I'm still obsessive; this item is back. Napster the corporation has been destroyed, but the Napster paradigm continues. 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 once phrased it. Several years of back items are easily found in the music2 and music3 conferences. Linked between the Agora and Music conferences.163 responses total.
So far I've only seen this one end-of-year story on CD sales in 2002: "Album sales took another tumble" http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2003-01-02-album-sales_x.htm Christmas sales were decent and trimmed the loss a bit; CD sales were down 8.7% for the year in number of units sold, which is better than the 10-12% decline which was being predicted as recently as the fall. The 2002 decline follows a 2.5% decline in 2001. These are SoundScan's numbers. Country music was up 12.2%; all other genres reported were static or down. The dead tree edition of this story had an accompanying chart listing the Top Ten sellers for the year. "Rock is dead, they say:" the closest to rock music in the top ten list were Avril Lavigne and Pink. There were four hip-hop/rap albums on the list, and four country albums, including the venerable O BROTHER soundtrack album, which was the #10 seller in its second year of release. Eminem had the year's best selling album with about 7 million copies sold, but O BROTHER's sales totals over two years match that 7 million figure. I lost the story which reported that the music concert business also took a beating in 2002. The concert decline cannot be attributed to digital file sharing; it instead reinforces the idea that the music industry is losing its grasp on people's attention. I'd love to see a comparison of the decline in CD spending and the growth of DVD spending.
Oh, one more point from the new USA Today story: it refutes the story reported in November http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2002-11-03-online-music-sales_x.htm in which a study claimed that music sales were plummeting at online retailers. The new story says that online sales were up 8.6% for 2002.
Nobody is going to buy rock music if there is no good rock music to buy.
It's interesting to speculate where the record labels would be placing blame if peer-to-peer file trading services had never become popular. Ironically, Napster may be the best thing that ever happened to a number of record company executives..
yeh, it caught them napping ....
I'm with Steve on #3.
One thing Napster and other P2Ps have done is to help introduce non-pop
bands to a significantly wider audience. Those bands' sales don't even show
up as a blip on the RIAA's radar.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28749.html DVD Jon is free - official By John Leyden Posted: 07/01/2003 at 11:09 GMT The entertainment lobby has failed to persuade a Norwegian court to convict a teenager for creating a utility for playing back DVDs on his own computer. Jon Lech Johansen has been acquitted of all charges in a trial that tested the legality of the DeCSS DVD decryption utility he produced, Norwegian paper Aftenposten reports. Norwegian prosecutors, acting largely on the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), argued in court that Johansen acted illegally in sharing his DeCSS tool with others and distributing it via the Internet. They claimed the DeCSS utility made it easier to pirate DVDs. The court rejected these arguments, ruling that Johansen did nothing wrong in bypassing DVD scrambling codes that stopped him using his Linux PC to play back DVDs he'd bought. Judge Irene Sogn ruled that there was "no evidence" that either Johansen or others had used the decryption code (DeCSS) illegally, Aftenposten reports. Judge Sogn dismissed prosecution arguments that Johansen intended to aid and abet DVD piracy. The ruling means its legal to use DeCSS code to watch legally obtained DVD films, at least in Norway. The case began three years ago with a raid on Johansen's home, after which he was charged by the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit for obscure offences against Norwegian Criminal Code 145(2) which carry a sentence of up to two years in jail. The case has been closely watched ever since, and Johansen's victory represents a big win for the tech enthusiasts against the bully-boy tactics of the US entertainment industry.
phew! /
I have never used a DVD. Is it not normally possible to play one in a computer DVD-drive, or is it just not possible to use Linux to do so?
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So why did someone have to write a decoder for Linux?
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A DVD drive lets you read data on DVD discs, like a CD-ROM drive. The problem comes in because DVD movies are *encrypted*, and need to be decoded in a specific way to be played back. The encryption is intended to stop people from copying the video off the DVD and into other formats. (Analogous to 'ripping' audio CD tracks and converting them into MP3 files.) It doesn't prevent copying the whole DVD to another DVD, though. My understanding is that DVD drives are capable of reading the data, and capable of supplying the necessary decryption key (if the disc is the same region as the drive is set to), but the playback software needs to do the actual decryption. Only licensed software companies that pay royalties to the MPAA are supposed to have the ability to write this software. DeCSS is an unlicensed, illegal (in the US), reverse-engineered version of this decryption code written by someone who was frustrated by the lack of DVD players for Linux. If the drive *isn't* set to the right region, flaws in the encryption algorithm make it possible to brute-force out the correct decryption key, but it's more time consuming. This is all based on my understanding of bits and pieces of information I've seen. If I've got something wrong, let me know so we can all learn. ;)
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So there are players for Windows?
There are lots of players for Windows. Every DVD I rent seems to have a different one.
Yet another weird use of the DMCA -- this time, a suit filed by Lexmark to prevent third-party companies from making printer toner cartridges. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/7/28811.html Excerpt: "This week, federal district court in Lexington, Kentucky issued a temporary order to prevent Static Control from making or selling its microchips. "The order has been put in place until Lexmark's motion for a preliminary injunction can be heard by the Court. "Lexmark's complaint alleges that the Smartek microchips incorporate infringing copies of its software and are being sold by Static Control to defeat Lexmark's technological controls, hence the invocation of the DMCA. Its case is that Static Control's technology permits the unauthorized remanufacturing of Lexmark Prebate toner cartridges." In a way, I think companies like Lexmark are doing us a favor, by making it obvious how absurd the DMCA really is.
I'm behind; some stories will have to get entered without me digging up the links. Reported in business and entertainment news everywhere: Tommy Mottola is out after 14 years of running Sony Music. The press release calls it a resignation but most news stories say he was pushed. Sony ranks #3 among the Big Five music companies, and its 2002 losses are reported in one story as over $100 million, in another story as $140 million. ----- Two recent articles on the live concert bootleg scene. The NYTimes reports that the trading of concert recordings is booming on the Internet; the music industry mostly leaves it alone because they have bigger problems right now. Concert bootleg CDs have changed from a premium- priced item sold at dubious CD shops into a non-profit, gift-exchange medium. Fans openly run Web pages to coordinate trading. Bootleg enthusiasts consider themselves to be preserving artistic history. (Though it's not mentioned in the article, that point has already been borne out by the dedicated fans who bootlegged lots of old jazz performances. And see the Dylan article which follows...) Meanwhile, musicians deal with the new reality that every note they play in a concert is going to be heard worldwide: the Times concludes with an anecdote about how this realization led one musician to quit drinking on stage. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/06/arts/music/06ARTS.html Over in Salon, there is a very nice essay about how the craving of fans for Dylan live & unreleased songs created the modern bootleg industry, and how the bootleg industry has returned the favor by keeping Dylan's profile and critical esteem high, even in the last 25 years when his official studio output has been mostly low quality: http://www.salon.com/ent/music/feature/2003/01/07/dylan_boots/
Another unrelated story in Fox News' entertainment column on Tommy Mottola's firing is this: Whitney Houston's new album JUST WHITNEY has sold 430,000 copies in the USA. The article describes it as a "dismal sales failure;" you might not think 400K copies as a failure, but Whitney has a contract reported elsewhere to be worth $100,000,000, and this Fox item claims that she has borrowed $20 mil from her label Arista as an advance against future royalties. So, on a per-CD basis, Fox claims that Ms. Houston has borrowed about $40 for every copy of her CD sold. (Arista, according to Fox, claims 1 million copies shipped and is asking for a platinum record on that basis; I thought the RIAA had put up safeguards to stop giving out awards on the basis of shipments, not sales, years ago.) To give this a little more context: sales of JUST WHITNEY are less than 1/10 of what Eminem has sold with his last couple of releases -- nowhere near enough sales to support her megacontract. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,75046,00.html
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Can we conclude that Country Music fans don't know how to download and burn CDs, or that they actually do want the CDs from the artists. ?
We're getting another burst of "music industry crisis" stories. The February issue of Wired puts the subject on its cover, though none of that content is posted online yet. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/13/business/media/13TUNE.html "Music Industry Braces for a Shift" 2000 CD (and cassette!) sales were 785 million; 2002 sales were 681 million, for a two-year decline of 100 million. Lots of punditry: the business' problem remains that their biggest costs, for "talent" and marketing, are out of control, and there are always music execs willing to overspend in those areas. Sony Music, trying to "think outside the box," has brought in a TV executive to replace outgoing head Tommy Mottola. It is suggested that most music industry executives are stuck in the old, failing business model and will have to be replaced. One unnamed executive says the price of CDs must come down, observing that it is absurd that a movie soundtrack CD now costs more than that same movie sold as a DVD. On the other hand, the RIAA's Hilary Rosen sounds even more pathetic than usual when she talks about keeping the price up in the face of falling sales, and then goes on: "... she said the industry needs to promote the joy of CD collection and to revive the value of owning a physical object."
What does a DVD cost?
How much does a physical blank DVD cost? I imagine it's around 50 cents. How much does a DVD cost that has a movie on it? $25-30 if it's a top of the line movie or one that's in demand, such as a recent Disney movie or any successful movie released in theaters in the last year. If I want a movie or CD, I buy it. But there aren't that many I really want.
John's numbers are a little out of date. Many popular recent movies are released on DVD in the $15-$20 price range and last year's biggest blockbuster DVD releases (the first "Lord of the Rings" movie and the first "Harry Potter" film both sold for around $15-$17 the week of their release. It's fairly rare for a new single-disc movie to cost $30.
Is this 'less' than the cost of a CD?
Moreover, it's not uncommon to see a movie, months after release and
the initial buying sprees have died down, to be released for $10 or $20 less
than it was originally. Not so with CDs. A few are released for less, and
usually it's not significantly less, by the publishers.
CDs and movies bottom out at about the same prices. Bargain-bin CDs, ones that are on the verge of going out of print for lack of demand, tend to cost around $10.
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Heck you can get the *real* bargain bin cds for .99-3.99 at Big Lots.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51958-2003Jan13.html "Entertainment, Tech Firms Reach Truce on Digital Piracy" *Some* tech firms -- most notably Dell, Intel and Microsoft -- and *some* parts of the copyright industry -- most notably the RIAA -- claim to have reached agreement on Something on copyright issues. There are as yet absolutely no details on what that Something is. Notably absent from the agreement are the Consumer Electronics Association from the hardware side, and the MPAA (movie trade group) from the copyright side.
The agreement is widely reported in Wednesday media. Essentially
the parties agree to play nice together. The RIAA agrees not to
push for government technology mandates; the tech industry agrees
to stop promoting copying, which I guess means an end to those
Intel Inside! ads showing young people with homemade CDs.
A number of observers report that this shows a split between
the RIAA and the MPAA, with the movie industry sticking to its
demand for the Hollings bill or something like it to mandate copy
controls in all digital devices which could conceivably access
copyrighted content.
-------
The forces of Truth and Justice lost as the Supreme Court rejected
the arguments of the plaintiffs in the Eldred case. By a 7-2
margin, the Court ruled that while the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension
Act was probably bad policy, it was within Congress's power to pass
such a law.
-------
Finally, here is a Canadian story on the music industry situation
in our northern neighbor. Two interesting differences in the
Canadian story, compared to the American version:
1) The CD sales decline in Canada has been much sharper, with a
17% decline in 2002, and a 25% decline over three years.
That's about twice as bad as the drop in USA sales.
2) Lots of space is devoted to the "copyright tax" which Canada
levies on blank media and some digital equipment.
From Toronto's Globe and Mail:
http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/ArticleNews/gtnews/TGAM/20030115/RVM
USI
So copyright isn't for a 'limited time' after all.
Sure it is. It's "limited" to however long brodcast media conglomerates can keep buying votes from legislators. Heck, I expect the Mouse to be liberated any day now..
You mean "any 20 years now."
Somewhere I read a pro-Mouse person saying that their idea of an ideal copyright term would be "infinity minus one day." That's still a "limited term," you see. I am tickled by Lawrence Lessig's observation that the first Mickey Mouse cartoon was an unauthorized takeoff on a Buster Keaton film that was released _earlier the same year_. Try doing that to a Disney film these days and see how fast your empire grows, says Lessig.
"infinity - 1" isn't finite, but I have no doubt that it would nearly satisfy the copyright lobby.
The next copyright bill will probably set the length of copyright at maxint years.
At least it will be "for a limited time". Out of curiosity, does anyone understand the implications of the US unilaterally extending copyright terms? The previous extensions probably haven't been an issue with our Berne Treaty partners because I think they just brought the U.S. into line with what most of the others were doing but what happens if the U.S. decides to keep extending and Europe does not?
Economic santions against the EU until they comply. And guerilla market tactics by the copyright holders to undermine the value and accessibility of 'unauthorized copies' of the affected works, naturally.
sanction... /cnat
the european copyrights were not extended ... LOTS of greate stuff hitting right now. i thnk it was a pavoratti story about the legit distributor outright *buying* the bootleg company for total control of pavoratti recordings.
The Disney organziation has benefitted greatly from the public domain
("Snow White", "Cinderella", "Hunchback of Notre Dame", etc. etc.) and
appears not to want to give anything back, ever. Disgusting.
The New York Times just had a piece on disparities in copyright terms. In much of Europe, the term is still 50 years. A whole bunch of Maria Callas music is now in the public domain there, and the availability of (bad) copies of old releases has prompted the owners to re-release the good stuff.
I support removing all copyright BULL SHIT! SUPPORT NAPSTER & CRONIES ET AL.
The trend seems to be towards encrypting content so that even once it has fallen into public domain, actually copying it will be either illegal or impossible.
Music Exec: ISPs Must Pay Up for Music-Swapping http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=582&e=3&cid=582&u=/nm/2003 0118/ wr_nm/tech_internet_music_dc The RIAA is pushing for a fee to be imposed on ISPs to compensate record companies for music piracy. They may actually get it -- after all, they successfully got fees on blank cassettes and audio CD blanks. I think this is stupid, but I didn't really think that ISPs would get away forever with using music file swapping as a selling point for broadband.
Here's another weird DMCA suit, from the latest RISKS digest: Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2003 18:48:21 -0800 Subject: DMCA v garage door openers >From: Fred von Lohmann EFF <fred@eff.org> To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> In the latest bit of DMCA lunacy, copyright guru David Nimmer turned me onto a case that his firm is defending, where a garage door opener company (The Chamberlain Group) has leveled a DMCA claim (among other claims) against the maker of universal garage door remotes (Skylink). Yet another case where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are being used to impede legitimate competition, similar to the Lexmark case. Not, I think, what Congress had in mind when enacting the DMCA. The Complaint: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20030113_chamberlain_v_skylink_complaint.pdf The Amended Complaint: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20030114_chamberlain_v_skylink_amd_complaint.pdf The Summary Judgment Motion: http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20030113_chamerlain_v_skylink_motion.pdf Attorneys for Skylink are (both at the Orange County offices of Irell & Manella, a large law firm): "Nobles, Kimberley" <KNobles@irell.com> "Greene, Andra" <AGreene@irell.com> Fred von Lohmann, Senior Intellectual Property Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation fred@eff.org +1 (415) 436-9333 x123
fag.
Copying the content assumes that the media have survived long enough for the material to become public-domain. For CDs and DVDs, this is very iffy.
fag.
qweer
In one of the music industry's biggest legal wins to date, a federal judge has ruled that copyright holders can use the expedited subpoena powers of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to compel ISPs to disclose the subscriber ID associated with a given IP address when the copyright holder has observed that IP address offering copyrighted files on a peer-to-peer service, such as Kazaa. No judicial review is required of such expedited subpoenas. The DMCA procedures clearly applied in cases where the suspected copyright infringement resided on a web server at the ISP's office; The case turned on whether the DMCA applies to ISPs in their role passing through files which resided on subscribers' own computers. It would appear that, at a minimum, many thousands of P2P users will shortly be getting direct communications from the RIAA. This was the "RIAA vs. Verizon" case. http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,57330,00.html
The prosecution in the Norwegian DeCSS case has decided to seek an appeal of Jon Johansen's aquittal. http://online.securityfocus.com/news/2102
resp:53 :: I want to paste in two quotes about the privacy implications
of the RIAA/Verizon ruling. The first is from a Washington Post
online dicussion with intellectual property attorney Megan Gray, who
filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case on behalf of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation and similar groups. She describes the
mechanism the court has upheld:
"The burden of proof ((to get a DMCA subpoena)) is zero.
All RIAA or any purported copyright holder needs to do is submit
a signed letter saying (1) I am a copyright owner in [insert name
of copyrighted work]; (2) The material at [insert description]
infringes my copyright; (3) I swear under penalty of perjury
that the purpose that I am submitting this paper is to get the
identity of an alleged infringer and I will use that information
only to protect my copyrights. The purported copyright holder
submits this signed letter to a court clerk -- no judge or lawyer
at the court reviews this document, ever. Under the DMCA, the court
clerk is *required* to approve the letter and issue a subpoena."
http://discuss.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/zforum/03/sp_technews_gray012203.h
tm
Salon runs an AP story which quotes Verizon's counsel Sarah Deutsch:
"The case clearly allows anyone who claims to be a copyright holder
to make an allegation of copyright infringement to gain complete
access to private subscriber information without protections
afforded by the courts."
http://www.salon.com/tech/wire/2003/01/21/verizon/index.html
http://www.cdfreaks.com/news2.php3?ID=5565
----------
Recall that this case was not about whether Verizon could be forced to
disclose the subscriber information; rather it was about whether Verizon
could be forced to disclose it without judicial review. In the matter
of uncovering the identity of Internet users, Congress and courts have
now delegated the subpoena power to any private party who wishes to grab it
and is willing to run the trivial legal risk of signing a false statement.
Re #55: Interesting. If your records are turned over pursuant to a subpoena, do you at least get informed so that you can sue? I can see a new application: the VPN-tunnel between computers so that a person can act as an anonymizing proxy for others. The proxy works for http, P2P services, and a bunch of other things. This way, neither the ISP nor the RIAA can know who the requests are coming from, or where the data are actually stored; neither a subpoena nor a search following it yields anything useful, especially if the proxy keeps no logs. Slashdot today has a story about the imminent collapse of the record labels.
Re #56: I know there were various groups working on anonymous file sharing software of some sort, but I haven't heard anything about them lately. In the one I vaguely recall hearing about, the design was distributed in the extreme -- files were spread across systems, and connections were forwarded around the network so that you couldn't know where the various chunks had come from. The on-disk storage was also encrypted so that any particular user had no way of knowing what files were stored on thier system. (Plausible deniability, of a sort.) Interesting stuff.
Sounds great from a technical standpoint, but given the current reality that mere possession of certain kinds of information (specifically child pornography) is a felony with jail time and ruin-your-life potential, I'm not so sure that I want to participate in a system where I've got "no way of knowing what files [are] stored on [my] system," plausible deniability or no..
this may have been mentioned, but I think it's funny that Disney is trying so hard to keep pushing out the length of copyright, when they've made billions off of things in the public domain.
(I mentioned it in resp:43. The adjective I used was "disgusting".)
Russ's resp:56 refers to the polemic from Charles C. Mann, who has been writing about copyright issues & the music industry at least since Napster appeared. It's the cover story on the dead-tree issue of Wired for February, and you can now read it at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/ Mann frames his piece with an account of his last chat with Timothy White, the editor of Billboard Magazine who died suddenly last year. According to Mann, White was predicting the collapse of the whole music biz. The article does make the observation that the recording industry needs friends, lots of them, to tackle each of its big problems, and it doesn't have many friends -- it is resented by its talent, its its customers, its retailers and its co-business people in the hardware industry in a way that might be unique. Two amusing quotes: "Why, when most industries are using technology to slash costs, is Michael Jackson running up $30 million in studio bills? Or, rather, why is Sony Music letting him?" "Ultimately, Timothy ((White)) suggested to me that night, the industry as we know it could vanish not so much because of technology but because few people over the age of 30 would care if it did." --------- Might as well stick in some more dark gloom pieces. The Boston Herald runs a piece with a local focus where the music biz complains more about CD burners than about online file sharing -- oops, that piece from last Friday has gone into the for-pay archive. Two quotes: After discussing the widely shared view that most current releases aren't very good: "Or as one major label executive said in a recent issue of Billboard, 'The storm might pass more quickly if someone would make a decent record.' Also: "One other cultural factor that must be pointed out is the decreasing importance of music as the generation-defining cultural touchstone," followed up with a couple of retailers and students offering quotes suggesting that music is not the all-consuming passion that it was for many of us 15-25 years ago. --------- And for doom, you can't get much better than Norman Lebrecht, author of "Who Killed Classical Music?" In a November column, Lebrecht kicks around the rubble of the classical music recording industry which he already thinks is dead. http://www.scena.org/columns/lebrecht/021127-NL-dilemma.html Lebrecht points out that in two of the remaining "success" stories in classical music, the recording artists aren't getting much more than beer money. Naxos, the very successful budget label, pays its artists a flat $1000 with no further royalties. And, for the widely reported venture where the London Symphony started releasing its own discs: the orchestra divvied up the profits among the musicians, and each musician made only about 100 UK Pounds ($150) for all the dozen albums the LSO issued -- that's just a little more than US $10 per album recorded.
Ironically, the US $10 / album each musician earned wouldn't even pay for them to buy a retail copy of the music they'd performed.
Couldn't they borrow a copy from a friend and burn a CD from it?
Errr, Sindi, that's not the point -- the musicians should have been able to be paid more for that much work.
they can be. the studios and record labels need to be paid much less, and the RIAA needs to be paid nothing.
Re #58: True. I wonder, if the file were striped RAID-style across a bunch of systems, so no one person actually had a useful file by themselves, if that'd still be prosecutable.
I think Sindi is making a joke in resp:63. Twila and Tony in resp:64 and resp:65 :: Lebrecht's argument is that it is unclear how the artists *can* get paid any more in "serious" classical music recording. The major labels can no longer make money off of their classical artists; the major labels are cancelling the contracts of almost all their classical artists, except for a handful of stars like Cecilia Bartoli.
I simply wonder if there's a way for musicians (particularly classical ones) to be paid what their art is worth without dealing with labels making money.
Re #58: That would be a reason to run either a proxy node or a storage node, but not both. Helping other people hide without any knowledge of what you're hiding or transferring is unlikely to do more than make the authorities terribly grumpy; what could they do?
re #69: > Helping other people hide without any knowledge of what you're > hiding or transferring is unlikely to do more than make the > authorities terribly grumpy; what could they do? So long as the answer to that question remains unknown and the worst-case scenario is sufficiently fearful, I suspect there will be few takers to participate in such a scheme -- that's the nefarious nature of a chilling effect.
Accessory after the fact. You can be tried for murder in Texas if you simply start a riot in which someone is killed. Conspiracy. What can they do? Lots.
They can already take your computer on fairly loose charges, and if the info is "encrypted" that's more incentive to pretty much destroy your data (and deprive you of your computer for months) while deciding if they want to press charges or not.
Re #72: You're using an incorrect premise. People running proxy nodes *would not have any data*; all they would do is decrypt and forward requests, and encrypt and forward responses. The purpose of the proxies is to anonymize the traffic. There might be more than one level of indirection. People trying to find the data would have to follow proxy connections which change from day to day, or even minute to minute. AFAIK, there is no law, regulation or precedent which says that you're committing a crime for refusing to leave your name and address everywhere you go, or helping someone else to do the same. This is more or less analogous. And on the funny side: http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/comics/archive/showComic.hts?date=20 03/1/27&name=Fox_Trot&quality=g
Re 73: You're assuming we have sufficiently intelligent law enforcement which will not just go on periodic witchhunts.
I wonder if an open, anonymous proxy could be considered an "attractive nuisance" for legal purposes? At very least I suspect anyone running such a thing would quickly find themselves forwarding vast quantities of spam.
re #75: > At very least I suspect anyone running such a thing would quickly > find themselves forwarding vast quantities of spam. This isn't a mail proxy we're talking about, it's a file service proxy. I suppose it could still be used to inflict spam on people, but not in the same way. My guess is that if this sort of service became popular enough to be useful it would be quickly be outlawed on the pretext of protecting us from child pornography and no lawmaker would dare to vote against the legislation..
Re #74: No, I'm assuming that a siezure without probable cause will be struck down by the courts, and police agencies won't do that more than once in a given milieu. Re #75: Anonymous remailers stayed up for some time after spam became a problem. So have many anonymizing http proxies. One could always require "hash cash" or the like to prevent abuses. Re #76: Since such proxies have many lawful uses (such as merely being able to research privately, without leaving traces in the http logs of competitors), I doubt the courts would uphold a ban.
Didn't anon.penet.fi (?) meet a legal demise?
re #77: > Since such proxies have many lawful uses (such as merely > being able to research privately, without leaving traces in the > http logs of competitors), I doubt the courts would uphold a ban. While it's possible that the courts will side with you, I'll stick to my prediction that if such networks ever become popular the kiddie-porn scare factor will be used as an excuse to either outlaw them outright or burden them with enough legal hazards that no responsible person (under U.S. jurisdiction, at least) will be willing to act as a host.
Re #78: anon.penet.fi wasn't completely anonymous; it assigned pseudonyms to people who used it, so that replies could be forwarded. The Co$ demanded (and got) the user list. However, *real* anonymous remailers keep no such lists, and I was reading about such remailers until a couple of years ago (I haven't looked for them recently, so they've fallen below my radar). Size limits probably prevent such from being used for things like dirty pictures, and frequent log purges (like cryptome.org) mean that little remains to be analyzed. Re #79: Hasn't even touched KaZaa as a network (let alone Gnutella), so I doubt that too. People who host illegal (as opposed to infringing) materials are just stupid. Slashdot had a piece today on a P2P network for delivery of content from overly-popular (e.g. Slashdotted) websites. That's one more thing that a court would have to consider legitimate.
More published rumblings suggesting that prosecutions for peer-to-peer filesharing users are looming. The last such rumblings promised prosecutions last year; my own feeling is that the Feds have enough on their plate, with the FBI closing numerous scattered office to try to gather manpower to use against suspected terrorists. Declan McCullagh writes about the possibility that someone is going to "win" the prosecution lottery. He writes that the No Electronic Theft act has yet to be used against file-sharers, despite the fact that it was crafted for precisely this sort of situation. Declan cites just two convictions under this act so far, both for posting software or movies to web sites. He says the copyright industry is continuing to increase pressure on the government to prosecute some people. "The New Jailbird Jingle" http://news.com.com/2010-1071-982121.html Business Week writes about the threat of such prosecutions. They point out that it would really piss off a lot of consumers. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2003/nf20030127_9897.htm Finally, a short detour into paranoid speculation land. Hilary Rosen, the departing RIAA leader and spokesperson, was a favorite target for vilification over the last three years. Press reports say she did not expect this and was hurt by it, since business lobbyists are usually invisible and the Napster war had not erupted when Rosen took the RIAA job. Some of the profiles written on Rosen's departure paint her as a moderate, trying to drag her employers, the major music companies, into the Internet Age. So here's my paranoid speculation: Did Rosen quit now because she knew prosecutions were coming up fast, and she didn't want to be at the center of the firestorm?
Really nice page at Project Gutenberg which explains the details of what copyrights have expired, or not: http://promo.net/pg/vol/pd.html One piece of good news from my personal standpoint: anything published WITHOUT ANY COPYRIGHT NOTICE before March 1, 1989 (in the U.S., before or without any foreign publication) is public domain. In other words, legislative manuals from 1923 to 1988 with no copyright notice (like West Virginia's and probably some others) can legally be mined for pictures to scan and publish online.
As can M-net user postings before 1 March 1989... Hmmm. bet that would piss off a few people...
I put copyright notices on some of mine...
Well, it was specified that only those items lacking copyright notices were affected.
Items from today's tour of music/p2p news portals: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-verizon31jan31001451,0,4320674.story? coll=la-headlines-business "Verizon Made Offer to Name Some Names" The LA Times reports that Verizon made a settlement offer to the RIAA, which is suing it for express access to customer information. Verizon offered to cooperate with a limited number of customer ID requests; "the RIAA proposed an electronic way to speed the identification of subpoenaed customers," which suggests to me that the RIAA wants direct access to the Verizon customer data base. The RIAA rejected any limits on the number of DMCA subpoenas it would send Verizon, so Verizon is now appealing the trial court ruling against it. The point of the article is that Verizon is standing on issues of costs, not issues of principle.
Salon runs an essay by a board member of NARAS, the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences, the organization which gives out the Grammy Awards. The author, John Snyder, is president of a small record label I have never heard of before, and the intro says he has been nominated for a Grammy Award 32 times. http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/02/01/file_trading_manifesto/?x "Embrace File Sharing or Die" This is a long essay which was written to convince the NARAS board that it needs to stop supporting the RIAA positions on file sharing. Much of this will be familiar from this series of web log items. From the introduction: "The statistic discussed in the December meeting that there were 3 billion downloads the previous month shows that the law is goign to have to be changed, unless you take the position that downloaded music is stealing and THEREBY CRIMINALIZE THE SOCIETY ((emphasis KRJ)). But how can 50 million people (over 200 million worldwide) be wrong?" from the middle... "Why is it that record companies pay dearly for radio play and fight Internet play? ... If we look at the Internet as analogous to radio, the problem becomes one of performance rights, not one of unlawful exploitation of intellectual property." "If your music is not being downloaded, then you're in trouble. If you can't give it away, you certainly can't sell it. Daniel Bedingfeld recently had a Top 3 song on the radio, with "Gotta Get Thru This." However, his music was hardly available on any of the P2P networks. His record lasted on the Billboard Top 200 for less than a month, even though the single had been on radio playlists all over the country for several months." The authors compare this with Eminem, whose 2002 was both widely downloaded, and the top selling album of the year. "This seems to indicated the opposite of what the RIAA would have yhou believe. When people share MP3s, more music is sold, not less." and from the Conclusion: "((The RIAA)) is leading us over a cliff. The RIAA has staked out a position that is as unrealistic as it is anti-consumer and anti-artist. Their interests and the interests of NARAS are not the same. ... They cling unsuccessfully to the past rather than embrace the stunning opportunities offered by the future. ... It is one thing to be unsuccessful, it's one thing to argue a bad position, but it's quite another to be silly and laughed at, and that's where the RIAA has ended up. They appear to be totally irrelevant except as bagmen."
He has an astonishingly good point regarding radio vs. internet "radio" play.
((I misspelled the name of the artist cited in resp:87; it's Daniel Bedingfield. He's the guy who the Snyders say had radio chart action for months, though his CD sank right off the Billboard 200. The Snyders say you can hardly find his stuff on P2P networks. I ran a Google search on him, and it looks like his major label gotten him stuffed into every music portal site they could find. But press coverage is minimal, and there is no sign that he has any fans.... So from here it looks like his record company bought his radio exposure, but no listeners seem to give a hoot about him, which is why his music isn't being traded, and why his CD sank rapidly after release.)) ((Of course sales aren't everything: Richard Thompson's 1971 debut solo album was cited as the lowest selling release in the history of his record company...))
So I take it that Bedingfield is invisible, not because the record companies have successfully stomped out file trading of his songs, but because nobody actually likes his music? Is his top-10 status a purely artificial creation, then?
That's the contention.. It's almost certainly possible to buy your way to the top of the singles charts these days, though it takes a very large amount of money to do so..
Yup, the radio promo business, which was the focus of periodic payola scandals, is still alive and well.
It looks like the copyright holders have ratcheted up the legal arm-twisting on IRC networks. DALnet (the IRC network where I used to hang out in #ecto and #indigo-girls) has announced that it will start squashing channels whose primary purpose is to facilitate file trading. The DALnet news coverage didn't say anything about what motivated DALnet's new policy. Slashdot points to a statement from irc-chat.net (a network I haven't heard of) which says that (krj's interpretation) after serious legal threats from the MPAA, the network operators will now comply with expedited DMCA subpoenas and hand over contact info on IRC users to the copyright holders. http://chat.irc-chat.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=26 The timing makes me guess that the MPAA is citing the Verizon ruling as precedent when it approaches the IRC network operators.
50 smackers a weekly to ride Clyde Ankle really heavy would be downright cheap these days.
The RIAA and MPAA are making threatening noises towards large corporations -- specifically the Fortune 1000. They have sent a mailing warning corporations of their legal liabilities if the corporations do not suppress the use and trading of unauthorized copies of songs and movies on their computers and networks, and they are suggesting that the corporations begin auditing staff computers and disciplining employees. The unspoken threat is that corporations which do not adopt such policies will face whopping copyright infringement suits. This story was widely reported, here's a few links: http://www.billboard.com/billboard/daily/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id =1817612 http://news.com.com/2100-1023-984548.html ----- Meanwhile, in Australia, the music industry has moved to direct action against two students who appear to have had a web page offering MP3 files, and the industry is in court demanding access to the students' email accounts as evidence. http://news.ninemsn.com.au/Sci_Tech/story_46014.asp
Couple of stories I wanted to dump in, but I'm sort of pressed for time. Music publishers sue Bertelsmann, one of the big five labels, for some of the copyright infringements of Napster users. The publishers claim that Bertelsmann's investment & flirtation with Napster propped up the venture and made the injuries to the songwriters & publishers worse. An unconfirmed report says the suit is asking for $17 billion-with-a-b. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-985285.html?tag=lh ---------- Here's two stories on Universities involved in attempts to throttle P2P filesharing. In the current budget climate, universities cannot get more money for more bandwidth, and the file sharing applications eat all available bandwidth on well-connected sites. The first story is about a company called Audible Magic, who claim to be able to reassemble a file from the packets at the router level, compare it against a database of "audio fingerprints", and block the exchange of selected files. The article points out that the computational demands of a broad-based block would be immense, and the system could be defeated by minimal encryption -- uuencode and rot13, anyone? University of Wyoming is dabbling in this. http://news.com.com/2100-1023-985027.html?tag=cd_mh The second story is a non-technical story about a claim that Kansas State has a home-grown application which is squashing students' use of file-trading systems. The claim is that their system is so effective that it has slashed the number of DMCA complaints the school is receiving from copyright holders. http://www.p2pnet.net/feb03/kansas.html
I had thought this was a mis-reporting of the case against two Australian students which I cited in resp:95 :: however, the followup discussion on Slashdot indicates that no, the story is written correctly. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/18/1045330603596.html "Recording companies have asked the Federal Court to allow their computer experts to scan all computers at the University of Melbourne for sound files and email accounts, so they can gather evidence of claimed widespread breaches of copyright." In the followup discussion, an employee of another Australian computer reported that their machine was scanned as part of a dragnet for MP3 files.
"dragnet"
This isn't attributed to a verifiable industry source, but it's the first printed report I've seen on CD sales so far in 2003: down 14.5% for the year-to-date so far compared with last year's sales. If that number is accurate, it says that the falloff in CD sales is accelerating. The source is the Seattle Times Grammy awards preview: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/134638870_grammys23 .html
One hopes that the decline is largely the likes of NSync and Britney. It might prompt the business to find some good music for a change.
Oh, good grief-- you've really got to get over yourself. Those acts are following established formulas than have been around since at least the 1950's. What's equally true is those same formulas appeal to kids and seem to aggravate adults. I think Ken was on to something in the "Geezer Rock" item: no matter how youthful the boomers think they are, they're bound to follow similar paths as their folks. I laugh when I hear folks disparage the Britneys, Christinas, and other R&B-influenced pop acts out there. It may be true that their voices could use a bit more room for refinement.. but, listen to the wannabes out there. I catch American Idol occasionally, or listen to some chick off the street (on the radio, out and about, whatever) and I find many sadly lacking. So many people trying to duplicate the vocal gymnastics of these performers without accomplishing the basics. Breathy, whiny.. no diaphragm support, no intonation (off- kay).. you get the idea. I've studied voice a bit. It is so less tangible than instrumental study; you've just got to try things out. It helps to have a tonal memory (remember how things sound/like of like a memory tape recorder). A personal voice coach is invaluable. Come now, do you really want Madonna ruling the airwaves again?
More campus news, not exactly music but certainly appropriate - Stanford's on-campus video rental store is closing down. So many students own DVDs now, informal lending among them is so high, and they're so easy to rip and burn copies of - seniors report a complete change from when they were freshmen - that the video store is obsolete. Not being plugged into the student trading market, and having absolutely no patience (or bandwidth) for online downloading, I wonder how I'll see movies at home if rental outlets continue to disappear.
> and [DVDs are] so easy to rip and burn copies of they are?
I thought it was fairly easy to copy a video casette. Maybe the students are just so rich now that they are all buying their movies instead of renting.
RE#104 - Yeah.
I know that I buy DVD's used from the video store with the intention of lending them to lots of people. It is much cheaper than renting movie plus one doesnt have the hassle of returning the things.
re #106: the grocery store a few blocks from my house rents DVDs for $0.79 during the week (Monday through Thursday nights.) If I'm looking for something a little less mainstream than their selection, I can find it for at most $3.00 at a full-service video store. Considering the cost of blank DVDs I just can't imagine that it's cheaper and/or easier for students to copy them than to rent them. Even if we're talking about not fully duplicating the DVD but just swapping a lower-quality video encoded as, say, DIVX, I still find it hard to believe that finding and downloading a full-length film on the Internet is easier and cheaper than renting it at a nearby video store unless the person doing this places no dollar value on their free time.
Videotapes were really easy to copy too. Weird.
Videotapes were time-consuming to copy, though, and once you were done you couldn't use your copy to give someone else a copy without serious quality problems. I suspect that what's happened is all the DVDs on in the on-campus video store have become avaliable as DIVX files on the campus LAN. A trip around Michigan Tech's LAN with Network Neighborhood would net you all kinds of audio and video files while I was there, and that was a couple years ago. I'm sure the selection has only gotten bigger since then. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who joked that he was doing Blockbuster a service by making off-site backups of all their Playstation games. ;)
Re #102: Ah, yes. "Established formulas", indeed. Perhaps it's time to recognize that the formulaic approach makes lousy music more often than not, and try to make better music? Ars gratia artis, and all that. Apparently, at least one of the satellite radio outfits has recognized that musicians give tribute to the best of their own, and has set up a channel of music that musicians listen to. I doubt that Madonna will get played there; I know NSync won't.
USA Today has a puff piece on the Rhapsody authorized download service. It includes some customer numbers on the major authorized services: "Sony and Universal's Pressplay, and Rhapsody, have about 50,000 subscribers each, and MusicNet, owned by Warner, EMI and BMG Music, has 10,000, says Phil Leigh of research firm Raymond James. The numbers are low, he says, because few people are aware of paid alternatives to pirate swap sites. "That could change Wednesday, when a revamped MusicNet will be launched on America Online and marketed to its 35 million members..." ((most of whom still use dialups -- KRJ)) http://www.usatoday.com/life/2003-02-25-rhapsody_x.htm Also widely reported is that Roxio (the makers of Easy CD Creator) are planning to relaunch the Napster brand as an authorized pay download site later this year. The business plan, from one of the stories I read, seems to be depend on the courts killing Kazaa; they realize that selling downloads will be tough while free ones are used by millions. (But killing Kazaa is going to take years of international legislation. And then there's Gnutella, and eDonkey, and heaven knows what else...)
From what I've heard, a big problem with the legal download sites is that their catalogs of available songs are pretty small compared to the illegal sites. If you aren't offering what people want to buy, you're not going to win them over.
From Declan McCullagh on Cnet: A congressional committee calls for file sharing at Universities to be treated as a serious Federal crime. (It is already defined as such under the NET act, which nobody seems to want to use to prosecute users, as the law is intended.) One congressman makes an analogy to assault and murder. The general demand is that the Universities stop their students from running file sharing. http://news.com.com/2100-1028-986143.html?tag=fd_top
That's almost impossible, once the students figure out what's happening. Some people have no perspective.
Just wait until the "assault and murder" P2P clients are released and then we'll really see some legislative panic!
Did someone cry Wolf? Or was it "the sky is falling?" it all sounds the same anymore...
I wonder if Congressmen have any idea of the technical challenges involved. Attempts to block instant messenging in corporate environments are instructive -- they've merely resulted in instant messaging clients that create network traffic that looks very much like web browsing, to firewalls.
Re 117. From the perspective of the pop music world, the sky IS falling. Not that it bothers me any.
Here's a fun new essay, from a print media guy's perspective, about
the reactions of the music and movie business in the face of the
Internet driving the value of *all* media towards zero.
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/media/columns/medialife/n_8384/ind
ex.html
"Stop, Thief!" by Michael Wolff
"For one thing, it is very strange to have entertainment executives--
generally regarded as among the most amoral, conniving and venal
of all businessmen -- taking the high ground. And yet here they are
delivering heartfelt defenses of artists, and even art itself--they
see the very essend of the nation's cultural patrimony at risk.
And you really don't sense a phony or opportunistic note.
Rather these guys actually seem to be losing sleep over this.
It's right and wrong they're arguing about here. Good character
versus a virtual barbarian deluge. They believe, with feeling,
that bad or sadly misguided people do this digital pilfering...
"The other odd thing is that these guys who have built their careers
and their industry on trying to give an audience exactly what it
wants -- no matter how low and valueless and embarrassing -- are
now standing with a high-church rectitude against the meretricious
desires of this same group. It is a bizarrely out-of-character
role: holding the line. Censuring the public. *Suing* the public!
Indeed, branding the great American mass-media audience as a
craven and outlaw group."
...
"...*everybody* can't be an outlaw. If everybody does it, it's
normal rather than aberrant behavior. It's not so much the consumer
who is on the wrong side of the law, but the entertainment industry
that's on the wrong side of economic laws."
RE#118 -- Are corporate environments trying to squash IMs? We view it as "critical infrastructure" to quote my boss. It's a great tool.
Some are. We haven't tried, for the most part, where I work. Some places view it as either a major time-waster, or as a threat to security. Not only have many IM packages turned out to have significant security holes, IM traffic is much harder to log than email. That can lead to legal exposures or risks of people leaking trade secrets undetected.
I know Trillian, as a multi-user IM client, has an option to log conversations. I know nothing about the programming involved, but even if it's harder, I suppose it may still be theoretically possible. If security programs can currently log keystrokes entered on a machine, why not this? (This is not a rhetorical question, I'm honestly listening.)
Keystroke loggers do not discriminate. Logging everything is more insecure than not logging important conversations. Besides, a keystroke logger will only record the outgoing half of the conversation.
It depends on how much authentication and encryption IM does. If IM used Diffie-Hellman, for instance, then without getting a copy of the private key used at one end, there won't be any way to recover the shared secret and decrypt whatever is protected using it. If you can install software on the client machine, instead of a keyboard log, you might instead want to log all screen updates done by the IM client. Of course, if you want to search the text, depending on where you hook into the graphics subsystem, you might have to do character recognition of bitmapped graphics.
Are there any current IM clients that actually do encryption? I thought they were mostly using plaintext.
A quick Google shows that VeriSign and AOL are or were working on an encrypted IM client. and I see a news report from April 2001 reporting on Novell and Mercury Prime(?) making encrypted IM clients..
I'm entering this discussion late in the game, and haven't looked at any of the earlier incarnations in some time, but I am surprised that the recording industry isn't trying to take advantage of the positive aspects of file-trading, rather than trying to kill it off altogether. Using the radio analogy, it seems to me that a workable solution would be to concentrate not on the trading of files per se, but on the trading of high-quality stereo files suitable for CD burning and avoidance of purchasing high-quality commercial copies. I don't know about the current service providers, but Napster always claimed that they were providing users with the ability to "try before you buy". Not that I necessarily *believe* that, but if the industry had called their bluff, and negotiated a deal whereby files could be traded only if they were of sufficiently low quality (perhaps even requiring that they be monaural) to make them unsuitable for CD burning, while being of just high enough quality to give a fair idea of the content, the industry could have gained another avenue to promote its products. After all, amazon.com as well as several other music marketplaces already have marginal-quality monaural excerpts on selected tracks for CDs they offer for sale.
The record industry has not been noted for its intelligence lately. Had it been a bit smarter and more willing to take risks it could have started a decent download service years ago.
Remember, this is the same industry that thought it should be illegal to buy blank cassette tapes.
..and effectively killed DAT as a consumer audio format and nearly did the same to MiniDisc.
YEs, if it wasn't for the tenacity of Sony we'd not have MiniDisc's
Which is agood thing (having MiniDiscs!)
JABBER !
I've avoided MiniDisc because I don't like formats that only one manufacturer supports.
It's a semi-propriety standard, but there are certainly recorders and media available from manufacturers other than Sony.
Sony was, though, as usual, very late in opening up the specification
to the MD format.
Yup. I kind of figured it was doomed to be the 8-track tape of the digital world, and it's looking like I was probably right.
Minidisc is highly useful if you need a very small, very portable, decent quality digital recorder. My wife uses hers a lot to record herself singing. However, if you don't need the portability at the recording end, MD has pretty well been replaced by MP3 files recorded on a larger computer and played back on a portable. Unfortunately the development of quality portable MP3 recorders is blocked by the Audio Home Recording Act, due to the requirement that consumer digital recorders implement a SCMS (Serial Copy Management System). The few MP3 recorders on the market appear to be trying to stay under the radar by limiting the MP3 rate to 128K or so.
Outside of the US, MiniDisc is quite popular.
Isn't a microcasette recorder small enough?
Small enough, but the sound quality of microcassette is terrible.
Saying it's terrible is being kind.
I've never tried recording on a microcassette, but a minidisc recording has the good qualities of both a cd and a tape -- you have digital quality, archival permanence, the ability to re-record and rearrange tracks.
Here's an interesting item from the NYTimes about Natalie Merchant, former lead singer for 10,000 Maniacs, former million-seller solo artist. She has chosen not to renew her contract with Elektra and her next album will be self-released. A comment from Jay Rosenthal of the Recording Artists Coalition (the performers group launched by Don Henley) echoes things Richard Thompson said earlier when he chose not to renew his contract with Capitol/EMI: "The only reason to go to the major labels is to get your songs on the radio, to go for the promo money." Rosenthal predicts that a large number of artists will soon be following the self-employment model: "he expected major labels to cut their rosters by 30 to 50 percent in the next year." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/13/arts/music/13NATA.html
Two electronics hardware firms introduce new portable disc formats. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993490 Sony announces a system which uses minidisc-style encoding to cram 30 hours of music onto a single CD-R. Philips uses DVD blanks and says its system stuffs 100 hours of music onto a single disc. "The music industry this week condemned the launch of two recording systems that will let people copy between 30 and 100 hours of music onto a single disc. The launches, from electronics giants Sony and Philips, are being seen as a potential pirates' charter. ..." "Sony Music did not want to comment on its sister company's launch..."
The toothpaste is already out of the tube on that one. I routinely put ten to twelve albums' worth of MP3s on CD-R blanks. Lets me carry a good chunk of my CD collection around in my car in a compact way, without risking losing the real CDs if my car is broken into. I could stuff 30 hours in if I were willing to tolerate lower quality. It's amusing to watch the internal disagreements between Sony Music and Sony's electronics division.
I've noticed it's easy to get 9 hours on an MP3 CD encoded at 192-44-S.
I can already carry around as much music as I need at any time in my pocket on CDs as it is; why do I need more miniaturization, especially if it's at a loss in sound quality, which I definitely don't need?
But minidiscs aren't degraded. They're digital too, and you can rearrange the music on them. I love 'em.
Yeah, I've kind of settled on 160 kbps, 44.1 kHz, joint stereo as a good compromise for the environments I listen in. With a good encoder (I like LAME) I can't tell the difference between MP3 at that bitrate and a CD when I'm in a moving car. I can tell with headphones in a quiet environment, but it's not enough that I find it objectionable. If I'm doing something where I'm not so concerned about fitting as much music as I can onto the disc, I go with 250 kbps, 44.1 kHz, joint stereo. My player starts to flake out at bitrates above that. It was an early model. I've always liked that MP3 lets me set my own trade-off between space and quality. That's something that's lacking in these proprietary lossy formats like MiniDisc. (Yes, MiniDisc uses a lossy compression, and does cause some quality loss. It's just not enough to be noticable in a single generation.)
RE#150 -- MiniDiscs use a lossy compression scheme known as ADTRAC, to they are degraded, in a similar fashion to how MP3s are degraded.
The kind of music I listen to, you notice the loss in quality. Or at least I do.
Ah. I am just not good enough to hear the losses from a recording on a MiniDisc, not so sophisticated as Ken or David. (I know that I never noticed that much of a problem with my off-the-rack tape recorders as compared to nice tapes with all the bells-and-whistles that Ken made.) I suspect that I don't have an ear for that kind of distinction.
There are some artifacts which I can occasionally hear. Not enough to prevent me from enjoying small, cheap, recordable media which allows rough editing and very compact location recording.
I have a little interest in home audio equipment, and I was friends with someone who was really into car audio and competed with his system. I guess when you get involved with that stuff, you start to hear the differences.. you just have to be exposed to a lot of it. I used to subscribe to Sound & Vision (which used to be Stereo Review). It just blew my mind how these people could dissect the sound, but then, they do it for a living.
I wrote, "The kind of music I listen to, you notice the loss in quality. Or at least I do." But I am not an equipment junkie! In fact, I am still using the same 30-year-old off-the-shelf amp and speakers I've had for, uh, 30 years. It is simply that I am a classical listener, and you don't have to be much of a classical listener to notice a degredation in sound quality. Lots of instruments: all acoustic: it's sensitive to that.
I suspect that that may be where I don't have the ear training to hear what you hear. I have never been able to get into classical music. (Much as I haven't been able to "get" jazz or any other type of music which is mostly instrumental. I have a major voice bias in my musical tastes, and I tend to listen to the words and get very impatient with long instrumental hiatuses.) I also don't play any instrument, so I don't have that kind of training to fall back on either.
I'm not sure that's so much training as exposure.
An article about a recent speech by departing RIAA chief Hilary Rosen: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/29797.html It includes this bit of revisionist history by Rosen: "The argument is that somehow the record companies seek to encroach upon a consumer's ability to make a personal copy of music. Nonsense. We have always been supportive of the ability of consumers to copy a CD for the gym or for their car. More power to the music fan." And a comment on the Verizon case, in which the RIAA tried to get the names and addresses of peer-to-peer network users released without a court order: "Verizon has unfortunately turned this case into a bogus claim to protect their members' privacy rights. Well first of all, there is no right to commit a crime in private. And second and more importantly, when you are on one of these p2p systems and have opened your hard drive and its contents to the network, you have given away your own privacy." She admitted publicly for the first time that the RIAA has been inserting bogus files into peer-to-peer networks in an attempt to frustrate users. She also all but admitted that the unlabelled copy-protected CDs they tried to foist on us weren't the best idea: "While the technology is apparently not quite ready, there is promise for some protective technologies, which would offer consumers use of their music on the computer and still prevent uploading onto the Internet. While there are no specific plans to release such products into the marketplace at this time, if they are produced, record companies will need to work closely with retailers to assure that the proper consumer education and labeling takes place."
Twila: There's plenty of classical music that's vocal. Have you tried listening to choral music? classical art song? opera?
Um. Only a very little.
"Replay TV maker Sonicblue to file for Chapter 11"
http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2423476
Sonicblue has been the hardware maker most willing to introduce
innovative products and take the legal heat from the copyright
industry. They defended and won the copyright suit over the original
Rio MP3 player, and Sonicblue's win allowed all other makers of
MP3 players to get into the market. More recently they were
defending their ReplayTV video recorder in another copyright
infringement suit.
In a previous article which I don't have as a citation, it sounded
like the company was being dragged down by its legal expenses.
This seems like another step closer to the copyright industry
obtaining a defacto veto over the development of new technology.
The Rio and Replay hardware lines are to be sold to the Japanese
firm which runs the Denon and Marantz brands.
-----
This next item was widely reported this week. This quote is from the
ZDnet story:
"...the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sent letters
to about 300 companies providing evidence of specific instances of
their internal networks being used to swap copyrighted songs, and
warning of potential legal liability."
"RIAA turns up heat on file-trading at work"
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-993143.html
In a followup story...
"The RIAA's action drew protest from the Information Technology
Association of America, a trade group representing Microsoft Corp.,
IBM Corp., and more than 400 other software and service companies.
"'When corporations are trying to protect themselves from major
hackers and terrorists... trying to do serious damage to their
networks, I don't know that they want to spend their time chasing down
a half-dozen employees who like to trade old Rolling Stones songs,'
said the group's president, Harris Miller. 'It's a matter of
prioritization.'"
http://www.dailynews.com/Stories/0,1413,200~20950~1253396,00.html
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