Lets see them blame THIS on file sharing! (1 Viewer)

[Scott Merryfield]

I *never* take my original CDs in my car. I burn copies from my originals (some complete albums, and a lot of my own compilations). I do not want the originals getting damaged -- dropping the cases on the pavement, scratching the discs while trying to load a new one, heat damage in the summer, etc.

As for the MP3 question, who wouldn't want the ability the take their entire CD music collection with them in a device small enough to fit in a pocket when traveling? When using earphones, a well-encoded MP3 file sounds virtually identical to the original CD.

Personally, since buying an iPod over a year ago, I listen to more music on it than any other way -- and it's all from my own legally purchased CD and DVD collection.

 

[MarkHastings]

Scott, I will add to your comment and say that since my iPod, I will buy more CD's because I know I can rip them to the iPod and have them available to me at any time in my car. If not for my iPod, I'd stop buying as many CD's, becuase of the inconvenience of trying to play CD's in my car.

 

[Brian Perry]

There's no dispute that the ease with which we can now clone or make a close fascimile of a music CD adds to the perceived value. I remember the old days of dubbing LPs to cassettes, which entailed buying the blank tapes, setting up the deck for various equalization, Dolby, etc., and then waiting around while the deck recorded in real time.

These days, from a technical standpoint, copying is basically free in terms of money, time, and quality. The ethical issues are another story.

 

[Scott Merryfield]

I can certainly understand that, Mark. I've even listened to some of my wife's purchased music (we have different tastes), since it's so easy to copy it to my iPod after ripping to MP3 for her iPod mini.

Conversely, Sony lost a sale yesterday when I checked out Amazon to order the latest Santana CD for my wife (she asked for it for X-mas, but Santa didn't bring it). It had the dreaded "rootkit" copy protection on it. If I can't put the product in my PC to convert it to MP3 and burn a copy for the car, it's no sale here.

 

[WadeLil]

I find it strange that the industry is in an uproar over ILLIGAL music but turns a blind eye to some of the tools needed to get it done.Like CD BURNERS,CDRS, AND BURNING SOFTWARE.

 

[Jeff Ulmer]

Prefacing this reply is the fact that I am not a judge or lawyer, nor do I play one on TV, so the following opinion is based soley on my interpretation of the existing statutes and the case law I have looked at. More info on Fair Use and Copyright can be found at http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyrigh...ew/index.html.

Since each infringement pertains to a single song, the damages being sought by the RIAA look pretty generous to me.

 

[BrianW]

Thanks, Jeff. I know Fair Use is not clearly defined under all circumstances, so I appreciate your sticking your neck out, so to speak, and proffering your opinion.

I'm sure we're all smart enough here not to take what you said as legel advice.

 

[Eric_L]

I found this article recently and thoguth it was sooo germane that it must be posted here;


http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...ck=1&cset=true

An Industry Unwilling to Play by Rules of 'Fair Use'

Scarcely a week passes without the entertainment industry warning us that its business model is about to be exterminated by some new technology.

The Internet, satellite radio and TiVo are among the mortal threats that have sent media executives scurrying to Washington with proposals to rein them in, tax them, even ban them. The music labels, TV networks and movie studios never propose to alter their own models to accommodate new technologies — they merely insist that everybody else change to accommodate them. When they don't get their own way with lawmakers, they take it out on consumers.

The most brazen recent example of the latter approach was a copy-protection program that Sony BMG Music Entertainment added to 52 of its CD titles by artists ranging from Sinatra to Van Zant. When any of these CDs was played on a personal computer, it secretly installed software designed to prevent copying of the disc. But the program also surreptitiously transmitted data to Sony about what was on the PC, rendered it vulnerable to hackers and was configured to wreck the machine if the owner attempted to uninstall the program.

After all this was exposed this fall, Sony recalled the CDs and gave buyers a safe way of eradicating its coded mole. (The label still faces lawsuits, and possibly government action, in the matter.)

Sony's rationale was that the ability to make flawless reproductions and distribute them over the Internet could destroy its business. It's not alone in exploiting this supposed threat as a pretext for imposing new limits on what consumers of CDs, DVDs, TV programs and books can do with them.

To this end, DVDs bought in one country sometimes can't be played on players bought in another. Buyers of songs from Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store are subject to tight restrictions on how often they can copy the songs to CDs or computers. Hollywood is asking Congress for restrictions on the design of TV recorders like TiVos, so that consumers will have to pay a fee for each recorded show.

Plainly, the media companies are engaged in an all-out attack on the principle of "fair use."

Fair use is a legal limit on the rights of copyright holders. It's a compromise: In return for the exclusive right to profit from the initial sale of a work for a given term (in the U.S., up to 70 years after the death of the creator), the copyright holder allows some non-commercial copying, limited quotation by critics, parodies and a few other uses.

Media companies detest fair use. They regard your ability to make a backup copy of a CD as a lost opportunity to sell you a new disc. They worry that a song parody by "Weird Al" might be mistaken in a store for the real thing. They don't understand why a critic with the knives out for a book should be permitted to quote from it in a review. If they had their druthers, you'd pay them a few bucks every time you played a DVD at a party or put songs on a mix CD to give to a friend.

Fair-use rules are constantly changing because new uses keep emerging, and then landing in court. In perhaps the most famous case, the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that recording a TV show at home to watch later, or "time-shifting," is fair use. The justices rejected the movie studios' demands for a ban on the pioneering Betamax videocassette recorder and for damages from Sony, its manufacturer. (This was years before Sony, as a copyright owner, landed on the other side of the fair-use debate.)

The next court case might well involve Google Print, the search company's proposal to scan the full texts of millions of published books into its database. A search would return only a few sentences of context on either side of a search term, but the publishing industry has already called this process a potential copyright violation.

It's true that copying entertainment content is much easier today than it was in the days of analog LPs and audio cassettes. Back then, you couldn't easily distribute copies of a song or movie to millions of strangers. Moreover, every copy you made was less crisp than the original.

Today, a digital copy of a digital content file is identical to the original and every file can be exposed almost instantaneously to the entire world online. That's a prospect the entertainment companies say could cost them billions.

Yet, it's a mystery why anyone believes the entertainment companies' claims about their losses from online piracy, given their record of ludicrously inflating the dangers of earlier technologies.

Consider the studios' long campaign against home VCRs. In 1982, Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, wrote himself into the history of cocksure misprediction by warning a congressional committee that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." He demanded a steep tax on recorders and blank tapes, to compensate for the damage they would do to Hollywood.

We all know the punch line: The movie industry survived, nay, thrived in the VCR era. Most VCR buyers used them exactly as the Supreme Court anticipated — to tape TV shows for viewing a few hours later. Rates for commercial airtime didn't fall, and the VCR didn't make free TV disappear.

Are today's technologies any different? CD sales have declined in the years since free file sharing became possible, but there's evidence that this has more to do with the dearth of exciting new acts than with Napster and its successors. Bootleg songs and video clips often enhance, not suppress, interest in the commercial product.

The industry wants our money, but they also want to dictate all the ways we can use their products once we own them. As the copyright expert Lawrence Lessig says, this "permission culture" will only make us less free. In short, the media moguls are making arguments that we shouldn't buy.

 

[MarkHastings]

Who wrote that article? I want to shake his hand, hug him, kiss him, whatever!

 

[Thomas Newton]

It's not the copyright holder who allows Fair Use. It's the Government who refrains from giving away the citizens' inherent right to copy.

Some of the things Fair Use covers are more or less mandated by the conflict between copyright and the First Amendment. Quotation by critics and parodies fall into this category. At its heart, the mechanism of copyright (Government-enforced restriction on propagation of copies of speech) is at direct odds with freedom of speech. The restriction of quotations and parodies would be especially harmful -- thus, the explicit protection.

Note that the critera for Fair Use are guidelines -- they are not iron-bound rules that are to be interpreted in the narrowest possible way against the general public, and in the broadest possible way for monopoly recipients.

For instance, in the Betamax decision, the Supreme Court ruled that timeshifting of complete copies of TV programs was Fair Use. They said that there was no indication that Congress had ever intended to prohibit timeshifing -- and that when new technologies created uncertainties in how to apply copyright laws, the laws should be interpreted in a conservative fashion (i.e., in favor of the public keeping its rights).

 

[Ravi K]

Was the Sony-BMG worm thingy only on US-pressed CDs? I have an Indian CD released by them in late 2005 and I've played it in my computer.

 

[Thomas Newton]

An Internet search turned up this EFF list of known infected "CDs".

Some of the titles are pretty funny, considering the XCP rootkit payloads of the "CDs":

Healthy in Paranoid Times
Get Right with the Man
Nothing is Sound
The Invisible Invasion
Life of Agony (band name)
Suspicious Activity

Well, at least they're funny if your computer wasn't one of the ones affected by XCP!

 

[Cees Alons]

Sony BMG also produces DVDs (e.g. under the label "Sony Wonder"). Nothing the matter with these discs (a.f.a.i.k.), but their ethics may become of paramount importance when they would start producing HD or BR discs.
Caveat emptor!


Cees

 

[Thomas Newton]

 

[KevinGress]

What I don't see mentioned is, I think, a root cause of music piracy in the first place. People are conditioned to think that they should get music for free because how the music industry, early on, decided to promote their product - radio. In top 40 radio, they play the "hottest" hits in their entirety very frequently, essentially "giving away" their product. Then they expect people to go out and then buy that product, and what do they ususally get - the 2 or 3 good songs they've already heard for free, and 7-8 that they won't listen to after the first go-round.

Movies don't do that - you see a trailer and hopefully you're enticed to buy by going to the theater or waiting until the DVD comes out. (I understand that people can pirate movies, but that process is more involved and so less people are inclined to do that) Now with technology one can copy off DVD movies, ending up with good quality, it's not near as frequent as music - largely due to people's conditioning to paying for movies.

Contrast that with TV show on DVD. Why are they so hot now, and why are people eagerly paying for them, when they could simply record them off of TV? There are multiple resaons, but in sticking with current shows a big reason is because of all the added 'extras' one gets - commentary, insider views, exposes', etc. Albums, on the other hand, simply have the 'filler' that wouldn't survive airplay. If albums had more of that 'additional' content, people would be more enticed to buy albums.

Myself, I like being able to pay $1 for a song online because I rarely like a whole album an artist puts out and I generally listen to music while working on the computer. I won't even consider buying a CD anymore as it's too bulky in comparison to MP3 alternatives. A $1 a song is fair, downloading is quick, and *presto*, I'm listening to the song...

The MPAA is a dinosaur organization that is working the wrong end of problem. They need to find ways to reduce the cost of the music, offer more 'benefits' for those willing to buy whole albums, and find ways to work with technology than trying to defeat it.

 

[MarkHastings]

But as you mentioned, if someone likes a show, they usually like every episode of that season, so when they buy a TV show on DVD, they do it because they know they're going to enjoy every episode.

With CD's, I have hardly EVER bought a CD where I've liked every track.

There's a big difference in this regard. I would NEVER buy a full season of (insert TV show here) if I only like a few episodes of the run.

That's the MAJOR difference why TV shows (on DVD) do so well. The quality holds up through the entire season.

Imagine if TV shows pulled the CD route and only produced 2 good shows a season and the rest were just 'filler'. The TV on DVD craze would be miniscule at best.