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| Author |
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| 25 new of 151 responses total. |
krj
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response 62 of 151:
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Jul 23 21:44 UTC 2001 |
Same old same old... from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,45234,00.html
Title: "What if Napster *was* the answer?"
At a music and technology conference, anonymous major-label execs
say privately that the labels should have managed to come up with
a solution to work with Napster, because the post-Napster world is
looking even tougher for them.
Analysts say that the major label download plans still look like losers,
and the majors have maybe 6-9 months to come up with something
consumers will accept before the Napster successors are as big and
entrenched as Napster was at its peak.
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krj
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response 63 of 151:
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Jul 24 03:52 UTC 2001 |
A crowing piece on www.mp3newswire.net:
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/topclones.html
"Napster clones crush Napster, take 6 of the top 10 downloads on Cnet"
Napster won't talk about how many users have downloaded their new,
restricted, beta software directly from them. From Cnet, Napster
downloads are roughly 1% of the Morpheus downloads.
"RIAA president Hillary Rosen cheered triumphantly - almost tauntingly
- a week ago when Judge Patel ordered that Napster will remain
shutdown until it could reach 100% perfection in its filtering
endeavors. It seemed almost that Rosen was oblivious to what
Napster's shutdown was unleashing and that the reversal of Judge
Patel's order last Wednesday was the least of her problems."
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krj
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response 64 of 151:
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Jul 24 04:30 UTC 2001 |
Napster's CEO Hank Barry, who was installed by the venture
capitalists who funded Napster in its early stages, is stepping down.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6651876.html?tag=mn_hd
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dbratman
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response 65 of 151:
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Jul 24 05:47 UTC 2001 |
Oh, the copyright/restricted usage situation is getting real bad. At a
recent librarians' conference, I was treated to the story of the Rocket
e-book. Originally, the physical readers were being sold as a loss
leader: money would be made on selling content. But the companies
discovered that many reader-buyers were never buying content: they were
using the readers to read free content from the web (Project Gutenberg
texts, etc).
So the new models have been made with software that will only accept
Rocket proprietary texts as readable. And if you munge the reader
software so that it will accept free texts, then whenever you hook up
the reader to the web to search for or buy new product, the website
will detect this and re-set the reader software.
Copyright owners have a legitimate interest in preventing illegitimate
distribution. But they've gone way beyond this, and challenged the
hitherto unquestioned right of the purchaser to do whatever s/he wants
with the purchased copy itself. With much downloadable material, you
can only use it on the computer you download it to. You can't even
transfer it to another computer you own, even if you erase it from the
first computer at that time, which would be a fair restriction.
I think danr has the answer to falling sales: people are tired of
getting gouged. Every major arena concert in my area is followed by a
sheaf of letters to the newspaper's arts section, complaining about too
high prices for too little concert.
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krj
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response 66 of 151:
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Jul 24 17:07 UTC 2001 |
resp:64 :: The new CEO of Napster is Konrad Hilbers, a veteran
executive with Bertelsmann. So Bertelsmann is tightening control
to try to salvage something from their investment in Napster, is
my guess. It's obvious by now that Napster isn't going to make
the promised July date for the relaunch of their for-pay
service.
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krj
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response 67 of 151:
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Jul 24 17:23 UTC 2001 |
From the hometown of the American record industry:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-000060022jul23.story?coll=la%2Dheadlines
%2Dbusiness
(sorry the URL is excessively long there)
The piece is fairly bleak about the early prospects for the major
label download systems winning many customers.
Quotes:
>"All they're doing is having an electronic version of Tower Records," said
>Roger Noll, a Stanford University professor of economics. "I suspect that
>they're structured this way because they're so dominated by the record
>companies . . . [which are] very much afraid of a world where the unit of
>production is not the CD."
...
>The companies have revealed few details about their services,
>but this much is clear: They won't be free, they won't offer a
>comprehensive catalog of music,
>and they won't let subscribers transfer songs from their computers
>to their cars or living-room CD players.
...
>Dennis Mudd of Music Match said: "If you're going to have a
>service that's just like Napster except that it's got less content,
>it's more expensive [and more restrictive] . . . you're going to lose."
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mcnally
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response 68 of 151:
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Jul 24 21:36 UTC 2001 |
Last night, driving across northern California (somewhere in Mendocino
or Sonoma County) I was listening to a local radio station's folk and
bluegrass program when they cut in between songs with a recorded message
describing how the station had ceased streaming its programming over the
web because of legal fears related to the DMCA and recent court decisions.
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dbratman
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response 69 of 151:
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Jul 25 18:22 UTC 2001 |
That's a bad sign. Up until now, restrictions on streaming webcasts
used to be that they would remain streaming only (no downloads), and
for webcast-only material that they wouldn't tell you in advance what
you were going to hear next.
If radio broadcasting were invented today, the record firms would never
allow it. Going out ... over the airwaves? And anybody with a cheap
radio can, like, just listen to it without paying anything else?
Unheard of? Licensing, you say? No licensing! Just ... stop it! Run
for the hills! Buy off Congress!
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krj
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response 70 of 151:
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Jul 25 18:53 UTC 2001 |
Issues like these were actually fought over at the time radio and
the recording industry were young, and eventually Congress imposed
the structure we have today for royalties and compulsory licenses.
I have come to the conclusion that nothing successful will happen in the
"legitimate" section of the online music field until Congress
imposes a similar set of rules regarding royalties and compulsory
licenses. This is a good example of where the marketplace is NOT
working things out. There are too many players, and they are all
too greedy and determined to maintain control, for negotiations to
reach a successful conclusion. Songwriter representatives have
been indicating that they think the songwriters should get about
half the money from the online music business, compared to roughly
the dollar per CD they get today.
Wired news, today: Universal has announced that it will launch
the Universal/Sony "PressPlay" system in the first half of September
-- whether or not agreements have been reached with the songwriters
whose works will be sold. Universal is already being sued
for having launched its farmclub.com download system without
getting clearance on songwriting copyrights.
(Actually I kind of hope they do this. With the Napster and "Tasini"
precendents, I think they'll be crushed for multi-million or billion
dollar damages, and unlike Napster, this time there will be a defendant
with deep pockets. I call it poetic justice.)
Anybody want to debate "Tasini v. NY Times?"
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aaron
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response 71 of 151:
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Jul 25 20:42 UTC 2001 |
Given the recent decision that, unless they expressly signed over
electronic rights to their work, freelance writers retain copyright on
their work, the same would probably hold true for musical performances.
Although my guess is that music companies, like print publishers, have
been obtaining those rights as a matter of routine in recent years. That
decision may slow Sony down a bit if it planned to offer music for
which it does not have electronic rights.
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gull
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response 72 of 151:
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Jul 26 15:43 UTC 2001 |
Aren't musical performances in a different category now, the same one as
movies? Something about "works for hire"?
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krj
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response 73 of 151:
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Jul 26 21:46 UTC 2001 |
Cnet: "File Trading Pressure Mounts on ISPs"
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-6674297.html?tag=mn_hd
Sort of a repeat article, but maybe things are heating up again.
The copyright industry is trying to get ISPs to terminate customers who
run Gnutella or Napster-clones. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act
never envisioned a scenario where copyright infringements emanated from
a user's home PC: the "notice and take down" scenario was designed for
material on the ISP's machines -- web pages, for example -- and it
is sharply limited to the
copyright-contested material. Nothing in the DMCA speaks to the issue
of copyrighted material not under direct control of the ISP, and nothing
in it talks about cutting off users from the net.
Some ISPs are bending to the will of the copyright industry and some aren't.
There's clear potential for abuse, and no semblance of due process,
in what the copyright industry wants here. The Church of Scientology,
just to pick a handy example, would love to be able to terminate the
Internet access of its online critics. The ISPs also realize
that file trading has driven all the money they have made selling
high-speed connections, and they are wary of alienating their paying
customers.
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micklpkl
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response 74 of 151:
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Jul 30 13:41 UTC 2001 |
resp:36 -- An article in Stereophile magazine concerning Macrovision's
method of making audio CD's un-rippable.
http://www.stereophile.com/shownews.cgi?1094
"TTR's patents reveal that in the SafeAudio system, "grossly erroneous
values," or bursts of digital noise, are added to the signal, forcing a
regular CD player, whose error correction can't usually handle such extreme
digital hash, to cover the gaps of bad data with data from before and after
where the distortion occurs. But when copying the audio file to another
device, like a PC's hard disc, the extreme digital values are said to
overwhelm the computer's ability to transfer the data properly, leaving
annoying noises in place of music."
(this "technology" was developed jointly by Macrovision & TTR Technologies,
and has been used *secretly* by several record labels on new releases, since
March of this year)
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polygon
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response 75 of 151:
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Jul 30 13:49 UTC 2001 |
Re 74. It doesn't seem to me that this will prevent ripping for long.
Or would a program to screen out digital noise be illegal under the DMCA?
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orinoco
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response 76 of 151:
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Jul 30 14:50 UTC 2001 |
Programs already exist to remove the skips from a CD while ripping it. I
would not be surprised if CDParanoia, say, would also do a pretty good job
of overcoming the intentional noise on these disks.
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krj
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response 77 of 151:
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Jul 30 15:41 UTC 2001 |
My question about Mike's resp:74 :: if the Macrovision technology (a)
(a) has been used secretly on several releases, and (b) actually blocks
copying as a data file, then don't you think we would have heard reports
from people saying, "Hey, I can't rip this CD, what's up?"
Thanks for the pointer.
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krj
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response 78 of 151:
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Jul 31 22:12 UTC 2001 |
resp:51 and subsequently, on the sharp downturn in CD sales:
"As Audiences Discover Frugality, Pop Culture Starts Feeling A Chill"
Not actually about CD sales at all, but the article does discuss
the flattening or downturn in pop/rock concert ticket sales, along with
problems in Broadway, movies and book publishing. Free/inexpensive
entertainment such as TV is either measured, or anecdotally reported,
to be increasing its audience. The top tier of entertainment
still sells well -- Madonna's tour, the movie "Shrek," the musical
"The Producers," but below that level, business has fallen off
in all sectors.
Some pundits argue that prices are too high and people are watching
their wallets carefully as they worry about their jobs.
Others argue that a sort of cultural ennui has set in; people are
tired of megahyped blockbuster after megahyped blockbuster, in
all genres and styles.
Regarding concerts:
"In the first six months of this year, according to figures
published in the trade journal Pollstar, the top 50
concert tours took in 12.6% less money than last year's
top 50. The number of tickets sold was off by 15.5%...
"'A two-million-ticket drop is not insubstantial,' Pollstar's
editor Gary Bongiovanni said. 'The conventional wisdom is
that the entertainment business is recession-proof, and with
inexpensive forms of entertainment that's still true. But
since the last recession in 1991, the cost of our product has
more than doubled. What used to be an inconsiderable expense
is becoming a luxury item.'
"Music promoters in many parts of the country are seeing
considerable drops in business."
----------
The relevance to the Napster arguments: it does start to look like
file trading is irrelevant to the falloff in CD sales. Something
bigger is happening in the culture at large.
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krj
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response 79 of 151:
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Aug 1 04:29 UTC 2001 |
BMG is going to test a anti-ripping scheme from SunnComm. In the
initial test they will just process promotional CDs.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6719912.html
A Cnet columnist compares the file sharing systems still operating:
http://music.cnet.com/music/0-1652424-8-6699285-1.html?tag=sd
Legal fantasy? mp3newswire.net points to a findlaw.com essay
suggesting that the Supreme Court's ruling in Tasini v. NYTimes
creates a precedent which may save the original filesharing
Napster system...
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/2001/tasini.html
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gull
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response 80 of 151:
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Aug 1 12:52 UTC 2001 |
The Register reports that a way has been found (already?) to bypass the
Macrovision SafeAudio technology:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/54/20766.html
The article's a bit short on details.
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krj
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response 81 of 151:
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Aug 1 14:36 UTC 2001 |
Wired reports that Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chairman
of the Senate Commerce committee currently working on an Internet
privacy bill, is talking about using that bill to begin the
process of establishing a Federal security standard for entertainment
files. Once the standard is developed, all new "electronics
devices" would be required to conform to those standards and
reject unauthorized files (like your MP3 file collection, most
likely).
This is the holy grail for the copyright industry; Disney is
wildly in favor of it.
The good news is the example of the SDMI consortium, which is now
two years beyond its original deadline for a security standard for
music files and which doesn't seem to be making any headway.
There's no reason to believe a Federal process would be any more
successful in mediating the conflict between the copyright industry
and the electronics industry: the electronics companies believe
that what the copyright industry demands, consumers will not buy.
http://wired.com/news/mp3/0,1285,45701,00.html
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krj
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response 82 of 151:
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Aug 3 00:08 UTC 2001 |
Another CD copy-prevention system, called Cactus. Sony is testing
it in Eastern Europe. They claim to be able to make copied CDs
generate square waves to damage electronics and speakers,
though the test CDs sold in Europe were not manufactured to do that.
(Sounds like a declaration of war to me.) Haven't had time to
read this closely yet:
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991105
Aren't all of these schemes defeated by a pass through the analog
domain?
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orinoco
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response 83 of 151:
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Aug 3 06:00 UTC 2001 |
(In Douglas Hofsteader's book _Goedel, Escher, Bach,_ he comes up with an
analogy for proof by counterexample using record players. The Tortoise keeps
buying new record players. The Crab can always come up with a record that
will blow the latest player to bits. In that sense, he's got
the advantage.
Sometimes, the Crab thinks he's noticed a pattern in the Tortoise's
players. He takes advantage of that pattern to make a record that will
destroy -- he hopes -- any player at all. But the Tortoise can always
gain the upper hand by making a new player that doesn't follow the old
pattern. In that sense, the Tortoise has the advantage.
Douglas Hofsteader is a strange, strange man.)
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danr
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response 84 of 151:
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Aug 3 15:52 UTC 2001 |
re #82:
When I try to pull up that article, I get:
Sorry, This article is unavailable at the current time - every effort
is being made to get it back up and running as quickly as possible.
It's a conspiracy! Seriously, though, off the top of my head, I don't
see how they could put anything on a CD that would damage speakers.
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gull
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response 85 of 151:
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Aug 3 18:32 UTC 2001 |
Speakers don't tolerate square waves at high volumes well. Back before CD
players were savvy enough to refuse to play data CDs, it was pretty well
known that the digital 'hash' generated by trying to play one could blow
speakers.
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krj
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response 86 of 151:
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Aug 3 20:53 UTC 2001 |
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-mp02.html
Northwestern University fires a secretary for having 2000 MP3
files on her computer. She wasn't running Napster; the University
long ago blocked it.
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