The Recording Industry Likes to Make Me Look Like an Asshole

http://blog.earbits.com/online_radio/the-recording-industry-likes-to-make-me-look-like-an-asshole/

by earbitscom • 15 years ago

92 149 15 years ago

blog.earbits.com

palish• 15 years ago

This is an interesting point.

I have no idea, but is it reasonable to make the claim that the DMCA is flawed? By that I mean, is it excessively annoying / ineffective to actually use the DMCA for its intended purpose?

(I'm not referring to DMCA abuses... just whether it's fundamentally broken or not.)

I haven't really given it much thought. I always assumed that the DMCA was a reasonable middle ground. But is it?

earbitscom4• 15 years ago

Well, I'll start by saying that it's excessively annoying that each artist and independent label and movie creator and so on, are responsible for knowing about and checking for their material on every site that provides MP3s, videos, etc. New ones pop up all of the time and it's impossible for most of these companies and individuals to even know about them, let alone check them from time to time.

But then it gets worse, because you have sites like Grooveshark, which plenty of people do know about, do police, and do contact to have their content taken down, only to have that content reappear every other day. As of right now both The Eagles and King Crimson have publicly shared their lengthy email histories with Grooveshark, asking repeatedly to have their content removed. Grooveshark removes it, and then 24-48 hours later most of it is back on the site. Technically this is covered by the DMCA and it is the artist and their label's job to go to Grooveshark every day, find the content, pull the links, notify the company, and keep doing this over and over. The problem is, between the upload and the takedown, the content is there long enough for people who might otherwise use a legal service or purchase the material to access it as much as they want.

wmf• 15 years ago

I think it's safe to say that the Web 2.0 user-generated content sites were not envisioned (by either side) when the DMCA was drafted. These sites have made it so easy to share content and their business model does nothing to discourage infringement (compared to traditional Web hosting); these factors have shifted the balance so that infringement is much easier than enforcement. I don't know how to fix that, especially since there's a powerful status quo bias now that Web 2.0 has existed for so long.

jerf• 15 years ago

If you believe that the purpose of the DMCA is to make it so you can sit back and do nothing and all piracy magically stops by Sheer Force of Law, it doesn't work.

If you believe the purpose of the DMCA is to give rights holders a certain amount of power to self-enforce and are willing to concede that it won't all be stopped, it works pretty well.

If your opinion is somewhere in between, adjust as needed.

I think if earbits wanted to clean up his essay a bit he should come out and state clearly and explicitly what his goal for his desired legal regime is. I suspect he's sneaking in an implicit requirement that it be perfect on us, and if you accept that you'll never be satisfied. There is no set of tools that the government can hand the industry to eliminate piracy. Even SOPA isn't draconian enough. On the other hand, once you accept that a certain amount of lossage is inevitable and that we expect rightsholders to only really have to chase down violations on the largest sites and have the tools to catch the vast bulk, the argument that the DMCA is some sort of grossly flawed bill becomes much, much harder to just float by without justification. There's a huge gap in the logic there, which I think is what some people are choking on without quite consciously realizing it.

I suspect that actually filling in that gap will inevitably erode the perceived power of the argument, though. He complains technical people aren't working out how to solve a problem that he can't actually give his true requirements for without losing his audience.

snowwrestler2• 15 years ago

The fundamental flaw of the DMCA is that it does not provide a mechanism for handling sites that exist outside U.S. legal jurisdiction (but of course are just as easily reached by U.S. citizens).

There is a volume problem with the DMCA, as earbit notes, but I tend to think that that is solvable with software.

But when a site sits on a fat pipe in the Ukraine, serving up every movie made in the last 10 years for free, there is currently nothing in the DMCA or other U.S. law that can do anything about it.

tomjen33• 15 years ago

I hope one day you come to think about what you are really saying.

The music industry isn't a thousand part as important as a usefull internet. Frankly copyright has become far too difficult to enforce without killing the internet so we should drop the enforcement, accept the decline in output from the movie/music industry (and I am ok with it going all the way to zero) and move on.

Unlike a lot of others here I don't have anything against mainstream music, but I do no that there is no such thing as a free lunch and that the price of copyright, compared to the additional value created by it, is too high.

Remember there is no natural right to copyright, it was allowed by the founders as a way to promote useful art and science - and there is no requirement that we keep it.

earbitscom4• 15 years ago

I hope one day you come to think about what you are really saying. It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em.

baremetal2• 15 years ago

What he is saying is that the output from artists and the resulting copyrights has next to no value when compared with the value of the internet. I tend to agree, people will still make music even if they cant easily profit from it, yet if we lose the internet we are back in the stone age of communication. So what if a few special interest groups pay the price via a failed business model, empires rise and fall as it has always been and will continue to be.

sbronstein• 15 years ago

Look Joey, if you want to argue that the DMCA is flawed and we should have a stronger law to protect rightsholders, then you really need to spell out what you want that law to look like. Because it turns out that whenever anyone tries to suggest a "compromise", that compromise will break the internet in some fundamental way. That is the point that tomjen3 is making.

So tell us - how to you propose to "fix" the DMCA? Because if you won't give us any specifics except saying that the DMCA is flawed, and you won't come out against SOPA, then guess what - the recording industry is just showing the rest of us who you really are.

kiba• 15 years ago

I do not care about the 900,000th totally unoriginal song. Nor do I care if they keep on doing it. It wouldn't do a thing to my universe of musics, nor the fact that there are too many songs in the world to consume within my lifetime, or the next lifetime.

In this context, whether or nor the music record industry lives or die have zero impact on my music collection other than when it's about dying time, or rather they think it's dying time, they must poison the landscape and everything else.

The record industry is not dying. They are actually thriving. Nor are they particularly significant. However, they want to destroy the internet in the ways it work. I resent that.

soult2• 15 years ago

I do care about the artists. I don't care for the labels. In a world where listening to music is as easy as downloading a file from Amazon they just don't add any value.

You want me to find a copyright enforcement law that is better than SOPA and DMCA? I'll do you one better. I want you to find an artist compensation mechanism that cuts out the fat middle-man (the labels).

mixmastamyk• 15 years ago

Yes, they'll shift to different business models just as buggy-whip manufacturers did. Whether or not you take it personally, history has spoken.

reitzensteinm• 15 years ago

I make video games, so I'm in exactly the same boat as musicians with respect to piracy. It sucks, sure.

But it is not worth destroying the internet to try to fix it. I would rather go bankrupt than live in the world this bill is pushing us towards.

A free and open internet is on track to do more to progress humanity than any other invention in history. Trying to derail it because musicians are finding it hard to sell CDs is selfish at best and borderline psychopathic at worst.

orangecat2• 15 years ago

It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em.

On some level I would agree with that. If the rights of party A can be protected only by draconian laws that trample the rights of parties B, C, and D, then we shouldn't pass those laws even if it really is unfair to A. And in the real world that formulation is overly generous to the record labels, who do have means to enforce their rights, just not as conveniently as they'd like because they have to deal with annoyances like evidence and due process.

barkingtoad• 15 years ago

Let's put that concept to bed straight away.

Nobody was protecting the interests of artists before the Internet. Nobody. 0.1% got Ozzy-level rich, 0.9% did OK, the rest of the artists were not even allowed to sell their out-of-print back catalog.

READ THIS

http://www.negativland.com/albini.html

quanticle3• 15 years ago

>It's too hard to protect the interests of artists, fuck 'em.

It's too hard to protect the interests of buggy-whip makers. Let's outlaw automobiles. It's too hard to protect the interests of barges. Let's outlaw trains. It's too hard to protect the interests of ocean liners. Lets outlaw air travel.

No one is entitled to a living. No one should have to rely on the government to protect their business model. If your business model doesn't work in an Internet-enabled world, too fucking bad. We didn't bail out the buggy whip makers for having a business model that couldn't survive in an automobile enabled world. We didn't bail out the barge and steamboat industry when trains came along. Why should we bail out the recording industry because they can't hack it in an Internet-enabled world?

Because that's what this is. A bailout. This a bailout that dwarfs the bank bailout in terms of the harm it can do to our economy and our liberty. And it's not even a bailout for artists. It's a bailout for a parasitic monster that, as far as I can tell only serves to funnel money from consumers to lobbyists.

EDIT: By your logic, even the recording industry itself shouldn't exist. The recording industry killed off the "home-performance" industry and drastically cut sheet music sales by making and distributing recordings of performances. So who's looking out for their interests?

Natsu10• 15 years ago

It's not just "too hard", it's impossible. You need to control every computer, everywhere, perfectly. One failure is all it takes, then its game over for your protection scheme. Technical people have been trying--and failing--to stop the piracy of computer programs. I've watched them do it for pretty much my entire life and I'm over 30. And piracy of computer programs is, in theory, an easier problem than the one faced by music because the programs have to be executed and they can try to check if they're legit or not, while music is just data. Dongles, type the Nth word on page X from the manual, code wheels, code that breaks when run in a debugger... I can relate to you the entire, long, history of failure and tell you why the schemes do not work and cannot be made to work. It's like trying to watch people prove that 2==1, convinced that they could make it work if they could find a bigger one or a maybe a smaller two.

The techs are upset because the new ways people are proposing won't just fail, they'll create all sorts of new problems in addition to failing.

Nobody hates the artists. Why would they? Artists give us great entertainment! Without the artists, we'd have nothing to enjoy. There are solutions, though. The solutions don't require new laws, they require new ways of doing business. Maybe that's not fair, but I can't help you there. No one can help you there. It's like we're trying to convince one of King Canute's advisers that a more strongly-worded rebuke will not, in fact, turn back the tide that's swallowing up their property and they're stubbornly holding their breath, waiting for a proclamation that works. The way forward is more like using the waves to provide power. Use piracy as marketing. Money comes from other things: signed products, live appearances, merchandising.

There are creative ways to solve these problems. You can even get your fans to help, like that guy I pointed to who holds parties with his fans while they help him ship his books. Anyone who is not doing this kind of thing, but instead holding their breath, waiting for techies, lawmakers or even King Canute to solve them is going to suffocate. It's not fair, but that's life for you. If it could be changed, it already would have.

WalterSear• 15 years ago

As an artist, I assure you, the recording industry has done way more damage to me than the internet has.

johnl• 15 years ago

You could model after the pharmaceutical companies where the drug gets a waiting period before generics can compete. Use 12 months, Require downloadable files be zipped with a header that can be searched and automatically deleted.

Natsu10• 15 years ago

Everything on the internet must be downloaded before it gets to you. Even if you suppose there's some censor out there looking for anything with the "copyright bit" set, it still wouldn't work, because so long as you could send two different messages that would pass some censor, you could encode one of them as a 0, the other as a 1, then do a horribly inefficient data transfer that bypasses whatever controls are in place.

You may think that's ridiculous, but things of that sort already exist. For example, there's a way to use DNS as a tunnel for other data. Yes, doing that is crazy.

If I'm incredibly pessimistic about this, it's because I've watched the long history of failure as many smart people attempted, then utterly failed, at doing this. One side must be perfect. The other needs just one opening. Games like that are so massively unfair that the only winning move is not to play. And you don't have to play: I've already pointed out how some artists have adapted and are doing good business. People want to support them. That's the way forward.

Maybe I'm wrong and someone will invent some magic technology that stops piracy. But anyone who is holding their breath waiting for it is very likely to suffocate. There are people looking for the way forward. It's just not a technical solution.

phil• 15 years ago

"Don't fight the Internet." - Eric Schmidt

ScottWhigham2• 15 years ago

Well said. I think it would be interesting to see the reactions/votes/comments to this broken down by age group. I suspect those > 30, by and large, agree strongly with you, those between 25 and 30 would be a mixed group, and those younger than 25 would think you are a crazy person. I have no "data" to back this up but it's my guess.

Well written - thanks for sharing. (And I'm 40 if that matters)

orangecat2• 15 years ago

I suspect those > 30, by and large, agree strongly with you

I wish to register myself as a counterexample in the strongest possible terms.

Terretta• 15 years ago

Over 40, think real art and music are created for reasons other than profit, and will be regardless of business model.

In fact, I believe un-funding the "recording industry" would result in an immediate and measurable net increase in the quality to junk ratio.

buff-a• 15 years ago

Over 30. Content creator myself. Completely disagree in strongest possible terms.

Natsu10• 15 years ago

> I don’t see people in the technology community making real and productive proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy.

That's because there is no technical solution, this is a people problem, not a tech problem. I've thought about it a lot myself. Software gets pirated too, after all, so if there was some technical way to block it, it would've happened already. Microsoft controls a significant fraction of the world's OSes and they can't even manage it, and not for lack of trying or lack of funding.

But that does not mean that artists are screwed, only that they'll have to adapt. Computers won't replace authors any time soon[1]. And adapting is possible, though it relies less on copyright and more on business acumen. Look at the webcomic authors: they give away their work for free, but the smart ones can still make good money. If you want lessons on how, start watching how Howard Taylor does business. He gets his fans to ship his books for him and they like it.

You can give the pirates the middle finger all you want. But, laws or no laws, I don't see how people are going to stay in business unless they adapt. I can understand it being painful: I see factory workers getting replaced by machines, after all. But the lesson is the same: evolve or die.

[1] Uncreative fill-in-the-blanks style writing, like that program that does sports reporting, excepted.

ScottWhigham2• 15 years ago

* That's because there is no technical solution, this is a people problem, not a tech problem. *

That's just not correct. The technical "solution" of Napster and later torrenting enabled this on a mass scale, did it not? Surely that's a "technical" matter and not only a people matter? If you make it technology easy enough that a 14yo with little tech skills can download the latest pop album for free and with virtually no risk of any consequences, then you've technically provided a way for someone to take the easy way out. People are like water - they'll almost always take the easiest route to get what they want. If it's easier to torrent/download and there are no repercussions (of whatever type), then they'll choose that more often than not.

Take away the tech that made it easy (or technically add in repercussions like a virus/trojan) and they'll stop.

baremetal2• 15 years ago

Data is just bits, bits can be copied with virtually no cost. Welcome to the internet.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

I hate to get 2nd-amendment-peanut-butter into your piracy-chocolate, but as I was reading your comment, the phrase "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" flashed through my mind. Guns are a mix of a technology/people problem, must as much as copyright infringement is, and we haven't even solved that problem yet. (At least, we don't seem to have solved it in the USA.)

Natsu10• 15 years ago

You can't make it hard. People have been trying that for ages and all that happened was that people got really good at cracking the protections. It only takes one "smart cow" to open the barn door for the rest. The situation is not symmetric. The attackers have an overwhelming advantage: the defense must be perfect while the attackers of a protection scheme need just one flaw. That's so massively unfair that we have never yet seen it succeed for very long. And even then, most of the things that weren't cracked were ignored because there were easier ways to get the content. Which is, of course, an observation you were quite correct to point out.

You can't take away the enabling, either, any more than you can turn back the hands of time. Information is information. If I can transmit a message to you, then I can do so whether or not it's copyrighted. I can just encrypt it to block out any middlemen who would otherwise censor it. I can route it through third parties. I can use steganography to hide it. It's not fair, but it is. Like much of life, it's evolve or die.

Even if we ramp the controls and enforcement to police state levels, one look at China's Great Firewall shows that it leaks like a sieve. What you say has been tried already. For my entire life. It has yet to succeed. I don't believe it ever will.

icebraining7• 15 years ago

What tech do you propose to take away? HTTP? Because a big part of sharing is done through generic servers and browsers, possibly with generic SSL encryption to avoid detection by middle men. How do you take that away without destroying the web?

burgerbrain8• 15 years ago

"Take away the tech that made it easy (or technically add in repercussions like a virus/trojan) and they'll stop."

Just admit it. You have no idea what you are talking about.

There is no "the tech". There is no head to cut off. If one group of people stop distributing the knowledge to share files, the another will take its place.

shalmanese• 15 years ago

Thank you. What's been conspicuously missing from the entire SOPA debate is how there does exist rampant and willful violation of copyright currently hidden under the safe blanket of the DMCA and that this is a legitimate problem that needs to be addressed.

SOPA is not the right way to do it but denying the reality makes the anti-SOPA side's message not being heard by those across the aisle.

waqf• 15 years ago

Would you mind giving examples so we can understand what scale of problem you're alleging?

donnyg1079• 15 years ago

To put no blame on either side, as the only attempts I've seen on this ground involve louis CK and some small-time dubsteppers, what of the music industry's effective monopoly and set-without-alternative pricing? Not many artists have the resources to bypass this system when they really have the opportunity to opt out of the label system, so the argument of "pay for it or find another way to get music" isn't exactly reasonable. And as a better indication, there's been a clear decrease in consumer valuation of individual songs, as evidence of the total effort exerted to bypass current prices, and yet the prices for music have remained steady.

I believe that there is a market equilibrium, and that as songs are made cheeper to reflect their new value to consumers, more will buy rather than steal, but it seems like labels are insisting that they should dictate market price without alternative rather than adjust price to demand. I don't mean that they should just lower prices until we get what we want, but I think the direction the music industry is headed is more enforcement of monopoly than prevention of theft.

If there were a way for artists to effectively bypass the system, or for value to consumers to have sway in the market price, this may not be an issue, but it is. In reality, the system means more theft, so artists see less revenue, and I'd imagine that artists would go for an alternative as readily as many consumers. And further, if there were some way to do away with it, there'd likely be far less of a culture of theft, or say, less communally supported resources for it, so artists might conceivably be able make money if they attempted to go sans-label.

Obviously these are just more reasons why the system is broken, but the difference is the availability of a market solution. And if there isn't in fact, a treatment for the disease rather than the symptom, I really only see SOPA as reasonable if it were immediately followed by anti-trust legislation against some big name labels.

vectorpush2• 15 years ago

Anyone who disagrees, frankly, can go fuck themselves.

Well consider me fucked.

What the author doesn't realize is that he's fighting against an organic phenomenon. Even if SOPA passes, piracy will continue to thrive. There are thousands of eager engineers begging for the chance to prove that they can produce an elegant hack around this poorly considered attempt to control the internet. There is also a culture that has now adjusted its formula for content value, and those people will demand piracy, just as they demand jailbroken phones and modded xboxes, and someone will rise to meet their demands. A new file sharing solution will emerge, and the media companies will have to spend another decade trying to lobby for a way to whack the next mole.

In the meantime, those of us who understand that you can't prevent a bit from being copied have learned how to create content that people feel good paying for. Of course, people don't have the right to download content without paying for it, but you can't stop the spread of 1s and 0s without giving the media companies an authority that goes beyond what is reasonable.

dlss3• 15 years ago

This. A million times this. Thank you.

The customer's desire to give you money is the product. This is inherent in the nature of near zero cost replication.

Loius CK gets it, Reznor gets it, Yorke gets it, kickstarter gets it. OP doesn't, the RIAA doesn't.

donnyg1079• 15 years ago

So you're saying that we only REALLY want the products to which we would chritably throw cash? so when I buy coke at the grocery store, it's because I want to charitably contribute to the coca-cola company's artful soda recipe? And when I don't feel like appreciating it, I should just take them?

OBVIOUSLY NOT. If you don't appreciate the music, or even the artists work, then don't download it. If you don't want it, dont steal and insist that your "just getting it for the right price." I can't even begin to explain how entitled it sounds o hear people saying that they wil pay for the things that they "really should be paying for because they want to be." This is a justification for piracy and is in no way a solution to the curent issues. You buy a product, you donate to charities which you like. Charities ask you to contribute, firms tell you what you need to to pay for their product. Louis CK is in no way an indication that people will pay for things they 'really appreciate,' lots of people really wanted the experiment to work. But what of Kanye's album? I see hundreds saying "Oh this guy is a jerk, I'm just gonna take his album." Is that how natural markets work?

Don't like it? Good, that's your NATURAL INCLINATION to go for lowest price possible which will in no way just 'go away' when you really appreciate your products, nor should it.

And this is not zero cost replication. There are people that put a ton of time and effort into piracy to make it work. We'll know when we've reached a solution that works when the enormous online filesharing infrastructure necessary for the current levels of piracy dissolves, and people simply start to pay for the products like they would any other.

donnyg1079• 15 years ago

If you're comfortable not stealing the products that you don't "feel good paying for" then go right ahead, only pay for the products you feel good paying for. But if you're saying that it's cool to just steal the work and effort of a product that just didn't sit right with you, then you are far in the wrong. No one insists that we can all steal from athletic shoe companies with factory worker human rights issues overseas, and yet somehow every time we think a media company abuses our rights to their content with oh so high pricing, we're just entitled to take their content. The issue of online theft isn't one of personal ethical comfort, and that it is no way to convince lawmakers that the online community is onboard to accept FAIR legislation, or even be civil with a government-free solution.

vectorpush2• 15 years ago

if you're saying that it's cool to just steal the work

From my post: Of course, people don't have the right to download content without paying for it.

There is no doubt that people deserve compensation for their work, but if the full value of your effort can be represented as a string of 1s and 0s, then you must accept the reality that computers, the most ubiquitous machines on the planet, are all designed with the fundamental purpose of shifting around 1s and 0s. You simply cannot fight the reality that data is cheap and easy to share without setting back progress.

ldar153• 15 years ago

"There is a plan to murder 6 million jews. Some of you have written in to ask me to condemn this plan. Unfortunately, I cannot condemn this plan, because none of you have come up with a reasonable alternative."

I don't think you can use the excuse that we don't have a way to support your business model, to turn around and support fascism.

Skroob3• 15 years ago

Godwin'd

shareme• 15 years ago

He forgets that in most countries Copyright, IP, etc are public commons 'licensed' to private companies by the laws passed. It is not an automatic privilege and does change over time as the public adjusts its laws to match reality.

In other words MPAA and RIAA do not have an automatic right to their business models because as technology changes so than to how much we the public grant in rights to companies in form of copyrights, etc.

Remember this dumb fuck MPAA and RIAA when DCMA was passed it got redefined by negotiation and court cases. When SOPA gets redefined we do not have to be nice about it..fair warning..

bmelton13• 15 years ago

I was very close to giving you an upvote, and then you resorted to calling the author a "dumb fuck" after he posted one of the most thoughtful, poignant essays I've recently read on the subject.

Because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't necessarily invalidate their opinions. If anything, in perhaps a better time, it would open the invitation for frank, but ideally _civil_ discussion.

burgerbrain8• 15 years ago

"Anyone who disagrees, frankly, can go fuck themselves."

"the most thoughtful, poignant essays I've recently read on the subject."

You might want to read more...

skew2• 15 years ago

Perhaps you should judge replies by the standard of civil disagreement set by the essay itself.

The first paragraph of the essay says anyone who disagrees that copyright is a natural right "can go fuck themselves".

nknight• 15 years ago

> Anyone who disagrees, frankly, can go fuck themselves.

I really don't think it's the recording industry that's making you look like an asshole.

ldar153• 15 years ago

Our founding fathers believed that you should be very careful what powers you give to any authority because, even though they may be nice now, you have no idea who will be in charge in the future.

This is why any student of history is against SOPA. We believe that it does not protect the rights espoused in the Constitution. We believe that it may be abused in the future.

Some people, such as yourself, seem to believe that this would never happen. You seem to think that because there is a need (in your view) for copyright holders to remove "owned" content, that we need a law like this. And further you seem to believe that its ok to have such a broad law, even though it may be open to such abuse.

UMG is just demonstrating why the founding fathers were right and why you are naive and short-sighted.

Here's the thing: if UMG wasn't actively doing it, you'd still be naive and short-sighted. You'd still be an "asshole", in your words, and the founding fathers would still be right.

mattdeboard• 15 years ago

Why would you put "owned" in quotes there?

There's one thing that the OP is indisputably correct about: Content creators (should) own the content they create. When Isee someone do something like putting "owned" in quotes, it just immediately strikes me as someone who justifies piracy to themselves by saying that no one owns content.

ldar153• 15 years ago

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlei

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

"limited times". Apparently the US Constitution disputes your assertion. Bunch of pirates, those founding fathers.

More on the "ownership" myth. Just one of many sites picked from google. http://c4sif.org/2011/07/the-mythology-of-intellectual-prope...

calcnerd256• 15 years ago

Or at the very least, if nobody owns it (as some people seem to believe), then content creators shouldn't be deceived into thinking that they own it and that society won't just pass it around. Whether or not IP exists, society at large needs to mostly agree one way or another, or a lot of people will put a lot of effort into something they wouldn't otherwise, and they won't be reimbursed in the way that convinced them to put in the effort in the first place.

T-R• 15 years ago

It isn't the job of government to ensure that a business model is profitable where it otherwise wouldn't be. The concept that creating music or film (or any other kind of intellectual property) would be predictably profitable enough to merit investing so much in its production is a rather recent phenomenon.

Consider, when musicians and performance artists play on the street, they determine based on the donations they get whether or not their efforts are worth their time, and adjust their future investments accordingly - they don't use law enforcement to force every viewer/listener to pay, claiming entitlement to compensation. On the internet, the sound reaches further, and the street is larger - as are opportunities for donations, and the cost of using law enforcement to extort payment.

Perhaps a better solution hasn't been offered because, for things that travel and are reproduced more like sound waves than physical objects, this model of business/enforcement just isn't scalable, at least without infringing on people's rights.

JulianMorrison• 15 years ago

It's not that the recording industry is, just coincidentally, a bunch of jerks.

Copyright is not about money, not directly. Copyright is about power. In the case of the content industries, honking great amounts of government backed power to grant or withhold access to what is basically the shared culture of the planet. Enough to, eg: strong arm a company that would prefer not to be evil into accepting at-whim takedown - that's what power does. And that's what by-design amoral money-grubbing organizations do when you hand them that much power, they turn into thugs, because their only way to make money is to hold things hostage. Even those around them who would be moral are pulled into the amoral system, because of that power.

Regardless of whether you agree that artists and labels should be paid, copyright is a bad way to implement it.

Thus, defending copyright but saying "you make me look bad" - no, this is inevitable. If you shook the dice again and re-implemented copyright with different starting people, personalities and companies, this would happen again. it's what copyright does.

gerggerg• 15 years ago

Culture: No one ones it. Not even creators.

The Internet: A bit distribution platform.

Technology: Gave you the ability to sell physical records, then took it away. That was a quick century.

spauka• 15 years ago

While I agree that the protection of copyright is a noble pursuit (yes I believe people should be paid for things they create if they request to be paid), the recording industry is going about it in totally the wrong way.

Time and again, people have proven that if there is a SIMPLE EASY alternative, then we will use it. Take a look at Steam, Spotify, Amazon etc. All of these people provide a service that is easy to use, and despite there being a simple way to pirate the content provided on most of those services (and btw, this here is the big secret), MOST PEOPLE DON'T.

Most of the time, if there is a valuable product out there, then consumers have no problem paying for it. Yes, there will still be piracy for a variety of reasons just as there will always be physical theft, e.g. too high a cost, people are too poor etc..., most people support artists and content creators and are willing to pay for their use of those products.

Game manufacturers are starting to catch on, so are software producers with the emergence of app stores (the restrictions on those platforms are another matter entirely and I won't judge them here), but despite the fact that the music industry is older than either of those industries, it is aiming to shut down the only platform in modern society that can push their profits incredibly high if they do it right.

Yes, to do this right (and I am not saying Spotify or ITunes have this down), they would have to invest, A lot, but given how much they are investing in lobbying for SOPA, it is a joke to think they couldn't devote a tiny bit of their über profits to developing a platform that actually works.

P.S. earbitscom - Here is an alternative. One that your site goes some way towards providing.

Skroob3• 15 years ago

I'm not going to argue, but this one thing always bugs me, and it happens all the time:

"You get people like Universal, who yanks down a Youtube video that they have no copyright claim to, simply because they don’t like it and they can. This is suppression of free speech and a violation of the most important right in our country."

Only the government can suppress free speech. If you're talking to someone and I come in and shout over you so nobody can hear you, I'm not limiting your freedom of speech, I'm just being an obnoxious asshole.

skew2• 15 years ago

If there's a law that says you can call in the police to drag people away if they don't shut up when you tell them to, it certainly is an issue of freedom of speech.

Skroob3• 15 years ago

Maybe the law itself is unconstitutional (I won't argue that either), but there is nothing that I, a private party, can do to you, another private party, that will violate your right to free speech.

SudarshanP• 15 years ago

The author claims "And I support record labels, because many of the albums I love would not exist without label financing, and I might not know about them if not for label marketing and promotion."

While this statement may be true about "the particular albums this particular author likes" it is untrue in general. A good song will get popular through various means. An artist does not need his life to be controlled by a middle man so that the audience can be advertised to. There are many ways in which the word spreads in the 21st century. The hard thing for an artist is to acquire the minimum artistic ability which probably means years of toil to reach a level when some one cares to listen to you. Making a song is a relatively inexpensive task. And once u have a reputation, you have mechanisms like kickstarter to fund your project. More alternatives will evolve as the recording industry dies.

GigabyteCoin• 15 years ago

> far bigger dogs than me are on both sides of this fight and my opinion isn’t going to have an impact.

And that is where I stopped reading, unfortunately. Have a little faith in yourself, why don't ya?

_dps• 15 years ago

I like to view copyright as a short-circuit path to fast promise-exchanges of the following form:

"I have a really interesting piece of information. In fact, I create this information, and it takes a lot of work. For whatever reason, you want the information. I'm happy to share it with you, for a price far lower than the cost of creation, but only if you promise not to tell anyone else." Copyright is a short-circuit process whereby anyone who has ever received the information in whatever way (including hearing/seeing it in public) is legally treated as though they agreed to the above terms.

I think that some kind of "I'll give you info X if you promise not to redistribute it" structure is not a priori a bad idea. Obviously, it is unclear that those promises would be upheld in practice ... but at that point I believe it becomes a market question of whether people are willing to live up to their promises and not a question of bad policy.

Copyright, as an approximation to such a structure, is fundamentally problematic because it attempts to make the above exchange work without:

a) having to trust people (the law is used to scare them into behaving)

b) the receivers of the information having felt like they made a valuable promise in return for the valuable information (the receivers are told they are getting something that is "owned" as opposed to merely "not public knowledge")

twainer• 15 years ago

The SOPA outcry reminds me of global warming - specifically the generation that doesn’t believe in it, that scoffs at the notion that man could even affect mother nature.

That generation seems so backwards and hubrisitic: the crazy idea that one could just take and take and take without giving something back, without respect for the balance of the system. “My actions don’t count because mother nature will always figure a way to make it all work out okay.” Could there be a more juvenile train of thought?

That’s the fundamental problem when it comes to content; that’s the fundamental problem when it comes to ‘business models’ - not the RIAA or MPAA or even TPB - but the hordes of people who have too little respect for the people who create the content that is voraciously consumed. Hordes that take advantage of a system and predictably cry out when anything threatens their spot at the teet.

The earth, of course, doesn’t ask for money - just for respect - respect shown when each individual asks “Am I hurting you?” and when each individual wonders “Is there a better way I could be doing this?”

A lot of folks fancy themselves the smartest person in the room, but there is a lesson in respect for others that needs to be learned before true success can be realized. Put away the false dichotomy of how things used to be and how you want them to be; there is a real way they can be, and a balanced way they should be.

I remain optimistic. But then, it's sometimes tempered; Upton Sinclair said it well:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

OoTheNigerian• 15 years ago

Joey,

I am in the same business as you and I will say this old quote. "Do not cut your nose to spite your face".

So to fix lets say $50 billion worth of losses, you support destroying the Internet?

Do you realize that the way the DCMA is abused this moment, SOPA can and will be abused?

Based on your accusation of Grooveshark, let us take the reverse. do you realize with SOPA anyone can take down earbits every single day for any song and you have to prove you have the legal right to stream those songs?

Be careful what you wish for.

joejohnson2• 15 years ago

Here's is the thing: earbitscom _is_ an asshole. I think he might make a decent point toward the end of his piece, but he is an asshole and it shows in his comments and it shows in this article.

joejohnson2• 15 years ago

>> But the other reason is that, for all the reasons that SOPA may be bad, I don’t see people in the technology community making real and productive proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy.

It's not that simple to "solve" piracy with technology. Technology inherently makes it easy to copy and share things. The changes will have to come from the businesses that accept that they have a failed business model. They must accept that have no realistic way to continue.

wturner• 15 years ago

"But the other reason is that, for all the reasons that SOPA may be bad, I don’t see people in the technology community making real and productive proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy."

As far as artists being compensated for their work, I really have enjoyed some of Jaron Lanier's talks where he argues that if the net had retained a design intended to keep "provenance" then every person would get paid for the bit's (no pun intended) they've input, and ideally this is the direction that would have been more equitable. As to the feasibility or how "realistic" his views can extend beyond "talks" , I have no idea. I do think within the current framework piracy is simply the norm and all the politics around are just a barrage of job opportunities to try and "solve" unsolvable problems. The point of the piracy "war" isn't to end it, it's to extend it out as long as possible. :)

tptacek• 15 years ago

HE'S A WITCH! BURN HIM!

cheald• 15 years ago

> But the other reason is that, for all the reasons that SOPA may be bad, I don’t see people in the technology community making real and productive proposals for how to solve the problems of copyright protection and piracy.

If this is the crux of your argument (and I fully believe it is), then your entire premise is flawed. There are big players making major inroads into this problem already. You might have heard of some of them, like iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Amazon MP3, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Google Market, Steam, and Origin.

You should read what Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve Software, the owner of Steam (which is often credited with singlehandedly saving PC gaming as an industry) has to say about piracy: http://www.gamefront.com/gabe-newell-piracy-is-a-non-issue/

The solution isn't DRM, or dispatching special ops to assassinate teenagers who pirate Ke$ha music, or giving corporations an internet killswitch. The solution isn't even to eliminate piracy. You can't, and you'll never be able to. Beyond that, you don't even need to eliminate piracy. What you want to eliminate is lost sales. There's a lot of conflating piracy and lost sales, especially by the content producers, and it's utter bull.

If Newell is correct (and I have every reason to believe that he is), then the way you capture sales lost to piracy is you establish distribution that is easier and more accessible than piracy, and people will use it. The "they wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is old and tired, but there's a nugget of truth in it - there are two general classes of content pirates; those who would buy the item, but for whom piracy is more convenient, and those who wouldn't buy the item, and take it because they feel entitled to it. There's a third, smaller class, who would buy items, but lack the finances to do it, but it's arguable that that's not a lost sale, and in all three cases, you're still achieving greater distribution, which does make at least some contribution to your product's success, however nebulous. That's not to make an excuse for piracy, but I firmly believe it to be a reality of any form of content distribution.

The consumers have proven over and over again that we'll legitimately buy things if there are easy, convenient ways to get them legitimately. You generally lose sales to piracy when it becomes easier to pirate content, not when it becomes cheaper. I would argue that the majority of piracy is about convenience moreso than it is about money. The solution isn't to make it less convenient to be legitimate (hi, DRM), but more convenient, and all of a sudden, you find yourself recapturing those lost sales.

The Recording Industry Likes to Make Me Look Like an Asshole

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