Napster the corporation has been destroyed, but Napster's paradigm continues on. This is another installment in a series of weblogs and discussions about the deconstruction of the music industry and other copyright industries, with side forays into "intellectual property, freedom of expression, electronic media, corporate control, and evolving technology," as polygon phrased it. Several years of back items are easily found in the music2 and music3 conferences.160 responses total.
((( fall agora #25 <---> music #119 ))) There's been a torrent of interesting articles since the Agora rollover; I'll try to paste in links for all the ones I can still remember over the next day or three. It's widely reported that the music biz is launching a new anti-downloading ad campaign which will use top artists such as Britney Spears, Luciano Pavarotti, the Dixie Chicks and Eminem, to convey their message that downloading songs through the Internet is theft. The campaign is sponsored by a broad array of music industry groups. Here's the Washington Post link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2894-2002Sep25.html
Great. I can't wait to receive advice from Eminem on how to behave responsibly..
I can't wait to see what happens when you put Eminem and Pavarotti in the same room.
Eminem and (Sir?) Elton John was weird enough.
Perhaps Pavarotti can persuade Eminem to retire along with him? Word.
Imagine if every radio station, in order to play a song on the radio, had to negotiate individually with each song's composer, performer and record label. That's a good analogy of the legal quagmire facing the authorized download services such as PressPlay and Musicnet as they attempt to build up their catalog. (Imagine if the representatives of the composers could not be bothered to answer the inquiries because there wasn't much money in it!) Grab this *excellent* NYTimes article before it disappears into the pay archives early next week: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/23/technology/23MUSI.html ------- *This* NYTimes article, on the other hand, strikes me as just a lot of wishful thinking from the music industry, which believes that its legal actions, and its shadowy war to degrade the usefulness of P2P networks, are leading vaguely-charactized "early adopters" to give up on the file sharing networks and switch to the for-pay systems. Little of this matches the gossip I hear from file sharing users, although almost all of them do mourn the loss of Napster's comprehensive selection, probably the greatest library of music which will ever be assembled. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/25/arts/music/25DOWN.html "Online Fans Start To Pay The Piper"
Website for the music industry's anti-downloading campaign:
http://www.musicunited.org
Quote: "Our goal isn't to lecture anyone."
----------
News reports are everywhere about Congressional hearings on the
Berman-Coble bill. This proposed law in the House of Representatives
would authorize the copyright industry to take direct, summary action
against computers which they believe are sharing copyrighted stuff.
Lawmakers seem concerned about giving this much power to corporations
without any due process for the targets. The story of an attempt to
force a UUnet user offline for the offense of posting a Harry Potter
book report turned up in a couple of stories.
Buried in the Wired discussion was this nice link from a source
I have not seen before, giving an overall summary:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,558966,00.asp
Declan McCullogh for Cnet is here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-959774.html
The proposed bill is here:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:h.r.05211:
Text:
(a) IN GENERAL- Notwithstanding any State or Federal
statute or other law, and subject to the limitations set
forth in subsections (b) and (c), a copyright owner shall
not be liable in any criminal or civil action for disabling,
interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise impairing
the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or
reproduction of his or her copyrighted work on a publicly
accessible peer-to-peer file trading network, if such
impairment does not, without authorization, alter, delete,
or otherwise impair the integrity of any computer file or
data residing on the computer of a file trader.
"Imagine if every radio station, in order to play a song on the radio, had to negotiate individually with each song's composer, performer and record label. That's a good analogy of the legal quagmire facing the authorized download services such as PressPlay and Musicnet as they attempt to build up their catalog." What do you mean, "imagine"? That once was the case! That's the problem that ASCAP and BMI were invented to solve. Which suggests that the solution for the PressPlay and Musicnet problem is ... do I have to say it?
ASCAP and BMI only work because of the underlying Federal legislation setting mechanical royalties. Congress so far shows no willingness to force such a compromise on the factions of the music business; meanwhile each faction is determined that its piece of the pie should optimally increase, and at all costs must not decrease, in the new digital music era.
There is currently no digitally reproduced equivelent for being in the audience in the auditorium when Pavarotti sings _Nessum Dorma_ among other things. Assuming he shows up in the first place at all and doesn't have a cold. (details) I've never been able to do that as the only time I had tickets was the last time organizer folk booked him before he was banned in my small town on account of not showing up. Who owns music? Did Custer when he did the last stupid thing before he died along with the rest of his troops pay for the rights to play 'Garryowen'? I think not. And the last of the 657th time the _Stones_ played _Sympathy for the Devil_ live in concert was when? Some have told me the first time was at Altemont but I don't buy it. I had paid for tickets but my mother wouldn't let me go with Glen Jensen who is in the film of the events and that was too cruel. The point being that the actual physical performance of an artist is impossible to properly reproduce and that any second generation or further reproductions are merely that. Thus any 'bootleg' recordings are exactly that and even the exact duplication of a legal recording is still nothing less than a simulation by definition and practicality. (To be fair a CD impression from a master is still nothing but an imitation.) Therefore, if you attain the written score to _Handel's Messiah_ you must abide by any contractural relationship not to further reproduce it. But if you merely record it and reproduce it you should be free and clear. Given you cannot advertise 'as performed by' so and so under probable trademark restrictions.
Positing an infinite number of parallel universes, theoretically there must be a number of them where beady serves on the Supreme Court and his legal theories are respected. Think how bizarre that would be..
Law School would have been a lot more fun.
I haven't seen any TV ads from MusicUnited yet -- this is the music industry group which is sponsoring musicians trying to make people feel bad about downloading music from the Internet. What I have seen, quite a few times, is a new Intel ad showing young people making home-made CDs and passing them around with their friends. Gee, that looks like fun. I think I'll go buy an Intel computer. (*coff, coff*) ----- EFF points to this item from eetimes.com, a trade journal for electronic engineers, about Hollywood's "hysteria" over "the analog hole." If I am reading things correctly, there are proposals for legal restrictions to severely restrict the interoperability of digital and analog TV equipment. Also much talk about analog-domain watermarks, and about getting legislative control over analog/digital converters. http://www.eetimes.com/issue/fp/OEG20020920S0062 ----- You might recall Courtney Love's suit against her record label Universal, which was supposed to blow apart the industry or something like that. As is typical with such suits, it looks like the label is going to pay millions rather than defend their business in court. Billboard reports that the outline of a settlement is done: Love gets released from her contract, and gets millions in advance payments on future Nirvana royalties in her role as Kurt Cobain's heir. http://www.billboard.com/billboard/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id =1720037
The most recent PC Magazine to hit my mailbox has John Dvorak's column "A Buck Forty or Die", on the appropriate price ($1.40) for a CD. The law may say one thing, but what the people do will be quite another.
Thanks for the reference, Joe! I found that Dvorak column online at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,543415,00.asp
I own too many free samplers, or $2 samplers, to fall for any nonsense about production/distribution costs for CDs. Yes, they're loss leaders. But not that much of a loss. Dvorak is right on. "Why would you buy one for [more money]? Because you had a moral obligation? ... Where is the morality in keeping the price jacked up?"
Indeed. Nice column.
Hmmm.. I didn't find it all that compelling. It sounds great for the consumer side but doesnt offer much reason for the record companies to switch (apart from "do as I say, or you are doomed! doomed!") Essentially he seems to be arguing in favor of them giving themselves a 90% pay cut. It *may* be the case that the market will eventually force this, though I'm highly skeptical when the market is tilted so dramatically in their favor currently, but until that comes about what's supposed to be the record companies' motivation to compromise?
The fact that they really can't put ALL of us in jail? And nothing less will stop the sharing of music? Don't look at it as a "90% pay cut"; look at it as a 1000% raise: from $0.00 to $1.40.
re #19: > And nothing less will stop the sharing of music? That's where I disagree with you.. ..to a point, anyway. I believe your statement to be literally true to the extent that (practically) nothing will ever stop trading completely, but they don't have to stop it completely to make their business model work again.. heck, it seems to be more or less working even *now* -- people are still paying $15-$20 per CD and if the labels didn't keep making bafflingly bad assumptions about the bankability of aging pop stars they'd be making a profit even now. They mostly just need to keep sharing from growing further. Over the last few years it seems like they've done a surprisingly good job of keeping runaway file-trading growth in check, even if they haven't been able to stop it completely.
Re #18: Something has to give, though. By the record companies' own figures, demand has been dropping for years now. But the price has remained constant. Are they the magical industry that's immune to basic market economics?
I don't use Napster or download mp3s, but it has been years since I bought a new music CD for myself (other than at a concert from the artist directly). $18 still gives me severe sticker shock, and at that price, I'm not in the market. CDs don't have to go all the way down to $1.40 to attract me back. Less than $5 would probably do it. I could easily spend quite a lot at prices like that.
$10 is about the break point for me. I'm much quicker to buy a CD that costs under $10. One that costs $18 I really think hard about, and usually don't buy.
$18 is too much for me too. If I didnt have my discount at Borders, I wouldnt really buy cd's. Luckily, that $18 cd costs me $12 which makes sense to me. If I had to pay $18, I might buy a cd now and then but I would buy fewer and would be more motivated to buy used cd's.
I agree with gull - $10 is about the right price that I might take a chance once in a while. More than that and I only want to buy something if it's a sure thing, which not many things are.
If I'm teetering about buying a disc I sometimes grab a few tracks from my current favorite file sharing program and see if I like them. Generally if I like two or three tracks from a disc I'll like the rest of it, and it's worth buying.
I don't usually buy discs at $18, well, okay, imports don't count. :-) But I haven't bought an import in several months (possibly over a year).There are bands that I buy automatically , as soon as I know they have an album out (Oysterband, Dougie MacLean, Garnet Rogers, Mustard's Retreat, possibly Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention..., Tannahill Weavers, BattleField Band, Julie/Buddy Miller... and of course James Keelaghan) but that list is not terribly long. Most of my new music these days is either given to me by friends or sent to me for review purposes. I have a secondary list of people whose music I will buy if I think it's cool, which is pretty long, but they aren't auto-buys, and I don't buy them at full record-company prices. I will shop around and try to find them at Best Buy or whatever. Not that my personal list of musicians is really usually available there, but one can always *look*. I find that the prices charged for CDs makes me much more wary of buying anyone not on my autobuy or secondary list, simply because I don't like getting a pig in a poke. (Similarly to my book-buying habits -- if it's not paper back or an autobuy author, or look so really exceedingly fantastic that I cant' resist it, I am not spending $30 on a hardcover.)
Used CDs are cool. And I don't care about not being hip 'n with it, either. (Does that mean I'm getting old, or still that my tastes run a little slow and eclectic?)
Via Slashdot & USA Today: The five major record companies and three large retailers have agreed to pay $67 million and distribute $75 million worth of CDs to "public and non-profit groups" to settle the price fixing suit brought by several states. http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-09-30-cd-settlement_x.htm This case involved the MAP policy (Minimum Advertised Price), which was an attempt to prop up CD specialty retailers who are trying to hang on against big box stores using CDs as loss leaders. Quote: > The companies have not practice the pricing agreement since 2000. > At that time, they agreed in settling a complaint by the Federal > Trade Commission that they would refrain from MAP pricing for > seven years. > > Former FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky said at the time > that consumers had been overcharged by $480 million since 1987 > and that CD prices would soon drop by as much as $5 a CD as a result. ((Huh? There was no such price drop.)) The companies admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement and in another news story, sources indicated the companies were glad to make the case go away for so little money. Supposedly that $67 million is going to be returned to customers. Yeah, we all saved all our CD purchase receipts from the last five years....
I can't find it now, but at least one article I read on the settlement reported that the $75 million worth of CDs supposed to be donated to educational and non-profit groups would be if you calculated by full retail price -- i.e. about $15/CD average. So really, if you figure it'll maybe cost them a dollar per donated CD (probably less, because I'm sure they'll find some way to charge it back as a promotional expense to the artists whose discs they're giving away) that $75M becomes a lot more like $5M, nearly halving the total cost of the "$140 million dollar" settlement in real-world dollar terms..
I can't see any reason why CD's should cost more than paperback books. The "raw" cost of the CD proper is probably pennies. It's certainly less than $.20. It's obvious that mass produced CD's are essentially "free" - how otherwise to explain the drove of CD's companies such as AOL have delivered to every american household with a postal address. Clearly a naked CD is cheap enough to be a cereal box giveaway. The jewel case & artwork of a commercial CD may have cost more than the actual CD. The royalty due to the artist under most current contracts is clearly not much more. A few exceptional performers may actually get rich, but they are just that--exceptions. Most of the cost of a CD in a store should be the cost of distribution and marketing. That is not unreasonable; we pay similar fees for food in stores with no qualms, and welcome being able to get tomatoes grown in California in winter without the necessity of a plane trip to negotiate with a farmer for purchase and transportation of fruit on an individual basis. The real question is what is actually a reasonable fee for having a CD in a store? In the paperback market, when you buy a paperback, you aren't actually purchasing just one book, but several -- the ones you didn't buy are the ones that get pulped (curtesy of the "magazine" model having overtaken the book industry in the 70's), so in essence you are buying at least $1-$2 worth of paper -- and they still manage to make a profit at "only" $6.95. Another completely independent way of coming up with roughly the same figure is to look at the cost of "naked" software bought in Taiwan. In this market, untrammelled by any real copyright restrictions, you can purchase virtually any software title you please for only $5. You aren't paying anything to microsoft, so the costs you pay are 100% production and distribution. The major risk (ie, additional cost to you the consumer) is that the police might stage a raid and seize some product, but this is low because they usually telephone ahead and warn the vendors. $5 is close enough to the going rate for paperback books that I think this is pretty obviously the "right" price. If anything, this is generous, perhaps the price should be lower. So this $18 / CD is clearly a ripoff. I found it annoying that in this recent agreement in which the record companies and distributers did not admit they had been practicing price fixing, that the corrective actions agreed to did not include lower prices. Apparently nobody representing the real injured party, the american consumer, was properly represented in court.
A welcome bit of humor: http://theonion.org/onion3836/riaa_sues_radio_stations.html
I'm not clear on how record companies set the price on CDs, and how
they've managed to maintain such a consistent price range of $16-18 even in
the case of artists recording on a label that they control (Ani DiFranco on
Righteous Babe or the Toasters on Moon Ska, for instance). Does anyone have
a good idea on how this is done?
Because they control not only most of the means of production but, for practical purposes, completely control the channels of music distribution, too.
Remember DataPlay, the new quarter-sized format which resists user copying? The music industry said they loved it, but apparently it wasn't loved enough: the DataPlay company has shut down while it tries to come up with a few million dollars in additional funding. They're broke for now. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-960514.html?tag=fd_top
resp:31 which said "Most of the cost of a CD in a store should be the cost of distribution and marketing. That is not unreasonable; we pay similar fees for food in stores with no qualms, and welcome being able to get tomatoes grown in California in winter without the necessity of a plane trip to negotiate with a farmer for purchase and transportation of fruit on an individual basis." Be careful: sometimes even that cost of distribution and marketing is too much. I've bought California produce in both California and the Midwest, and I regret to say that far too often, what Midwest consumers are buying, when they choose to pay extra money for California produce over local hothouse product - or even canned - is the word "California". By the time it gets to the Midwest, it's usually lost too much freshness. Not sure how this relates to CDs, which aren't perishable in that way, except that I cherish CDs I've bought at artists' concerts more than some of those I've bought in big stores - for the memory of buying them as well as for the knowledge that the money went to the artist, who deserves it.
Um, I've never assumed the word "California" is any kind of promise of freshness, just a vaguely interesting hint of where the food came from. I wouldn't pay extra for it. Local produce *might* be fresher (or it might not). Mostly I judge quality by the store. Some clearly seem better at getting fresh produce on their shelves than others.
Many of my CDs are filk music. This is not mainstream major record label stuff, but a mix of amateurs and some niche professionals. The distribution channel is also a lot different -- generally this consists of "hucksters" who come to SF conventions, and sell CD's made or at least distributed by a variety of very small production houses. These *should* be a lot more expensive than mass produced music; smaller volume, more labour intensive distribution, etc. Yet I think I've paid more like $13 on average for most of mine.
Hmmm. Most of the ones I have cost between $15 and $18 (the filk cds). Most of them in recent years have cost $17 or $18, but since it's such a small print-run (the last time I checked, a small print run CD for an independent band was around $10/cd (friend's band made just enough CDs to pass out demos and to sell to friends, that was the absolute rock bottom price for such a small run) so I don't mind covering that cost AND giving some cash to the artist) I figured that those costs were kosher.
I was in the filk recording manufacture & distribution business, once upon a very long time ago. We had no business model or planning budget. We set our prices by seeing what equivalent material in record stores cost, and figuring, "Well, that must be about right." Clearly, we were complete wankers. I doubt the wankiness quotient in filking has dropped much since then.
Rep. Boucher has introduced a bill called the "Digital Media Consumers'
Rights Act of 2002". The full text of the bill is here:
http://www.house.gov/boucher/docs/BOUCHE_025.pdf
Most of it deals with requiring labelling of copy-protected CDs, but section
5 is the part that interests me:
---
SEC. 5 FAIR USE AMENDMENTS
(a) Scientific Research -- Subsections (a)(2)(A) and (b)(1)(A) of
section 1201 of title 17, United States Code, are each amended by inserting
after "title" in subsection (a)(2)(A) and after "thereof" in subsection
(b)(1)(A) the following: "unless the person is acting solely in furtherance
of scientific research into technological protection measures".
(b) Fair Use Restoration -- Section 1201(c) of title 17, United
States Code, is amended --
(1) in paragraph (1), by inserting before the period at the
end the following: "and it is not a violation of this section to circumvent
a technological measure in connection with access to, or the use of, a work
if such circumvention does not result in an infringement of the copyright in
the work"; and
(2) by adding at the end the following new paragraph:
"(5) It shall not be a violation of this title to manufacture, distribute,
or make noninfringing use of a hardware or software product capable of
enabling significant noninfringing use of a copyrighted work.".
---
So in other words, this would prevent the DMCA from being used to prosecute
people for fair use of copy-protected material. This bill is bound to get
heavy opposition from the RIAA and other powerful industry groups. It needs
your support. Write your representative.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/03/tech/main524304.shtml Excerpt: The music industry goes to court Friday to try to force an Internet service provider to identify a subscriber accused of illegally trading copyrighted songs, setting up a legal showdown that could indelibly alter the free-swapping culture that has been a signature of the Web's early years. If successful, the suit against Verizon would pave the way for ailing record companies to send out reams of cease-and-desist letters to alleged music pirates, scaring them into submission rather than going through the long process of suing each one in court. Verizon general counsel Sarah Deutsch said a record industry victory would harm the privacy rights of Verizon subscribers and force Internet providers to give up the names of its customers without judicial review.
We are lucky to see a filk CD for $15 on a dealers table. Most
are sold at full "list" of $17 or $18. Ask Juanita Coulson if she
offers a discount for buying a large amount (like 4 for $60 instead
of $66 or $70). Roper does not talk discount no matter how many you
buy at one time, so might as well only buy one or two and wait on
the reaction the ones you just don't know about.
However, Roper's stock of 'Divine Intervention' CD by Julia
Ecklar (now digitally remastered, restored, etc) should sell out
on Friday night of ConFusion at $18. Prometheous music reports that
only packaging work remains (new artwork for the CD). They woudl be
luck to have stock for OVFF November 1st.
Some filk artists will sell their CDs direct at a concert
for $15, but have learned not to uncut the dealers at a con.
Meanwhile, the funnymusicians including Power Salad, Throwing
Toasters, Luke Ski, Tony Goldmark have put out full length CDs at
$10 or $12. They want product in people's hands more than they want
to make money. They also don't seem to be paying themselves
royalties. They should be priced more like $12 and $15. Shows
me that a filk CD need not be more than $15 on a dealers table. The
same would apply, for me, to other artists who have 1000-3000 unit
runs of their CD made. And I have a lot of those 'small run' CDs
in my collection.
Wired refers to the Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/27440.html "Music biz strikes back with free, DRM 'padlocked' downloads" Peter Gabriel's distribution company OD2 arranged for several days of free downloading of tracks encoded with Microsoft's Digital Rights stuff, presumably to get consumers used to the idea. The event seems to have been successful, since the OD2 servers were swamped. This was intended to be a UK-only offering.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Eldred case today. Links to early reports can be found on Slashdot.org; the best summary I have seen says that the plaintiffs' side, the Forces of Truth and Justice :), did not appear to do well.
The dead-tree edition of Billboard contains a story about the crash in the business of selling recorded dance music. A variety of statistics point to sales in the dance genre plunging between 50-80% in the last few years, far worse than the 15-20% decline of the music business as a whole. Dance music retailers are going out of business in substantial numbers. Music business people complain about MP3s being increasingly used by DJs; new electronics allow DJs to do the scratching thing with MP3s instead of vinyl. DJs and fans complain that the record companies charge too much for vinyl singles ($12?) and take too long in getting hot product to market. Billboard doesn't usually put the discouraging business reports on their web site, so you'll probably have to browse the paper version at a newsstand or buy a copy.
Do people listen to dance music anywhere near as much as they used to? It seems to me the market may be more a victim of changing taste than anything else.
Re #45: Yeah...one sticking point seems to be that under the plaintiffs' arguments, the copyright act of 1976 should be unconstitutional, too. As one of the justices put it, declaring that act unconstitutional now would cause "chaos". I can sort of see both sides of this. On the one hand, the Constitution only says that copyright should be for a "limited" time. Under current law, the term of a copyright *is* limited. The problem is every time certain works get close to that limit, Congress extends it again, so it ends up effectively being unlimited.
Re #47: I doubt that the general public bought dance singles, if they were running $12 each. That would make them a specialty item, and if the specialists change their technology to something else you would expect sales to collapse. (Serves the record companies right for being late with a horribly overpriced product, too. Hmmm, sounds almost like a list-price CD...)
The Register has an article here about the Supreme Court challenge of the "Mickey Mouse" copyright extension law of 1998. http://www.theregus.com/content/6/26598.html It goes into some detail about the arguments presented. I thought the author of the article had an interesting point here, though: "Actually, the Mickey Act provides a positive financial incentive for authors and publishers to keep works in print longer by virtue of its retroactive term extensions. It's hard to make money off a printed work that's in the public domain unless it's required reading at uni (e.g., Shakespeare, Donne, Fielding, etc.) or immensely popular (e.g., the Bible). If works pass sooner into the public domain, less popular and lesser-known ones might end up available only on the Internet, and that would be a slap in the face to the billions of people who either prefer to curl up with a real book (like me) or have no computers or Internet access."
Actually, I think that's a totally bogus argument and I believe it's got things almost exactly backwards.. To begin with, the issue isn't whether works will pass "sooner" into the public domain but whether they will *ever* do so or whether existing copyrights will essentially be extended forever, twenty years at a time. Additionally, the extensions cover far more than just books -- they also cover film, music, visual artwork, and much more. And finally, less popular and lesser-known books written seventy-some years ago (which is the time period we're talking about) simply aren't available to "curl up" with -- they're long out of print and there's nowhere you can count on getting a copy. If a work is still popular after seventy years there'll be someone fulfilling the market demand for it in any case and it will be cheaper and other artists will be free to make derivative works if it has passed into the public domain. If it's not popular enough to be money-making, passing into the public domain, where it can be distributed almost without cost, is the best hope a work has of reaching people who might appreciate it.
<nods> There's a lot of old books I'd never have read if it weren't for the cheapass Dover editions.
I agree that that's a problem. I have a lot of out of print material that's no longer available from any commercial source but is still illegal for me to duplicate. I think the argument's relevent, though, because the MPAA has been giving a version of it. They asked whether anyone would have gone to the trouble of restoring and re-releasing _Citizen Kane_ if it had been in the public domain. That's a good question; there are a fair number of early cartoons and such that actually are public domain, and you don't often see copies of them for sale. Commercially anything public domain seems to be considered a dead end, fit only for the dumpster. That aside, I'd like to see the Supreme Court declare the 1988 law unconstitutional but I don't think they will. I think it'd be a bit of a stretch, because the term *is* still limited, the limit is just longer than most of us would like. It's hard to say exactly what *would* violate the wording of the Constitution except for a law that explicitly declared a perpeptual copyright.
I imagine movies may be a little different. Isn't film harder to duplicate than other media?
About ten or fifteen years ago, during the height of the VCR boom, one of the early movie studios which had become more or less defunct (perhaps Republic?) accidentally let the copyright on a great deal of material lapse because whoever owned the rights neglected to renew them. All of a sudden the market was flooded with inexpensive reproductions of movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" and movies that hadn't been broadcast on television in years were rediscovered, while the ones that had been popular enough to still show (like "It's a Wonderful Life") became so commonly aired that people started to make jokes about it.
The New York Times ran an editorial opining that the Sonny Bono \C\o\n\s\u\m\e\r\ \E\x\t\o\r\t\i\o\n Copyright Extension Act should be held to be unconstitutional. I hope the Court agrees. Re #50: The argument that public-domain works lose all commercial value is blatantly false on its face; just look at the great commercial revenues reaped by Disney on Victor Hugo's works shortly after they entered the public domain. Of course, Disney will argue that Steamboat Willie and the Hunchback of Notre Dame have nothing in common. I hope the Court is smart enough to see through that.
Or how Disney took public domain stories like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" and made a bunch of money, but is horrified that somebody might make some money from Disney property in public domain?
"Global CD Slump Accelerates" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2319209.stm "The value of music sold dropped by 9.2% in the first half of 2002, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) has said.... The slump follows a 5% drop in 2001." ((The IFPI is the international version of the RIAA.)) A sidebar lists declines for several markets for first half 2002: US: down 6.8% Japan: down 14.2% UK: down 6.2% (UK was up about 5% last year) France: up 5.2% (!!!) Western Europe total: down 7.5% Asia total: down 15.6% These are money values, not units sold.
The Register is reporting that HR.5469, the bill that was supposed to save online webcasting, has been heavily amended in a backroom deal with a "cabal of thirteen small commercial operations." Most webcasters now feel that the bill will merely ensure only the largest commercial webcasters survive. It also apparently would require, for the first time, that educational and religious terrestrial stations (meaning regular radio stations) pay performance royalties, though the article only mentions that in passing. http://www.theregus.com/content/6/26615.html
This response has been erased.
The Register is one small notch above the Enquirer. If it was valid, they probably reprinted or stole from someone else. Just venting...
Most Internet news sites just reprint stuff from other places. My expectations of them are pretty low -- The Register is more consistantly accurate than Slashdot, and doesn't have the annoying comments, which is why I started reading it. Like Slashdot and Security Focus, I mostly use it as a convenient overview of interesting stuff other sites are reporting on, because I don't have time to read them all. A couple more items that came up there recently (mxyzptlk can skip these): More on HR.5469, including comments from some of the people involved. The bill is not expected to pass, due to opposition from terrestrial broadcasters. http://www.theregus.com/content/6/26644.html An odd situation involving a RedHat errata and the DMCA. The headline doesn't really tell the story on this one -- you have to dig in to find what's really going on: http://www.theregus.com/content/4/26656.html Basically, RedHat is issuing a kernel bugfix errata for a security-related bug. But if you're in the U.S., they can't tell you what the bug is. The reason is the person who discovered it is afraid of DMCA prosecution, and has copyrighted his analysis with a license that stipulates only non-U.S. citizens can read it. (Okay, mxyzptlk can start reading again.) Dimitri Skylarov, the Russian programmer prosecuted under the DMCA for breaking Adobe's eBook cipher, is once again in kind of a bind. He's legally required to attend a trial in the U.S. and testify against his employer ElcomSoft in the U.S. But the American Embassy in Moscow has denied him a visa. http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=2400
The Register is a bit like Hunter S. Thompson's early 70's political writing in Rolling Stone. The regular publications would say "Senator X gave a speech where he said Y", while Thompson made a point of neglecting the official details in favor of his own personal observations, such as "A disturbingly offbalanced Senator X was quickly hustled out to make yet another stump speech written by his handlers, after which he was pulled out of sight and hopefully taken to a hospital".
Fox News reports that Whitney Houston's new CD has leaked out on the net one month in advance of its official release date. Whitney was paid gazillions of dollars for her new contract, and the label is worried the early release will damage sales. Such early exposure didn't hurt Wilco or Radiohead, both of whom had great sales of material widely distributed on the net, but maybe the market for critical-fave rock bands works differently than the market for pop/r&b divas. Carlos Santana's new album has also leaked, just a week before official release. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,66212,00.html
Rolling Stone has a piece on some of the upcoming fall releases.
The article says that the labels used promtional pricing as low
as $9/disc (where??) to boost sales. But we should expect to
pay about $20/disc for big name releases in the fall.
"Label sources say that because of the industry's slump
-- 2002 sales are off almost ten percent -- they can't
afford to lower prices."
I dunno, that just put a big smile on my face.
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=16879&afl=mnew
(Um, the labels used promotional prices this summer, I left that phrase out.)
Sounds to me like they should be anticipating more of a slump.
It would be nice to see the RIAA's funding basis dry up like a puddle at nuclear ground zero.
I kind of wish they'd just accept the law of supply and demand as it relates to pricing, instead of trying to prop up prices with legislation. I worry about the legislative damage a dying RIAA could do.
The "law of supply and demand" is exactly their problem now that it's technologically trivial to make nearly limitless copies of the product they sell.
My point is that if they weren't still trying to fix the price at $16 per disc, they wouldn't be having so much trouble. I suspect fewer people would download music and burn it to CDs if CDs weren't so expensive. There's room for them to make a profit, just not the huge profit they're used to.
I would buy a lot of CDs that I don't now if they were $15/16 a disc reliably. That seems fair and reasonable enough to me. Cheaper would be nice, but I would feel as if I were spending an okay amount if they were a straight $15 or $16 per.
Yeah, a lot of cd's are more like $19
"because of the industry's slump ... they can't afford to lower prices." OK, I admit I wasn't the top student in my econ class, but that's a direct contradiction to my limited understanding of the law of supply and demand.
It depends on the false assumptions they bring to plan.
They think of themselves as being like the health care industry. They have a monopoly on music, so that supply and demand stuff doesn't apply.
I particularly love how the RIAA tries to make it look like Napster
has hurt their business to the point to which they have to take drastic
measures, but every indicator I've seen, including their yearly profit, says
otherwise.
Interesting how the decline started *before* Napster was released, too, isn't it? Apparently it not only allows people to share files, it can go back in time, too.
Harrumph. Those people were holding off buying CDs, waiting for Napster. Well, I couldn't find it, but I read an item recently claiming the whole RIAA "piracy" fight was really intended to stifle small competitors, especially in Web radio.
I'm a bit puzzled by the RIAA's contention that web radio is different then terrestrial radio because it allows "perfect digital copies." Whoever wrote that has never listened to a 32 kbps RealAudio stream.
That's something that's true at the moment, but five or ten years from
now, you may well have realtime access to 144 or 192kbps mp3 quality audio
streams in realtime to the average American user.
No MP3 stream is a "perfect digital copy", though. It's lossy.
I hope 32K sounds a lot better than the 16 20 and 24K I have been hearing (which is still less hissy than the mono broadcast radio I listen to since there are no longer any local classical stations). I have seen 128K stations listed already.
MP3 streams are lossy compression, but considering that (a) it's
usually "good enough" for most listeners, and that (b) a MP3 stream from a
MP3 source is a perfect digital copy ...
(I had a response lost by a connection lockup which was going to say essentially what jazz did in resp:81 :: we assume that the bandwidth available to home users is only going to get better, and the sound quality of Internet radio will only get better. So it's not irrational for the music business to be planning for this future in which digital streams are close enough to CD quality for most people; we've already seen that a tremendous number of people find MP3 files "good enough.") The essay Scott mentions in resp:79 is most likely titled "Raising the barriers to entry" and it's at: http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2002/raising.html
Re #81: What gull said. That's no excuse for writing a law which treats a stream which is degraded far worse than a cassette recording of an FM broadcast the same as the .WAV file straight off the CD. If you're going to argue that "perfect copies" are the problem, then you shouldn't be applying the same law to grossly imperfect copies. Of course, this law is more about restraint of competition for listeners and attempting to dictate musical tastes than "piracy". That's why it's important to puncture the falsehoods around the RIAA's case. Re #85: Then perhaps a rational law would allow no-royalty broadcasting above a certain rate of distortion. That would allow small webcasters to get started on the cheap, and work their way up to high-quality streams as the revenue appears to pay for it.
If an internet radio site has a maximum of say, 128 listeners, it is negligeble to a small FM station that usually reach 12,800 listeners (small town) or or 128,000. What are the royality/air-play rates those stations pay?
Radio stations only pay songwriter royalties, not the record company royalties that are being proposed for Internet stations.
Assorted sales news: A story reports that online sales of CDs have taken a sharp nosedive this year, down 25% from last year, which is much sharper than sales overall. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021104/ap_on_hi_te/onli ne_music_sales_1 (note the URL wrapped) Meanwhile, USA Today reports that while overall CD sales are down over 10% this year, country music sales are *up* 5%. This correlates with sales being up at Wal-Mart and other "rack accounts;" such retailers sell about half of the country sales. Is this the effect described by Moby: would country music fans be less computer-literate than rock and rap fans? Or is this evidence that what's going on is a huge shift in public tastes? http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/2002-11-06-cover-country_x.htm
The overall quality of country artist's CDs could be getting
better. In other words, more satisfaction with the whole CD package
instead of buying the album for the one or two tunes you like.
While the overall audience for country music might be
remaining stable, there may be a change in that new audience
members are more likely to buy CDs ?Converts from pop buying
habits?
I know that I've actually gone out and bought at least three country albums in the last year or two. That's a big jump up from zero, which is what it had bee n for many years.
This guy is going to get clobbered. I wish him well, but he has about the same chances as a goldfish in a blender: http://online.securityfocus.com/news/1608
Gotta give him credit for chutzpah.
The Register had a story on this about a week ago which seemed a little sketchy. However, the website listed below appears to be official, unless it's a well-crafted hoax using BMG trademarks. BMG is announcing its plans to copy-prevent all its CDs in Europe. http://www.bmg-copycontrol.info The Register also had a second story about EMI making similar moves. If The Register was right on the BMG story, odds are good they're right on the EMI one as well.
What a great strategy. That'll certainly increase CD sales. Huh?
Isn't BMG's initiative related to Cactus, which has already been
compromised?
It seems that Roxio, the CD burner software maker, is going to buy the assets of Napster for $5 million. As I expected, this is substantially less than the $8 million offered by BMG; the bankruptcy court was convinced to rule that the BMG offer was a sweetheart deal which wasn't maximizing value for the creditors. (I argue that the record companies, which made this argument in their role as holders of damage awards against Napster, didn't care that they were going to get less money in the bankruptcy: instead, the record companies were trying to screw the other creditors, mostly Napster's lawyers, as much as possible. This seems to me to be a serious perversion of the bankruptcy laws; the rejection of the BMG offer by the court was supposed to lead to *better* offers.) http://news.com.com/2100-1023-965960.html?tag=lh http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/28126.html ----- Followup on resp:89, on the report of a study claiming a sharp decline in the Internet CD ordering business. The first reports claimed a 25% decline in sales for the first three quarters of 2002, relative to the same period in 2001. The NY Times had a story which was even more alarmist: a 39% decline for the third quarter, relative to 2001, and the base period in 2001 includes the weeks after the September 11 attacks, when US entertainment spending dried up for a few weeks. But the bottom of the Times report was taken up with reports by Amazon, the dominant online CD retailer, and from CD Universe (#5 in the field, I think) saying that their sales were doing just fine. This doesn't make sense: if sales are down 25-39%, we should see online retailers folding; we shouldn't see reports of sales holding steady. So I'm suspecting the study reporting such a sharp sales decline online is bogus.
(It could be that the decline is killing off the small retailers, and big names like Amazon are hanging on okay. Or, yeah, it could be that the report is full of it.)
I dunno. I buy CDs online from small retailers more than not. But then I like to buy odd and obscure stuff when I get music -- folk music, from other countries, that's not available on Amazon. I haven't gotten that much bought music this year -- and most of that has been at a brick-and-mortar store, or from the artist directly, though. (OhMIGawd, I just figured it out. It's all my fault! I'm the reason they think all the sales are declining! I haven't been out there spending money on CDs so the slump is all my fault! I must go hang my head in shame now.)
Uh, yeah, Twila. And because of you, the Terrorists Have Already Won. ;)
I rarely buy new CDs from "brick and mortar" stores, these days. They rarely seem to have what I want in stock, and if I have to special-order I might as well cut out the middle man and go straight to Amazon or CDNOW. When I go to a record store these days, it's usually to buy used CDs.
Actually I've bought a few LPs from the ReUse Center ($1 each, which is high by garage-sale standards) and found some pretty cool music - Burt Bachrach Plays His Hits, Perspectives in Percussion vol 2 (one of those cool records they made to push stereo hi-fi). </keesan>
gulag
Keesan buys her LPs by the bagful from the library booksale at about 10 cents each at the winter and spring clearout sales, but I think they are normally 50 cents each and they have a large selection.
I don't buy lps, although I do own quite a few. I also don't buy cassettes any more, although I do have several machines that can and do play them. I have probably several hundred of each in the house, and then there are the CDs. I don't think I actually *need* to get any more music, but I certainly want to get more!
I've occasionally bought LPs, mostly of albums that are out of print and hence aren't available on CD. I burn my own CDs of the music, after recording it to my computer and doing normalization and noise reduction. The results aren't as "clean" as a modern CD, but they generally sound as good or better than the LP and I don't have to worry about wearing it out.
Cnet reports that RIAA is seeking contempt sanctions against the file trading service Madster, the former Aimster, for failing to shut down the trading of copyrighted files in compliance with a preliminary injunction. The owner of Madster was claiming, IIRC (it's not in this story) that the system was so decentralized that it could not be shut off. I don't know the details of its architecture; somehow it is piggybacked on AOL Instant Messenger. More file trading court dates coming up in the next two weeks. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-966800.html?tag=lh
Napster? Does anyone even talk about napster anymore? It's November 2002, people: get with the times!!
Having a hard time reading past the title?
The bargain-hunter site FatWallet.com was given DMCA notices by WalMart, Target, Best Buy, Staples, OfficeMax, Jo-Ann Stores, and KMart for posting their sale prices on its site: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28223.html http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/messageview.cfm?start=0&catid=18&threadid=1 26042 FatWallet complied, but has since filed a lawsuit claiming "frivolous copyright assertion" and demanding damages, based on their belief that sale prices are facts and cannot by copyrighted: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28429.html Apparently the final straw was when WalMart obtained a subpoena to try to get FatWallet to name the person who gave them the pricing information.
Couldnt someone just walk into any old WalMart store for information on their sale prices? It isnt like they go out of their way to keep their prices a secret.
I imagine that's part of what FatWallet's claiming in their lawsuit. Seems like a no-brainer to me, but maybe there are, uh, subtleties that I'm missing.
If this is the same case I heard an NPR piece on the other day, I got the impression that the merchants were angry because their upcoming promotions were being leaked and posted on the site in advance of their official announcements. If that's the case, then no, the same information wouldn't be available to someone walking into any old WalMart store.. It's still unclear to me that the merchants have any course of action against FatWallet. Against their own employees who are leaking competitive information, sure, but not necessarily against the third party reporting that information.
Especially since I don't think you can copyright information per se. You can copyright the specific way in which it is presented, but not the content itself. (Assuming the content is not in and of itself a unique creative product.)
It might come under the category of "trade secret" (in fact, probably does) but the DMCA does not, as far as I know, protect trade secrets.
I know someone who was once asked to leave a store because he was writing down prices. I don't remember if it was WalMart or KMart. The same guy was threatened with legal action for a web site he made that documented Houghton gas prices for several months. (He was demonstrating that not only were all the gas prices in the area the same, they remained at the same (high) level as prices fluctuated in other nearby towns.)
FatWallet is now countersuing under the DMCA. (It inlcudes a clause saying it can't be used for spurious/harassing claims)
re #116: Did he take down the site or tell the fuckers that they could go ahead but they'd have their butts kicked all over the courtroom?
Another Tower Records near-death story. They have $200 million in debt and $18.99 is too much to charge for stuff that Amazon sells for $3-4 cheaper (and Wal-Mart, and Best Buy). Their selection is not saving them. Tower is praying for big holiday season to bail them out, so we might watch for another story after Christmas. http://www.p2pnet.net/issue05/page6.html http://www.detnews.com/2002/business/0211/30/business-23788.htm As mentioned in the last round of Tower-Near-Death stories, a failure at Tower Records would be a massive blow towards what remains of classical CD retailing in the USA.
Well, at the prices currently being charged for CDs, I'm not surprised.
resp:117 and WalMart caved in.
I haven't seen an operating Tower Records in a long time--are there any left in Michigan? Twoers that I've shopped at in Ann Arbor, East Lansing, Toronto, and other places have all closed already.
Tower opened a new store in downtown Birmingham maybe a year? ago. Leslie and I were there briefly last month; we were pressed for time and I could not check it out in detail, but my casual impression was that it was not as well stocked as the old Ann Arbor store.
Sounds like it's not going to last.
Re #118: He took it down. College students can't afford lawyers.
The definitive case on "facts are not subject to copyright" is FEIST v. RURAL TELEPHONE, a U.S. Supreme Court case around 1990. Of course, the content people have been busy bribing Congress ever since to rewrite copyright law in such a way as to invalidate Feist. But one of the key goals of the "database copyright" law would be to allow the pro sports leagues to copyright scores, so that no one could report on games or publish statistics without paying a royalty to the NFL or Major League Baseball or whatever. I think that prospect was shocking enough to people that the bill has been stalled for a while.
Arizona 23, Detroit 20. My bad. :)
Sounds like the Lions' bad.
Tower Records, which I believe originally comes from Northern California, is still thriving out here, and the classical sections are well-stocked. When the Berkeley store moved and expanded, the all- classical outlet was closed and moved back in with the rest, but not diminished in size, and there's an all-classical store across the street from the other store in the North Beach district of San Francisco. That's not counting the 4 other Tower outlets I frequent. But I'm buying about half my classical CDs from Amazon now, and some of the rest from a B&N superstore which has the misfortune of being closer to my home than any of the above Towers. I am tentatively concluding from the previous two posts that there must be an NFL team in Arizona. What? This is news to me. I heard that the Colts left Baltimore for ... uh, somewhere, but after that I lost track. My knowledge of pro sports pretty much stops dead around 1972.
How healthy of you. Other than the chance for water cooler conversation on the topic, you only miss as much as you choose to place value on. I'll fill you in, but only because it's such an amusing thing to fill you in on. The St. Louis Cardinals left St. Louis and moved to Phoenix (well, Tempe). The Los Angeles Rams left Los Angeles (well, Anaheim) and moved to St. Louis. The Baltimore Colts left Baltimore and moved to Indianapolis, adn the owner was recently feeling out the possibility of leaving Indianapolis for Los Angeles. They're still in Indy, though. The Cleveland Browns left Cleveland and moved to Baltimore, becoming the Ravens, and a new team was created in Cleveland, once again called the Browns. They played in a Division with the Tennessee Titans, which used to be the Tennessee Oilers after moving out of Houston as teh Houston Oilers. Houston just created a new team this year, called the Texans, that plays in a division with the Titans. Houston had to get permission to use the name "Texans" from the Dallas Cowboys, who were called the "Texans" when they were first founded. In related news, Dallas is also home of the Stars, who were moved from Minnesota, when they were called the Minnesota North Stars. Minnesota created a new team, called the Wild. They play in a conference with the Phoenix Coyotes, which used to be the Winnipeg Jets, the Colorado Avalanche, which used to be the Quebec Nordiques, and the Calgary Flames, which used to be the Atlanta Flames (you guess it--Atlanta just created a new team, called the "Thrashers.") No, I didn't have to look any of this up. Yes, I do have a life, and yes, it is rewarding, and yes, this is a reminder of why you're probably better off having forgotten all about professional sports. :) It's funny, see?
Atlanta *Flames*? They named it after the burning of their own city?
Atlanta Thrashers. Calgery Flames.
Ah, okay. I wondered.
"Atlanta Flames" wouldn't be that weird. Have you seen the Florida license-plates with Challenger on them? They commemorate on their cars the most infamous motor-vehicle accident to occur within their borders. Now that's bizarre.
It's both, actually. The original Atlanta franchise that moved to Calgary was called the Flames. The new franchise is called the Thrashers. Chicago's Soccer franchise is called the "Chicago Fire," though they do diffuse that somewhat by using the fire department's symbol as their logo.
I hate it when sport franchise names are in the singular. Worst of all is my own university, which calls its teams the Stanford Cardinal. I keep wanting to ask, the Stanford Cardinal WHAT? Cardinal Sins? I went along with dropping Indians, but I voted for the Robber Barons as the new name.
I would have suggested the Fighting Honkies, in case they wanted to stick with racial references.
I hate singular names, too. There's a small club sports team or something in the northwest that has one Native American team called the Fighting Whities. I don't know many other details, but I think it's hilarious. You could always go for the Fighting Irish, or ask the New Orleans basketball franchise (formerly of Charlotte, of course) to change its name from the Hornets to the WASPS.
I thought the students at Stanford had voted (by a very wide margin) to name the sports teams the "Robber Barons".
My school used to have as their mascot a native american warrior, known as the Saltine Warrior. That was changed, in the name of political correctness, to a large citrus fruit. (somewhat less intimidating, however, if I was approached by a 5 foot 5 inch tall citrus fruit in a dark alleyway, I think I'd be pretty scared) (Said citrus fruit is currently one of 12 mascots that are up for the "Capital One Bowl Mascot of the Year" award. Sadly, he's only got 3% of the vote right now)
Saltine?
http://www.syr.edu/aboutsu/memorabilia/mascot.html <remmers suppresses politically incorrect comment concerning citrus fruit mascot>
Syracuse was known as the "Salt City", presumably for a pretty decent number of Salt mines in and around the city. The "Saltine Warrior" was, to the best of my knowledge, named to reflect this, not as a tribute to the tasty cracker of the same name. (It is not known as to whether or not the Saltine Warrior threw saltine crackers into the audience ;) )
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28574.html No particularly new information, but kind of amusing. Excerpt: Yesterday it [the RIAA] issued a press release announcing a piracy bust in New York which unearthed 421 CD-R burners. Only there weren't 421 burners, but "the equivalent of 421 burners." In fact, there were just 156. How did the RIAA account for this discrepancy? "There were only 156 actual burners, but some run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x. This is well above the average speed," was the official line yesterday.
http://www.cdfreaks.com seems to have the best headline news roundup these days, though much of the material is of shaky quality. They point to this story from usa today: http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2002-12-12-record_x.htm "Record industry braces for lumps of coal in its stocking" Soundscan reports that USA album-length sales are down 11% this year, in year-to-date numbers. "It's unlikely that the final stretch of Christmas shopping will pull 2002 out of a nose dive." Are older fans less likely to download/trade unauthorized copies, or are they just more interested? "The exception ((to the sales decline)) seems to lie in the long-ignored demographic of older fans. Such adult-skewing artists as James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen, the Dixie Chicks and Alan Jackson seem immune to the industry malaise." From other stories which I can't reference right now: the sales of Mariah Carey's "comeback" album are mediocre, and the sales of Whitney Houston's new album have to be considered catastrophic, given that she was signed to a $100,000,000 contract. "Death of the Divas" stories are running in a number of places.
I chuckled at the redefinition of 156 CD burners as 421 burners because they ran at high speeds. I suppose Roger Bannister got to cast extra votes at elections, counting as additional persons, because he ran at high speeds. I am reminded of a strategem in the current attempt to prove that poorer people are undertaxed: their social security tax is not counted, on the grounds that this money is eventually returned in the form of benefits.
"Adult-skewing artists"?
Sure. Lots of people who like the Dixie Chicks wind up pretty skewed. Why do you think they had to take that "Earl" song off the air?
Re #146: According to a Wall Street Journal editorial, poor people need to be taxed more heavily so that they'll develop a healthy hatred of government. Presumably they'd then vote Republican, like all right-thinking people.
(resp:147 :: Probably I'm mangling the language. Artists who tend to draw an older audience than the music business is used to marketing to.) (resp:149 :: we're really drifting here, but I wonder if the Wall Street Journal considered that Maggie Thatcher tried the exact same maneuver. To get lower-income people upset with their local government, she attempted to force the local governments to levy a per-person tax amount -- this was called a poll tax in the UK. The plan was to make people demand a lowering of the tax amount and deep cuts in social services; the result, however, was close to a general uprising and Thatcher was forced out of office.)
Maybe the extra 265 burners exist in virtual reality.
How are other media markets doing? USA Today (paper edition) reports that book sales are down 7% for fall 2002, a decline roughly comparable to what's being projected for the music industry. Amazingly, the book industry spokespeople don't blame the internet or copy machines :) ; instead they talk about the soft economy and the fall in popularity of several megablockbuster authors.
The U.S. government has lost its DMCA case against Elcomsoft for producing a product to decrypt Adobe e-books. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/1857 'Lawyers for the Russian company said Elcomsoft's program simply allowed users to make backup copies of eBooks and be able to read them on other devices, something permitted under the "fair use" concept of copyright law. 'Jury foreman Dennis Strader said the argument made a big impact on the jurors, who asked U.S. District Judge Ronald M. Whyte to clarify the "fair use" definition shortly after deliberations began. '"Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had trouble with that concept," said Strader.'
Wow, this is huge. In the early reporting it sounds like a case of "jury nullification." Thanks, David!
I hope it's not jury nullification, because then it could be overturned, and wouldn't have any precedential force. What we need is what resp:153 quotes the jury foreman as saying, that ebook use restrictions are a direct violation of established fair use provisions.
The SecurityFocus report (which is off the AP wire, I think) suggested this wouldn't really set a precident against the DMCA, and that another case would be necessary for that. So maybe it was jury nullification.
I think it's going to be clear how important this is as a precedent once
it's appealed. But the important thing is probably not the jury per se,
who aren't expected to interpret law, but only determine if the facts
"fit" the law, but the arguments made to the jury by the two opposing
teams of lawyers, and whatever instructions the judge gave the jury.
Most of that is based on centuries of hoary common law. Jury
nullification would be if the jury made a decision completely contrary
to all logic - in this case, it sounds like they more likely made a
decision consistent with the law as it was explained to them. Assuming
they did so and that the law was explained completely and accurately,
it's very likely the recording industry is going to be at least somewhat
disappointed. Perhaps DMCA didn't go far enough in working through all
the ramnifications of "fair use" and redefining them to meet the
recording industry's expectations, or perhaps the recording industry
completely failed to explain how legitimate use of resources could fail
to violate DMCA, leaving an apparent contradiction in law. That's no
problem for common law; apparent contradictions happen all the time,
indeed, lawyers thrive on the stuff. They've got all sorts of rules for
what happens in such cases, and if that's what happened here, then the
ever popular "status quo" rule won the day. There's another rule which
says if {a long list of exceptions} didn't happen, then what the jury
decides must be true, which means judges try hard not to interpret law
in ways which contradict how "properly instructed" juries interpret the
law. So I think the decision this jury reached is really quite
interesting.
Of course, that assumes a properly functioning judiciary system. You
never know how ideology will affect a "strict constructionalist".
It will be interesting to see what "son of DMCA" looks like should this
court decision survive the appeals process.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28590.html The Librarian of Congress has the power to review the effects of the DMCA and grant exemptions every three years. The deadline is Wednesday for this round. Only narrow issues where there's a "factual case for harm caused by the law" are considered, though.
I'm a librarian, but I'd never wanted to be Librarian of Congress. You have to live in D.C., and the job is more administration and publicity than actual librarianship. (Most librarians hate to be administrators, and try to avoid promotion into such positions. As a result the administrators are the ones who actually enjoy it, which is often even worse.) But I have to say, having power over the DMCA has made me dream wistfully of what I'd do if I somehow did become Librarian of Congress ... but if I did what I'd want to do, I probably wouldn't hold the job long.
(Librarian of Congress seems to be a powerful position. He also gets to choose what films are added to the National Film Registry. I always do a double-take when I see his name in the news -- he was a history professor of mine in college, back in his teaching days...)
You have several choices: