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}
no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 07:31 am (UTC)It's been my understanding that the distribution part of the cycle has become so pourous that getting all "content" was simply as easy as having the right toys to get it. Won't that always be true? Gotta catch me first - the true American first motto...
Daniel
no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 10:51 am (UTC)Sorry to be a bit nit-picky, but I think you missed a few things:
1. Why was the CD and DVD formats created?
To reduce production cost; easier to duplicate digital data and stamp out CDs that cut vinyl; you can mechanise it more easily, and no messing out with massive spools of tape. But they passed on the initial startup costs onto the listeners and viewers for many years after they'd recouped them; hence CDs and DVDs being more expensive than tape, vinyl or VHS. This led to consumer resistence; when the lockin features came along people were already annoyed at paying more for less functionality...and the very easier-production method bit them back because it meant a disaffected and feeling ripped-off audience could also easily dupe the CDs.
2. Napster was only one file-sharing service, it might be the first (debatable?) but it was quickly joined by Audiogalaxy which was more functional - the Napster software was notoriously flakey and quickly became beset by limits.
3. DVDs are MPEG2, MP3 is based on MPEG1 - your article makes them sound as they are the same thing, whereas the latter was I think and extension to the MPEG-1 format, a codec/algorhythm developed by Fraunhofer and when they got license-heavy got reverse engineered by others into a usable open format (hence LAME, BLADE et al) whereas the former was created by the MPEG group.
I think licensing is going to be the scary one in future - currently you only license your DVD and don't own it or the content on it. You could see a future where you get LICENSE REVOKED when playing your latest film or CD :-( It just encourages hacking tho, as people get pissed off with the restrictions.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 01:01 pm (UTC)But with the current governmental climate that is favorable to big biz vs. individual consumers, you get abominations like the DCMA that make it "illegal" to hack. :\ We should all just shut up and drink the Kool-Aid. (NOT!)
ARGH!
Date: 2006-01-05 02:25 pm (UTC)Re: ARGH!
Date: 2006-01-05 02:51 pm (UTC)If the prices of CDs were lower (in Spain it was about 20-50% less than the U K in some shops! average price in otehrs seemed to be 17-14 Euros, way less than the UK which is that in pounds but the exchange is like 1.4 - so about 30-40% less) and the quality high, I think people would buy more. A lot of artists I like and promote got big through websites and P2P and use the internet rather than fear it. For the little indies and smaller artists things like Myspace and filesharing are great, because most radio ignores them. That's probably more what the RIAA et al are scared of, a new distribution medium that bypasses all their shite, ie, they won't get a cut of direct sales, neither will the labels, PRS or royalty collectors.
Direct sales from the artist is the future!
no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 02:53 pm (UTC)They do say a good/pro or really hi-fi turntable pisses all over CDs. The hum and rumble used to annoy me tho.
If the prices of CDs were lower....
Date: 2006-01-05 03:43 pm (UTC)Re: If the prices of CDs were lower....
Date: 2006-01-05 04:14 pm (UTC)the other thing that bugs me is that people always point towards iTunes et al as a legal alternative; thing is MP3 is nowhere near the quality that CDs are, and CDs aren't as good as very hi-fi vinyl...MP3 is more like a tape copy, so I'm offended that I'm expected to pay the same as CDs - 99p a track - when the quality is plainly not the same and no coverart or extras. I tend to buy CDs instead.
quality is plainly not the same
Date: 2006-01-05 05:22 pm (UTC)Re: If the prices of CDs were lower....
Date: 2006-01-05 06:25 pm (UTC)Would the people who asked for a free copy
Date: 2006-01-05 07:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-05 08:16 pm (UTC)Much of what you brought up also applies to the work that I do. As an indepentent filmmaker, distribution is key to getting anything back for my work. The easier I can reach my viewers, the more chances I have of making a sale. Sharing may cut into the total, but it might be considered akin to the cost of advertising and stocking. You eventually get it back in volume.
Digital tools and the internet have allowed the small fry to flourish, and none of the heavy-handed tactics of the big-wigs will prevail. Your whack-a-mole anology is right on!
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 03:35 am (UTC)People are already getting a taste of the concept of licensing (rather than owning) in the newer 'legal' Napster, Rhapsody and others that allow you to play (actually rent) the music for as long as you are a paying subscriber. Stop paying, and all the music vanishes (except for those you paid extra to burn to CD). The stronger the tactics used to control the content, the more effort gets put into hacking it. Hollywood did learn a bit of a lesson and lowered the average price of DVDs, especially those that have been out for a while. This encourages more people to buy, since a disc at a price less than that of a movie ticket is a compelling impulse buy, whereas one at 20-30 dollars would only be bought if someone feels it's a must-have or offers some other special bonus.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 03:41 am (UTC)Expect a big fallout around the time of the analog television broadcasting shutdown and the coming heavy-handed control of TiVo'd content.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 03:49 am (UTC)Vinyl has a special meaning for me, as I wrote about quite a while back. I grew up with it, and because the act of listening to a record takes much more effort than just popping in a CD and letting it rip (no pun intended!). The listening itself is an event, you can watch the record play, there is all that nice, big cover art and liner notes to sit back and take in... it's a very 'personal' and intimate process. And with some good equipment, the sound is so silky smooth and detailed.
And, as you noted, there is no pointless 'rights management'.
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.
Re: ARGH!
Date: 2006-01-06 04:02 am (UTC)(cough)ClearChannel(cough)fuckingmonopoly(cough)(cough)
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 04:03 am (UTC)Re: ARGH!
Date: 2006-01-06 04:04 am (UTC)Look for this in an upcoming installment.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 04:37 am (UTC)Oooh. I think that may be one of the first podcasts I'll check out. LOL
no subject
Date: 2006-01-06 03:03 pm (UTC)As long as artists are free to distribute their music they way they decide, hopefully we'll still be able to get good, interesting, quality music. Maybe a greater share of the "entertainment dollar" will go to people creating music, movies, games, whatever and sharing it with people. I think we are already seeing it with blogs, podcasts, videocasts, creative commons etc...
Power to the people.
P.S. Great post
no subject
Date: 2006-01-08 05:07 am (UTC)As the trend of direct artist-to-consumer marketing continues, the middleman industry will lose out, and undoubtedly try to somehow try and insinuate themselves somewhere into the picture, most likely with legislation.
Gaming has become a very widespread pasttime for many. The detail and storyline behind some of the games is amazing. The connected nature of some of them adds to the fun.
Power to the people indeed.