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| Author |
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| 25 new of 65 responses total. |
dbratman
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response 4 of 65:
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Jul 25 23:25 UTC 2000 |
OK, I guess this is my opportunity to ask a stupid music question of a
technological bent. This has been puzzling me for some time, but I
didn't know who to ask.
Let me present what I understand, and someone can tell me where I'm
wrong.
1) File transfer programs have been around for a long time. But for
most of that time, trading of music files was very rare because the
files were too big.
2) Then mp3 was invented, a compression program that made files small
enough to transfer.
3) Napster and other such hoohah mostly, or perhaps entirely, consist of
mp3 files.
4) It is now commonly predicted, or feared, that Napster if unchecked
will lead to the death of CDs and other physical musical-storage media.
5) But mp3 files, being compressed, have very low fidelity. One may
accept this when one wants the equivalent of AM radio, but not for
high-quality playing at home, and not for music about which one has a
stronger interest than in throwaway pop songs.
6) If that is the case, then how is Napster going to drive CDs out of
business?
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mcnally
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response 5 of 65:
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Jul 26 00:55 UTC 2000 |
A couple of possibilities spring to mind:
a) a large part of the revenue stream in the music industry
comes from "throwaway pop songs"
b) your reasoning about when musical consumers are willing to
tolerate compromised recording quality is probably incorrect.
most casual listeners (who make up by far the greatest number
of music consumers) are a lot less finicky than hardcore fanatics
Furthermore, there's no carved-in-stone reason why MP3s have to be
much lower quality than CDs. Currently they are because most people
don't have the time, bandwidth, or patience to push around as many
bytes as would be required for a full-quality recording. That's almost
definitely going to change.
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scott
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response 6 of 65:
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Jul 26 00:58 UTC 2000 |
Three words: "FM Radio FRee". Record companies have been giving it away for
decades on radio. They're making such a big stink about MP3/Napster now
because they want precedent, not because they think that particular service
will hurt them.
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brighn
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response 7 of 65:
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Jul 26 17:49 UTC 2000 |
I was of the understanding that MP3s were of significantly higher quality than
FM radio.
Who are on the top of the charts right now? Britney Spears. N'Sync. Christina
Aguigggigugiuggllera. B*Boys. Which of these are not throwaway popsongs?
FM Radio isn't the same thing at all. If you want to hear the latest Britney
Spears on FM, you gotta wait, or call it in, you gotta put up with the DJ
talking over the ends, and possibly not even playing the whole thing... and
that's if you wanna hear Britney. IF you wanna hear a few more tracks off the
Fuck the Pigs CD, forget it. Also, the radio version's been cleaned for FCC
approval, but that's not the record company's doing.
FM Radio is a form of advertising. That's why the record compaanies like it.
That's where, historically, there's been struggles and scandals as to how much
record companies can pressure redio stations to play their music,
specifically.
Napster is out of the record company's control, entirely. Not the same thinga
t all, hardly even comparable.
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gypsi
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response 8 of 65:
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Jul 26 18:15 UTC 2000 |
I loved that spelling of Aguilera... =)
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scott
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response 9 of 65:
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Jul 26 21:55 UTC 2000 |
The type of MP3s that most people are downloading are of roughly FM radio
quality.
But your example of how hard it is to hear your Britney fave on the radio
pales in comparison to owning and using a PC to download and use MP3 tracks.
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brighn
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response 10 of 65:
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Jul 26 22:44 UTC 2000 |
How so? Most people who are heavy music consumers own or have access to
computers with Internet connections.
Granted, I'm in a poor neighborhood, so most of my neighbors don't own
computers, but then, they're not heavy CD buyers either.
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scott
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response 11 of 65:
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Jul 26 23:58 UTC 2000 |
It's important to remember that John Q. Public is still not very computer
literate.
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mcnally
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response 12 of 65:
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Jul 26 23:59 UTC 2000 |
I think the suggestion is that firing up your computer, dialling up your
ISP, browsing the internet for the desired song, downloading it to your
computer, finding the place on your computer where the browser stuck the
downloaded file, and invoking the MP3 player to play the file is just a
bit more complicated than turning on the radio and waiting..
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brighn
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response 13 of 65:
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Jul 27 15:31 UTC 2000 |
Quite right. The record companies should wait five years until all of that
involves only a few mouse clicks before interceding.
Honestly, compare the ease of use of a computer now vs. five years ago, and
the ubiquity of a computer. I believe the relevant phrase is "nipping it in
the bud." It might still involve some technical steps now, but if Napster et
al were left unchecked, the technical steps would fairly quickly work
themselves out.
And that also doesn't address the core point: RAdio isn't on-demand, and you
can't get complete songs without some DJ talking over it. Perhaps if someone
had mentioned cable music channels, which at least don't have DJs (I'm talking
about the audio-only DMX channels), which have a wider variety of older music
in predictable genres, so you don't have to wait nearly so long for something
interesting and don't have to worry about static, but even there, record
companies have control of whether or not something gets played, and under what
conditions (they can't force something to get played, but they can prevent
it from getting played).
The current (alleged) difficulty of getting a desired song from the Internet
(remembering, once again, that the prime pop music buying public is 14-29,
middle income, which is also the prime computer using public for non-business
applications) is irrelevant. What's relevant is that radio, TV, DMX, and any
other *company* which plays music can be controlled (to some extent) by the
owners of that music. This is one major reason why the record companies aren't
all that crazy about local microradio stations, below the wattage of the FCC.
And certainly why they're not all that crazy about Napster et al. There is
at least one company that SELLS MP3s over the Internet, and I don't see the
RIAA going nuts about that... it's not the issue of MP3s, it's a plain, simple
issue that for some reason a growing number of otherwise educate people seem
to be missing:
REPRODUCING COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE OWNER OF THE
COPYRIGHT IS THEFT.
FM Radio is ok for a plain, simple reason: the record companies say it's ok.
That's not oppression, or The Man coming down on the Masses. That's the owner
of the copyright saying, Hey, according to the laws of this country, this song
belongs to me, and I can distribute it as I see fit.
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gypsi
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response 14 of 65:
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Jul 27 16:27 UTC 2000 |
Napster is going to be unavailable/offline as of Friday due to the court case.
It will be unavailable/offline during the case, which could go on for days,
weeks, months...
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dbratman
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response 15 of 65:
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Jul 28 23:41 UTC 2000 |
If mp3 files are of such quality, then why did it require the invention
of mp3 to enable mass file-trading? I thought the secret of mp3 was
file compression. This will surely degrade quality severely in the
ears of anyone beyond a casual listener who just wants the song.
Of course there are many such listeners, but there are also many who
want CD-quality sound.
I'd like to point out one thing about the "theft" of copyrighted
material. You aren't stealing the material: the copyright owner still
has it too, after all. What you're stealing is royalty payments.
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brighn
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response 16 of 65:
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Jul 29 00:15 UTC 2000 |
What you're stealing is the right of the creator to control how their cration
is distributed. It's called "intellectual property."
Copyright law applies just as much to items which are given away by the
creator as it does to items which are sold, and to items which are not
distributed at all.
Even poor-quality WAV files take up 10x the file space of comparable quality
MP3 files. Tracks on commercial CDs are roughly the same size as WAV files.
You can MAKE high quality (CD quality) MP3 files, but those are probably
around twice the size of lower quality files, so people who are trading over
the Internet, predominantly via modem (not DSL) lines, are going to prefer
speed of transfer over resolution.
A standard 650MB CD will hold about 74 minutes of WAV-sized files, or roughly
10MB to the minute. A CD-quality compressed MP3 file will contain roughly 1MB
to the minute. I imagine FM-quality MP3s would contain roughly 1/2 MB to the
minute. With a five minute song, that's a difference between 2.5MBs for an
FM-quality MP3, 5MB for a CD-quality MP3, or 50MB for a WAV file
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krj
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response 17 of 65:
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Jul 29 05:39 UTC 2000 |
David, I think you are confusing the ideas of "audio compression" --
where the dynamic range of the music is squished -- with
"computer data compression." A good data compression scheme produces no
losses when the data is uncompressed. Minidiscs and the MP3 scheme
use "lossy" compression, where the software makes increasingly good
guesses as to what the human listener won't miss. I couldn't stand
first-generation minidisc sound, but now I don't notice anything
awful when I'm listening to Leslie's minidisc recordings -- they
generally seem better than cassettes, even though minidisc is still
using lossy compression.
I haven't listened seriously to MP3 files, but when I have heard them they
sound about as good as anything else I've heard come out of a computer.
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gypsi
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response 18 of 65:
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Jul 29 09:39 UTC 2000 |
Napster itself is simply a file transfer site. If they sue Napster, they
have to sue any other system that allows file transfer. So, ICQ, bunches of
email systems that support 3-7 meg transfers, AIM, etc... It's ridiculous.
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krj
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response 19 of 65:
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Jul 29 17:54 UTC 2000 |
(I'll leave my Napster comments in item:240. This is, after all, a
Short Question Item. :) )
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brighn
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response 20 of 65:
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Jul 29 18:12 UTC 2000 |
They don't have to sue anyone they don't want to sue.
"Selective enforcement" applies to law enforcement, not lawsuits.
The argument that the RIAA makes is that Napster hasn't done enough to prevent
illegal trading of copyrighted materials. I don't see anything particularly
odd or unfair about singling Naopster out, because Napster's raison d'etre
is the transfer of MP3 files. ICQ allows illegal exchange of materials, but
wasn't created with the purpose of file transfer of predominantlycopyrighted
and commercially viable pieces in mind. The majority of people who use ICQ,
or AIM, or e-mail, don't spend the bulk of their time using the software to
break the law.
This is vaguely how the RIAA views it: Let's say it's a college town, Ann
Arbor for example. You run a club for college undergraduates. You have a big
sign over the bar that says "No Alcohol. No Drugs." But you have rave music
on, you encourage smoking, and people around Ann Arbor start to know your club
as "The Party Club." Your friend runs a coffeehouse, like NAC. Your friend
provides board games, several TVs tuned to silly sitcoms, and sells coffee
and bagels. There's a quiet corner of the club, away from the windows, where
some ravers figure out they can do X without being seen by random passersby.
Now, how far do you honestly think you'd get with the Ann Arbor police when
they raid you and find X, LSD, and underage boozing, when you say, "But people
do X in my friend's cafe!"
Your club becomes a target because, while you nominally attempt to prevent
illicit activity, your environment encourages it. That, I believe, is the
RIAA's argument. If you played rave music, encouraged smoking, but kicked out
any patrons who were openly consuming illicit substances, the courts wouldn't
have a leg to stand on. The RIAA's argument is that, while Mapster discourages
the transfer of illegal files, they don't do enough to prevent it.
Also, your other examples don't generally involve making those files public...
better examples would be UseNet, or personal websites. For instance, I have
some images on my website that may be copyrighted. I honestly don't know.
Anybody could copy them. But even there, my ISP doesn't have a central
location it could go to to get a list of all my potentially copyrighted files.
Napster does. there's nothing preventing Napster from doing precisely what
Metallica forced them to do -- ban all the users who had traded Metallica
files. In fact, Napster did it quite readily. Ironically, the fact that they
did it so quickly and readily works AGAINST them, legally, since their claim
is that they were doing everything they could do BEFORE Metallica came alon.
Metallica came along, said, "Do this," and Napster did it, so OBVIOUSLY they
han't done everything they could do to prevent illegal file transfer.
Earlier versions of the suit, or of RIAA complaints, said basically that...
if Napster HAD policed thevarious servers for at least obvious copyright
violations (just as if you, the club owner, had gone around kicking out at
least the most blatant drug users), then the RIAA wouldn't have a leg to stand
on. You, the club owner, can't do much at all about people who slip drugs into
their legally-obtained Sprites without your knowledge, anymore than ICQ can
do anything about people who transfer illicit files. You CAN do something
about the people doing it out in the public, though, and Mapster CAN do
something about it on the public servers.
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krj
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response 21 of 65:
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Jul 29 18:38 UTC 2000 |
Actually the legal situation for Napster is much worse than brighn
describes. Napster's early publicity material said, essentially,
"Come to Napster and get the good (illegal) Mp3 files, don't wade
through all those boring unsigned performers on MP3.com."
And the Napster internal e-mail which the RIAA introduced through
discovery made it plain that Napster's intent was to build a business
based on piracy.
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brighn
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response 22 of 65:
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Jul 29 21:22 UTC 2000 |
*I'm* going on how Napster supporters are depicting the service in an effort
to defend its morality... in other words, the *GOOD* PR that Napster is
propogating. If that's the best defence they can come up with, and *it's*
pretty bad, well, we don't really need to talk about the reality. ;}
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dbratman
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response 23 of 65:
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Aug 2 18:23 UTC 2000 |
Paul: "Intellectual property" is not "the right of the creator to
control how their creation is distributed." "Intellectual property" is
an umbrella term referring to copyright, trademarks, and patents as a
group. You're probably thinking of "droit moral," which is the right of
the creator to ensure that their work is not distorted or
misrepresented, and which has some, but limited, application in U.S.
law. That is not the same as contract rights to control distribution of
copies, and I am not at all sure why the Napster suit hasn't been fought
on contract rights grounds. I'm not free to burn CDs of your song and
sell them, even if I _do_ pay you royalties, unless you give me contract
rights to do so, so I'm not clear on why lack of royalties is the
offense of Napster. (My objection to Napster is that it's the biggest
bandwidth hog ever invented, but that's another matter.)
In any case, aside from bootlegged unreleased material - which has
indeed been stolen - the musicians objecting to Napster are not talking
about their work being distorted (droit moral) or that they don't want
it distributed that way (contract rights), but over loss of payment for
their work (royalties).
Ken: Your explanation leaves me even more puzzled than before. If MP3
compression is so good, then why aren't CDs being issued that way? You
could fit more music on them, after all. And why is the term "lower
fidelity" still constantly being used to describe it? And why did it
take so long to develop? File compression is a pretty old art form by
computer standards.
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brighn
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response 24 of 65:
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Aug 3 00:20 UTC 2000 |
I've heard "intellectual property" applied outside of the realm of copyright,
trademark, and patent law. I won't get into legal lingo, though, I'm not
versed in it. I'm using it as a common parlance term.
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krj
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response 25 of 65:
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Aug 3 00:47 UTC 2000 |
I regret I'm such a poor explainer of things....
"If MP3 compression is so good, then why aren't CDs being issued that
way?" Because the CD standard ("Red Book Standard," I think it's called)
was defined in 1980 and the MP3 format did not exist then. Many people
put lots of MP3 files onto recordable CDs -- I believe you can pack about
100 pop songs onto such a CD -- but such homemade CDs cannot be played
back in "standard" audio CD players, only in computers which are programmed
to decode the MP3 format from the CD drive.
(Commercial CDs all have to stick to that 1980 standard if they are to
be played on the millions of CD players which only know that standard.
Getting beyond this standard is a fascinating market problem; there
are currently two new digital audio disk standards, DVD-Audio and
SACD, trying to tackle this topic.)
"Why is the term "lower fidelity" still constantly being used to
describe it?" Because MP3s probably are lower fidelity than CDs.
The questions then become: (1) how much lower is the fidelity?
(2) How many people notice enough to care? (3) How many people are
willing to accept the lower fidelity to get free music?
Does MP3 sound better than a commercially recorded audio cassette?
My gut feeling is yes, and yet those audio cassettes sold by the
millions until recently.
20 million Napster users seem willing to accept the limitations of the
MP3 format, either to preview music they may want to buy later on CD, or
get the tunes for free. I can understand this, since I'm downloading
lots of Real Audio stuff which is probably worse-sounding than MP3.
"Why did it take so long to develop? File compression is a pretty old
art form by computer standards." What's old is perfect compression,
where the file recovered after compression/uncompression is bit-for-bit
the same file. I'd argue this is engineering and not an art.
Lossy compression does become an art; one is making guesses about what
the listener (or viewer) won't miss if the compression process throws
it away. Lossy compression is useless for storing computer data
for archive purposes -- software backups, or tax files, say --
so it's only become useful as a tool as computers have become
entertainment devices rather than calculating machines. That's why
MP3 was late to develop.
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scott
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response 26 of 65:
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Aug 3 00:53 UTC 2000 |
Isn't there an upfront processing penalty for schemes liyke MP3? Several
years ago I read an article about Brian Ritchie (yes, the Unix guy) working
at Bell Labs to develop such compression schemes. They'd realized that as
long as decoding was quick they could accept a slow encoding process. So
maybe the process of encoding MP3s cheaply needed more modern hardware as
well.
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brighn
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response 27 of 65:
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Aug 3 03:39 UTC 2000 |
In reality, all digitized music is "comperessed" from the standpoint that not
all of the original music (every iota) is represented. As analog gets
converted to binary, something is lost (or the representation becomes SO large
it's utterly unwieldly).
Think of a circle drawn on a computer screen. As computers have evolved, the
circle has looked more and more accurate... now, with a modern monitor and
a high resolution, it's fairly difficult for the human eye to see that it's
not a perfect circle... but it isn't. It's impossible for a "perfect" circle
to be drawn on a pixelated screen.
What's improved over time is the art of maximizing resolution while minimizing
memory taken.
As to the commercial MP3 issue, wouldn't it make more sense to popularize MP3
*players* first? it's not that difficult to make a CD player that plays both
formats, after all, and it wouldn't have to be the case that the old CDs get
phased out. Also, CDs that don't take up the whole disc could have both sorts
of files on them... a CD that takes up only, say, 85% of the CD would have
room for MP3 duplicates, shouldn't it? (And 85% of a 74 minute CD is, what,
64 minutes? Still longer than the standard CD.)
One reason for NOT wanting that technology to become standard: When I was
a kid, artists were expected to churn out about 30 minutes of music a year...
by the time I was a young adult, that had become 45 minutes, and now it's
around an hour. An MP3-compatible CD holds about 10 hours, 11 hours of
music... great for classical music buffs (all those long operas), but what
about pop music? What sort of crap would be on as filler if pop stars were
expected to fill 3 hours a year?
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scott
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response 28 of 65:
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Aug 3 12:41 UTC 2000 |
What if record labels weren't worried about fitting to an existing medium
anymore? If there wasn't a need to not "waste" the rest of a CD, maybe we'll
get *less* filler.
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