UK's ISP-record industry deal won't stop infringement, but will make it harder for the record industry to cash in
So no, I don't think this is going to have any appreciable effect on filesharing. However, it will succeed in driving music-swapping even further underground, to encrypted protocols and offline hard-drive parties and private swapping networks. These are every bit as efficient at getting music into the hands of kids, but they're a lot harder to monitor and charge money for.LinkThe original Napster had a fine proposition: they would charge their users for signing onto their network and write a cheque for as-many-billions-as-you-like to the record industry every quarter. After all, they had the fastest-growing technology in the history of the world at their disposal, 70 million internet users in 18 months, and they'd found that the average American user was willing to spend $15 a month for the service. The record industry sued them into a smoking hole instead, and out of the ashes of Napster arose dozens of new networking technologies. Each one was more hardened against monitoring and disconnection than the last.
These days, if you wanted to charge a flat fee for access to all music (something that consumers all over the world would be eager to accept), you'd have to do stuff that's a lot more complicated and funky to get anything like the clean reports we'd have gotten off of Napster 1.0.
And yet that's just what we're going to end up doing. It's historically inevitable: whenever technology makes it impossible to police a class of copyright use, we've solved the problem by creating blanket licences.
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Another great article. Taking no prisoners!:
"Ten years ago, the record industry had a simple little problem they could have solved by showing a tiny amount of future-looking flexibility. A decade of intransigence and stubborness has bred a killer strain of antibiotic-resistant filesharing technology that grows more and more difficult to police by the year."
Excellent writing. I think I'm going to have to buy one of this Doctorow guy's books.
The bit about the gun over the mantelpiece is actually Anton Chekov's "Mantelpiece Rule": "If you place a gun above the fireplace in act one, it absolutely must be fired by the final curtain."
I say keep it coming record industry, they are just pushing innovation in file sharing and that's fine by me. As long as they don't start arresting people for file sharing they haven't gone too far, oh wait....
Then maybe, after the record companies die, people will start creating art again for the right reasons (I said art Metallica, not that "album" you recorded in my garage on a tape recorder called St. Anger). Personally, I hope everyone keeps downloading Kiss albums until Gene Simmons dies so he never makes music ever again.
Your argument seems "obviously right" in hindsight. Very well written.
Where do you think the tolls could/should go?
BTW, I don't suppose there's a recording from your recent talk in Cambridge, is there?
Cory, can you please get on the BBC some time? Present yourself as an expert on the situation (as you arguably are) and get this viewpoint out.
Because every time this type of story is covered on Radio 1 or the wider BBC news, it's always presented as a two sided argument between 'expert' record industry executives and aggrieved, whingy file-sharing criminals.
There never seems to be a suggestion that the record industry might have done something wrong, that this is an invasion of our privacy by our ISPs (though thankfully I'm on AOL and they haven't signed up to this yet) or any kind of proper rebuttal to the record industry's claims other than from random file-sharers on the street that aren't given proper time to come up with a decent argument.
I don't think this is any kind of conspiracy, the BBC is simply too lazy to find people to argue both sides on an equal footing.
So, if we could all buy our music from any source and pay one low price per song, what would the price be? And if there is no DMR, or other means of tracking the music, how are accurate data to be gathered? Data that is absolutely required if this business model is to prosper. I think the obvious issue is that no matter how low the price is, there will still be millions of people that will opt for the free song from a file sharing site. These issues are only addressed theoretically, and seems to ignore a few key components in human psychology. If that’s not the case, and I’m missing a vital part of Mr. Doctorow’s assertions, then please, someone tell me what I’ve missed.
A good article. I like the way it proposes a solution, unfortunately we know they are not flexible thinkers.
I worked for these fools during the 90's. I remember the week that the EMI boss came back from a swanky conference educating the fat cats on the perils of digital music and he promptly demanded that all the 30-second realplayer clips were removed from every artist webpage, in order to stop people from stealing music. Stealing crunchy Realplayer clips?
This was at the same time I was trying to persuade them to approach digital music with an open mind.
It was funny to see them rush toward unfavourable ringtone deals which offered them much lower percentages (yet higher profits), meanwhile persevering intransigently with their old model 'recording sales' business.
very weird.
at the time I was told that all this was to avoid upsetting the high street retailers (ringtones was under the radar)
But now?
I'd be interested in hearing your views on the details of blanket licensing.
For instance, should we be paying the license fee to the recoding industry? After all it's not the labels that actually make music, and it will be the consumers who are handling all the copying and distribution. So if this so-called "industry" is not actually doing anything why would we want to give them any money?
Of course, this is a rather crude way of suggesting that the fee should go to the artists first. But this merely raises the question of how to create and maintain a body to administrate the distribution of the resultant funds.
And further, who is to decide which artists receive what percentage of the revenue? Presumably we do not want to give a share to some tone deaf wannabe on YouTube equal to the share received by a truly popular artist? If we use popularity as a guide to payment, how do we decide the measure of that popularity? We cannot count files shared over LANs, over ad-hoc wireless networks, on exchanged hardware and media. Should the people who are paying decide who is being paid in a purely democratic fashion, and if so what technical measures would be required to make this both usable and secure?
And what of the other creative arts? Should we have another license fee for movie file-sharing? Another for books? Another for 3D printer files? [I sense this is starting to exceed the price of the average broadband connection.] Or should we attempt to combine the licensing into a one-stop system where novelists will be competing for funds with teenage pop singers?
Now, all these questions might sound negative, yet I still believe the blanket license to be the answer we are looking for. But we really need to understand how it will work, and know that it will not be mismanaged, cannot be corrupted or usurped, before we make any world-changing commitments.
Tarmle -- all good questions that have a wide variety of real-world answers in the US and around the world. I'm not going to answer them (partly because William Fisher of Harvard has written many books and papers that enumerate them in great detail), but rather, I'll note that as a set of questions, these are infinitely easier to answer than "How do we make the Internet worse at copying music?" and "How do we convince people to like DRM?"
Clearly, any form of music reproduction - digital downloads, CDs, vinyl, cassette tapes, sheet music - that allows the consumer to take the music home with them raises the risk of unauthorized duplication. That's why we at the RIAA are outlawing the sale of music in any form, and introducing the new concept of 'listening rooms'. When you want to listen to a piece of music, you will now go to your nearest RIAA-approved listening center, where authorized music industry employees will play the recording to you. You will of course be subject to a security inspection on entry, to make sure that you're not trying to smuggle any recording devices into the listening room. On exit, you will be briefly subjected to a medley made up of snatches from recent pop hits and random tones whose purpose is to overwrite any memory of the music you have heard. In this way we ensure that you cannot violate RIAA IP by unauthorized humming, singing in the shower, and so forth.
People have taken free access to music for granted for far too long. The RIAA Listening Room (TM) once again makes music the rich, unique, and inconvenient experience that it was always meant to be.
Jeff- you're right. just as there were people willing to record songs from the radio (myself included)
there will never be a 100% system to get everyone to pay for music. but there never was. The trouble is, current record company methods aren't doing anything to bring the percentage of paying customers up.
Angusm - Love it! I'm sure that ideas *almost* that absurd have been discussed.
For some of what Cory is talking about in his comment see: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11750492
Well I'd say the original Napster plan would have made giving money out proportionately much easier- just look at their records and done. But a method similar to how artists get paid for radio play is a decent method. Far from 100% accurate, it works as a poll- a sampling of radio stations' play records is looked at, and based on findings, royalty figures are worked out. This is why Madonna's income will never stop rolling in millions, even if she never records again. Because one of her songs is probably playing on a few hundred radio stations around the world right now.
... If they want to cash in on filesharing, they'd better do it soon, before every potential licence fee payer decides to opt out of the system forever.
For me, it's already too late. I'd rather we kill the record industry right now. The world did not have a record industry 100 years ago. We could live without one today.
According to this article http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=562&doc_id=147735 , illegal downloads are directly related to the bandwidth offered.
ISPs are trying to limit BW for their own reasons (costs) but do you think they'll come through?
Why do I get the feeling there's about to be a big up swing in TOR [http://www.torproject.org/][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)] usage in the UK.
#10 said, "Jeff- you're right. just as there were people willing to record songs from the radio (myself included)"
Everyone recorded songs off the radio. But it’s a matter of degree. As we know, there is a huge problem with people that share digital information. Call it stealing if you want. If we want to get rid of the record companies, then by that same token, we should get rid of book publishers. After all, what’s for the company to do other than edit, package and distribute? Record labels are validation stamps. If you need to have a work validated by a big company before you ever hear it (or read it), then maybe the problem is purely with the validation process, not the distribution. If all recording artist knew the only way to get “air time” was based on word of mouth generated by the songs they post on a sites like YouTube, then so be it. A cleaner, friendlier distribution system that keeps the IPR in the hands of the producers/artists that does not use DMR has not been invented yet. There can be a big difference between theory and practice, but one thing you can count on--people like Free.
Just as the whispers I heard on fidonet in the '80s became mutterings on usenet in the 90s, and have become a roar on the web: "Death to the communications monopolies, may ten thousand autonomous systems bloom!"
I'm sure everyone will disagree with me on my opinion, they usually do. But here's why I think the majority of people don't pay.
It is easier.
That's it.
It has historically been simpler to load up Napster/Kazaa/limewire/bittorrent and type in "Boney M" than it is to trawl the various non-linked up sites looking for the right songby the right band in the right bandwidth with the right type of DRM for you.
As much as popular imagination has the general public cast as thieving scoundrels, the reality is that they simply want an easy transparent method of listening to music on demand.
I used to download tracks illegally when I had a jones for something I didn't own, now I just pull it up on Last.fm , or similar.
There was no law or threat used to curtail my stealing ways, just a simple service that gives me what I want. I know that most of my friends no longer "steal" music, because it is quite easy for them to get it legally now.
On the flipside, as a musician I often give music away as promotion. I have no qualms about this - the more people hear my music the more likely I am to actually receive money for it. The value is not in the recording.
For Jeff and others, as a music recording artist, I'd rather get $1 for an album from a listener than $1 from a record company. The web can substitute many of the things a record company used to do. With this in mind, I don't see how the record company can help me. When I was growing up, I'd record vinyl onto cassette, and if I had no cable, then a microphone in front of speakers would do it. The point is, you can't stop it, so you have to figure how to use it. Prohibition will only create speakeasies. The more underground it goes, the harder it will be to take a cut. Record companies have to offer the artists something they can't do on their own, and earn their money encouraging the public to pay. You can't make someone pay by threatening them with a big stick.
Coresect, Record companies produce, package, promote, distribute. Just as publishers do (replace produce with edit). If you don’t think there is any benefit to the kind of promotion a record company can accomplish then maybe you would be better off without them. We have readily transitioned to a digital music culture where distribution cost is almost nothing. But there is something to be said about having connections in the industry. If Warner Brothers or Sony offered you a nice three album deal, would you turn it down? Their PR people could get you a gig on the Late Show. Think of all that celebrity glory you could have.
I would like to get money for the work I do, but there is also a little point that a euro from a record label is the same as a euro from a listener, it's just the latter comes in without a lot of other people taking a cut first. If a record company wants to keep on operating, they have to realise they must offer something for their cut, AND offer the listener something too. Beating one's chest and waving a big stick won't make people suddenly cough up cash, unless you're planning armed robbery.
I want to see artists getting paid for their art. I don't care to see people get rich selling other people's art. There is a middle ground, and eventually it will balance out, but crippling someone's internet connection and sending them legal threats will not give the artists their fair pay.
The internet now can enable many people to do themselves a small part of what labels used to have an exclusive on, namely distribution and promotion. As time goes on, people will be able to do more and more on their own, so labels need to counteract that by ever so slightly changing the services they offer. I'd sign up tomorrow with a record label ( www.coresect.com sign me now, please) but with things the way they are, with the oversaturation of music production combined with an overall decline in sales, it isn't easy to find people willing to do that any more. I think artists will always need Record labels (www.coresect.com sign me now, please) but the record labels need to decide what they can offer the artist, and as the internet can offer a great deal now (especially for niche markets like ours) it's going to come down to money more and more as time goes by. That doesn't mean more money for the artist, though it would be nice (www.coresect.com sign me now, please) but perhaps making it cheaper for the public, and easier to purchase, and without useless protection that just makes it harder for the buyer to listen to the music how they want, and in the end does next to nothing to protect the music itself, perhaps doing these things are more effective than blocking internet users and suing college students.
Paul
Blistering accurate, right-on.
For years I bought vinyl, then CD's, at retail. No more. Not because I stopped listening to new stuff, but because of the behavior of the -industry-. And then I noticed that word: -industry-. When did music ever need an -industry-? All it ever needed was musicians.
And there's where my dollars go. It's been a year since I bought my last CD. The industry convinced me to do it that way. Thanks industry! And when I buy a CD from a band, I get a big smile and a thanks.