Hopefully krj won't mind me entering this item this time. I have some stuff I wanted to post in it. This increasingly irrelevantly-titled item is for discussion related to copyright issues in digital media.104 responses total.
Two news blurbs: A lot of web broadcasters are shutting down now, citing RIAA royalties that, even after being cut in half by the Librarian of Congress, are too high. http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25338.html Apparently the issue isn't just the current royalties, it's that they're *retroactive* for the last four years. So places that have been broadcasting for a while, especially the larger ones, suddenly have a massive tab due. --- Microsoft seems to be spinning their DRM OS to make it more palatable. This is the "Secure PC" operating system with built-in support for copy protection. Microsoft, perhaps realizing this isn't very marketable to anyone except Hollywood and record companies, is now referring to it as an OS meant to protect your security and privacy, instead of one meant to protect intellectual property. http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25344.html
Heh. The Register refers to the murdering of the web radio stations as "culturecide." ((As for the naming of the items: while Napster Inc is increasingly irrelevant, the company and the software do seem to have marked a turning point, and keeping the names of the items the same helps any one who wants to read the backstory across over two years of conferences.)) ((( Summer Agora #17 <---> Music 107 )))
((((Oh, yeah, and these items just aren't for "copyright issues in
digital media," there's also a great deal of stuff about issues
roiling the music business which I stuff in here.))))
The dead-tree edition of USA Today contains an 8 page "Technology" supplement which is primarily about the technology and copyright issues and the music and movie industries. Little in it will be new to readers of these items, but it's startling to see so many column inches devoted to the subject in the most mainstream media. I dunno how much of it is available on USA Today's website.
Another Register item, this one about a bill introduced by Congressman Howard Berman (D-California). The bill would make it legal for the RIAA to disrupt peer-to-peer networks that are being used to distribute copyrighted works, essentially giving them the right to defend their copyrights with vigilante justice: http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25385.html Berman does suggest there would be strict limits on what would be acceptable for them to do -- damaging property would be out, for example.
Slashdot points to this Wall Street Journal / MSNBC story: http://www.msnbc.com/news/775684.asp "Major music companies are preparing to mount a broad new attack on unauthorized online song-swapping. The campaign would include suits against individuals who are offering the largest troves of songs on peer-to-peer services..." "Companies have been reluctant to take legal action against individual Internet users, in part because they have feared the possible backlash that could result from big corporate interests dragging individuals into court...." "People with knowledge of the matter say that the recording-industry trade association is still in the early stages of planning its efforts..."
Monday's dead-tree edition of USA Today had a story on music recording
sales for the first half of 2002. The slide continues and accelerates.
If I remember the numbers correctly:
album-length CD sales down over 9%
all-format sales down over 12%
From the peak year of 2000, all-format sales are down over 18%.
The collapse is concentrated at the top of the charts.
In first-half 2001, 34 albums sold 1,000,000 copies;
in first-half 2002, only 20 albums have reached that level.
Who would say that that decrease is from file-swapping of
popular CDs, or from the audience turning away from those offering
their latest?
I am beginning to enjoy picking up songs from mp3.com. Those
are ones being offered by the artists and companies.
Today's Slashdot ( http://slashdot.org ) links to an anti-music-industry
essay by 70s singer-songwriter Janis Ian. She's supportive of file sharing
and critical towards the record companies -- which is no doubt why the
interest from the Slashdot crowd..
http://www.janisian.com/article-internet_debacle.html
Heh, beat me to it. Janis Ian is an entertaining writer. (And an entertaining performer, and an all-round fun person: we got to see her last year at both the Philadelphia Folk Festival and the World SF Convention, the events one week apart.) Wired reports that Gene Kan, the developer of Gnutella, is dead. Suicide, age 25 I think. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53704,00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53704,00.html
Quiet, Sad Death of Net Pioneer
2:00 a.m. July 9, 2002 PST
It's horribly ironic that the news of Gene Kan's death has trav-
eled so slowly -- no tributes posted on Usenet, no mention of his
passing at any of the usual geek news sites.
Perhaps the story of how a 25-year-old genius took his own life
is simply something that is just too difficult for folks to talk
about.
Kan, peer-to-peer file-sharing programmer extraordinaire, died on
June 29. His professional life revolved around developing new
ways to share information easily and quickly. Thousands of people
use Gnutella to swap files, a program Kan was instrumental in
developing and promoting.
Kan's suicide was not completely unexpected, according to some of
his friends. They had hoped Kan was winning his hard-fought bat-
tle against depression exacerbated by personal problems.
"We did all the things you're supposed to do," said Cody Oliver,
Gene's business partner in peer-to-peer search technology
gonesilent.com. "We got him on Prozac; we connected him to the
suicide hotlines. He promised he wouldn't do anything drastic.
But now he's gone. It's a really rough time."
The signs of impending awfulness were there, Oliver said. Very
recently, Gene had changed his resume, which was stored on the
University of California at Berkeley's server, to read: "Summary:
Sad example of a human being. Specializing in failure."
The university has removed Kan's pages.
Whatever was going on in his personal life, friends, colleagues
and industry observers all agree that Gene Kan was not a failure
-- either as a professional or as a human being.
Kan was among the first programmers to produce an open-source
version of the file-sharing application Gnutella, which enables
users to search for and transfer files from computer to computer.
His ability to translate complicated technology into easily
understandable terms quickly led to his becoming the unofficial
spokesman for Gnutella in particular, and for file-sharing appli-
cations in general.
"Gene was one of the first people to make hay with the idea that
peer-to-peer file sharing wasn't just about music, but about a
powerful approach to problems in computer networking," Tim
O'Reilly, of O'Reilly Publishing, said.
"It was Gnutella and Freenet, more than Napster, that got the at-
tention of the technical elite and made us think more deeply
about the way the Internet was evolving," O'Reilly added.
"And years from now, when we have an Internet-scale operating
system, and don't think of a computer as something on our desk
but as something pervasive that we interact with through hundreds
or thousands of different points of contact, we'll look back at
pioneers like Gene and see the soil in which the future took
root."
Kan was always careful to point up all the good things that could
be done with peer-to-peer applications, while never mincing words
about the problems the music industry perceived with file-sharing
technologies that also allow users to swap music and other media
files.
He testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last June,
advising the recording industry that "the toothpaste is already
out of the tube," and it would be best to adjust their businesses
to the new reality of file sharing, as opposed to trying to ban
it.
"I had the privilege of sitting next to Gene when we both testi-
fied before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on file shar-
ing -- his cool and calm, and centrality of purpose set my ner-
vous mind at ease," recalled Jim Griffin, CEO of Cherry Lane Di-
gital, a music-publishing firm.
"Gene's mind and talents were sharp and always in service to
mankind and the bigger picture, and it is truly ironic that he
sped the sharing of information but word of his death has trav-
eled so very slowly."
(page 2)
Kan's most recent project, InfraSearch, is based on Gnutella's
technology. InfraSearch allows any connected device on a network
-- from cell phones and wireless PDAs to PCs and servers -- to
communicate, collaborate and share information.
Sun Microsystems bought Kan's company, then known as GoneSilent,
last March for a reported $10 million, and until his death Kan
worked for Sun as a consultant on the connected search project,
now known as Project JXTA.
"He was happy with the work. It was going well and he was getting
paid," Oliver said. "Sun wanted him to do some things that he
wasn't thrilled about, but he knew that was part of the deal when
you work for a big corporation."
Oliver said when he thinks of Kan, he doesn't dwell on his
friend's brilliant mind or advanced technical skills, but on the
"damn good fun we had together before this whole mess."
In his private life, Kan loved racing cars and writing strange
haikus. He also collected license plates with technology-related
expressions but refused to have the oft-suggested "MP3" plate
made, believing it would cause hassles he didn't want to deal
with.
"It is hard to imagine any good coming from his death," Griffin
said. "But I'm guessing the peer-to-peer network will soon extend
to the great beyond."
.
Depression kills.
As sad as it is, stories like Kan's help me when I am feeling like a failure. It helps to know that even people I consider successful get those feelings and get depressed and whatnot. It helps me to remember that one doesnt have an objective view when one is depressed.
From the last few days, mostly via slashdot:
The RIAA is pushing for a legal mandate to require a "do not copy" flag
in future digital audio standards, and to require that everything
in the world honor that flag.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-944640.html
-----
The US Commerce Department held hearings on digital rights management
this week. This was a big business meeting, and the views of the
public were not wanted. In protest, some of
the free software people are now taking to a small bit of ruckusing.
Many stories:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-944668.html
(Note that the MPAA's Jack Valenti now denies trying to "abolish"
the VCR 20-some-odd years ago.)
http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/07/18/0155208.shtml
http://features.slashdot.org/features/02/07/18/1219257.shtml?tid=99
(takes the position that the ruckus was not helping things)
The Register is reporting that a videoconferencing company in Austin, Texas is claiming patent rights to technology used in the JPEG standard, and is demanding royalties on pretty much everything that decodes them. Sony has apparently already ponied up $15 million: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/26272.html The JPEG committee seems confident they can get the patent overturned with evidence of prior art: http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25676.html Also, fair use advocates apparently weren't welcome at a U.S. Department of Commerce public workshop on digital rights management: http://www.theregus.com/content/6/25660.html
let's all switch to png. right now.
PNG isn't really a good replacement for JPEG, because it's a lossless compression -- it just can't match the file size reductions you can get with a lossy compression like JPEG. An 800x600 color photograph ends up huge as a PNG file. PNG is an excellent replacement for GIF, though.
To give you an idea of the difference, a 640x953 truecolor photograph, compressed at 9.0 compression with PNG (the most aggressive setting) gave an 814,516 byte file. The same image, as a 75% quality JPEG, was 60,037 bytes. Obviously this makes a *huge* difference for web browsing. If you're curious, a long time ago I worked up a web page comparing GIF, PNG, and JPEG on a few different types of images. I did this as a quick way to educate people who annoyed me by using the wrong image format for something. ;) (Like using GIF for photographs, or JPEG for line art.) The page is here: http://www.gull.us/imageformats/ The example above is taken directly from it. BTW, I've noticed Photoshop 4.0's PNG compressor isn't very good, I seem to get smaller files with GIMP or NetPBM. The files on that page were created with GIMP 1.0.4.
gull, how did you get "gull.us"? I didn't think anything but the fifty states and DC had been created under .us.
try girls-r.us
And once again I mourn the loss of Mr. Postel.
Re #19: They opened it up for all U.S. citizens, legal residents, and U.S. corporations to register names in April.
Slashdot points to the EFF blog on digital TV issues. In separate letters, Sen. Hollings and Rep. Tauzin urge Federal Communications Commission chairman Michael Powell to move forward immediately on requiring equipment to respect the "do-not-copy" flag/ "broadcast flag" in all digitial television applications. The legislators says the FCC already has the authority to do this. Rep Tauzin's letter is co-signed by Rep John Dingell (D-Mich), who will shortly be appearing on a primary ballot for many of you. :)
(oops:) http://bpdg.blogs.eff.org/ http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/23/1241245.shtml?tid=129
More on the JPEG patent issue: http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25713.html The ISO standards body has said they'll no longer list JPEG as a formal standard if Fogent continues to demand royalties on it. The patent expires in 2004 anyway, though, so I suspect a lot of companies will just wait this one out. There's also some comments by JPEG committee member Richard Clark on the flaws in current patent law: '"It's becoming impossible to set standards in multimedia; huge numbers of patents are granted. In Japan there are 4,000 patents on image and wavelet technology in Japan alone. It's followed the US model, where for many, many years, the US has allowed patents on very small changes to very detailed technical terms and where the benefits are few," said Clark.' ... 'And there aren't any safe havens, he warns.' '"You can't create a standard that doesn't infringe patents - PNG or Ogg Vorbis could equally be challenged. So it's no good saying something is patent free: you have to persuade a US jury of that, and it's a crapshoot."' Personally, I think it's particularly egregious when a company waits until a standard has been firmly entrenched for over a decade, then pops up to make a claim.
I agree with the last paragraph of #25. I believe the courts have ruled as much with trademarks: Companies can lose some of their trademark rights if their product name becomes so ubiquitous it's a de facto synonym for the product itself (examples include Kleenex, Coke, and Xerox... how many companies have a Minolta Xerox machine, and how many people blow their noses on Puffs Kleenex?). Unfortunately, that's trademark law, not patent law, although I'd think some of the concepts would be extended. I haven't read the details on this. Is this any different than the GIF flak? It was ultimately decided that end-users couldn't be held responsible for GIF trademark violation, only programmers of graphics packages (more detail than that, but that was the basic gist).
That's pretty much what Fogent is claiming -- that if you create a program or device that decodes JPEGs, you're using their patented technology and have to cough up a royalty.
Bah, that's as bullshit as the GIF argument, but they're probably assuming that because the GIF suit went that way, they can go there with JPG too. *sigh* "Henry Ford announced today that, since the automobile is popular, all manufacturers of the automobile are infringing upon a patent that he would have filed had he known how popular the automobile would be, and they all have to pay him money fore very car they build." bullshitbullshitbullshit
gull, #18, that's a really nice images page. but, uh, the smtpe color bars are, ummm 'off.' he left-=most bar is supposed to be 70% white adn teh absolute (100%) black and white bars are the squares on the bottom. also, that looks WAY oversaturated, and the green and purple tint seems a bit 'off' to my eyes. are teh smpte color bars and the ntsc color bars supposed to be the same? notice that my observations are based onthe ntsc bars, please. (yes, i'm using a calibrated ibm p260 monitor, fwiw)
Re #29: I'm sure they are. They're not my color bars, I snagged them from another site. IIRC, the site did note that they didn't imitate the proper brightness levels because there's no way to ensure that in a digital image. Dunno if the 'blue filter trick' for adjusting saturation and tint would still work with them. Probably not, which makes them sort of useless for monitor adjustment purposes, but I just wanted an image with some sharp edges and areas of solid color.
Re #16: The Register ran some reader letters recently about the JPEG patent problem. They noted that several readers have suggested, as you did, that switching to PNG might be a solution. They pointed out something I'd forgotten -- that PNG also has a patent encumbering it. Apple has a patent on alpha blending that appears to cover technology used in PNG. So far they haven't tried to enforce it, but there's nothing to prevent them from deciding to in the future. Reference: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/22898.html So, you're pretty much going to run afoul of *someone's* patent claims no matter what format you try to work with.
An Australian Federal Court has ruled that Playstation mod chips are not illegal when used to play legally purchased disks from other countries: http://www.theregus.com/content/54/25764.html
http://www.theregus.com/content/55/25813.html Remeber those fears that the DMCA would be used to quash legitimate security research? It looks like they're coming true. HP's threatening to sue a group of researches who found a buffer overflow in the 'su' command of Tru64.
Cnet carries a story from Declan McCullagh on the looming possibility of criminal prosecutions for file sharing users. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-949533.html The actual hard news in the story is that a group of leading Senators and Congressmen from both parties, including Sens. Biden and Feinstein for the Democrats, have written to the Justice Department urging that such prosecutions begin. The Cnet story contains a link to the letter. Under the NET act, I have written before, such prosecutions would be a slam dunk. It would be sort of like a lottery.
of course democrats want convictions - this is not news.
Business Week runs an overview story reporting that the music industry is finally starting to look seriously at Internet distribution models which might work. The industry is driven by the continued collapse of physical CD sales, with sales figures down 12.8% from a year ago through August 3, following the 2001 decline of 10%. (I think those are dollar value figures, not units.) http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2002/tc20020812_4809.htm ----- Somebody called Forrester Research releases a study claiming that MP3 trading has not been the cause of the crash in music sales; Forrester's study blames the recession, and competition from videogames and DVDs for entertainment dollars. http://www.globeandmail.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/front/RTGAM/20020813/gtmusic /Front/homeBN/breakingnews http://www.forrester.com/ER/Research/Report/Summary/0,1338,14854,00.html (above from the forest of links following a Christian Science Monitor overview story, which does contain the news that I missed, that the FCC has mandated anticopying technology in "the next generation of televisions."; you can find that story from wired.com)
resp:34 :: another Cnet story from Declan McCullagh. At a conference in Aspen Colorado, a deputy assistant attorney general states flatly that the Justice Department is prepared to begin prosecuting users sharing copyrighted files over the Internet; he would not, however, set a date when such prosecutions would begin. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-954591.html?tag=fd_top
This could get interesting. I mean, what we have here is probably the most widespread example of popular disobediance of a law since Prohibition. Widespread prosecutions are going to be highly politically unpopular, and you may suddenly see people caring enough about this issue to actually pressure their representatives to not knuckle under quite so thoroughly to the MPAA and RIAA. (Other than the geeks who already care, I mean.)
Declan McCullagh and Cnet again. The RIAA is asking a federal court to compel Verizon to disclose the identity of a user who the RIAA believes was sharing music files. Verizon has declined to honor the RIAA's request under the "notice and take down" provisions of the DMCA, because (as I've written before) the plain language of that law does not cover material resident on the ISP customer's machine, only material residing on the ISP's server. The RIAA believes the DMCA rules should apply, of course, and this is not such an outrageous stretch that the court would dismiss it without a second thought; it depends on how literalist the court wants to be, given that P2P software -- serving up files from the customer's own computer -- wasn't worried about when the DMCA was written. Still, this is another sign that the RIAA has decided to go hunting for individual file sharing users; they have decided they have to endure the probable public backlash. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-954658.html?tag=cd_mh
The Washington Post has an interesting overview piece:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42239-2002Aug20.html
"A New Tactic in the Download War: Online 'Spoofing' Turns The Tables
on Music Pirates."
Nothing terribly new, but it rounds up some choice material.
The hook/lead is about the appearance of bogus / fake MP3 files on
the file swapping networks; the music companies are not 'fessing up
to being behind this, but the idea is to clog the networks and
get users to waste time, get frustrated, and go to the CD store.
(Digression: I get the impression that the music industry thinks they
can fight P2P file sharing to a draw with this tactic, but I have not
run into anyone complaining about such bogus files yet.)
Quote, after talking a bit about the music industry's
quest for an uncopyable CD:
"All this smacks of desperation," says Eric Garland,
president of BigChampagne, a company hired by major
labels to measure online file-sharing traffic. "When you've
got a consumer movement of this magnitude, when tens of
millions of people say, 'I think CD copying is cool and I'm
within my rights to do it,' it gets to the point where you have
to say uncle and build a business model around it rather than
fight it."
...
The record labels have been spurred to action by figures
they find terrifying: The number of "units shipped" -- CDs
sent to record stores or directly to consumers -- fell by more
than 6 percent last year, and it's widely expected to fall 6 to
10 percent more by the end of 2002.
Most intriguing to me is the mention of a new MP3 recorder, the Ripflash,
priced at $179. Google points to their website:
http://www.pogoproducts.com/ripflash.html
This is, to my knowledge, the first self-contained MP3 recorder which
touts decent music quality. As such, it's probably flatly illegal under
the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) because MP3 files do not incorporate
Serial Copy Management, to prohibit endless recopying. I've seen about
two previous stand-alone MP3 recorders, and both of them were positioning
themselves as voice-only recorders for dictation and recordings of
meetings, presumably in an attempt to stay under the RIAA's radar.
I might digress some more and mention that the AHRA is why so many people
are playing and recording music on their computers. The AHRA mandated
that consumer digital audio recorders had to prohibit making copies of
copies (Serial Copy Management System, or SCMS). No product designed
to conform to this law has had more than modest niche success in the
market:
Digital Compact Cassette is dead.
Digital Audio Tape is a marginal pro-audio format.
MiniDisc appeals to a small number of gadget freaks or people who
need really portable, decent-quality recording.
I know about half a dozen MD users, including myself.
The format appears to be fading; Best Buy is slower and slower on
restocking the Minidisc blank media
Audio component CD recorders just haven't gotten any market impact,
despite the glossy TV ads from Philips.
However, the AHRA exempted general-purpose computers from having to
implement copy controls; thus, once the PC got a bit more powerful,
the race to move music into computers was on. Consumers, almost
unanimously, have rejected Congress' intent that they should not have
access to unrestricted digital copying; they have rejected this by
the tens of millions. To crib from someone else: we are starting to
move into real "consent of the governed" territory here.
(Sorry, I'm blathering again.)
Go ahead and blather, it is massive peacefull civil disobedience. Does congress want to give me more laws to ignore?
The Rolling Stones are the last major rock band whose CDs still sound crummy. Slashdot reports on a plan to fix that starting in a week or so, with pointers to a story in Slate. The new remastered Stones CDs will be done as dual layer CD/SACD discs. SACD take an interesting approach to copy prevention: they incorporate a "physical watermark," a bit pattern which is not part of the musical data stream, to identify an authorized copy. SACD players will refuse to play any disc lacking the physical watermark bit-pattern. (Oh, SACD: Super Audio CD, yet another new format. Reviews rave about the sound quality.) http://slashdot.org/articles/02/08/21/2012213.shtml?tid=141 http://slate.msn.com/?id=2069628 http://www.bitwareoz.com/sacd/faq.html
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/08/22/1321224.shtml?tid=126 Technology Review has an article (http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/prototype10902.asp?p=7) about a new CD and DVD copy protection system (http://www.doc-witness.com/tech.htm) by Doc-Witness (http://www.doc-witness.com/), where the disc itself has a smart card on it. The card checks if a request is valid, and then returns a key to decrypt the contents of the disc. It apparently works with standard drives.
Is this an online or offline system? By online, I mean that they contact some sort of server, either via phone line or internet. By offline, I mean that the box in the store contains everything needed to make the disk work.
Offline.
I'm one of the people who is of the opinion that the perceived sound improvement from SACD discs is due to the placebo effect. Record companies really like the idea, though, because they're hoping to sell people all the same albums over again. And audiophiles, who have always been suspicious of regular CDs, will sign on.
If it's an offline thing, it won't be long until people figure out how to compromise it. Right off-hand, I'm not sure what would stop people from simply ripping the tracks once decrypted - and I take it this thing must come with a software driver to handle the decryption part.
But that would be illegal! :-p
re: 46 SACD and DVD-Audio both sound better than conventional CD's. Though, the increased quality varies, based on what you're actually listening to. I'm guessing the difference between the SACD and CD versions of the Rolling Stones disc would be negligible, especially on a $500 "Theater In A Box" system. Though, I wouldn't put it past Sony to master the SACD version with a bit more treble and bass, to create the impression of brighter sound and "punchier" bass on a cheap system. However, jazz and orchestral music does sound better on advanced audio formats. I briefly owned a SACD player and noticed a difference on my home system (Harmon/Kardon amp, Yamaha NS-100XT speakers, etc.) but not to the extent that I saw the value in keeping a $500 CD player, and paying extra money for the few SACD's I could find, just to have them not work in my car or computer. re: 47 I wouldn't be too sure of that. First off, even if you do rip the audio (which would be possible today, if computers had an audio format that could accomodate a frequency rate that high) where are you going to play the tracks, other than on your computer? Also, consider that the watermark is physical, not digital. The Sony Playstation uses discs with physical copy protection, and nearly seven years later, the best anyone's come up with is a chip that requres substantial modification to the system.
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If it sounds better to you, great. The claims made for it seem to contradict what's known about how the human ear works, though, so I'm skeptical. I also know there are a lot of tricks they can do to make it *seem* to sound better -- one easy one is to make the output level from the player slightly higher when playing SACDs instead of regular discs. People will perceive the slightly louder music as "clearer". Tinkering with the mix is, as you mentioned, another option.
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If I remember right, they're encoded at 24 bits instead of the 16 on a regular CD, and at a 2.4 MHz sample rate instead of 44.1 kHz. Note that 44.1 kHz is enough to accurately record any sound up to just under the Nyquist limit of 22,050 Hz, and the human ear can only hear up to 20,000 Hz. Also, 16 bits is thought to have about 3 dB more dynamic range than the human ear can actually pick out in music. Hence my skepticism. Mostly this is being pushed by record companies. When CDs came out they were able to sell everyone new copies of all the albums they'd previously bought on LP -- profit with no expenditure on promotion or finding new talent. They're hoping to cash in on that again by getting everyone to upgrade to SACD.
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re: 51 / 53
That's something I've been confused by. I distinctly recall CD's being touted
as "perfect", in that they're able to reproduce the entire range of listenable
music. IIRC, the *only* limitation of CD's is the masters they're recorded
from. (Does anyone else remember the AAD/ADD/DDD specifications that used to
be printed on CD's?)
This is the same reason I don't entirely understand how a $2,000 "reference"
CD player can produce notably better sound than a $60 CD-changer. I mean, it's
just a digital stream. You can't really convert it in different ways. Yes,
I understand that the mechanism that turns that stream in to something my
receiver understands can be of varying quality. It's the reason my 200-disc
changer is connected with a fiberoptic cable, instead of two RCA cables. But
there's only so much improvement you can build atop the core technology.
Certainly not $1,940 worth.
In terms of pure technology and understanding of human hearing, I don't see
how it's possible for SACD (or DVD-Audio) to sound better than a CD, except
under very rare circumstances where the music pushes just beyond what a CD
is capable of. But for whatever reason, it does. There is a presence in
non-vocal music on SACD that isn't quite the same on CD. It seems more
lifelike, although I can't figure out how it possibly can be, other than
tinkering with the mastering of the disc.
Although I'm not yet willing to buy in to a Sony/Philips/RIAA consipracy, I've
always believed that mass-produced CD's haven't been mastered to their fullest
potential since the CD format gained complete consumer acceptance. It seems
noticably coincidental to me that an artist's debut album sounds (in terms
of clarity) better than following albums more often than not. Conspiracy?
Probably not. Laziness? Absolutely. Why spend days mastering, and remastering
something that you already know people are going to buy either way?
With SACD's (and formerly, CD's) there was a degree of uncertainty there. They
cost more than other formats, weren't as versatile in terms of being copyable
and/or playable in cars or portable units, and the players cost more money
than most people spend on components.
Writing this made me remember something...so I just tested my theory. Janet
Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" sounds very, VERY crisp and clear, despite the fact
that it's an AAD master from 1989. The same song ("Alright") sounds muddier
(albeit, slightly) on "Design Of A Decade" which was produced in 1995.
In 1989, you were lucky to pick up a component CD player for less than $150.
Portable and integrated CD systems were much more expensive (and prohibitively
so, for the teen audience that record companies target), and there wasn't
exactly a slew of CD's to be bought. In 1995, you could get a nice integrated
portable system, or disc changer for half of that price, and there were tons
of CD's available. Most anyone who wanted a CD player could afford one, and
because of that, there was no real need to convince anyone of the clarity that
CD's provided, because you could sell them on the convenience factor.
Whether the laziness was slowly accepted as cost-effective, or planned all
along is probably unknowable. Or maybe I've just been listening to CD's for
so long, that I associate older discs with how amazingly clear they seemed
to be. I dunno.
re: 52
Super Audio Compact Disc, IIRC
Well, there are a couple things "wrong" with "perfect" 16-bit 44MHz CDs. One thing a few audiophiles have claimed is that human hearing doesn't stop at 20KHz, and even if it does there are phasing artifacts well above that. So, some people doggedly hang onto their vinyl since it doesn't have that fixed 22KHz theoretical limit. The issue about CD players is that while the digital stream always decodes the same, not all D-A converters are created equal. The cheaper units tend to suffer more from noise from other parts of the circuitry, nonlinear effects from the semiconductors, and non-optimum analog circuitry. That being said, my hearning is better than most people's and I can't hear any limitations.
Higher-end CD players tend to have better tracking subsystems, too. My 1986-vintage Sanyo player, which was probably pretty expensive new, will play discs that my Discman gives up on, and it skips less often. This may have something to do with the fact that the Sanyo splits the laser into three beams for tracking purposes, while the Discman multiplexes a single one. There's also some room for tweaking in the analog filters that have to follow the D/A converters.
Filters that affect the passband. Power supply design. Stable clock. I'm not saying it's worth an extra $2k, but there is more than one way to skin a cat, and my $600 player does sound better than my $60 player. I have to agree though that the record compaines are in the business to make money and sell you more formats. That said, SACD and DVD-A are improvements. IS it worth it to most people? Doubtful.
What is twinkie doing here?
CD's: If you're into any type of music that doesn't have a pretty compressed dynamic range (classical vs. pop for example), the 16-bit CD's ability to make *both* the really quiet parts (like some wind instrument solos) and the really loud parts sound good is pretty limited. I've certainly experienced this (though i can't rule out that it's just poor quality production work). My understanding is that there's plenty of room for a niche market selling the same music on the same media, but with all the slip-ups/ short-cuts/etc. in the production work corrected. Some perfectionists have money. Younger people often have hearing that goes up to 23+KHz. CD's and CD players have to fade out quite a ways below that to avoid wierd effects from their 22KHz limit. Even if the digital music on the CD is "perfect", it's technically impossible to convert that to an analog signal with 0% error. More money can buy you less error...how much you got and what's good enough?
I think that's bordering on pretentious. Yes, any D/A conversion is going to have some degree of error, but we're not comparing something with a 10% error rate to a 1% error rate. We're closer to 0.73% vs. 0.03%.
I used to be able to hear the ultrasonic motion detectors in Fiegel's, but I didn't have anything resembling good musical taste at the time. I don't know how well the music industry is going to be able to force the genie back into the bottle. CD is more than good enough for most people, and huge numbers find MP3 acceptable. SACD may be an improvement, but I doubt that very many people will care enough to want to replace their legacy CD players and collections. As long as people want to play their old CDs, even SACD players will have to support the format; that will make all the watermarking in the world useless.
Re 61: You've never met a hardcore audiophile, have you?
Hardcore audiophiles also buy special oxygen-free speaker cables that cost $20/foot, and think resistors wound with silver wire sound better than ones wound with nichrome.
re #63: bought a recording on LP or cassette tape lately?
once a clear winner emerges from the battle between
new "secure" digital formats, expect the record companies
to start cutting back on which parts of the catalog they
release on CD. that won't compel CD owners to upgrade
their existing collections, but it will force much of the
market towards the new format.
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re: 63 I have. They tend not to "border" on being pretentious ;-)
An article talking about how the RIAA is continuing to blame file sharing for the drop in CD sales. It rather sarcastically suggests several alternative reasons. http://www.theregus.com/content/6/26099.html '"Though other factors like the decline in consumer spending have played a role, Cary Sherman, President of the RIAA, said that illegal music downloading was the main culprit in the drop in sales," the lobbying group explains.' 'Clearly the RIAA knows its enemy, and has the numbers to "prove" it. We just wonder who they'll blame if they ever achieve their government-mandated DRM copyright paradise, and sales continue to disappoint.'
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"The RIAA and PWC can shove that argument up their own posteriori." ....beautiful. Just beautiful.
Thompson Multimedia has changed their MP3 licensing policy in a way that makes it GPL unfriendly. Apparently it's still free if you're producing a free application, but royalties are due if the application is sold. Or so they say; they've removed the old language that exempted free players entirely, so there's no longer any official assurance they won't exercise their patents against free applications. http://www.theregus.com/content/4/26136.html
The New York Times has an article on the commercial launch of the teensy tiny DataPlay discs, which we've discussed here before. The article is not too optimistic about the DataPlay's chances for wide adoption for music; at best, says one analyst, it may end up a marginal product like the MiniDisc. The music industry wants the product to succeed because it includes copy prevention features. There is a nice picture of the DataPlay disc next to a CD. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/29/technology/circuits/29RECO.html
fag.
DO you always gotta do everything that jp2 dares you to???
fag.
I read the NY Times article that Ken refers to in #72 a few days ago
and while I'd agree that the article is "not too optimistic about
DataPlay's chances" after reading the article I'd go even further and
say flat out that the DataPlay format will never succeed as long as
these "features" as mentioned in the article are part of the bargain:
1) pre-recorded discs several dollars more expensive than CDs
2) playback devices and blank media very expensive.
3) except for media size, no obvious advantage over CD format
4) potentially cumbersome anti-copying restrictions in recorders
My own belief is that for a new format to supplant CDs, one of two
things needs to happen. Either
1) record companies all stop releasing recordings in the CD format, or
2) the new format will have to be either much better, or the recordings
much cheaper than CD. Probably the new format will have to be both
better *and* cheaper.
Well, the same thing is happening with DVD audio discs. Might be better quality, but the cost per disk is like $24.95, where the CD version might sell for $17.98 or in some cases, is in the mid-price catalog, list as $12.99, common at $9.99. Of the stack I seen recently , probably Best Buy, a small catalogue of titles, and it did not include the new Bruce Springsteen title. If the record companies really wanted to sell DVD audio, 1) the price per disk would not be more than $1 more expensive, 2) new titles need to be supported immediatly. 3) Nothing that would sonicly ruin the music to prevent copying.
I don't know who the RIAA thinks they're fooling, but it's not me. I'm trying to send them a message by buying anything good I can find so long as it's under $10. I just found another Tom Waits CD for $7.99, which is reasonable given the cost of production etc. If they try to jack the price up to $25 I won't be buying any new music from them at all. What I buy now is almost exclusively from little indy labels for $15/disc or less. I'm sure there are a lot of indie artists who will continue to publish on CD even if the RIAA goes to something more expensive. This will just make the indie artists more attractive to listeners and get them to stop buying from RIAA members and their retail channels. Oops...
In today's news: two companies see different directions for music and the Internet. The NY Times writes about AOL's plans to become a major force in music marketing -- sort of the next MTV, perhaps, since MTV isn't very interested in music any more: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/02/technology/02MUSI.html Meanwhile, there are lots of stories reporting that the Bertelsmann conglomerate (BMG in music) is about ready to give up on the Internet. Bertelsmann is expected to shutter its online book & CD selling ventures, and close down what's left of Napster. This follows in the wake of the ouster of Thomas Middelhoff, the former Bertelsmann CEO who was a champion of the online stuff; the corporate board dumpe Middelhoff in large part because of the online losses. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956225.html?tag=fd_top
read an article last night about the new laser techinology that lets you store 4 times the data curently storeable on a cd by using blue instead of red lasers. Sony is pushing this as opposed to several otehr formats that are coming out doing a similar function. So combine that with the the dataplay and think of the amount of music or data you can stoer on it.
An update on the piece I posted earlier about Thompson Multimedia's MP3 license changes: http://www.theregus.com/content/4/26153.html MP3 royalty scare over - not many dead By Andrew Orlowski in London Posted: 08/31/2002 at 05:30 EST Thomson Multimedia, who license the MP3 format have confirmed that software players are not under threat, and can remain free. The disappearance of a specific opt-out for software from Thomson's licensing page caused great alarm earlier this week. Thomson's licensing page had indeed changed, and an opt-out of free decoders had vanished. But Thomson says the decoder royalty refers to hardware devices, such as CD players capable of playing MP3 data files, and the policy is unchanged. "Thomson has never charged a per unit royalty for freely distributed software decoders. For commercially sold decoders - primarily hardware mp3 players - the per-unit royalty has always been in place since the beginning of the program," a spokesman said. "Therefore, there is no change in our licensing policy and we continue to believe that the royalty fees of 75 cents per mp3 player (on average selling over $200 dollars) has no measurable impact on the consumer experience." A Thomson spokesman told NewsForge's Robin Miller that it was a ruse by Ogg Vorbis advocates to get publicity.
Many media reports: the bankruptcy court judge overseeing the Napster case has blocked the proposed sale of Napster's remains to Bertelsmann. Here's Cnet's story: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-956382.html?tag=fd_top Bertelsmann's proposal was to forgive the $85 million already loaned to Napster and pay $9 million for its remaining assets. This was opposed by the record industry and the music publishers -- in my view, because they are pursuing a scorched-earth policy against Napster and anyone who did business with it, in particular its lawyers. The judge ruled that because Napster's CEO Konrad Hilbers had ties to Bertelsmann, there was a conflict of interest in the sale. With Napster's advocate Thomas Middelhoff gone as CEO of Bertelsmann, the media group indicates it has no further interest in pursuing the matter. Napster is proceeding to a fire-sale liquidation which will yield pennies for its creditors -- the Bertelsmann deal was better than anything likely to appear now. Napster laid off all remaining employees except for a small staff overseeing the bankruptcy. Visit the napster.com site, while it lasts. I'll probably continue titling these summaries as "Napster items." :)
The music industry gets an injunction to force Aimster/Madster to shut down immediately: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54950,00.html The Washington Post has a nice overview on the dispute between the RIAA and Verizon, and the RIAA's attempt to bend the DMCA to force Verizon to disclose a user's identity without any due process: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38034-2002Sep4.html
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,55006,00.html "Digital Rights Outlook: Squishy" Buried in the story is a report that Thompson Multimedia has plans for a Super MP3. The Super MP3 will include a "tracking signature ... that will identify the PC that made it." No implmentation details are offered, but there's a quote from a Thompson Multimedia VP so presumably this is halfway thought out.
Interesting. Must be intended to help record companies track down people to prosecute. It won't work, though, no one will use it.
A new paper by Sandvine, Inc. finds that between 40 and 60 percent of all Internet traffic is now generated by Kazaa and Gnutella. http://rtnews.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/tech/RTGAM/20020906/g tcybsept6/Technology
I'll have to read the article but that claim has set my bullshit detector buzzing.
The article unfortunately doesn't have many details. There's a link to the paper, but it requires some kind of registration. I'm not sure it's so far-fetched. Have you ever tried Gnutella? It's incredibly inefficient. The amount of traffic when you aren't even doing anything is amazing. It's enough to swamp a 56K modem link all by itself.
I can see the "squishy" DRM thing lasting about 2 days, then enough people will have encoded and compared their files to have found a way to delete or corrupt the identifying informmation. Once the files are anonymous again, the RIAA has nobody to sue even if they find an illicit file. In the mean time, people will download .OGG encoders en masse.
Since Napster can use a range of ports, it's hard to tell, but
tracking the most commonly used ones, about thirty-two percent of one DS-3
that we'd used for a test case analysis was used by Napster (when it was
still up) and other common P2P programs at the time.
The slyck.com coverage of the Sandvine paper is at http://www.slyck.com/newssep2002/091202a.html and their link to the Sandvine paper on bandwidth consumption, which seems to require no registration, is at: http://sandvine.com/solutions/pdfs/P2PWhitePaper.pdf
via Wired and the dead tree edition: USA Today runs a summary story on
the struggles between major recording artists, now organized as the
Recording Artists Coalition, and the RIAA labels. Seems like the
RAC group is starting to get some traction; their drive to get a
seven-year limit on contracts, a limit on every other industry in
California, was tabled this year but is set for a big push next year.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-15-artists-rights_x.htm
Keith Richards says he's not in the struggle for the money, but for
the music: he says it's time for the accountants to stop defining what
good music is.
-----
In the slashdot followup chatter is this pointer to the San Francisco
Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/08/18/PK4256.DTL
Jimmy Buffett ("Margaritaville") has departed the major labels and
set up his own label. He sold half a million copies of his release
on his own label. He's looking to sign other unhappy artists to
his label: he's already landed Poison.
Quote:
> "We make as much money if we sell 100,000 copies this way as we made
> when we sold a million copies through a major label," Poison
> bassist Bobby Dall told Billboard magazine."
Buffet doesn't have the horrendous overhead of the majors -- no big upfront
deals, no high-paid executives -- so the payout to the artists is much
larger.
via Slashdot: A Robert Cringely column about BayTSP, a company devoted to searching the net for copyright infringements and child pornography, on behalf of the copyright industry and the government, and Mark Ishikawa, who runs the company. http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020919.html Buried deep in the story: > According to Ishikawa, we'll see major arrests in October > of people who have been illegally > (and flagrantly) sharing movies. With the evidence already > gathered, the game is afoot, > meaning this week is too late to stop sharing those movies > and expect to get away with it. > This might be a good time to get a lawyer. in resp:37 was a report that an official from the Department of Justice announced that such prosecutions would be happening. A story I lost somewhere suggested that it would be the movie industry, and not the music industry, which would be the first to throw people in jail, because the movie industry worries less about backlash and its image.
I still think this is a risky move. The backlash might be political (i.e., a call for the laws to be changed) and that could be bad for corporate copyright holders.
If someone posts a movie in say a usenet newsgroup, but noone downloaded it, was there any damage?
Under the DMCA, I don't think damages have to be proven. Just that a copy protection scheme was circumvented. That'd be either the CSS encryption on the DVD or the Macrovision encoding on the videotape.
I don't think we are looking at prosecutions under the DMCA, but under the NET (No Electronic Theft) act. Copy prevention schemes are not an issue here; under the NET act, and for the first time, non-profit copyright infringement becomes a felony at a certain dollar value threshhold. Prior to this act, it was (at least in practical terms) not possible to criminally prosecute copyright infringements which were not for financial gain.
I suspect the music industry doesn't think it has much left to lose.
http://www.infoanarchy.org carries a report on Danish raids against computer users hosting eDonkey servers. eDonkey is a file trading network which has avoided the mainstream coverage given to KaZaa and Morpheus. The report is not totally clear, but it seems that there were 11 servers confiscated at different locations, but only the owners of two of them were charged. I am not totally clear on the technical construction of the eDonkey network, but it seems that the raided servers only contain directory information. The people carrying out the raids in Denmark regard mIRC as prohibited software, because it can be used to exchange files.
Interesting. A while ago we thought Grex was the subject of a distributed denial of service attack, because we were being hit by a mssive flood of requests from many different hosts. Closer examination showed that someone had put an edonkey directory on Grex. Lucky the Ductch police didn't confiscate Grex.
Maybe that's what clees is coming over to do.
resp:88 David Brodbeck writes, "Have you ever tried Gnutella? It's incredibly inefficient." More inefficient than going down to the record store and buying an album? (Or online, if you don't have a record store.) Reports of inefficiency, mess, time-consuming*, and complexity, as well as my semi-non-techie uncertainty of how I'd get the files to play when I'd downloaded them has scared me off file-sharing far more efficiently than any threats from the music industry. * generally speaking, I find that N minutes spent waiting for my computer to do something is about as tedious as 5N minutes spent waiting for anything else in my life I might have to wait for.
I meant inefficient in the sense that it takes up a large amount of network bandwidth, even just for things like search traffic that are only peripherally related to downloading files. I would tend to agree that getting an album from a file sharing service, burning it to CD, downloading the cover art and printing it out, etc. is much more time consuming then just getting Amazon.com to deliver the darn thing to you, though.
A couple of days ago NPR re-broadcast an earlier interview with Jon Langford, founding member of the long-running British band the Mekons as well as participant in countless other side-projects. The interview will primarily be interesting to those who are either Mekons or alt-country fans but there are a few segments of general interest, including a bit about 16 minutes into the interview where he discusses the dificulty of being a modest-selling band with a major label recording contract. In the late 80s the Mekons recorded two of their best albums, "Rock 'n' Roll" and "The Curse of the Mekons" for the major label A & M but disappointing sales (by A & M's standards) led to the label's decision not to release in the USA and almost led to the break-up of the band. Langford talks about this peripherally, mentioning how the band started at A & M with a theory that an inexpensively-recorded album with modest sales could still make money for the label but that after the person they'd signed with departed, label employees without a relationship with the band questioned the wisdom of bothering with a band whose sales were likely to be measured in the tens of thousands and not in millions. Ever since the A & M debacle the Mekons have recorded for small indies, though Langford says in the interview that that's no guarantee of being treated decently, either. The interview winds down with a few interesting bits about playing the British punk scene in the late 70s, which may also be interesting even to people without an interest in the band. To find the piece, go to www.npr.org and search for "Mekons", the Langford interview is the most recent item that pops up. Real-audio player required to listen to the streaming audio.
You have several choices: