have figured in the Napster arguments: http://www.latimes.com/business/updates/lat_love010228.htm Lead paragraphs: "Just as actress Olivia de Havilland brought down the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s and outfielder Curt Flood fought for free agency in baseball in the 1970s, rock star Courtney Love is determined to radically redefine the nature of the music recording business for the next century. "Love is seeking to break her contract with Vivendi Universal, the world's largest record conglomerate, and expose what she calls the 'unconscionable and unlawful' tactics of the major record labels." Summarizing: The basic argument seems to be that the standard record label contract is a servitude-for-life kind of deal, and courts have held those to be unreasonable. California has a law which limits entertainment contracts to seven years, but the law has never been tested in the music business. The record companies have settled similar suits with other artists, but Love has strong financial resources, since she controls the Kurt Cobain estate, and she has already fired her previous attorney for trying to settle the suit.
She may have a point. It's entirely possible that seven years exceeds Courtney Love's life expectancy..
There was a similar suit filed within the last six months or so, and my mind has gone vague on the details. It was by the leader/songwriter of Foreigner, or some similar hard rock hair band of days gone by. The plaintiff's argument went like this. Under the contract, he still owes two albums to the record label. However, the label has lost all interest in his style of music, which he admits is now out of fashion, and so the label won't accept or release anything he turns in. There is still a minority interest in his music, and he would like to be free to look for an independent boutique label or maybe market himself; but the label refuses to release him. So essentially he is in permanent bondage and can never earn money through recording music again. He asks the court to terminate the contract because it cannot be fulfilled. I've heard nothing further about this.
He should change his name to a symbol, and wait out his record contract. It worked for Prince, sort of....
Breaking news items on today's court hearing: Judge Patel "concluded the hearing by saying she will rule at an undisclosed time." Napster says it will block one million songs from being traded, starting this weekend, in an attempt to pacify the record companies. (from www.sfgate.com)
According to Britney Spears, there are nine million wonderful songs in the world, so that doesn't seem too bad for Napster. <cough>
Aaron, do you have a cite for that "statistic"? Seriously, it sounds like something which would be a pretty funny read. :)
http://www.mtv.com/sendme.tin?page=/news/gallery/s/spears00_2/index3.htm l
(the "l" wrapped)
Amusing little interview: "MTV: People always think, "Oh, this whole teen pop craze is only going to last five minutes." How is it important for you to show that that won't happen to you? Britney: I think it really boils down to good music. If you do that, I think you'll be around for a while." Hee hee. :)
News media reports differ on whether Napster is going to block "one million songs" or "one million file names;" the RIAA says that one million file names could be as few as 100 songs, since the users pick and mispell the file names as they wish.
So presumably users could get around any blocking based on file names, simply by renaming files. Is such an approach likely to satisfy the court?
Dude! Heard the latest mp3 from Meta11ica? ;)
In the original preliminary injunction order from Judge Patel last July, Napster was directed to halt all trading of copyrighted material involving their service, even if it required Napster to shut down. In contrast, the directions of the appeals court seem to be saying (this is based on press reports and fallible memory, remember) that Napster has to stop the exchanging of copyrighted files to the extent that their technology allows them to do so, while not unreasonably hampering lawful file transfers. All Napster HQ ever sees is the file names; the actual transfers of binary song files take place directly between the users. So the file names are all Napster Inc. has to work with.
Interesting. Thanks for the clarification.
Napster was supposedly going to install filters this weekend to cut down on the copyrighted song traffic, statistics right now are: 2075980 songs 10350 users 8874GB of data. So much for filtering.
Judge Patel's new injunction came out this morning. Reports on it are in most online media sources. The New York Times and inside.com have pretty opposite analyses of it.
regarding Napster song blocking, a friend sent me this.. > I love this idea, from a headline blurb on Slashdot. It can't see it > holding up, but it's a truly inspired idea. :-) > >> AIMster is offering a Pig Latin encoder that will encrypt your mp3 titles. >> They state that, under the DMCA, it would be illegal for the RIAA to >> reverse engineer their encoding scheme and try and filter the encrypted >> filenames from Napster. I have to concur with his assessment that it's unlikely to prevent much of an impediment to the RIAA, but I love the ironic angle..
remmers in resp:124 :: a good article on the injunction and what it requires of Napster is at the Washington Post: http://www.washtech.com/news/media/8141-1.html My guess is that what happens is that the RIAA goes back before Judge Patel in a week or two and says, this is not working.
"The Music Business Thinks Like Napster:" Found at Borders tonight is a sampler from the Verve label's new reissue program of old jazz classics: Ella, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and so forth. It's supposed to be free if you buy one album from the series: but if you want to buy it on its own, Borders will sell it to you for a penny. So far, pretty standard promotional stuff. The twist: for your penny, you get two identical CDs. "Music so good we made it twice," reads the package. "Keep one and pass it on!" This is actually the second time I've heard of this gimmick, though the first I've seen it in the store. (Note to Twila: the package also says there is a bonus new Diana Krall track in here, so you might want to scoop this up.)
a penny for a new Diana Krall song? I'm there..:)
resp:128 :: I lost the news story where the record labels are complaining that Napster is still allowing many song files to be traded. The LA Times reports that Napster is asking Judge Patel to appoint a technically competent monitor to verify that Napster is doing everything possible to comply with the injunction crafted under the guidance of the 9th circuit appeals panel.
I just found out that e-music is having a free promotion (through March 18th) -- they'll let you download fifteen songs (or a whole album, as you choose), for free. They do pay royalties to the artists, and it is a trial to allow you to see how good their for-pay service is, but I found some pretty cool artists on there, and some groups I wouldn't have expected (lots of Cooking Vinyl artists, Ken, and some Shanachie, too...). The url for those who might be interested is: t http://www.emusic.com/index.html#promoanchor (without the t at the beginning, of course)
As a law librarian, I've just had the privilege of cataloging a videotape recording of the appeals court arguments from last November by David Boies (for Napster) and other lawyers (for N's nemeses). My private personal conclusion: They're all idiots, every one.
I've started a new Napster item to be linked between Music and Spring Agora. It's item:music,304 in the music conference. Discussion here should probably stop, though I won't take the step of freezing the item.
You have several choices: