Music and your rights
Jan. 5th, 2006 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greatbear(What follows is part one of my first article dealing with music, movies, your rights to enjoy them and how you enjoy them. These rights are being stripped away at an increasing rate, being replaced with additional costs and aggravation, needless upgrades and damaged or non-functioning equipment. It's a long read, being placed behind a cut for courtesy. I hope those who read this can learn something, and will help them make informed decisions regarding how they spend their money on some of their most favorite entertainment)
Your Friend - A Dying Breed
It's not 'music' anymore. It's 'content'. You do not own it, you instead pay for the priviledge to listen to it. The content is to remain on the original disc that you licensed, and if you desire to have an electronic version of it for your computer or portable player, you must repurchase the content in that form. In the future, you will not be billed for the initial license, instead you will pay a fee according to how many time you listened to (experienced) content. Pay to play.
Sound farfetched? It's not. It's happening right now, and the means are being put into place right now to track usage of the various files and media with the option of being able to charge for every playing. And this is happening because no one is complaining. Yet. Much.
A bit of history is needed here. Back in the early days before recorded music, musicians and composers were (generally) paid or otherwise compensated for their efforts for each performance. With the invention of the phonograph, musicians were given a cut of the sale of recorded media. Things were pretty much settled until the technological means to make recordings became cheap enough to move from the realm of the recording industry and into the hands of 'everyman'. The industry assumed that not everyone would be recording their own original compositions but instead would duplicate the the efforts of professionals without any form of compensation. The industry cried foul to lawmakers and managed to have a fee levied upon blank media to ostensibly compensate for 'lost sales' caused by people making copies of record albums.
Fast Forward
Most people were making cassette tapes of their favorite music for use in the car, portable cassette players and such. This was deemed perfectly legal long ago by a principle called fair use. Fair use, among other things, guarantees that once you purchase a particular recording, it is yours to do what you want to, including making backup copies, incorporating parts or whole of the recording in your own private compilations, transfer the recording to different media, and sell the original recording to another party (as long as you surrender any copies you made from that original recording). All guaranteed by law (in the US, at least). Of course, the industry was not too keen on any of this, since they would rather you buy the cassette as well as the album if you needed both (never mind that prerecorded cassettes were almost always inferior to ones you could make at home, even with rather modest equipment). Life, though, was rather sweet during the "Analog Age". There seemed no shortage of good recordings and high quality equipment for the music enthusiast to indulge their hobby with, and take with them on the road.
Freeze Frame
Video Killed the Radio Star. And, it seems, in more ways that first thought. A new gadget is in town. It's name: Betamax. While videotape was nothing new at this point, the video cassette recorder, like the consumer reel-to-reel and cassette decks before it, made what was once the domain of professionals using expensive, difficult-to-use equipment now something that could easily be operated right in the living rooms of anyone, for a reasonable cost. This caught the eye (and ire) of the motion picture and television industry, who, perhaps thumbing their nose at the music industry smug in the knowledge that their business was safe from any sort of roll-your-own consumer gadgetry thought they were immune. Just like the schoolyard cohort that also caught the blame for what his bullying buddy had done, the TV and movie industry immediately cried foul and went stomping and holding his breath all the way to the Supreme Court of the US. It was there that it was finally decided in 1984 that despite the fact that the VCR was able to be used to make illicit copies of copyrighted content, there were far more legal, non-infringing uses for the recorder guaranteed by existing fair-use laws. This became known as the "Sony Betamax Case". It did not take long for the industry to embrace the once feared gadget, and as a result, the movie industry flourished as it hadn't since it's golden years. Where a movie might enjoy one big release, then perhaps a television premiere in a year or so before it became stuck in the can until it's next humdrum playing on the TV, a movie was able to enjoy two major releases, one for the big screen, then again for the small screen. An entire industry of movie rentals popped up seemingly overnight and enjoyed huge successes. Life seemed good once again.
Pause
The digital age is upon us. The compact disc, that shiny, technological wonder that hit the world by storm reinvigorated the music industry as it had languished in the shadow of the VCR and it's success. Gone were the days of scratched records, worn-out stylii and background noise, replaced by instant access, a small format that was portable, and media that could conceivably last forever regardless of how oftem it was played. What more could people want? The recording industry was delighted. Here was a chance to not only showcase new music recorded in a pristine, digital process, but also an opportunity to re-release older material from the LP days to eager customers wanting to upgrade from their old, noisy, worn-out albums to the CD version. To hear the old music given new life was practically intoxicating for some, including me. To do this, the record companies were essentially selling to everyone (at an inflated cost, of course, compared to the LP) a perfect copy of a digital master recording. While this caused the industry some concern, the means to create a CD took thousands to millions of dollars worth of equipment, well out of reach of 'the common man'. People would make tapes of their CDs if they wanted to.
Abort, Retry, Ignore
Ah, the personal computer. Never has it been such a blessing or a curse. Can't live with 'em, and, nowadays, can't live without 'em. From it's early days as a hobbyist geek toy it became a liberating tool allowing people to tackle tasks once reserved for so many professional outfits. Why type a letter, when instead with a few more keystrokes, it could look like it came from a publisher? Keep your books on a spreadsheet. toss that Rolodex and use a database. Network and share information across the office to across the world instantly. The personal computer and it's amazing doubling of power and reduction of cost every year or two was changing entire industries seemingly overnight. The adoption of the Internet in the early 90s only accelerated the changes. But the technology itself grew at a massive pace. Digital storage became capacious and cheap. The technically savvy found new, different and compelling ways to use the technology and grow with it. With all this growth came tons of data. This data needed to be stored and backed up and dealt with in simple, familiar ways. The now ubiquitous CD, once a read-only format which had to have the information 'manufactured' onto the disc much the same way that a LP record had the music 'pressed' into it, and which was never intended to be a read/write format had suddenly become, again practically overnight, the 'next big thing'.
*Record Scratch*
The music industry, chugging along with seemingly nary a care in the world, went into full-freak mode. Here they were, distributing billions of perfect digital master copies to everyone. Now, with a personal computer, it was just a simple matter of placing that perfect digital master copy into a drive, and with a few keystrokes or mouse clicks and less than a buck's worth of media, out comes a perfect digital master copy, functionally indistiguishable from the first. Whereas a tape made of a tape shows immediate degradation, and subsequent generational copies quickly become unlistenable, a disc made from a disc is perfect, time after time after time. Once again, technology brings to the average Joe what was once reserved for industry players. And, once again, the effect on the average Joes is one of liberation. No longer does one have to settle for what the recording industry sells us, instead, as we have been doing for years, and make the music fit us. CDs made of the songs we like. Greatest hits. Greatest non-hits. Like the tapes before them, our CDs were as personalized as we are as people. The industry was furious, of course. Not simply the thought of people making copies (perfect, yummy, digital copies) of someone else's CD rather than buying their own, but at the apparent loss of control they once had on the creation, marketing and distribution of those CDs. Millions of dollars worth of equipment, personnel and such only to get trumped by 15 year old Ashley with her parent's PC making her fifty-seventh different version of N'Sync's Greatest Hits For Ashley. Like, OMG, they r so hawt and such.
DVDs Make The Scene
It was right about this time that the DVD was being introduced, along with concerns from the motion picture industry that anything they release in a digital format would suffer the same fate as music on CDs. In the early 80s during the development of the CD player and format, no consideration was given to the fact that one day, the format might become a cheap, simple to use, read/write format. The technological means just to make the first discs and players was so incredibly complex, and the state of the art was being pushed to it's extremes. Plus, the format itself was designed to have the data manufactured into the disc. The format, championed by Phillips and, to a slightly lesser extent Sony, caught on early and remained for the longest time set in stone. Since the data stored on the disc was in a digital format, it was not much of a stretch at the time to extend the format into a data storage format for computers. So, from the outset, you had two different formats, one for music data, the other for read-only, random access digital data. At a maximum capacity of an incredible 650 megabytes, the data version of the format opened up entirely new possibilities to distribute data cheaply. Entire dictionaries or encyclopedias, complete with pictures and sounds could be stored on a single disc. The data, the same as the data making up the digital audio on a music disc, had to be 'made into' the disc at time of manufacture. Because of the number of audio players and data drives in place, the format could not be substantially changed at a later date. People would not stand for having to buy a new CD player to play some new formatted CD that is immune to copying.
When DVDs were at the design stage, it was agreed that the format will come standard with an encryption scheme, and, as a carrot to the movie industry, a means for the content publisher to now control how their content was being used. In other words, in addition to the interactive nature being incorporated into the player and the format, there could be times where that interactivity can be reduced or practically taken away, where the only button that would work on the player would be the 'stop' button. A lesson learned from the movie and television people was that folks were using the fast forward buttons to skip past things they did not want to see, namely commercials. In fact, a lot of people would record their favorite shows simply to be able to wipe out the commercials. Angered by this, the advertisers and the movie industry wanted to ensure that, if they wanted to, they could lock out that insidous fast-forward button while an ad or other item was being shown on the screen. Anyone who had gotten frustrated at a Disney DVD trying to figure out how to get past all the soming video releases and theme park ads has seen this mechanism in operation. This mechanism, along with the encryption make up what is called the CSS, or Content Scrambling System. In order to legally make a DVD player, a DVD drive or DVD playing software for a PC, one must get a license from a DVD manufacturers consortium. This license gives you the keys to the content. In order to get these keys, your player must conform to certain design criteria. This criteria also includes the CSS control functions. You cannot legally make a player that bypasses this function either.
The Int@rweb, And Those Darned Kids
Video, needing much more data to represent each frame along with the sound, need far more data than CDs ever needed for just two channels of audio. In fact, even though a DVD can hold 4.7 gigabytes on a side (and can have two sides, unlike a CD's one), unless that data is compressed, the most a DVD could hold would only be a few minutes of video and sound. A highly efficient, lossy compression scheme was developed to compress the video information and 6 channels of sound. This MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group)-2 compression grew out of many different ways to compress audio, video, still pictures and other data. It was discovered that similar compression could easily be applied to CD audio, reducing the data needed to represent the audio by a factor of ten-to-one or more. Now, where originally a minute of CD-quality, stereo audio took over 10 megabytes of data to represent it, the same minute of audio could fit in less than a megabyte, with little to no loss of quality. The typical 3-minute song, about 2.7 megs. In the age of dialup-accessed internet service, 30 megs for a 3 minute song is unwieldy at best. 2.7 megs? Send it on over. Soon, people were ripping tracks from their CDs and converting them to the Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 format, known simply as MP3, and sharing them with one another. A college student by the name of Shawn Fanning, 19 at the time, threw together a little piece of software that allowed users to connect with one another and share files a lot easier than emailing them or passing them around school networks. This software allowed each user's PC to share a designated list of files which became searchable by name. The software took Shawn Fanning's nickname, Napster. With this little piece of software, peer-to-peer file sharing was born, and a revolution began.
Anyone I know who tried Napster out for the first time was shocked. Enter in a song name, and in no time, it was headed your way. It was addicting. Old songs you havent heard in ages. The latest hits. Obscure stuff. It seemed the possibilities were endless, and it just kept expanding. You knew it was not right somehow, but still, it was so compelling. Needless to say, the record companies were going ballistic. The movie industry was watching, but were counting on their encrypted content to keep from escaping into the wilds of the internet. Besides, who would try to download a movie averaging 3 gigabytes through a 56k modem? Enter Jon Lech Johansen, a Norwiegian teenager. Jon was trying to come up with a means of playing DVDs on Linux-based computers. Linux, due to it's open nature, was shunned by the DVD consortium, since part of the agreement to make player software is to close the source code, which flies in the face of what Linux is all about. Jon worked at reverse-engineering various software players trying to gain insight, where he discovered a case where the decryption keys were in an open section of code. From there, it was a simple matter to get at all the other keys stored on the disc. With that, DeCSS was born, and "DVD Jon" famous. Make that infamous. The movie companies clamped down on poor DVD Jon, but his program, despite efforts to quash it by any means, got into the wilds of the internet and the rest, as they say, is history.
Send Lawyers, (Big) Guns and Money
Both the recording and motion picture companies, seeing what they saw was a complete loss of control of their prized possessions, reacted in the only way they knew how. Shut down file sharing services. But, like a game of Whack-A-Mole, you pound down one service, and others pop up in their place. The file sharers, pointing to the fact that despite the consumer demand for digital downloads of music, none of the industry biggies would step up and give people what they were wanting. Diamond Multimedia, a company that originally made PC video cards, made a portable player that used flash memory and played mp3 files instead of CDs. Here was a player that was smaller than any current portable player, had no moving parts and CD-quality sound. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, representing the music industry) promptly sued Diamond on the grounds that this device is being sold and used strictly for the playing of 'stolen' music taken from peer-to-peer file sharing sites like Napster. Again, the courts sided with Diamond, citing the Sony Betamax case of substantial non-infringing use. This opened the doors to other players, including a peculiar, gorgeously designed player from Apple.
The RIAA would have none of this. The major record labels, as well as the movie industry (via the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America) started the ball rolling in an unprecedented 'war' directed at the core of it's very base, the music and movie enthusiasts themselves. And it's been downhill ever since.
(to be continued)
Your Friend - A Dying Breed
It's not 'music' anymore. It's 'content'. You do not own it, you instead pay for the priviledge to listen to it. The content is to remain on the original disc that you licensed, and if you desire to have an electronic version of it for your computer or portable player, you must repurchase the content in that form. In the future, you will not be billed for the initial license, instead you will pay a fee according to how many time you listened to (experienced) content. Pay to play.
Sound farfetched? It's not. It's happening right now, and the means are being put into place right now to track usage of the various files and media with the option of being able to charge for every playing. And this is happening because no one is complaining. Yet. Much.
A bit of history is needed here. Back in the early days before recorded music, musicians and composers were (generally) paid or otherwise compensated for their efforts for each performance. With the invention of the phonograph, musicians were given a cut of the sale of recorded media. Things were pretty much settled until the technological means to make recordings became cheap enough to move from the realm of the recording industry and into the hands of 'everyman'. The industry assumed that not everyone would be recording their own original compositions but instead would duplicate the the efforts of professionals without any form of compensation. The industry cried foul to lawmakers and managed to have a fee levied upon blank media to ostensibly compensate for 'lost sales' caused by people making copies of record albums.
Most people were making cassette tapes of their favorite music for use in the car, portable cassette players and such. This was deemed perfectly legal long ago by a principle called fair use. Fair use, among other things, guarantees that once you purchase a particular recording, it is yours to do what you want to, including making backup copies, incorporating parts or whole of the recording in your own private compilations, transfer the recording to different media, and sell the original recording to another party (as long as you surrender any copies you made from that original recording). All guaranteed by law (in the US, at least). Of course, the industry was not too keen on any of this, since they would rather you buy the cassette as well as the album if you needed both (never mind that prerecorded cassettes were almost always inferior to ones you could make at home, even with rather modest equipment). Life, though, was rather sweet during the "Analog Age". There seemed no shortage of good recordings and high quality equipment for the music enthusiast to indulge their hobby with, and take with them on the road.
Video Killed the Radio Star. And, it seems, in more ways that first thought. A new gadget is in town. It's name: Betamax. While videotape was nothing new at this point, the video cassette recorder, like the consumer reel-to-reel and cassette decks before it, made what was once the domain of professionals using expensive, difficult-to-use equipment now something that could easily be operated right in the living rooms of anyone, for a reasonable cost. This caught the eye (and ire) of the motion picture and television industry, who, perhaps thumbing their nose at the music industry smug in the knowledge that their business was safe from any sort of roll-your-own consumer gadgetry thought they were immune. Just like the schoolyard cohort that also caught the blame for what his bullying buddy had done, the TV and movie industry immediately cried foul and went stomping and holding his breath all the way to the Supreme Court of the US. It was there that it was finally decided in 1984 that despite the fact that the VCR was able to be used to make illicit copies of copyrighted content, there were far more legal, non-infringing uses for the recorder guaranteed by existing fair-use laws. This became known as the "Sony Betamax Case". It did not take long for the industry to embrace the once feared gadget, and as a result, the movie industry flourished as it hadn't since it's golden years. Where a movie might enjoy one big release, then perhaps a television premiere in a year or so before it became stuck in the can until it's next humdrum playing on the TV, a movie was able to enjoy two major releases, one for the big screen, then again for the small screen. An entire industry of movie rentals popped up seemingly overnight and enjoyed huge successes. Life seemed good once again.
The digital age is upon us. The compact disc, that shiny, technological wonder that hit the world by storm reinvigorated the music industry as it had languished in the shadow of the VCR and it's success. Gone were the days of scratched records, worn-out stylii and background noise, replaced by instant access, a small format that was portable, and media that could conceivably last forever regardless of how oftem it was played. What more could people want? The recording industry was delighted. Here was a chance to not only showcase new music recorded in a pristine, digital process, but also an opportunity to re-release older material from the LP days to eager customers wanting to upgrade from their old, noisy, worn-out albums to the CD version. To hear the old music given new life was practically intoxicating for some, including me. To do this, the record companies were essentially selling to everyone (at an inflated cost, of course, compared to the LP) a perfect copy of a digital master recording. While this caused the industry some concern, the means to create a CD took thousands to millions of dollars worth of equipment, well out of reach of 'the common man'. People would make tapes of their CDs if they wanted to.
Ah, the personal computer. Never has it been such a blessing or a curse. Can't live with 'em, and, nowadays, can't live without 'em. From it's early days as a hobbyist geek toy it became a liberating tool allowing people to tackle tasks once reserved for so many professional outfits. Why type a letter, when instead with a few more keystrokes, it could look like it came from a publisher? Keep your books on a spreadsheet. toss that Rolodex and use a database. Network and share information across the office to across the world instantly. The personal computer and it's amazing doubling of power and reduction of cost every year or two was changing entire industries seemingly overnight. The adoption of the Internet in the early 90s only accelerated the changes. But the technology itself grew at a massive pace. Digital storage became capacious and cheap. The technically savvy found new, different and compelling ways to use the technology and grow with it. With all this growth came tons of data. This data needed to be stored and backed up and dealt with in simple, familiar ways. The now ubiquitous CD, once a read-only format which had to have the information 'manufactured' onto the disc much the same way that a LP record had the music 'pressed' into it, and which was never intended to be a read/write format had suddenly become, again practically overnight, the 'next big thing'.
The music industry, chugging along with seemingly nary a care in the world, went into full-freak mode. Here they were, distributing billions of perfect digital master copies to everyone. Now, with a personal computer, it was just a simple matter of placing that perfect digital master copy into a drive, and with a few keystrokes or mouse clicks and less than a buck's worth of media, out comes a perfect digital master copy, functionally indistiguishable from the first. Whereas a tape made of a tape shows immediate degradation, and subsequent generational copies quickly become unlistenable, a disc made from a disc is perfect, time after time after time. Once again, technology brings to the average Joe what was once reserved for industry players. And, once again, the effect on the average Joes is one of liberation. No longer does one have to settle for what the recording industry sells us, instead, as we have been doing for years, and make the music fit us. CDs made of the songs we like. Greatest hits. Greatest non-hits. Like the tapes before them, our CDs were as personalized as we are as people. The industry was furious, of course. Not simply the thought of people making copies (perfect, yummy, digital copies) of someone else's CD rather than buying their own, but at the apparent loss of control they once had on the creation, marketing and distribution of those CDs. Millions of dollars worth of equipment, personnel and such only to get trumped by 15 year old Ashley with her parent's PC making her fifty-seventh different version of N'Sync's Greatest Hits For Ashley. Like, OMG, they r so hawt and such.
It was right about this time that the DVD was being introduced, along with concerns from the motion picture industry that anything they release in a digital format would suffer the same fate as music on CDs. In the early 80s during the development of the CD player and format, no consideration was given to the fact that one day, the format might become a cheap, simple to use, read/write format. The technological means just to make the first discs and players was so incredibly complex, and the state of the art was being pushed to it's extremes. Plus, the format itself was designed to have the data manufactured into the disc. The format, championed by Phillips and, to a slightly lesser extent Sony, caught on early and remained for the longest time set in stone. Since the data stored on the disc was in a digital format, it was not much of a stretch at the time to extend the format into a data storage format for computers. So, from the outset, you had two different formats, one for music data, the other for read-only, random access digital data. At a maximum capacity of an incredible 650 megabytes, the data version of the format opened up entirely new possibilities to distribute data cheaply. Entire dictionaries or encyclopedias, complete with pictures and sounds could be stored on a single disc. The data, the same as the data making up the digital audio on a music disc, had to be 'made into' the disc at time of manufacture. Because of the number of audio players and data drives in place, the format could not be substantially changed at a later date. People would not stand for having to buy a new CD player to play some new formatted CD that is immune to copying.
When DVDs were at the design stage, it was agreed that the format will come standard with an encryption scheme, and, as a carrot to the movie industry, a means for the content publisher to now control how their content was being used. In other words, in addition to the interactive nature being incorporated into the player and the format, there could be times where that interactivity can be reduced or practically taken away, where the only button that would work on the player would be the 'stop' button. A lesson learned from the movie and television people was that folks were using the fast forward buttons to skip past things they did not want to see, namely commercials. In fact, a lot of people would record their favorite shows simply to be able to wipe out the commercials. Angered by this, the advertisers and the movie industry wanted to ensure that, if they wanted to, they could lock out that insidous fast-forward button while an ad or other item was being shown on the screen. Anyone who had gotten frustrated at a Disney DVD trying to figure out how to get past all the soming video releases and theme park ads has seen this mechanism in operation. This mechanism, along with the encryption make up what is called the CSS, or Content Scrambling System. In order to legally make a DVD player, a DVD drive or DVD playing software for a PC, one must get a license from a DVD manufacturers consortium. This license gives you the keys to the content. In order to get these keys, your player must conform to certain design criteria. This criteria also includes the CSS control functions. You cannot legally make a player that bypasses this function either.
Video, needing much more data to represent each frame along with the sound, need far more data than CDs ever needed for just two channels of audio. In fact, even though a DVD can hold 4.7 gigabytes on a side (and can have two sides, unlike a CD's one), unless that data is compressed, the most a DVD could hold would only be a few minutes of video and sound. A highly efficient, lossy compression scheme was developed to compress the video information and 6 channels of sound. This MPEG (Motion Picture Experts Group)-2 compression grew out of many different ways to compress audio, video, still pictures and other data. It was discovered that similar compression could easily be applied to CD audio, reducing the data needed to represent the audio by a factor of ten-to-one or more. Now, where originally a minute of CD-quality, stereo audio took over 10 megabytes of data to represent it, the same minute of audio could fit in less than a megabyte, with little to no loss of quality. The typical 3-minute song, about 2.7 megs. In the age of dialup-accessed internet service, 30 megs for a 3 minute song is unwieldy at best. 2.7 megs? Send it on over. Soon, people were ripping tracks from their CDs and converting them to the Motion Picture Experts Group Audio Layer 3 format, known simply as MP3, and sharing them with one another. A college student by the name of Shawn Fanning, 19 at the time, threw together a little piece of software that allowed users to connect with one another and share files a lot easier than emailing them or passing them around school networks. This software allowed each user's PC to share a designated list of files which became searchable by name. The software took Shawn Fanning's nickname, Napster. With this little piece of software, peer-to-peer file sharing was born, and a revolution began.
Anyone I know who tried Napster out for the first time was shocked. Enter in a song name, and in no time, it was headed your way. It was addicting. Old songs you havent heard in ages. The latest hits. Obscure stuff. It seemed the possibilities were endless, and it just kept expanding. You knew it was not right somehow, but still, it was so compelling. Needless to say, the record companies were going ballistic. The movie industry was watching, but were counting on their encrypted content to keep from escaping into the wilds of the internet. Besides, who would try to download a movie averaging 3 gigabytes through a 56k modem? Enter Jon Lech Johansen, a Norwiegian teenager. Jon was trying to come up with a means of playing DVDs on Linux-based computers. Linux, due to it's open nature, was shunned by the DVD consortium, since part of the agreement to make player software is to close the source code, which flies in the face of what Linux is all about. Jon worked at reverse-engineering various software players trying to gain insight, where he discovered a case where the decryption keys were in an open section of code. From there, it was a simple matter to get at all the other keys stored on the disc. With that, DeCSS was born, and "DVD Jon" famous. Make that infamous. The movie companies clamped down on poor DVD Jon, but his program, despite efforts to quash it by any means, got into the wilds of the internet and the rest, as they say, is history.
Both the recording and motion picture companies, seeing what they saw was a complete loss of control of their prized possessions, reacted in the only way they knew how. Shut down file sharing services. But, like a game of Whack-A-Mole, you pound down one service, and others pop up in their place. The file sharers, pointing to the fact that despite the consumer demand for digital downloads of music, none of the industry biggies would step up and give people what they were wanting. Diamond Multimedia, a company that originally made PC video cards, made a portable player that used flash memory and played mp3 files instead of CDs. Here was a player that was smaller than any current portable player, had no moving parts and CD-quality sound. The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, representing the music industry) promptly sued Diamond on the grounds that this device is being sold and used strictly for the playing of 'stolen' music taken from peer-to-peer file sharing sites like Napster. Again, the courts sided with Diamond, citing the Sony Betamax case of substantial non-infringing use. This opened the doors to other players, including a peculiar, gorgeously designed player from Apple.
The RIAA would have none of this. The major record labels, as well as the movie industry (via the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America) started the ball rolling in an unprecedented 'war' directed at the core of it's very base, the music and movie enthusiasts themselves. And it's been downhill ever since.
(to be continued)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: ARGH!
Date: 2006-01-06 03:55 am (UTC)"Napster" and similar services are addicting, and can offer exposure (think of it as radio), but can also steal from your efforts as well.