« Men are From Mars, Women Are From Sweden | Main | Ah, Hockey » We're In Ur Dorms Downloadin Ur Filez06 Jun 2007 09:49 am Oh, Lord, I hadn't realized that big media's hired goons in congress are now busy persecuting college administrators for being insufficiently zealous in their persecution of college students who download stuff. The whole thing's preposterous. The social value of halting noncommercial copyright infringement by a class of people who overwhelmingly don't have any money is probably negative in the first place, to say nothing of the costs involved in implementing draconian countermeasures. Comments (31)
This is the downside of Democratic dependence on "Hollywood liberals". Hollywood and music industry liberals are solid on gay rights and abortion, and their anti-censorship position is genuinely liberal though also self-serving, but when it comes to intellectual property they're the worst of the worst. I'm not talking about the famous stars, but the bigtime people on the biz end who write the $100,000 checks. 
How long before Petey shows up, talking about Matt's lack of understanding of the value of copyrights?
"by a class of people who overwhelmingly don't have any money" perhaps you exaggerate.
"by a class of people who overwhelmingly don't have any money" Clearly Matt never spent any time over at BU, and has never seen the kids from Babson looking for somewhere to park their Mercedes convertibles. But even so, this is pretty rich coming from a Harvard grad.
I think Matt would find that in the days before rampant internet music piracy kids still found a way to pay for music. Clearly piracy isn't the only reason industry profits are collapsing, but there are perverse side effects to this phenomenon Matt would prefer we not mention including a big bump recently in the fees internet radio stations have to pay; it is a spike so severe it is likely to doom most of the independent players.
Not for nuthin', but college downloading isn't just for poor students anymore -- I know many job-having, latte-drinking grownups who help themselves to multigigabytes of music from college servers. There comes a point where the evilness and rank stupidity of the RIAA membership can't excuse illegal downloading from the harm it does to working musicians.
I'm not technologically skilled in that way, so perhaps what I am saying will strike those who are as a stupid question, but isn't there some basic way to prevent these files from being downloaded, or or least some way to screw it up so that the files that are downloaded won't work? If so, wouldn't it be cheaper to hire people to do that, and then keep them there to always try to stay one step ahead of the people who eventually crack the boundaries put up, then hiring an army of lawyers and lobbyists?
Compare the music of 1979 with the music of 1951. Now do the same for 1979 and the present. Not only does 79/07 sound damn similar, in lots of cases the music is, thanks to radio niches, exactly the same. That's why the industry is collapsing: it's threadbare.
"by a class of people who overwhelmingly don't have any money" I too would like to ridicule Matt for this line. It's the kids who aren't in college who don't have money. It was my generation who invented the idea that everything ought to be free, at least for middle-class white kids. All I can says is, things haven't changed much.
Brian: That's exactly what the companies like Sony are trying to do, and it cannot be done. Make a CD un-recordable by regular software, and people will find a new way to record it. Encode a DVD with a hideously long encryption key, and that key will be discovered. And so on. And that's assuming your new encryption doesn't keep legitimate customers from playing CDs or DVDs they bought (as tends to happen). As long as the files can be played on a stereo or a TV or a computer, they can be recorded in some fashion.
"I'm not technologically skilled in that way, so perhaps what I am saying will strike those who are as a stupid question, but isn't there some basic way to prevent these files from being downloaded, or or least some way to screw it up so that the files that are downloaded won't work?" As someone who works for a company that produces - in part - digital media transcoding platforms for broadcasters and professional consumers the short answer is no.
OK, I'm going to step in and defend the "don't have any money" line. In the context of this discussion, we're talking about huge sums. For example, *cough* a friend of mine downloaded about 5,000 songs while in college. At the iTunes rate, that's $5000 bucks, and it's about 1500 even at Emusic prices. Most college kids don't have that kind of income to spend on music. Clearly, if there was no downloading, people would listen to a much narrower variety of music then they do now, right?
What they're afraid of is creating a culture in college where downloading music without paying for it seen as normative, a culture which kids will take with them when they leave school and can actually afford music (which is still to expensive, in my view)
What they're afraid of is creating a culture in college where downloading music without paying for it seen as normative... Cat. Bag. Out.
There comes a point where the evilness and rank stupidity of the RIAA membership can't excuse illegal downloading from the harm it does to working musicians. I'm sure this has been beaten to death all over the intertubes, but please, can anyone document any case of a working musician being "harmed" by illegal downloading? The vast majority of working musicians never make real money from recording contracts in the first place. There is the semi-valid argument that studio musicians will be harmed if people stop buying recorded music, since they don't generally make money playing live, but most dedicated music fans don't really care if the studio guys cutting tracks for the latest overproduced teen diva record can't get work. That's like crying because prostitutes got laid off at the bordello. And when the studio guys can no longer get work playing on film and television soundtracks, it will be because computer synthesizers and samplers have replaced them, not because of illegal downloading.
"Clearly, if there was no downloading, people would listen to a much narrower variety of music then they do now, right?" It used to be the case that you had some music, and your friends had some other music. Sometimes they recorded it for you. Sometimes you just listened to it when you hung out with them. Maybe kids wouldn't be so fat if they left their rooms once in a while.
I'm glad to see this stuff hitting the Post. It's a real problem for universities when the RIAA can get a bipartisan group of Congressional types with real power in this area to pressure schools to serve as copyright cops.
I do all my downloading on a line owned by Time-Warner-you know a huge media empire themselves.
"but please, can anyone document any case of a working musician being "harmed" by illegal downloading?" Actually, you'd be hard-pressed to find a working musician NOT affected by the new realities of the industry (yes, yes, it's not just downloading, but to deny that downloading may be a factor is offensive). Here's one example: Many mid-level performers don't tour with bands anymore (just off the top of my head from the last few months: Grant Lee Phillips, John Hiatt). Now, why would that be? The money isn't there. You can talk about alternate revenue streams all you like, but if people are not paying for the main product, the creators are going to take a hit.
I do all my downloading on a line owned by Time-Warner-you know a huge media empire themselves. Oh, but they're just a service provider, you see. Universities are educational institutions and therefore duty-bound to educate their students to always do what the RIAA says.
Many mid-level performers don't tour with bands anymore I'm missing the connection. Are you saying these performers used to subsidize their touring bands with money they earned from selling recordings? Or were the record companies footing the bill for the tour as a promotional expense (that makes more sense)? In that case you're basically saying that we need to pay for recorded music in order to subsidize bands for performances that otherwise can't break-even on their own merits. I'm not sure that is the most compelling rationale I've ever heard. I'm also not sure why it's "offensive" to suggest illegal downloading may not be the evil to end all evils, I have some good friends in "mid-level bands" - the economics for them were pretty bad in the early 90s before illegal downloading, and I don't see that things have gotten appreciably worse. The record companies always took most of the income from record sales, the musicians never saw much reward, especially after the "advances", the "expenses" etc. got deducted. I'm sure you yourself have heard of the many cases where bands would OWE MONEY back to the record company after all was said and done. So no, I'm not hard pressed at all to find working musicians NOT affected - I can honestly say that for most musicians things are shitty but really no shittier than they always were, and in many ways, thanks to things like Myspace, arguably better. At least if you're a niche band it's a lot easier these days to find that niche.
What they're afraid of is creating a culture in college where downloading music without paying for it seen as normative, a culture which kids will take with them when they leave school and can actually afford music (which is still to expensive, in my view) Well, that's already arrived. My guess is that they believe four-figure fines serve in lieu of the music they would have bought had they been born fifteen years earlier. Now, in the past, people would get their music fix by listening to the radio and sometimes even taping off the radio. Remember 'home taping kills music', anyone? Of course, back then radio was less shit.
If I buy a commercial CD, I have paid all royalties that I am required to. If I take the CD home and copy the music to my PC and someone else downloads a song from my PC using file sharing software, where is the crime being committed? Answer, there is no crime. Why? Because when a consumer purchases a CD, they do not enter into any contract, explicit or implied whereby they agree to pay any further royalties. This is how virtually all music gets online. If neither I nor the person who downloads music from my PC exchange money, we don't owe the record companies a dime. This whole "piracy" issue is just another example of the unapologetic greed and disinformation of giant soulless corporations.
you're basically saying that we need to pay for recorded music in order to subsidize bands for performances that otherwise can't break-even on their own merits. I'm not sure that is the most compelling rationale I've ever heard. Harry Nilsson, Nick Drake, and The Velvet Underground spring to mind as examples of artists whose performances couldn't break even on their own merits.
Even before the advent of MP3s, people had plenty of ways to get music without paying for it. It was just more difficult and/or time-consuming. Ever since cassette decks became available at reasonable prices, people have been able to tape music off of the radio, or off of LPs (and later CDs) borrowed from a friend. That was what people did when they wanted music and didn't have the money to buy the album. Today, they download it instead. Is the end effect really any different? I suspect downloading is a scapegoat for problems caused by an entirely different reason - like maybe the fact that no music worth listening to has been produced in many years.
And before someone brings it up, yes, under the old ways the quality of the music was lower. But the quality of MP3s is also lower than that of the underlying CD. You can't jam a 1.5-megabit/sec. CD onto a 128-kilobit/sec. MP3 file without using audible lossy compression.
I suspect downloading is a scapegoat for problems caused by an entirely different reason - like maybe the fact that no music worth listening to has been produced in many years. If today's music isn't worth listening to, why would anyone download it?
What does the cost of draconian measures matter when it's being paid by gutless college administrators from the university budget? The RIAA is all about sucking off the government tit.
Josh, the problem is that downloading and MP3 sharing is both a lot better in quality and almost infinitely faster than copying via tape. With a dubbing tape deck I could copy a CD in a matter of several minutes, once I had a tape copy to work from. The first tape copy you had to make in real time. With the internet I can make infinite copies in somewhat less time. And while .mp3 is a bit lossy, it's a lot better than tapes made on standard home equipment. Nobody ever got enough tape copies passed to him to be able to opt out of the music market completely. But it's easy to do this now. And isn't The Other Brian's "argument" a perfect illustration of why the RIAA is going after the colleges?
Comments closed June 20, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
At some point, it should really matter that nobody supports these people and everyone hates them. I know you always get a few shills saying that you 'obviously don't understand the value of copyrights', but I'd imagine they more often than not get some form of payment from these people.
It's really sad that their money protects them from an overwhelmingly negative public opinion.
Posted by soullite | June 6, 2007 10:22 AM