1. I'm disappointed that the Government is working so closely with special interests like the RIAA to set legislation.
2. I'm glad that it is possible to FOIA it.
People do lots of things to cover up unpopular news. It seems that for whatever reason, the people in charge wanted to brush this under the rug. If the government does this and we don't like that, let's exercise our right and vote them out.
That there is no one who you'd actually want to vote in to public office to replace the scoundrels that screw the people over and over again is another issue.
> I'm disappointed that the Government is working so closely with special interests like the RIAA to set legislation.
If you're disappointed about the above just wait until you read about the blank CD tax which you pay every time you buy a blank CD. A federally mandated tax that goes directly to a private corporation.
"This only applies to CDs which are labeled and sold for music use; they do not apply to blank computer CDs, even though they can be (and often are) used to record or "burn" music from the computer to CD. The royalty also applies to stand-alone CD recorders, but not to CD burners used with computers. Most recently, portable satellite radio recording devices contribute to this royalty fund. [13]."
I've never seen one labeled for use with music. I doubt that's by accident.
I have, in stores like Target. It's confusing because the packaging tell you it's the "best" one for music, when I'm almost certain those CDs are identical to the ones next to them.
Some very, very old CD players won't accept "non-audio" CD-Rs.
> Physically, there is no difference between the discs save for the Disc Application Flag that identifies their type: standalone audio recorders will only accept "music" CD-Rs to enforce the RIAA arrangement, while computer CD-R drives can use either type of media to burn either type of content. [0]
in political science predicts that interest groups who have money to gain from a particular policy will fight harder to get their way on that policy than will voters in general who might gain more from a different policy. In education policy, there is HUGE access to the legislative process (especially at the state level, where most education policy is made) for the schoolteacher labor unions. The general public doesn't get the same kind of place at the table, by far. But politicians are not embarrassed by that. They call special access for special interest groups "taking care to consider the point of view of stakeholders," and don't think about policy in terms of what's right in the abstract, but rather in terms of what's expedient for staying out of political trouble. A quiet majority has less voice than a noisy minority on ANY issue, so there is nothing unique about the political tactics of music copyright-holders in this regard.
> That there is no one who you'd actually want to vote in to public office to replace the scoundrels that screw the people over and over again is another issue.
Ron Paul is running for President on a platform of drastically reducing the size of government and eliminating the Federal Reserve. He would definitely change things.
I'm just pointing out that there is at least one candidate who want to change things. Rather than complain that things will never change, one could go to work supporting and promoting politicians who would fix things. An example is http://www.revolutionpac.com/ which is basically a bunch of regular folks, political outsiders, getting together to produce and air commercials for Ron Paul. It's never been so easy to organize and communicate. Declaring that "there's nothing we can do" has never been more false.
Personally, I support Ron Paul. While I don't agree with all of his policies, he seems like the sanest guy up there. Still, HN is for discussion of tech, start ups, and cool new things in our world; not politics. Any political discussion will quickly devolve into ad hominem attacks, and provide no interesting commentary. If you want to discuss politics, head over to one of the many forums, subreddits or discussion boards about politics, but this is not the place.
The way to fix this is for the ISPs to charge the MPAA members to process any accusations.
This was the result from the three strikes legislation in New Zealand, and since the law and $25 fee came into force a month or two back there have been _no_ recorded requests from the MPAA members to ISPs.
It makes it obvious that even the MPAA knows that the claimed losses are a bunch of hogwash.
Thanks very much for linking to the original story. The author, David Kravets, did a bang-up job on it. (I edited it). And while I'm glad Mike Masnik of Techdirt reblogged it, I wish the OP had followed the link to the originating story, which has primary documents.
In Sweden the RIAA/MPAA has been deeply involved in dictating copyright legislation and using the police as their private enforcement agency for years. Not even a secret.
Considering the fact that the very reason that the RIAA exists is because of the government (collusion/anti-trust laws prevent labels from working together directly on things like pricing) and as a lobby organization, this doesn't seem that revelatory.
The whole point of trade associations (MPAA, RIAA, IFPI, ESA, CRIA, AJA, BSA, etc) is to avoid collusion while protecting the interest of associated members.
I had a lot of things I had to be aware of when working with other labels. All these tests, etc. SOX compliance also added another wrinkle.
In the case of those mentioned, usually these members are associated with intellectual property and representing copywrited works.
The whole point of trade associations (MPAA, RIAA, IFPI, ESA, CRIA, AJA, BSA, etc) is to avoid collusion while protecting the interest of associated members.
They vary in just how much they really have that aim, though. In some cases they really are organized as a way of protecting collective interests (e.g. the interests of the whole sector) without crossing over into collusion; with other organizations, it comes closer to attempting to collude without being caught. For example, is the purpose of the organization to expand the pie for music sales in general, or is the purpose to keep up profit margins by reducing competition among its members? The RIAA in particular has been caught doing that on numerous occasions. It's lost cases over pretty overt things like price-fixing, and I wouldn't be surprised if it does a lot of less overt things as well (various kinds of signaling and informal agreements to structure operations and campaigns in mutually beneficial ways).
Professional organizations that represent a sector, like the IEEE or ACM, seem to have a somewhat "cleaner" record on really promoting the sector rather than mainly aiming at reducing intra-sector competition.
But what I said was that the point of trade organizations was to ensure collective rights while avoiding collusion. That is the POINT, that isn't what they always do.
Sometimes they just hide collusion under the guise of avoiding it: hence lobbying.
Also any time you have an organization speaking for many, there are never any "clean" records. IEEE, IETF, ACM all have had their controversies.
> "In theory, the government should be representing the people, but the cozy nature of the relationship suggests it was exactly the opposite. The government was representing industry against the public interest."
Aren't artists and content creators "the people", too? Just because the RIAA represents the "industry" to so many people doesn't mean that they're not, if even as a bi-product, fighting for the rights of artists.
The RIAA is fighting to maintain an outmoded business structure in which major record labels' presence as a middleman was convenient for artists seeking broader visibility and distribution.
It is no longer the case that an artist must sign away all of their rights and virtually all the resulting revenue from their work merely to get their music distributed, so what purpose does the RIAA serve?
That is correct. Distribution is such a small part of what a good record label does for you. Even if you want to believe that an artist can do all of the things a label can do for them, that's not to say that they want to, or that they can do those things while successfully continuing to do what they do best - which is make music. Just because a handful of artists have achieved success without a label does not negate that the most successful artists today are still using them.
Take it from someone who works with hundreds of labels - the best ones still add tremendous value. The RIAA fights for the rights of labels, and by default, some of those rights are shared by artists.
I'll also point out that the people who have achieved the greatest results without a label, NIN, Radiohead, etc., were already famous, due in no small part to their prior labels.
Can't that argument be extended to patent trolls, though? "Fighting for the rights of inventors!" But the RIAA, like patent trolls, are not themselves content creators. They just managed to get a hold of IP.
It's not as simple as that, obviously -- the RIAA and musicians' interests tend to align more frequently than do inventors and patent trolls -- but the RIAA isn't in any fight for the "rights" of artists. They're in it for lawsuit money, and they could care less about anything else. And I doubt the artists' contracts stipulate anything about royalties on payouts from the industry's legal adventures.
"They're in it for lawsuit money, and they could care less about anything else. And I doubt the artists' contracts stipulate anything about royalties on payouts from the industry's legal adventures."
Huh? Where is the shred of research that the RIAA (or any trade group) is in it for lawsuits? Lawsuits are EXPENSIVE. I'm no fan of the RIAA (I think that they've done a horrible job at their mandate and don't like the tactics), but lawsuits were a demand from their members.
And regarding artist contracts, I suggest you read this front to back to see a typical one:
It doesn't matter. They fight for a strikes rule on copyright, it affects and benefits those artists who would like their copyrights protected and enforced. As an artist, if you want people to pay for your music and not take it illegally, the RIAA is one of the only organizations working in your corner.
Yes, 'creators' are part of the public. But the 'IP owning' side are clearly getting an unjustly disproportionate power over government.
The extra money IP supposedly allows creators to make does not come from nowhere: it is paid for by everyone else, the consumers. And consumers have just as much interest in having money as creators.
So IP is a tradeoff, and for that to work properly, both parts must be properly represented. Which is the point at issue.
(And this 'artists rights' stuff is nothing but PR spin. They have no intrinsic right to have a special market-restriction set up for them. Do tea-makers have special rights to a monopoly on tea-selling: so tea can only be sold in tea-shops, and no-one is allowed to make tea at home? With a justification that otherwise tea-makers cannot make so much money? How would the public greet a law to do that -- here is the proposition: everyone must pay more for tea, but in return tea-makers earn more money! No-one is going to be interested in that; do you want to pay more just so someone else gets more money? No, of course not. So, mutatis mutandis, the 'public' is only interested in granting monopoly privileges to creators of 'IP' because they get something in return (supposedly, more product) -- and they expect to get a good deal, not one rigged in favour of industry representatives.)
Long-time lurker who just had to jump into the fray about this nonsense and non-story.
Reading tech-dirt I came across quite a few comments equating copyright with censorship. You folks need to take a deep breath and then ask yourself if your support for your 'civil right' to consume something trumps the right of the person who produced the work in question to decided for themselves how the work should enter and survive in the marketplace. Because all I hear these days is that your desire to consume without renumeration is all that matters. Any deviation from that tucks into some part of the copyright conspiracy boogeyman.
The most important right is that an individual should get to decide how their own works are treated - want to give it away for free? Want to set up your own torrent? Want to charge for it? It should be an individual's choice what they do with their work; you have no right to make that choice for them and it is a painfully shameful that capitalism's consumerist end has come to long polemics on why stealing something isn't - and now watching torrents of The Office is a civil right.
There is an important statue being dedicated tomorrow in Washington DC - some of you folks should turn off Pirate Bay and pay attention to things that are actually worth caring about.
By the way, I lost my single karma point to bring up the issue of individual control. The issue of piracy affects developers deeply - it's important to discuss it, not down-vote it.
This isn't about copyright so much as giving not just any private party, but one with a demonstrated history of reckless abuse of the legal system, the power to exile you from our civilization without so much as an impartial judge seeing probable cause. And for this system to function, it will obviously require tight control over anyone allowed to sell connectivity to the Internet, and zero tolerance for anonymous access. Sorry, a chance to pat ourselves on the back about MLK's victory two generations ago rings a little hollow now, especially when the same struggle today would probably end with him being disappeared.
I do get your frustration. And we probably agree on quite a lot. I think copyright has lots of problems - but people not paying for anything isn't one of them.
My frustration is that the people who don't like the old structure won't allow a new structure to monetize itself. The greatest thing that could have come about out of the shell of the music industry was a way to pay artists directly. Pirate Bay could put that system in place tomorrow if they cared to. But it hasn't happened and won't happen if people don't actually pay.
The app store and iTunes are the closest we've got to that. But it doesn't make any difference that devs are independent - people crack their stuff and seed torrents all the same.
So there is another better model that could have existed. But it is 'disappeared'.
There could also be respect for the individual's right to mind their own creation.
But that is also disappeared.
Truth is the anonymous mob of the internet is another sort of unaccountable and unelected government. I wish it were different.
"Consume" is an interesting word choice, @twainer. Unlike making a ham sandwich for lunch, you don't actually consume anything when you copy a file (except a bit of electricity, of course).
Any chance you could come up with more appropriate language? Or does your position weaken once you start thinking about it a bit more precisely?
"Don't actually" is also an interesting word choice. It supports a scenario where the action of copying and distributing copies is meaningless. If it were so - as with any meaningless action - one would expect it to have no real effect on the system as a whole.
If that were the case - if that unlimited copying and sharing didn't have an effect or even much of an effect - there would be no piracy problem to discuss.
But the reality is rather different. Those actions actually have huge effects.
I would much prefer a system where those huge effects are channeled into a win-win system. At any level such a marketplace would be preferable to denying that such effects even exist.
I didn't say "don't actually" in the general sense with which you used "consume". I said - very specifically - that copying doesn't consume resources in the way people consume physical resources (e.g. ham sandwiches).
Only by removing the context (idiotic, given that the context was immediately available to any reader) could you establish an equivalence between my criticism of you and my own position.
Anyone with an honest interest in these debates knows that tangible goods and intangible goods are fundamentally different. More importantly, the desire to confuse this distinction is one of the favorite tactics of people on either side of the debate who wish to justify obviously self-serving behavior.
Just to reiterate, I never said that copying was meaningless. Indeed, any honest assessment would conclude that it is far from meaningless. But that doesn't mean that, in listening to files (copied with our without authorization from the copyright holder) that I am "consuming" anything in the material sense. And I maintain that you will never come to any clarity about the optimal way to handle intangible goods if you can't grasp the most characteristic properties of intangibility.
For what it's worth, I fully appreciate the economic effect of dilution. In a situation where a legal monopoly is enforceable, and some baseline measure of demand can be identified, then yes, unauthorized copying diminishes the value that could otherwise be realized by the copyright holder. At the same time, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that this projected value exists ONLY in situations where a legalized monopoly exists. It cannot exist in situations where the impossibility of two parties maintaining full possession of the same physical object (like our sandwich) forces some sort of negotiation and trade. Indeed, copyright is an attempt to make the intangible function as though it were tangible. In that sense, it is a deliberate fiction.
Historically, this valuable fiction could be maintained when the intangible good was wedded to a tangible wrapper. But once the physical component of media became something that folks on the buy side already owned our controlled outright (i.e. disk space, bandwidth, and electricity), the fiction became unsustainable.
I'll be the first to agree that we need a new system. Unlike you, I don't think we can define it by continuing to use language and concepts that are utterly obsolete. And more importantly, I think folks having these conversations need to maintain a degree of personal integrity when having them.
Deflecting criticism through false equivalence fails that test.
Aside from the personal attacks, you are attempting here to make an intellectual construct: ‘product’ as ‘legalized monopoly’ or, equally pejoratively, a ‘deliberate fiction’.
Your construct is used to deny value to a previously physical good that no longer requires a physical medium. As you put it: “But once the physical component of media became something that folks on the buy side already owned our controlled outright (i.e. disk space, bandwidth, and electricity), the fiction became unsustainable.”
In other words, unless something is a physical product it no longer has a defensible value.
So - taking your point - let’s agree that music isn’t a physical product at all. Of course, any piece of music starts it’s life as an idea anyway. Let’s consider music as a service - an entertainment service rendered by the artist onto anyone who chooses to listen. This is an ‘intellectual’ service provided much along the same lines as a lawyer or journalist or any thought-based medium. The main inputs are only the great intangibles of time and expertise.
Now, your original view invalidating the value of non-physical goods demands that any thought-based products do not deserve compensation or protection in your system. After all, there value is just ‘deliberate fiction’. The legal profession, of course, is just a ‘legalized monopoly’ complete with barriers to entry such as law school and the Bar Exam. Journalism - built on the back of intangibles of integrity, connections, and honesty - is just an ‘unsustainable fiction’.
Let’s put a bold line under it: this world-view dismisses the value of non-physical-product producing work. This sounds quite like Maoist China to me. You accuse me of peddling ‘utterly obsolete’ ideas but your line of thought is gravely far from being progressive. It is actually very retrograde and, in my opinion, anti-individual.
Work. Time. Expertise. All intangibles. Either they have value in society and deserve recompense or they don’t. It’s yes or it’s no. To avoid a long deliberation on the difference between lawyers and artists let's make it simple: if one derives something desired from the work of others than it is worthy of recompense for, logically, all that is desired has value. The inputs truly don’t matter. The medium of transference certainly doesn’t.
From where I am standing it is your thought so far that is actually the ‘deliberate fiction’: a mental construct dissolving value. A belief that through some McGuffin-like process of ‘digitalization’ the natural rules of civil society no longer apply. These are not top-down pronouncements from a single man or a government; they are bottom-up flexible norms derived from millennia of very real human experience across thousands of cultures comprised by millions of people.
That for me is the ultimate irony and hubris: to think that one’s simple fiction somehow displaces the truth of human society. I am all for transformation but the sad news for some people seems to be that the virtual world of the internet is but a derivative of the real world - not a replacement for it. If you want to build a better internet, build one that can re-purpose human interaction in a positive way. If you only want to consume the internet simply claim that that re-purposing has no basis for being done.
So which is it? I believe that artists deserve at least a period of recompense for their works. What do you believe?
Seriously, go back to the part where I said "I'll be the first to agree that we need a new system" and work out which of your conclusions - if any - square with that.
Congratulations on a finely executed end to your 'argument'. It is edifying to see someone's true colors where personal attacks take precedence over actually staking a hard, factual claim to what you believe in.
That an individual gets to decide how their own works should be treated is not the most important right, it's not a right at all. It's a limitation on other people's rights to imitate or reproduce things that they hear, read, or understand, that has within many legal systems been granted to various degrees in order to encourage the creation of new things. Freedom of expression is a civil right, and one which we may see fit to limit in order to encourage development.
Dismissing it as wanting "torrents of The Office [as] a civil right" is about as offensive to the people you're having the discussion with as dismissing the Catholic church as 'using a so-called mandate from God to get away with getting drunk' during Prohibition. People are having a real discussion about the limits of government, and you're dismissing it with hand-waving assertions of non-existent rights, and accusations of shallowness and greed towards anyone who would dare to find anything there to discuss.
The dedication of statues may be important to you, but it's as important to me as the record of the Windward Islands cricket team last year.
My point about The Office is a legitimate one - and I did not mean to cause offense.
The language to support piracy is often couched in terms of civil rights - and I can understand that side of it. In practice though piracy is used for consumption that mirrors almost exactly what people consume in the 'un-pirated' world.
I won't use this fact to damn piracy. For me, it is a clear recognition that the 'pirate' model would flow quite naturally into a mutually-beneficial marketplace if given the chance.
The best way to get the government or governing powers out of the way is to support a legitimate marketplace of one's own. If that lower threshold can't even be met, the argument that a 'fairer' governing power exists falls on deaf ears.
you express that an individual getting to decide how their work is treated is not a 'right' at all. You see it actually as a limitation on other people's right to use that work.
So, do you support a minimum wage?
An average worker has only their 'labor' to contribute; that is their basic, creative work. It is also fundamental to all sectors of the economy.
So, should laborers have a right to a basic level of recompense for their work?
Is their demand/desire for recompense such a limitation on those who benefit from their work that that desire for recompense is illegitimate?
I too support a minimum wage. I believe successful societies work and thrive because they create more of those 'win-win' scenarios that I have referenced a few times here.
So would you support a period of time in which an artist can monetize their creation?
Copyright is a (supposedly temporary) government granted monopoly.
It is very often used for censorship, and its origins are in the censorship system (ie., requirement for publishers to be licensed by the king) of the middle ages.
Authors that publish their works have no god-given right to control how others use their work, if I'm an sculptor and I sell an sculpture, whoever buys it can do whatever the hell wants with it, they can smash it, put it in their toilet, or whatever else.
The point of copyright was supposedly to encourage the creation of art, but it clearly has been stifling both the creation and enjoyment of art for a long time now.
What I see here is a desire to prevent any bad outcome by denying the legitimacy of a whole system. 'Copyright can be used for evil so it must not be a good thing, nor allowed to exist'.
As I am sure most here would agree, any complex system has both positive and negative effects. I will leave it to others to describe the negative effects of patent and copyright. For me, one of the positive effects of copyright is how it allows a personal innate skill and drive to translate directly into social and economic mobility. It's how a poor boy from Gary, Indiana becomes Michael Jackson.
Now, some people may say - who cares about Michael Jackson - but we are all human: there are thousands of people who have drawn inspiration from the progress of others - progress in arts and business - to better themselves and their communities.
Why should I sacrifice all the good of a system that allows that? In my world view, the total disrespect for individual creative rights is that huge step back to a Royalist world of serfdom.
Most importantly: it doesn't have to be either/or. Systems that respect both the artist and the consumer can exist. I find it hard to understand why asking to meet in the middle is asking for too much.
Not only does that not make sense to me, the denying of a right to meet in the middle feels very much to me, as a creative person, that I am simply being forced to trade one overlord for another.
The surprising part is that the RIAA is involved in setting copyright law. The surprising part is that the government was working with the RIAA to hide the outcome from public scrutiny.
Because they said the 6 strike plan was "voluntary" on the part of the ISP's, and the Government more than likely forced their hands to accept the deal.
Surprising it isn't any more, but it is still striking how recklessly one-sided and opinionated the goverment can be regarding one particular business. We dont officially know whether this relatively small business is _really_ that überimportant for the country, or did the business owners simply find a way to puppeteer the goverment to claim that it is überimportant. The circumstances strongly resemble the story of french 17th century button makers and their fight against innovation:
"Two of the most extreme examples of the suppression of innovation in France occurred shortly after the death of Colbert during the lengthy reign of Louis XIV. Button-making in France had been controlled by various guilds, depending on the material used, the most important part belonging to the cord and button makers' guild, who made cord buttons by hand. By the 1690s, tailors and dealers launched the innovation of weaving buttons from the material used in the garment. The outrage of the inefficient hand-button-makers brought the state leaping to their defense.
In the late 1690s, fines were imposed on the production, sale, and even the wearing of the new buttons, and the fines were continually increased. The local guild wardens even obtained the right to search people's houses and to arrest anyone in the street who wore the evil and illegal buttons. In a few years, however, the state and the hand-button-makers had to give up the fight, since everyone in France was using the new buttons." [1]
and
"The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: 'If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.' One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people's homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods." [2]
I didn't downvote you. However, from the guidelines (which I'm sure you don't need a link to):
Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
This is about politic lobbying by interest groups that hits closely to a hacker's interests so I say this is relevant. An alternative explanation would be that it is "internet politics" and by that relevant to people who use the internet and even more important, rely on the internet.
But your comment might even be downvoted just because it does not contain anything contributing to this thread but just spreads negativity.
You're right. Fundamentally, the question that must be answered is "what are you going to do about it?" They've got their answer: they've hired lobbyists to push for legislation, they've gotten a copyright czar who is working to broker voluntary agreements, and they're using the US Trade Reps to push for legislation abroad. I'm sure there are other things, too, that I forgot to list.
Thus far, there have been few counters to any of that. There's the EFF and folks who also lobby, support political allies and expose what's going on, but not much else except unfocused and therefore ineffective protest, though the Pirate Party has had some notable success abroad in terms of getting votes.
Admittedly, playing defense is much harder, but there are other possible avenues that haven't been tried. For example, forming a coalition of ISPs who do NOT subscribe to this agreement, pushing for copyright reform legislation, etc.
Occupy Wall St is about bringing attention to corporate control of government. The RIAA/MPAA influence on copyright legislation and enforcement is a specific example of that. So, the protests are in fact relevant. I know it has become popular in recent years to pooh-pooh the effectiveness of protests and to claim that they are obsolete 1960s nonsense. I don't know why anyone tries seriously to make that argument after the events of the last year. The protest is alive and well and as effective as ever. If your protest isn't accomplishing anything, it just needs to be bigger. Put a million people in the streets next weekend and politicians will notice. If that's not enough, put 10 million people on the streets. A large enough crowd is impossible to ignore.
2. I'm glad that it is possible to FOIA it.
People do lots of things to cover up unpopular news. It seems that for whatever reason, the people in charge wanted to brush this under the rug. If the government does this and we don't like that, let's exercise our right and vote them out.
That there is no one who you'd actually want to vote in to public office to replace the scoundrels that screw the people over and over again is another issue.