ihoby wog

This is one of the dumbest plans I’ve heard yet, regarding users of peer to peer networks. Carter’s opinion that ‘making an example out of people by imprisoning them will act as a deterrent’ is nothing more than an abuse of power. The first reason being, the threat of punishment has never been a reliable method of instilling appropriate behavior. If it was, our prisons would not be bursting at the seems with over 1.4 million people and 6.6 million people on parole, probation or in jail..and growing at a rate of 3 and a half percent every year. This means 1 in every 32 adults, it hardly appears to be a successful means to deter. Carter’s plan is obviously one to build more prisons (increasing state revenue), stock them with educated young boys and girls (further state revenue) and put them to work in new areas of the established prison workforce (yet more state revenue). Not to mention that it does wonders for beating down the creative spirit of the individual and helping the heavily corrupted record industry to further narrow the availability of diverse of musical talent into the handful of half-rate pop “artists” (I use the term for lack of a fittingly descriptive one) which are rammed down the public’s throat through every media delivery method which they own.

If the goal is to rid the world of intellectual property theft – if there is such a thing – I would instead recommend the following courses of action:

1. Lower the cost.
Insane prices of anything that can be copied are the number one cause of both Real Piracy – that which is copied by, sold by and/or a profit solely made by someone with no personal or financial connection to the author/creator of the material – and Fake Piracy – that which is copied for personal enjoyment or copied to give away freely for another person’s enjoyment. Lowering prices makes people astonishingly more willing to buy authentic copies for themselves, because that makes them realistically attainable. Consider the situation of attempting to get 5 albums on CD. Let’s see, should we buy them all new at $100 and not be able to buy food for this month? Hmm. How about buy them used for probably around $35 and still be able to eat? Still stuck eating raman but much better overall. I’ll assume you get the point.

2. Pay the artist, not the promoter.
The high prices combined with the fact that the artist receives such a small portion of the profits, makes the choice not to by a new a frequently easy one. Why not buy a used copy, download a compressed version or trade tapes with someone? Most of your money goes to the promoter, the label, the publisher if you buy new. The answer is to do away with these bohemoths. They were a good idea when they started but they’ve outlived their use in this world. Artists need studios and a certain level of promotion and distribution; but beyond basics that could be provided by freelancers or small agencies, the music should speak for and sell itself. The Internet allows for a means of distributed commerce that would have been impossible in years past. We can now built standards for interactive listening, purchase and even electronic distribution that could potentially allow the public find all the new music they could hope to find and pay the artist directly for every copy of the album or even individual song that is purchased..either new, used or downloaded. This leads into step 3.

3. Embed the copyright, free the audience.
When media presentation is enjoyed digitally, you have the unique ability to invent a new method of intellectual commerce. How?

3.1. For starters, you can embed complete creative ownership information into the file and keep it there no matter how many subsequent copies are made or how it is transmitted to the audience – i.e., CD, Minidisc, DVD, Internet Radio, Digital Radio and so on.

3.2. Provide a per-piece purchase price for copied products. This can be both an embedded, time depreciated rate for disconnected network copying devices and a market value rate for networked copying devices; via an artist/item identification string that acts as a homing pigeon for payments to find their author(s).

3.3. Device support. Playback/Copy devices would need four things: a manufacturer/device serial number, a resettable ownership ID key, an internal clock and internet networking support. This would allow the copyrighted material to know where it is, if it should be charging for usage and give the ability for the charge to be initiated.

3.4. Last piece of the puzzle, dedicated servers. A scalable number of servers dotted around the globe could be in charge of maintaining the status and grouping of IDs, placing charges and initiating media transfers.

At this point, I must stress that the technology is less important than the way it is implemented. It could either be used to freely seek out and share entertainment while giving credit and payments to the authors or it could be used to imprison creativity and the enjoyment of expression within a digital hell that nobody wants.

If this technology is used correctly, it can allow the audience to experience the work of the artist/author/creator for free via public delivery, purchase a copy of the individual work or collection (an album, series, etc.) from information embedded in the data stream, make copies to replay the work on other devices they own for free, make exact copies for other people to purchase, and make lower quality copies for others to experience for free. When a payment is to be made on a work of the author, it can be executed directly from the device to the author. No question of authenticity, no bogus charges, no needless limitations for playback, no need for middle-men and less starving artists.

Used incorrectly, this could be the means by which to lock down everyone’s ability to copy, trade and enjoy copyrighted material to the point of futility.

Example: Bob buys an album and plays it on his stereo. Yay, he’s happy. He thinks his friend Sue would might like to listen to one of the songs, so he tries to record it onto a tape. His stereo says “Error – Violation of Copyright. Further attempts to illegally duplicate will result in Fine or Imprisonment. This attempt has been logged and sent to the appropriate authorities.” Whoa, says Bob. That doesn’t sound like a good idea. He decides maybe he should just make her an mp3 of it on his computer. He gets the same error. Strange, thinks Bob. He tries to play the music from his computer. Error, with an additional message that if he wishes, he can purchase a license to play the music on his computer as well. Buy the same album twice? No thanks says Bob. He decides to go over to Sue’s house and just play her the song from his album, directly on her stereo. As he’s leaving the house, the stereo flashes on with a new message, saying that the one time purchase of his music will now be a subscribed service, with a monthly charge of only $59.99 for unlimited playback on his authorized stereo. In the car, Bob starts wanting to hear his new record again and pops the CD into his car stereo. Error it says, and tells him that he’s just been fined $300. Three hundred dollars? That has to be a joke, thinks Bob. He arrives at Sue’s house and tells her about this great song that she should just love listening to. He pops in the record and excitedly presses play. “Error – Violation of Copyright. A warrant for your arrest has just been issued. Please stay where you are. The term of your incarceration is set for 3 months.”

Overall words to remember: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Networked digital entertainment allows distributors to be able to track and punish whoever they feel like messing with at the time. It also allows the public to copy and trade copyrighted material at a much faster rate than before. Both are an abuse that the technology affords. Neither side can fully justify carrying on because of actions taken by the other but I personally feel that the side of the rich and powerful, the record companies and the lawmakers, is one that inflicts a greater detriment to the common good. The reason why is because their final intent is one of restriction, control, benign censorship and greed. The final intent of the file-swapping public however is one of high entropy, community, happiness and freedom. Now I don’t know about everyone else but I tend to see humanity having the traits of the latter. In case this doesn’t ring any bells, I must put forth the reminder that being inhuman is a bad thing.

If you try to imagine a world where, from the start, everything invented had exclusive ownership of the person or company or origin.. You end up in a world without the richness of art and innovation. It’s one thing to give credit, it’s quite another to demand indefinite intellectual ownership under threat of grandiose punishment.

Imagine for instance, if long ago, a guitar player in the southern united states thought up the walking bass riff and immediately copyrighted/patented it. That would mean very little if ANY blues music would ever be recorded, depending on if he was open to licensing. No blues music means no country, no r&b, and no rock & roll! Basically, no american music! No american music, no Recording Industry Association of America! Without the free sharing of intellectual “property”, the corporations bent on utter monopolization of industries built on those artistic and intellectual materials, there would be NO INDUSTRY TO RULE in the first place.

The RIAA owes its very existence to the process it is trying to outlaw and all the devices which have made the audience/creators of american music grow to the level of involvement it is today. The record labels’ level of inhumane greed and bills such as this ‘Induce Act’ which seek similar ends are of no benefit to the common good, nor to the actual creators of american music. Such thinking is fundamentally flawed.

How on earth would anyone know that the number of unpurchased copies is rising or falling?

This is not a hollywood movie where there’s some fanciful PirateNetWatch 3.8 ™ showing a red progress meter with a flashing, beeping “Not Profitable!” warning above and below.

My take is that this is a scare tactic. The game industry (rapidly becoming the most profitable in the area of entertainment) needs to just do the following:

1) Make better games
2) Always release demos
3) Price them affordably

As far as I know, most games get borrowed because they’re amusing but not good enough to buy, there is no demo to try, or the person just can’t afford it at the time.. or all three combined.

And one other thing, we’re not living in a time of vast riches and fair earnings. We’re living in a depressed economy with more people under the poverty line – both in number and percentage (which IS something we can gather statistics for) – then ever in US history. This is not the time to squeeze out a market because it’s not making a game publisher as rich as could be with an optimum profit margin. This is the time to ease off a little, treat your customers as people.

While I agree that stealing things is a very unkind thing to do, the difference between what P2P sharers, professional “pirates” and copyright owning mega-corporations are doing, is what really needs to be looked at before discussing the right and wrong of file swapping.

Let’s start off with terminology..
The terms PIRACY, STEALING, THEFT, ROBBERY or even BURGLARY simply do not mean what the RIAA, SPA and others portray them as meaning. Downloading copyrighted material is not an act of murder or robbery on the high seas, it is not taking money or property from a person by threat or force, nothing physical is being removed and no one is being deprived of the original material. They mis-use those words constantly and it pisses me off. The ONLY thing you can call the acts they’re deeming as illegal, is Copyright Violation.

Next, let’s outline the market..
In 2002, the RIAA complained of around a 4% drop in sales. They blamed this drop on activity of file-swappers. Two problems with this. First, I doubt anyone with a few brain cells wouldn’t agree that the recent economy is doing very badly. Second, the recording industry did some pretty wacky shit by themselves.. They decided to do several things at once:

-Disregard the tanked economy
-Raise the price of CDs from expensive to ludicrous
-Encode copy protection in any CDs they could
-Cut their number of yearly releases by about 12,000 albums
-Not report on or release most singles for sale
-Viciously attacked internet-only radio stations

Now unless you’re totally stupid, you can probably see how these points above are what hurt their sales the most. Because if you have no money, the prices have raised, you can’t make tapes or mp3s of what you bought, you can’t find the artist/album you want and you can’t even buy a CD single..obviously you’re going to be more reluctant to buy new CDs.

Another couple of interesting facts.. The decline in sales didn’t happen until well after they had Napster shut down. Also their price raising tactics got them in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission, who ordered them to discontinue the cooperative Minimum Advertised Price program which may have cost consumers $480 million in illegal charges.

Next item? Evil Intent…
So with the companies under the RIAA doing all of these bizarre and nasty things, you might pose the question…”Why?”

The answer is simple. Greed through control. What they’re doing is actively narrowing the variety of music available for broadcasting and sales. This maximizes their profits: Less operating costs from fewer artists to sign, manage, record and promote. More profit per sale through pricing monopoly. No competition in sales, because the radio and television don’t broadcast anyone else but the select handful of most profitable pop stars. They control the market with an iron grip and take as much money as they can squeeze out. No choice for us translates into higher profits for them.

They’re committing artistic censorship in the name of a greasy dollar. It’s anti-freedom, anti-choice, anti-capitalist, anti-competitive and basically anti-consumer. They’re making an evil musical dictatorship, built to force-feed the american public with 100% soulless top 40 crap. The only reason they’re getting away with it is because they expensively lobby to the government and lawmakers – all with the money they’re making off of YOU the consumer.

Are you disgusted yet?

Copyright Violations…
Now that I’ve outlined the lies and selfishness of who is causing the biggest stink about lost profits and violations of copyrights, I can talk about what I think of amateur (P2P jockeys) and professional (so called “pirates”) copiers of copyrighted material.

First, the professionals. People who copy material of a certain value and sell those copies solely for their own profit are in my view, the only real criminals outside of the recording industry. Particularly if they do so without any form of credit available of the artist who created it. It’s very clear that this is not okay legally, financially, or karmically. They are willfully undermining the creativity and/or monetary livelihood of the artist who made the material.

Second, the amateurs. My opinion about people who acquire and share copies of music (or software, etc.), is that it’s more an issue of etiquette and degree. A good analogy is email. Like file swapping, people use it every day to send eachother things and frequently you can encounter cases of bad etiquette. When you use email, it’s bad form to spam people with loads and loads of old jokes, chain letters, huge letters with way too much information. It’s also bad to send what other people wrote without giving credit. It’s unrespective and needlessly excessive. Those things are annoying, they’re not done out of necessity, they’re impersonal, wasteful and don’t inspire the cherishing of individual items.

Going back to file-swapping, if you’re copying massive amounts of songs just for the sake of copying massive amounts, if you are acquiring songs for free that you could just as easily buy, if you are distributing digital copies of songs without including the artist info; you’re abusing your freedoms in a manner disrespectful to the artists. I consider that stupid and mis-guided, but I wouldn’t consider it wholly illegal.

Now moderate amateur use of music or file swapping I feel to be the equivalent to sharing physical things and analog information. You buy some music, you sample some music, you share some music with friends, you find some music that you can’t buy because it’s out of print. Copy just enough music to listen to it where you want, hear music you wouldn’t otherwise hear and allow your acquaintances to do the same.

Sure, there are lost sales but the same thing happens with dubbed tapes and borrowed or swapped gadgets. Lost sales happen every day with used products. Whenever you buy a used CD, software title, chair, anything really, not one cent goes to the original artist, manufacturer or publisher. Same as file swapping! The only two differences are, file swapping can happen between more people that don’t know eachother and file swapping is cheap to track. It would cost the RIAA billions and billions of dollars to pay people to try and track physical and analog used products, which is why they don’t do it. Internet-based used copies of products though they can easily track down with a meager budget and a few lawyers. Massive profits and tyrannical control through fear.

For this reason of already accepted leniency through practicality, I don’t feel moderate swapping should be considered illegal or immoral. It’s just the way it is in the analog world.. It makes people happy and is culturally beneficial. It stimulates active diversity and spurs commerce of the arts. Most if any lost profits through swapping, wouldn’t have been attained anyway.

Another thing moderate sharing does that they don’t like to admit (which also is a major benefit of Independent Internet Radio, IIR), is it acts as free advertising for the artist and anyone who wants to be associated as a licensed seller of their work. For instance, when I started hearing new music through file swapping services and especially IIR, my musical horizons widened tenfold. I found I could Get Info while songs played and jot down the names of the artists, songs and sometimes albums I listened to; then go out and buy them. My CD collection grew by leaps and bounds, and I was VERY happy with most all of my purchases. And if I hadn’t heard them through these means, I wouldn’t have known to look for these albums. I would otherwise still be stuck in Top 40 Hell, disenchanted by the lack of any new and good music…life, dry and pointless. Hence, P2P and IIR are good for both consumers and artists because they allow low quality versions of songs with info of origin to spread through the world and form an emotional and commercial link between the creator and the audience. Once that link is made, culture grows and people are happy to pay money for more of the music they like at a higher quality, and/or hearing the artists live. Artists that otherwise, would never be heard by so many people.