To summarize, their new strategy is to make allegations of copyright infringement, in response to which, ISPs will voluntarily cut off people's internet access, without the music industry having to prove any copyright infringement in court. Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work; the alleged copyright infringers would simply switch to ISPs that didn't have agreements in place with the music industry. So the strategy depends on either suing the ISPs (in violation of the DMCA safe harbor clause? There's no mention of a counter-notice provision) or internet service monopolies who can be bribed.
If effective, this would grant a music industry association the power to unilaterally exclude people from participating in the public sphere: no access to Google, no access to Wikipedia, no emailing your lawyer, no blogging about how the music industry is corrupt. Given their remarkable lack of precision in filing lawsuits in the past, let alone their decades-long history of criminal conspiracies and abusive business practices, it seems irresponsible to allow this to happen.
I hope you folks in the US can do something about it.
Something tells me this will lead to an increase in stealing open wireless connections, and more advance pirates using aircrack on their neighbors WEP encrypted wireless. They will either do this preemptively or after losing their own connections. Expect to hear sob stories about how a grandmother can't look at pictures of her grandkids because a pirate used her open WiFi to download gangsta rap and the ISP shut her off.
Another counter-strategy would be if the next generation of P2P programs did two things:
1. use encrypted protocols that look like something else, e.g. email or http
2. only connect to trusted peers (e.g. the people on your email software's address book).
That way, it would be very difficult for the RIAA or anyone else to know who's filesharing.
And in five years time, hard disks will be big enough to store every piece of music that's ever been recorded; people will share the contents of their portable hard disks with their friends, copying music that way.
In the future, anyone who wants to will be able to get any piece of music they're interested in, without paying anything. The RIAA cannot alter this (no-one can without banning the Internet) and everyone will have to adjust to the new reality. The RIAA will either get a business model that works, or die.
People have been sharing files by swapping external hard drives for a long time, definitely nothing new there, but I doubt it will be the new big thing. One of the things private trackers like waffles.fm, what.cd, and OiNK cater to is people that want obscure things and these can't be had by calling up your friends for a hard drive party. There is obviously way more variety on the internet than what your friends might have.
So, you are correct that there will be counter strategies implemented by the P2P community. This is the way it has always been. ISPs like Comcast started throttling torrents, so torrent clients started encrypting their transfers. Early on, when Napster was sued, new P2P programs emerged that lacked a centralized server, so you could never just shut down the community.
I don't know if they will be able to encrypt and mimic http or mail protocols though, the volume and behavior of traffic just wouldn't match up. I'm not as sure about this so I might be wrong though, but wouldn't it be easier to mimic voip or some other streaming protocol?
> I don't know if they will be able to encrypt and mimic http or mail protocols though, the volume and behavior of traffic just wouldn't match up.
You're right; traffic analysis would be able to tell between filesharing and typical use of email or http. However, traffic analysis wouldn't be 100% effective and there would be plenty of false positives -- particularly people who used email or http in non-typical ways. I doubt if ISPs would (a) want to write software that propabilistically catches p2p-over-protocol use, or (b) piss off their customers by falsely accusing them of illegal filesharing. And I doubt if governments would enforce cutting off people's internet access based on probabilistic traffic analysis.
> wouldn't it be easier to mimic voip or some other streaming protocol?
VoIP may well be easier, especially if it included streaming video, since there would be more bandwidth in which to hide stuff.
You said: Presumably if there were a free market in ISPs, this wouldn't work.
You might have wanted to say "competitive market" or "perfectly competitive market", not "free market". A free market is one in which laissez-faire is the only rule, and monopolists and oligopolists are not a priori bad.
Yes, you're right; the market would merely have to be somewhat competitive, not some ahistorical wet dream of Hayek.
Regardless of whether monopolists and oligopolists are good or bad in general, I was only trying to establish that in the presence of oligopoly, the RIAA's strategy would be very bad, and in the absence thereof, it would be ineffectual.
> I hope you folks in the US can do something about it.
It's not just a US problem. They are attempting to do the same thing in Europe, either through the EU or by getting laws passed in individual countries.
They said that they are still going forward with previously filed lawsuits. So it looks like Joel Tenenbaum is still getting sued. Charles Nesson, his Harvard professor lawyer is trying to argue that the entire campaign by the RIAA is unconstitutional. If he succeeds, it'll give some precedent that cutting off people's internet would be unconstitutional.
The problem that started illegal filesharing still exists: the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users.
> the music industry still hasn't developed an acceptable and effectual model of digital content delivery for end users
They haven't developed one acceptable to them. One acceptable to users already exists, it's called P2P.
Attempting to charge people for a copy of easily-copied digital information is unlikely to work as a business model because charging people involves friction and therefore any service that charges people money is likely to be less convenient than one that doesn't.
What might work is pre-payment, where fans pay musicians (or other artists) to create a work. The difference is that they're not attempting to enforce payment at the time of delivery, which is futile given the existance of the massive copying machine known as the Internet. Pre-payment works as a form of copy prevention because you can't copy something before it exists.
What are the options? The current .99/song method, $20/month stream-all-you-want, or possibly a per month fee for a universal licence. (Then, instead of suing downloaders, they could just force them to pay the fee--not too onerous.)
The new Napster is $15 a month. I can listen my music on any computer and on my portable mp3 player. The artists and labels get paid based on which music I listen to.
The DRM really isn't a big deal, because I can listen from anywhere with internet without even installing software. It's "Music As A Service" and it seems very fair and reasonable to me.
To be honest, my only complaint with Napster is that Apple refuses to let their hardware be interoperable.
That's it, most likely. Sooner or later this will be the most viable strategy for making money on music. Even if the internet were turned off tomorrow, the continuing presence of rippable media (analog media, if nothing else), the easy availability of ripping tools, the fact that most people can't hear the difference between a really good recording and a merely average one, and the prevalence of terabyte hard drives with ever-falling prices means that sooner or later we will all have the recording industry's entire back catalog stored in our homes. It's just a question of how much time it will take, and whether the primary medium of transmission will be P2P downloading or face-to-face swapping of the contents of physical storage media.
Ironically, perhaps the best way to prevent the music lover of the year 2020 from energetically acquiring his or her own private Universal Music Library is to give out reasonably priced universal licenses. Once I know that I don't have to own my own copy of (e.g.) the complete works of Yanni -- that, if I ever feel some strange desire to listen to them, or to force someone else to listen to them, I can always P2P them from NapTorrent 4.0 in three minutes without any additional cost, difficulty, or risk -- I won't actually have to own them. The cloud can take on that task.
The problem with a per month fee is that it creates no incentives to produce good music. In the old systems artists who produced music people wanted to hear were rewarded with record sales and crappy artists didn't get paid.
With an all-you-can-eat model of music, especially for p2p distributed, how does the record label know whose music is worth more based on downloads. There will be little incentive to sign on new or indie groups and pay them while the consumers will likely download their music anyway, assuming it is covered by the all-you-can-eat license. New artist would be shut out of the system unless the had some sort of connection(corruption, manufactured pop group) to the record label.
And the record labels wouldn't even have to pay current artists in proportion their success if that success can't be measured. Even if they measure success by torrent activity, there would be still little incentive to sign new groups. As always the little guy gets screwed.
Maybe this could be arranged to work and even be better than the current system. But, I don't want to pay a monthly fee that goes to 90% of music that I don't like just to get the 10% I do like.
The problem with a per month fee is that it creates no incentives to produce good music.
Tell that to the countless Indie bands that produce music 10X BETTER than mainstream music. They don't have near the same amount of money as top 40's pop artists, but they don't care. They make the music cause it's what they love to do, I'll be damned if their stuff isn't sometimes better.
My point is that the indie bands would be cut out of the record labels deal. They won't get paid by the record label from the all-you-can-eat deal, but people will still pirate their music assuming it's covered by the deal. They may make good music but they won't get paid as much as they should for it.
My point is that the indie bands would be cut out of the record labels deal.
Obviously sol, it goes along with the entire virtue of being an "INDIE BAND", but the beauty in this is that they all have their own distribution methods, their own labels, and their own little microcosm within the industry. And it's thriving, very well.
* They may make good music but they won't get paid as much as they should for it.*
How much "should" they get paid? They distribute their own music however they deem fit, so if there was a memo that got passed around that says "a musician should be making billions of dollars because we're a society that simply thrives on entertainment", then my entire post here is moot.
The Indie subculture is doing VERY well on it's own, and they are by far more sympathetic to file sharing because they want the exposure.
Lessfinancial incentives to produce good recorded music to be played back by private individuals.
Live music will continue as before. Commissioned music (i.e. movie, TV, and commercial soundtracks) will continue much as before. Every musician whose record sales don't support them financially -- which is a very large percentage of musicians; go read some essays by recording artists on the subject of record contracts -- will continue as before.
Or, who knows, maybe it will all break. It's not as if the future is easily avoided, and it's not as if the current system is all that great. My favorite musicians make almost no money from recordings.
I'd very quickly pay a monthly fee for a universal license, provided it's free of DRM and anything like it, lets me use it how I want and pretty much exhibit the common sense rights that come when you purchase something.
So, after a month, when you've downloaded 10 terabytes worth of music you'd just cancel the subscription. I guess you may have to re-enable it everyone few years to update your collection...
So yeah, I agree, if that were available I'd be the first to sign up and buy my array of hard drives.
I think napster is the most viable existing service that provides a service close to what you are talking about. It has DRM to prevent these types of abuses. It's otherwise affordable. It's not like most people around here don't know how to take DRMed music and rip it...
Being realistic, no. I'm not the kind that downloads gigs upon gigs of music. Honest and truly, I've only downloaded 3 albums at a time, and that's kept me full for a while.
For me Im fine with having all music in the cloud.
Why do i want to buy hard drives and manage a huge collection of mp3s? I use to but got tired of doing so...now with my iPhone I just stream the music I want to hear.
SOme of these iphone apps and services cache the music so when i have no internet I listen to the cache.
Not suing isn't a business solution. Meeting customers' needs is.
Customers are asking for a way to conveniently listen to any music they want, where ever they are. Somewhere in that burning desire is a business model waiting to happen.
Soon enough to save the music industry? Probably not. But at least, many thousands of people who, 10 years from now, would be considered totally innocent and within their rights, won't have to go through this needless nightmare.
On the downside, it sounds like they're planning to get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them, which no doubt the larger ISPs will willingly bend over to. Good bye net neutrality.
The recording industry needs to go bust in a hurry. (and without bailouts)
If effective, this would grant a music industry association the power to unilaterally exclude people from participating in the public sphere: no access to Google, no access to Wikipedia, no emailing your lawyer, no blogging about how the music industry is corrupt. Given their remarkable lack of precision in filing lawsuits in the past, let alone their decades-long history of criminal conspiracies and abusive business practices, it seems irresponsible to allow this to happen.
I hope you folks in the US can do something about it.