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@physics.auth.gr | 21st Century Schizoid man I read the whole of the news and the commentary. Still makes no sense to me at all.
I am no law specialist, but IMHO the essence of copyright laws is twofold:
1. an individual should not profit in money from "the copyright owner's" products or intellectual work without paying them for the right to make money
2. an individual should not profit in other than money ways by claiming that a product is a product of his own
Thus the first aspect is material: you should not make money by selling the product or byproduct that is copyrighted, because this would mean less revenues for the original vendors. The second is ethical: you should not get fame or gain higher scientific status by claiming that a specific piece of work is yours, i.e. impersonating the original creator of the work.
Honestly, all this legalese and debating regarding mp3, napster and internet radio it makes no sense to me. In fact it resembles a snake eating its own tail. Forget the internet for a moment and try to imagine the earlier days of the recording industry, e.g. Elvis, Sinatra, Beatles, etc. They were great artists and they were trying to sell records. Their main advertiser was radio. Radio made them famous and radio made them idols and goldmines for the recording companies. And radio had to pay for broadcasting rights too, because radio stations themselves were getting high ratings _because_ they were playing Elvis, Sinatra etc. This is the essence of business (and capitalism): create a need (even the most perverse or illogical one), create a (preferable cheap) product, use or create the media to validate it as a valuable product, and wait for the bucks to pour in your pockets. Thus everybody was happy. Radio stations were (and perhaps are) paying royalties, but at the same time they were getting tons of promo disks and tons of advertisers etc. All show business to me boils down to money circulating round and round. So if you wanted to enjoy your favorite artist, you had to either wait for the radio to play your song (without paying nothing of course), or go buy the record (naturally paying for it).
Copyright laws were wisely established to discourage eventual outsiders from profiting from this golden merry-go-round that needed a lot of oil to keep its weels spinning.
Eventually the tape/cassette recorder was accessible to more and more people who naturally begun recording from radio or from disks. This new hardware industry was not ever threatened from copyright laws. Although it was (and still is) illegal to start a business and sell duplicates of cassette or LP records, it is still a strong business in underdeveloped countries, called "piracy". I think there there was and still is much tolerance regarding taping. First, it is "gray publicity": big idols of the time became even bigger. For example, recording companies would be very happy to know that you made 10 copies of a record and gave them to your cousins or shoolmates. Second, people did buy pirated copies but at the same time bought also more originals from the other artists that they would not buy otherwise. So small scale piracy is desirable, (although illegal), but large scale piracy i.e. making money in expense of recording companies is deemingly prosecuted.
Then came the CD. Things did not change much.
Then came personal computers and personal cd-recorders. The landscape did not change either, even though you can now make _perfect copies_ of original work - the equivalent of pressing your own vinyl records in the old days. The CD recorder itself being marketed is the biggest inconsistency in the history of copyright laws. One can make infinite perfect copies of a product costing $15 and sell it at $1 still making profit. However it is perfectly legal to a) buy a CDR b) buy CD blanks. Moreover, noone will ever ask you for what purpose you are buying a super-pro CD replicator that can make 100 copies in 10 minutes. If you come to think of it in legal terms, manufacturing, selling and buying CD recorders is 1000% illegal. However their market still grows, and now we have 32x or more replicators.
Now think of internet, mp3, napster and internet radio. Here we have minor cases of piracy. MP3s at 128 kbps are bad quality but listenable. However on file sharing schemes you'll easily find 192, 224 and even 320 kbps that are real close to CD quality. You can for example take these, remaster them in a sound editing program to compensate for spectrum and dynamics loss and make audio CDs that sound 1% (or less) inferior to the original audio CDs.
Here's a delicate issue: Fraunhofer they tried to keep the mp3 compression process proprietary to themselves and impose the $200,000 or so tarifs mentioned in one of the posts above, hiding behind the law of copyright. MP3 technology is a marketable one - and you can see it now everyday in the stores. However FHG apparently did not take into account the dynamics of the internet and the fact that you cannot patent mathematics easily. The MP3 format made music "pirateable" (in the same manner divx made movies pirateable) so is it bold to accuse Thomson/Fraunhofer as promoting illegal activities ? Why didn't they protect the mp3 format right in the beginning with a scheme like liquid audio? Because they themselves were stuck with the same snake biting its tail problem: if they were to protect the technology too much, nobody would have noticed its existence, we would not talk about it today (and of course our hard disks would be much emptier...).
It's the same problem as with every marketable technology, notably software. Why did Microsoft or Adobe or Macromedia etc become the dinosaurs they really are today ? Because they never protected their OSs or software in a _serious_ way. All that was (and mostly still is) needed is a copy of the CD, or even a small part of it and a valid serial number. This is gray publicity again. Imagine the opposite situation, where these companies protected their software with dongles or laserlocks: their market share would now be below 1% or less, cause they would not get known or popular (no radio would play their song) and thus today's PCs would all be running free linux - what a nightmare! It's a clever choice the companies made to sell 1000 copies at $1 instead of 10 copies at $100.
I sense that the mp3 arena is circling about the same problem. Music idols these days are created and killed constantly. Idols become famous for 15 minutes, sell 1 million copies, are very soon forgotten, and then are replaced by new artists. This is the current model for music showbiz and it is evident from the music genres that get most listeners in those semi-legal radio stations. Buying CDs today makes no sense, after one-two months they just collect dust in drawers. New marketing formats are sought, more appealing and more realistic to buyers. Thus mp3 buying by downloading was invented. Currently they are expensive, but expect a massive drop in the prices soon. An album while costing $15 on cd stores would probably cost only half or less as an mp3 download or perhaps $2 per songs. And this makes much sense to buyers, cause they can buy only the "hits" in the same sense some decades ago one had the option of bying the 45 singles and not the whole LP.
And I am sure these downloads won't exceed 128 kbps - otherwise downloading for dialup users makes no sense. Here enters the internet radio issue: they broadcast at a quality very similar to present shoutcasts, so at a quality comparable to _marketable_ mp3 that can be dloaded to your brand new portable mp3player. This latter piece of hardware has entered the market aggressively and owners sure need to feed it with the latest hits. I think mp3 players entered the market at a very bad timing for recording industries - they obviously invested in the huge existing base of (already pirated or to-be termed as pirated?) music found on the internet.
Some questions to ponder at: If RIAA or other bodies had means to control the developent of technology _in advance_:
1. would the allow Fraunhofer to publish the mp3 format, or would they decide that mp3 should remain a military secret ?
2. would they allow the development of general purpose CD-recorders, or would enforce that they embed hardware restrictions in audio cd replication like the ones in home audio cd copiers ?
3. would they allow the free development of streaming music technology, or would they limit it right from the beginning to paying subscribers only ?
I think that in all three cases, any restrictions imposed like the ones suggested in the second part of the above, would severely impede the merry-go-round of capital and investment, software and hardware, free and payable music. Each of these pairs are the driving forces of today's rapidly changing market and no sensible businessman would ever think to exclude _in advance_ any profit possibilities that cannot be forecasted or foreseen. Especially in internet-related businesses, where economy rules are discovered as we all go along.
Some more thoughts open to discussion...
1. Internet radio has nothing to be afraid of unless it interferes with the downloadable music market.
2. Current priority is on high-bitrate mp3 formats filesharing schemes, that allegedly threaten the sale of audio CDs.
3. I said "allegedly" because to my knowledge there is no market analysis definitely proving that recording companies have lost money to mp3 downloads (if you know any relevant url, please post it)
4. The real reason Metallica started the war was not because they felt their sales were threatened (what I suspect is that this war extended their caree for another 5-10 years). What they were afraid of is that their kingdom would be threatened by an obscure degeneration effect that I describe below.
5. An mp3 that you can find for free (or anything you get for free) is good by definition, because you have a desire for it, spend time hunting it, downloading it and eventually distributing it to your friends. At the same time, such an easy and costless process does diminish the satisfaction of owning the song. Just think of how pride you were about getting that particular CD in the same week it was out and how beautiful it looked in its jewelcase, your cdplayer and your CD shelf. You do not and cannot feel the same with an mp3. Moreover, that mp3 will be soon forgotten among the 40 GB of other mp3s or within a pile of mp3-CDs. And the worse, finding it to play it is much more time consuming than searching your CD shelf. (Admit it, the mp3 differs in psychology from the CD as much as the CD from the LP.) So Metallica had a moment of glory playing through your winamp, but their _image_ (literally, as a 2-dimensional surface of the CD or Label of the CD) will faded much more easily. To conclude Metallica's nightmare, you would not possibly imagine throwing their cd (=$15) in a trashcan, even if you came to dislike them. However, you would easily "murder" them by killing a tiny file on your Hard Disk. And this kind of mortality through sudden death, emphasizing the vanity of it all the star system business, is the everyday nightmare of all decaying (like Metallica) or newborn stars (like the typical trance/house/techno/dance music for 21st century butterflies).
Why is this post so lenghty ? I was triggered by the original article and especially the following paragraph about Alphabet soup:
>Ari is frustrated: "Unlike other labels, which charge
>based on our revenue (zero), one label required a large
>license fee based on listeners. We opted to instead remove
>all their content, however they informed us that they have
>disclaimer language which insists that no matter what we
>do, we will still be fully liable if we miss a single song".
That "if we miss a single song" sounded quite ambiguous to me when first reading the sentence (i'm not a native english speaker), which I took it as meaning "if we miss a single song from our playlist". This latter meaning sounded to me as describing the situation in a crystal clear way: "you cannot play our songs, but you are not allowed to boycot them either".
This is the insanity of 21st century. You just have to swim along the stream, but you must never make waves _or_ stop. And you cannot get out of the water either.
Is it worth swimming ? Is it worth fighting and spending time and energy about all that computer, internet, mp3 and radio stuff? Or are we just playing along their silly games, endlessly dancing around and eventually kicking at that snake that eats its tail, ever so happy it cannot bite us back? I am pretty much worried, my friends. Is that music really worth it? I look at my piles of CDs and mp3 CDs and directories on my HDs often look at them and try to figure what was the last time I heard that particular album. I think we should focus more on what we want to become than what we want to have. And I always wanted to become a bass player and I bet that did not become one because I was too lazy or too afraid of failure. Being a collector of music seemed to comfort me for some years now... but not so much anymore. Recently I think more and more often that being a consumer is just a substitute of being a creator. So "shut up, pick up yer guitar and play" seems to be the best way to bid you goodnight .... | |
Anon | I like your closing paragraph. It is a valid point, the whole creator vs consumer thing. sorry to say that years of television watching, jump-cut editting, advertising bombardment, and mouse-clicking have conditioned me in such a way that I was unable to read your entire post, let alone type a reply without distraction. | |
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