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| Author |
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| 25 new of 134 responses total. |
gull
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response 78 of 134:
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Feb 13 17:56 UTC 2001 |
I think the big question with recording industry practices is "is there
any alternative?" The problem is there really isn't. They control all
the distribution channels, so they can conspire to make the contracts as
bad as they want and it'll be a matter of "my way or the highway." At
one point they even made a nearly-successful attempt to keep stores from
selling used CDs.
The syndicates that handle newspaper comic strips are in a similar
situation. There's only about five of them, and if you're a cartoonist
and you don't like the terms they offer you, well, too bad. They've
locked up the market for newspaper comic page space. There's no room
for independents.
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krj
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response 79 of 134:
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Feb 13 18:24 UTC 2001 |
Sun/ashke in resp:74 :: "aren't we splitting hairs because the courts feel
that a computer does not constitute a home recording device (even though I
have a program like Adaptec's Disc Jockey where I can import my vinyl and
tapes into it) therefore it's not protected like your dual cassette recorder
is?"
This isn't the courts splitting hairs. This is the courts applying the
definitions -- pretty clear ones -- laid down by Congress in the
Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. These are the same definitions
which the courts interpreted to allow MP3 players to be sold, even
though they do not incorporate SCMS.
Yes, at some level it's splitting hairs, in the sense that most laws
eventually end up splitting hairs somewhere. On the other hand,
the AHRA was also one of those grand compromises which tried to
balance the competing interests of the copyright industry, the
electronics industry, and the consumers, and like it or not,
resolutions like this are what Congress is for.
See http://www.hrrc.org (Home Recording Rights Coalition) for
a good background on the law.
((I have more to pass along about the Napster ruling and will hope to
get it cranked out later today.))
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ashke
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response 80 of 134:
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Feb 13 19:24 UTC 2001 |
But that definition was laid down BEFORE mass applications for computers were
truly used....correct? The leaps and bounds in computer technology and home
pc technology are amazing. If you had told me in 91 that I'd be playing music
on a computer, I'd have called you crazy. Now? I use it as much as my
stereo.
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brighn
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response 81 of 134:
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Feb 13 20:07 UTC 2001 |
I was playing music on the computer in 1991. I was playing music on the
computer in 1984.
Mass reproduction has been available for quite some time. The law is plain:
Reproduce a few times, and we won't prosecute, even though it's illegal.
Reproduce a few thousand times, and we'll prosecute. This isn't a matter of
new v. old technology. The only way that new technology is relevant is that
it's now easier to break the law. That doesn't mean you're not breaking the
law anymore.
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gull
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response 82 of 134:
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Feb 13 20:37 UTC 2001 |
Re #80, 81: Actually, the law says, "reproduce a few times, using a
stand-alone audio CD burner and audio CD blanks, and we won't
prosecute. Reproduce a few times, using a computer and data CD blanks,
and we might." It does sort of split hairs. Stand-alone audio burners
are considered "home recording devices" and computers aren't.
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krj
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response 83 of 134:
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Feb 13 21:14 UTC 2001 |
Brighn is somewhat mistaken in #81: he's describing prosecutorial
discretion and allocation of resources, not the law, and we are
generally concerned with civil copyright infringement here, not
criminal. And so far no individual users of Napster have been
sued.
Gull in resp:82 :: yes, that's the law. In exchange
for the extra royalties one pays for the audio CD burner and the
audio CD blanks, Congress rules that you are immune from copyright
suit for the non-commercial use of those things, even if you are
duplicating copyrighted material. There's no technical
difference between an audio blank and a data blank, merely a
legal/royalty difference. You could be sued for copyright
infringement for the use of your computer to clone CDs on data
discs, and if you did it often enough the felony provisions
of the No Electronic Theft Act would apply.
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brighn
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response 84 of 134:
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Feb 14 04:28 UTC 2001 |
This response has been erased.
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brighn
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response 85 of 134:
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Feb 14 04:34 UTC 2001 |
>Somebody somewhere here a long time ago referred to a law that limited home
>copies to a certain number. There was some discussion at that point as to
>whether or not that was a law or just a practice, but I thought that it had
>ultimately come down that it was a law.
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gull
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response 86 of 134:
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Feb 14 04:54 UTC 2001 |
Re #83: Who decides who gets the royalties? Do they just go to the
record companies?
(Interestingly, it's also *impossible* to use the legal, audio blanks in
a computer. You get an 'application code' error.)
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brighn
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response 87 of 134:
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Feb 14 17:51 UTC 2001 |
OOC, I've been archiving my old vinyls onto CD via computer. Not that I'm
going to stop or anything, but I assume that's legal... is it? (It's for my
own usage, recording LPs I own into CDs I own).
#85> I recall now that it was determined that it wasn't law, but rather a
legal guideline agreed to by some grand power like the RIAA or other...
details remain sketchy in my head, though. *shrug*
This is why I keep trying to remind myself to stay out of legal discussions
and keep to moral discussions. The law is overly intricate and pointless, in
many ways.
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gull
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response 88 of 134:
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Feb 14 18:58 UTC 2001 |
Re #87: It's technically illegal, but the chances of getting sued over
it are nonexistant.
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mwg
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response 89 of 134:
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Feb 14 19:29 UTC 2001 |
In theory it is also impossible to use data blanks on home audio CD
recorders, but some can be fooled and anything can be hacked.
I've been prowling through Napster a bit. It is a good place to pick up
those goofy fringe recordings of horrible things happening to a purple
reptile or to mutants with video displays embedded into thier digestive
systems, or other oddball things that you won't find on a mass-produced
audio format.
And if Napster does get heavily modified, as has been pointed out,
alernatives exist already, including servers using Napster protocol that
will work with clients that can be given specified servers. (I don't know
what a real Napster client is like, so I don't know if this is
easy/hard/impossible on them.)
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brighn
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response 90 of 134:
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Feb 14 22:41 UTC 2001 |
The technological cat's out of the bag, re: Napster.
Frankly, the best the Majors and the RIAA can hope for is maintaining enough
of a PR image that some of us actually respect them enough to keep from
ripping them off. I think that's Bertelmann's strategy.
Of course, they could ALWAYS restructure how they pay artists so those of us
who don't respect them begin to again. If anything, that's one really good
thing that could come out of this mess, once the dust settles. Personally,
I'm not going to hold my breath, but that DOES seem to be a motivator that
I've heard a lot -- the first is that CDs are too pricey, but the second is
that none or little of that money goes to the artists (directly, at least,
and the indirectly is clearly too "indirectly" for some people's tastes).
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aaron
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response 91 of 134:
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Feb 14 23:02 UTC 2001 |
Their best response, barring an unforeseen advance in encryption and
pay-per-download technology, would probably be to offer affordable
blanket licenses for various libraries of downloadable music (akin to
what is available to commercial enterprises through BMI and ASCAP),
while pursuing legal remedies against those responsible for any
significant level of piracy.
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polygon
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response 92 of 134:
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Feb 15 17:16 UTC 2001 |
Re 75 re 73. Many thanks for this acknowledgement. I appreciate it.
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krj
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response 93 of 134:
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Feb 16 22:33 UTC 2001 |
Back to my resp:0, second paragraph... today we have a wire service
story about a Napster statement that they are continuing to work on
developing their subscription service:
http://www.latimes.com/wires/20010216/tCB00a6683.html
"The new business model and technology enables digital music
files to be transferred from computer user to computer user -- so-called
peer-to-peer sharing -- but restrictions such as limiting the ability
to copy files on a CD will be placed on the transferred files,
Napster said."
So I guess my first thought was correct: they must be planning on having
either the sending or receiving program put a Digital Rights Management
wrapper around the vanilla MP3 file. ???
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dbratman
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response 94 of 134:
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Feb 17 00:56 UTC 2001 |
Stanford University, where I work, has instituted network routines to
put Napster and several other such services at the bottom priority of
network processing. They've been eating up so much network resources
it slows everybody down. There is no prohibition, and in fact they
recommend certain times of day when other network traffic is low.
As I suspected, it's the bandwidth.
Response among students has been mixed. Some whine that they can't get
everything they want RIGHT NOW. Others suggest that perhaps this move
will improve the dating scene on campus, as students will be impelled
to go out instead of spending all their evenings downloading music from
the Web.
A list of things that _I_ would prefer doing to watching little
completion percentage bars crawl across my computer screen would be a
very long list indeed.
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gull
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response 95 of 134:
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Feb 17 05:07 UTC 2001 |
At Michigan Tech they banned Napster use because they found the usage
pattern it created was aggravating a problem with their backbone
switch. (A problem that the switch's manufacturer had, at the time I
left, been utterly unable to fix over a period of two or three months.)
It wasn't a bandwidth usage problem, exactly; something about the
rapid-fire way Napster makes connections was triggering the switch to
drop whole network segments for ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
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krj
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response 96 of 134:
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Feb 17 05:42 UTC 2001 |
News item:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010215/tc/belgium_napsster_1.html
"Belgian Cops Raid Music-Sharers."
The raids of users homes were primarily aimed at a web site.
However, the prosecution spokesman says, "four cases against
Napster users were currently under review."
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mcnally
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response 97 of 134:
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Feb 18 02:14 UTC 2001 |
I much preferred the hysterical Slashdot extrapolations (jackbooted Belgian
stormtroopers conducting mass arrests) to the actual story, which involves
police seizing computers from several people who operated an MP3 download
site, but this could indeed turn into a trend to watch..
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krj
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response 98 of 134:
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Feb 18 19:20 UTC 2001 |
www.inside.com has the best explanation I've seen of how a Digital Rights
Management Napster is supposed to work. Grab the story quick before they
move it from the "free" section to the "members" section.
New Scientist has a piece on SDMI and watermarking.
http://www.newscientist.com/features/features.jsp?id=ns22782
Like most good stuff, this is indexed from the http://www.mp3.com/news
index page.
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raven
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response 99 of 134:
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Feb 21 08:11 UTC 2001 |
And the latest news is Napster wants to try to settel with all the record
companies including the indies for a cool billion dollars. This works
out to 20 dollars a subscriber for napsters current 50 million subscribers,
assuming most of them stay signed up for a subscriber service which is a big
if, with open nap, guntella, etc, available for free. Seems like a sketchy
business model, but it could way to reach the win win solution of unlimited
aqccess to music while assuring the record companies and more importantly
the artisits their cut.
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mdw
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response 100 of 134:
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Feb 21 09:38 UTC 2001 |
The artists? Doubtful even in the most optimistic model.
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krj
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response 101 of 134:
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Feb 21 17:20 UTC 2001 |
resp:96, resp:97 :: ZDnet(UK) runs a story that the IFPI (the global
version of the RIAA) is pushing hard for raids on Napster users in
Belgium. "The head of IFPI in Belgium, Marcel Heymans, claimed
Thursday that Belgian police were poised to raid the homes of hundreds
of Napster users."
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2687923,00.html?chkpt=zdhpnew
s01
or some URL like that.
As for the billion dollar settlement offer, it smacks of desperation
to me. If the four major labels (other than BMG) wanted Napster to
continue to exist, and if they thought it could produce a billion dollars
in revenue, then they could just continue their lawsuit, win, and collect
all Napster assets in the judgement; then they would own Napster and
its potential revenues forever.
Several of the pieces I read yesterday -- there was a huge flurry of them
prompted by the billion dollar offer -- suggest the most likely outcome
will be that someone sets up a Napster-ish directory server in one of the
countries which currently host off-shore gambling sites. Revenue?
One could probably get millions of Napster users to pay a small monthly
fee for access to the directory server if the files traded were unrestricted
MP3 files, rather than the restricted-use files planned for Napster II.
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brighn
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response 102 of 134:
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Feb 22 17:11 UTC 2001 |
#110, 99> Even fairly optimistic lil ol' me isn't naive enough to think any
noticable amount of Napster's settlement with the RIAA and the Majors will
go to the artists.
(er, that was 100, not 110)
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