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Where it All Stands Now |
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This article was published by Time Magazine, which is part of Time/Warner, which means they are not going to be sympathetic to the actual issues involved in file sharing. And this article is not... it pretty much takes the hardline against the practice. Then, at the end, it seems to regrettfully conclude that it's here to stay. In either case, it's a good description of exactly where we are in this whole music revolution mess. |
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James Phung saw Phone Booth before you did. What's more, he saw it for free, in the comfort of his private home-screening room. Phung isn't a movie star or a Hollywood insider; he's a junior at the University of Texas who makes $8 an hour at the campus computer lab. But many big-budget Hollywood movies have their North American premieres in his humble off-campus apartment. Like millions of other people, Phung downloads movies for free from the Internet, often before they hit theaters. Phone Booth will fit nicely on his 120-GB hard drive alongside Anger Management, Tears of the Sun and about 125 other films, not to mention more than 2,000 songs. "Basically," he says, "the world is at my fingertips."
Phung is the entertainment industry's worst nightmare, but he's very real, and there are a lot more like him. Quietly, with no sirens and no breaking glass, your friends and neighbors and colleagues and children are on a 24-hour virtual smash-and-grab looting spree, aided and abetted by the anonymity of the Internet. Every month they -- or is it we? -- download some 2.6 billion files illegally, and that's just music. That number doesn't include the movies, TV shows, software and video games that circulate online. First-run films turn up online well before they hit the theaters. Albums debut on the Net before they have a chance to hit the charts. Somewhere along the line, Americans -- indeed, computer users everywhere -- have made a collective decision that since no one can make us pay for entertainment, we're not going to.
As crimes go, downloading has a distinctly victimless feel to it -- can anything this fun be wrong? -- but there are real consequences. Click by click, file by file, we are tearing the entertainment industry apart. CD shipments last year were down 9%, on top of a 6% decline in 2001. A report by Internet services company Divine estimates pirates swap between 400,000 and 600,000 movies online every day. It's information-superhighway robbery.
If you ask the pirates, they'll say they're just fighting for their right to party. If you ask the suits, they'll say they're fighting for their lives. "If we let this stand, you're going to see the undoing of this society," says Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America (M.P.A.A.). "I didn't preside over this movie industry to see it disintegrate like the music industry." Them's fightin' words, and the battle lines are being drawn. Two landmark legal decisions last week, one in favor of the entertainment industry and one against it, will shape the way we deal with digital movies and music for years to come. The only thing left to decide is which side of those battle lines you're on.
It's easy to see why the pirates do what they do. Right now you can find thousands of free movies online if you know where to look -- a glance at one popular website yields links to copies of Holes, Malibu's Most Wanted and even the Rowan Atkinson comedy Johnny English, which won't hit U.S. theaters until July. Just about every song ever released -- as well as quite a few that haven't been -- is available online for nothing more than the effort it takes to point and click. Record-industry types have a cute nickname for this phenomenon: "the celestial jukebox."
Most online piracy happens through what is called file-sharing software, such as Kazaa, Gnutella and Direct Connect, that links millions of computers to one another over the Internet. File-sharing software takes advantage of the fact that music and movies are stored as digital data -- they're not vinyl and celluloid anymore, but collections of disembodied, computerized bits and bytes that can be stored or played on a computer and transmitted over the Internet as easily as e-mail. Using file-sharing software, people can literally browse through one another's digital music and movie collections, picking and choosing and swapping whatever they want. If you've never tried it, it's hard to describe how seductive it is. Start up a program like Kazaa, type in the name of your favorite rock band, and a list of song titles will instantly appear on your screen. See something you like, click on it, and it's yours. An average song might take two minutes to download to your computer if you have a broadband connection. Log on any night of the week and you'll find millions of users sharing hundreds of millions of songs, movies and more.
Ask your average high school kids if they use Kazaa, and the answer is a resounding "duh." Stewart Laperouse and Jennifer Rieger, a couple at Cy-Fair High School in Houston, log on as part of their regular after-school routine -- it's the new milk and cookies. Often they do their downloading a deux, after he gets out of lacrosse practice. His collection is relatively small: 150 songs and about 50 music videos. She's the real repeat offender, with 400 pilfered tracks on her hard drive. "Who wouldn't want to do this?" Rieger says. "It's totally free and it's easy." Look for pangs of guilt and you'll get only shrugs.
This isn't how it was supposed to be. A little more than three years ago the Recording Industry Association of America (R.I.A.A.), which represents most U.S. record labels, filed suit against Napster, the granddaddy of file-sharing services, for "contributory and vicarious copyright infringement." The R.I.A.A. won; Napster lost. A judge ordered its servers shut down. End of story?
Hardly. The file-sharing services didn't go away. They evolved, getting smarter and more decentralized and harder to shut down. Napster's network relied on a central server, an Achilles' heel that made it easier to unplug and shut down. But Kazaa, now the most popular file-sharing software, is built around a floating, distributed network of individual PCs that has no center. There's no single plug to pull. Kazaa has savvily chosen a decentralized business strategy too: it's a mirage of complicated partnerships with the official owner, Sharman Networks, tucked away on the South Pacific island of Vanuatu. So far, its diffuse structure has kept its management off U.S. soil and out of U.S. courtrooms.
It isn't just the file-sharing companies that are evolving; the Internet is too. Broadband Internet access has become cheaper and more widespread -- analysts expect the number of households with broadband to jump 41% this year -- and that means we can move bigger, fatter files in less and less time. Personal computers have also evolved. In 1992 the average hard drive was 120 megabytes. Now it's 40 gigabytes, 300 times as big -- perfect for stashing whole libraries of audio and video. CD and DVD burners used to be expensive peripherals; now they come standard. Every new PC is a self-contained entertainment studio, right out of the box. What we have here is not a failure to communicate; it's a raging, runaway success.
The consequence of the high-tech evolution is a new generation of technologically empowered consumers for whom free entertainment isn't a windfall, it's a basic right. Just ask Sean Farrell, a senior at Yale. A sophisticated listener, he dabbles in jazz and classical along with the usual hip-hop. But he hasn't bought a CD in four years. Instead, he has 5,000 songs on his computer's 430-GB hard drive, and more in the 20-GB MP3 player -- an Apple iPod -- that is permanently attached to his hip. When he and his roommates have parties, they don't bother with CDs, they just run cables from the computer in Farrell's bedroom to the stereo in the common room and blast the free tunes straight off his PC. "I don't feel really guilty," he says. "The music industry has to realize that this is here to stay; it's not going away." See the pattern yet?
For years people wondered whether all this downloading would actually affect the entertainment industry's bottom line. Now that last year's numbers are in, we have the answer. According to Nielsen SoundScan, CD album sales slid from 712 million units in 2001 to 680 million in 2002. CD sales in the first quarter of 2003 were down 15 million units from last year. Or look at it this way: in 2000 the top 10 albums in America sold 60 million copies; in 2001, 40 million; in 2002, 33 million. Nobody knows for sure exactly how much of the decline is caused by piracy, but it's safe to say the answer is somewhere between "some of it" and "most of it." Sure, the economy had a down year, but people found enough spare change in their couches to boost sales of MP3 players 56% over 2001. And while consumers bought about 680 million albums last year, they purchased 1.7 billion blank CDs -- up 40% from the year before. The clear implication: users are downloading free music and burning it onto blank CDs. Industry analysts are reduced to fairy-tale metaphors to describe the change. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora's box is open. The dikes have burst, and the Dutch boy has gone surfing.
Which isn't to say music executives are sitting around wringing their hands. It takes time for any corporation to recognize that its universe has changed, and major labels don't exactly turn on a dime. For Martin Bandier, chairman and CEO of EMI Music Publishing, the dime dropped three years ago when his 11-year-old son Max gave him a present: his 100 favorite Motown songs. "I said, 'But we have hundreds of copies!'" Bandier recalls. "He said, 'This is in a different place -- on my hard drive.' It was scary." Bandier immediately convened a war council to figure out how to protect EMI's precious song catalog, which ranges from Judy Garland to Norah Jones. "People did not think it was real in the beginning," he says. "It's as real as can be."
Reality bit, and deep. In 2001 EMI brought in new top management, including chairman of EMI Recorded Music Alain Levy, to help navigate the brave new digital world. The administration promptly laid off 1,800 employees (20% of EMI's staff), which helped absorb the impact when sales fell 10% in 2002 -- and created an executive position, global head of antipiracy. It also brought in executive vice president John Rose, an e-commerce ace from consulting firm McKinsey. "The fundamental premise of hiring someone like me," says Rose, "is that this industry needs to be re-engineered." Since last summer, EMI has been holding weekly three-hour lunch meetings with artists, managers, agents and lawyers, a dozen at a time, to explain to them, as Rose puts it, "how the world needs to evolve."
First order of business: evolve some claws. Some labels (they're reluctant to identify themselves) hire professional counterhackers, companies like Overpeer, based in Manhattan, that specialize in electronic countermeasures such as "spoofing" -- releasing dummy versions of popular songs onto file-sharing networks. To your average Kazaa user they look like the real thing, but when you download them, they turn out to be unplayable. Movie studios, meanwhile, staff screenings with ushers wearing night-vision goggles to suss out would-be pirates with camcorders. When Epic Records distributed review copies of the new Pearl Jam album last fall, it sent them inside CD players that had been glued shut. The White Stripes went further: review copies of their new album Elephant were sent on good old-fashioned vinyl, which is trickier to copy. In the copy-protection wars, low tech is the new high tech.
For EMI, the plan is not to prohibit copying, just to keep us from doing it quite so much. In theory, the CD of the future will be smart enough to let its owner make one copy of a song for the computer, one for the iPod, and maybe burn an extra for the car, but that's it. But even that might annoy consumers who are used to making as many copies as they want. Even if the smart CD of the future becomes a reality, to work at all it will have to work absolutely perfectly. If just one copy leaks onto Kazaa, anywhere in the world, millions of people can have all the copies they want.
Of course, there's an even older-fashioned way to keep people from stealing your stuff. It's called the law. "What we're dealing with is thievery, plain and simple," says the M.P.A.A.'s Valenti. "People try to use a lot of sophistry to get away from that fact." The legal landscape on which the war against piracy will be fought is being defined right now. In January a federal judge ruled that Verizon, a telephone company that is also an Internet service provider (ISP), must honor the R.I.A.A. subpoena to reveal the identity of one of its customers, a Kazaa user whom they suspect of downloading more than 600 songs. Verizon asked for a stay of the decison, and a flurry of briefs from the M.P.A.A. (backing the record companies) and numerous privacy and consumer organizations (on behalf of Verizon) ensued. On Thursday, the judge denied Verizon's request. Unless it can get a reprieve from an appeals court, the company has 14 days (and counting) to come up with the name.
The message is clear: If you're going to download music, don't expect to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet. On the other hand, if you're in the business of making file-sharing software, you have a lot less to worry about. On Friday a federal judge ruled that two companies -- Grokster and StreamCast Networks, which makes a program called Morpheus -- were not liable if users of their file-sharing software infringed on someone else's copyright. In his decision Judge Stephen Wilson cited the legal fuss that sprang up in the 1980s over Sony's Betamax technology. Like file sharing, it was a tool that could be used for both legal and illegal copying. Then, as now, the former was deemed to outweigh the latter.
The ruling is a stinging blow for the R.I.A.A. and the M.P.A.A., which brought the suit (and will appeal it), and it tells us a lot about how the war against piracy will be fought. If file-sharing services won't sit still and be sued, individual users will make easier targets. Case in point: lawsuits filed last month against students at Princeton, Michigan Technological University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that seek billions of dollars in damages -- $150,000 for each pirated song. Nobody thinks piracy can be stopped by suing one user at a time, but if companies focus on major uploaders -- people who make huge numbers of files available for others to download -- a few high-profile busts may scare off some of the rest. "In the Verizon case, we got the judgment that we really needed," says Andrew Lack, chairman and CEO of Sony Music Entertainment, "which is that on an individual basis you are being ripped off, and you have a right to stop that."
The pace is picking up as Big Media head to court with everybody they can think of. The M.P.A.A. is wrangling with a company called 321 Studios over the legality of one of 321's products, software that enables consumers to make free copies of movies from DVDs. The FBI busted a Los Angeles man last week for camcording movies off the big screen and selling copies -- a legal first. Universal Music Group and EMI have even filed suit against venture-capital firm Hummer Winblad just because it invested in Napster back in 2000.
But the legal fight is far from a sure thing. Copyright laws are slippery and subjective -- the judge in the Grokster case made a special plea in his ruling asking Congress to fix gaps in the laws that cover file sharing. Enforcing those laws is also tricky. Colleges, where a lot of the downloading goes on, like to think of themselves as bastions of privacy and free speech, not copyright police. The international reach of the Internet makes enforcement even dodgier. Case in point: in 1999 Jon Johansen, a Norwegian teenager, figured out how to break the copy protection on commercial DVDs, making possible the cheap, high-quality, a la carte copying of movies. This information became, shall we say, fairly popular on the Internet, earning Johansen, who was 15 at the time, the nickname "DVD Jon." In 2000 Norwegian prosecutors, egged on by the M.P.A.A., charged him with violating digital-security laws. In January the verdict came in: Johansen got off. An appeals hearing is scheduled for December.
There's another problem with suing people: it doesn't make you popular with your customers -- and Big Media are already fighting a major p.r. battle. Everybody who has ever watched VH1's Behind the Music has heard musicians bad-mouth their record labels, and no one is going to feel bad for ripping off the suits who ripped off their favorite rock star. File sharing has become cool, a way to fight the power, to stick it to the Man. Re-engineering the public image of studio executives probably isn't in the cards -- these are, after all, the same companies that coughed up $143 million last October to settle a class action accusing them of price fixing -- but in the past few months, more and more artists have begun speaking out, and they stand a better chance of winning sympathy. For years musicians and other artists were reluctant to address file sharing, in part because they saw how uncool Metallica's James Hetfield looked when he tried. But in September the likes of Nelly, the Dixie Chicks, Brian Wilson and the incontrovertibly cool Missy Elliott delivered televised antipiracy scoldings. In April, Ben Affleck appeared in an antipiracy spot on behalf of the movie industry. Still, you don't have to be Alanis Morissette to spot the irony in a zillionaire celebrity pleading for sympathy. After a spoofed version of Madonna's new album, American Life, started circulating on the Net, featuring a recording of the Material Girl saying "What the f--- do you think you're doing?", a hacker took over the singer's website, Madonna.com, and posted real, downloadable MP3s of every song on the album.
The entertainment industry's grand plan for surviving piracy isn't just about the stick; there's a carrot too, a big one. The Internet offers a whole new way of selling music, and when music and movie executives are not expressing their outrage over downloading, they are salivating over a potentially massive revenue opportunity. There are already a couple of dozen legal, pay-to-play downloading services, including Pressplay, Listen.com's Rhapsody and Music Net. Apple Computer has a new service, which was slated for rollout this Monday, that's meant to integrate seamlessly with its iPod MP3 player and its iTunes music software. Movie and TV downloading websites are sprouting up as well. Movielink, which is backed by five major Hollywood studios, made its debut in November and features a library of more than 300 films. SoapCity.com offers online episodes of daytime serials.
But these services face competition you wouldn't wish on Bill Gates. Unlike, say, Kazaa, they have to clear each song or movie or show for digital distribution with each individual artist and studio. They have made significant progress -- Pressplay, for example, has upwards of 300,000 tracks available for download, with membership starting at $9.95 a month -- but it's slow work. The for-pay services also mire users in a mesh of restrictions that limit what they can do with the music they download. That $9.95 plan at Pressplay buys you unlimited downloads, but you can't move the songs to your portable MP3 player or burn copies of them onto a CD, and you can listen to them only so long as you're a Pressplay subscriber. Miss a payment, and the files lock up. For $8 more a month, Pressplay gives you 10 "portable" downloads that are free of those constraints. But compare that with the roughly infinite number of unrestricted, unconstrained, infinitely copyable downloads that Kazaa offers for roughly nothing, and you can see that Pressplay has an uphill battle on its hands.
Pressplay and the other "legitimate" music services are more reliable than Kazaa and its ilk. For one thing, there's no porn and no spoofing, and Apple's new offering is expected to give the whole process a more streamlined, user-friendly feel. These services also give customers the peace of mind that comes with not breaking the law. It will be interesting to see how much that's worth. But for now listeners are staying away in droves; industry analysts estimate that the legitimate downloading services have fewer than 300,000 users in all. Still, if the retail-music business is going to survive, this may be what it has to look like, and for the business side, that's the real significance of the digital revolution. "It's not piracy per se but a transition to a digital world that will transform what a record company is and how it works," says EMI's Rose. "While downloading is an important issue, it's just symbolic of a much more fundamental shift in how music will be moved and acquired by consumers and be used."
Can the for-pay services compete? Maybe. Can antipiracy laws be enforced? Perhaps. Can copy protection stand up to a hacker army of teenage Jon Johansens? It's possible. But all this raises an interesting question: What if the pirates win? If you play the thought experiment out to its logical extreme, the body count is high. After all, you can't have an information economy in which all information is free. The major music labels would disappear; ditto the record stores that sell their CDs. The age of millionaire rock stars would be over; they would become as much a historical curiosity as the landed aristocracy is today. Instead, musicians would scratch out a living on the touring circuit, since in an age of free music the only commodity they would control is live performance, along with any merchandise they could hawk in the parking lot after the show. Hollywood would also take a hit. People might still pay to watch movies in the theater -- viewing on the big screen beats watching movies on your computer -- but Hollywood would have to do without revenue from video stores. Who's going to rent what they can download for free? TV studios would likewise have to do without their cushy syndication deals, since the Net would become the land of infinite reruns. Hope you like product placement -- you'll be seeing a lot of it. Already this July the WB network and Pepsi plan to launch an American Bandstand -- style TV show called Pepsi Smash, featuring performances by big-ticket music acts. Alternative revenue streams never tasted so good.
In a sense, the future is already here. You can see it in action in Asia. Piracy is a growing phenomenon in the U.S., but in some developing countries, it is a fact of life. There's a marketplace in Karachi, Pakistan, where you can buy a DVD of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days for 100 rupees (about $1.75) even while it's playing in first-run theaters in the U.S. Karachi boasts five optical-disc factories, just one of which churns out 40 million pirated discs a year. If you think American teenagers are guiltless, file-swapping punks, try talking to a Karachi shopkeeper. "We make copy of everything!" says Mohammed Haris. "Even George Bush cannot dare to come over here. We will keep the original and send his copy back home."
This kind of commercial piracy has devastated the Asian entertainment industry. In China, where piracy rates for movies, music and software are all more than 90%, record companies trying to develop local talent have bled money for years. Every time they try to build up a star, the pirates siphon off the profits. "There's no point in spending money to drive demand," says Samuel Chou, Warner Music's CEO for China and Taiwan, "because what you drive all goes to piracy."
It's a scary cautionary tale -- but at this point, hypothetical horror stories are almost beside the point. The people have spoken, and they say they want a revolution. File sharing isn't going to save us from corporate entertainment the way the Beatles saved Pepperland from the Blue Meanies, but if it allows more people to listen to more music in more ways than they ever have before, can it be all bad? And does good or bad even matter? Technology has a way of sweeping aside questions of what is right or wrong and replacing them with the reality of what is possible. Recorded entertainment has gone from an analog object to a disembodied digital spirit roaming the planet's information infrastructure at will, and all the litigation and legislation in the world won't change it back. The genie is out of the bottle, and we're fresh out of wishes. |
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other items in this group |
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| | Apple Prohibits iTunes Rentals on Fifth Generation iPods
01.29.08 by Bryan Gardiner (wired.com) | | | | | There's a certain amount of speculation in a recent wired story as to why iPods that are only 6 months old or so can't support iTunes rentals. I'm betting with those that suggest its some artifact of DRM incompatibility. It's just yet another example of why unlocked media is just a simple pragmatic consumer benefit. If DRM schemes can't even work within a single companies offerings, how can we realistically expect them to work across platforms? To me, this is the greatest significance of unlocked media, simply that it works better. | |
| | EU court: downloaders can stay private
01.28.08 by Aoife White, AP Business Writer (Yahoo News) | | | | | The EU has decided not to allow record companies access to identity information of users that are caught downloading. Ahhhhh.... privacy! | |
| | Bruised music majors back iTunes rival
01.15.08 by Joshua Chaffin (Financial Times) | | | | | Suddenly, the record labels that feel left out of the iTunes cult back their own kinder, gentler, cult at Amazon | |
| | In the Fight Over Piracy, a Rare Stand for Privacy
12.31.07 by Adam Liptak (NY Times) | | | | | Here's an amazing story of the little university that could... the University of Oregon tells the RIAA to stuff it and stands up for students' privacy | |
| | Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use
12.30.07 by Mark Fisher (Washington Post) | | | | | Now the RIAA is getting tough and reiterating a stance it has taken all along: even ripping a CD you purchased into your computer for your own use is illegal. | |
| | Prince is determined to revolutionise the music industry
07.15.07 by Neil Armstrong (The Daily Mail (UK)) | | | | | The maverick from Minneapolis has been doing things his way since 1977 when, at the age of 19, he signed a three-album deal and blew the budget for all three albums on the first one, and this after insisting that he play all the instruments himself, record all the vocals himself – and produce it himself. He had assumed full artistic control from the off and he has never relinquished it. | |
| | Music Industry Attacks Prince CD Giveaway
06.29.07 by Katie Allen (The Guardian UK) | | | | | It seems that it doesn't matter even if you print your own cds with your own music on them... you're just not supposed to give music away. | |
| | AT&T Blocks Pirated Media
06.20.07 by Alexandra Berzon (Red Herring) | | | | | This is huge. Until now, ISPs had been trying to stay out of the whole anti-piracy arena. This signals a huge change in strategy. | |
| | Worlds at War:The New and Old Media
02.18.07 by Peter Lauria and Holly M. Sanders (NY Post) | | | | | The newest war has begun: the old and the new media are going at it, and we could all be collateral damage. | |
| | Vatican plans punk version of Divine Comedy
01.03.07 by John Phillips (The Independent UK) | | | | | I can't possibly believe that the Vatican is even doing this. And we also can't believe how much we want to see it. | |
| | RattleHead Unveils Station Archive
03.20.04 by Ferret (RattleHead Records) | | | | | On the anniversary of the tragedy that claimed the lives of 100 music fans, RattleHead Records unveils its own online Station Archive. | |
| | RIAA Takes it in the Ass
12.19.03 by Ted Bridis (MyWay News) | | | | | The RIAA finally gets it right where it needs it. A federal court has just bitch slapped the mighty RIAA and told them that they can't force ISPs to turn over the name of users file-swapping. (And this, after they already sued hundreds of people!) | |
| | MP3.com Closes, CNET Attempts to Fill Gap
11.28.03 by John Borland (ZDNet) | | | | | The grand daddy of mp3 sites, mp3.com is closing its doors because a big label named Vivendi bought it and wants to get that smell of indpendant music off its servers. Where were you when the house fell down? | |
| | Music Can Save the World
11.09.03 by M.R. KROPKO (AP) | | | | | This short little story should show everyone the power of music; maybe it really can save the world. | |
| | Who Said Copyrights Stifle Innovation?
11.03.03 by AP Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | Whoever said copyrights stifle innovation was exactly right... here's a group of student trying to do something really cool, and they've been thwarted at every turn by the copyright system. And even when they try to do it legally, they're screwed. | |
| | Most people Would Call This Extortion
10.18.03 by Reuters Staff (CNN Money) | | | | | The RIAA, instead of spending money with actual lawsuits now, is "pre-settling" lawsuits with those evil downloaders. | |
| | It Only Gets Worse from Here
10.17.03 by CBC News Online Staff (CBC News Online) | | | | | The word's out on the street: If you're a media giant, it only gets worse from here. Some traitorous physicists just got together and figured out how to make the downloads even faster. | |
| | Quick, Someone Brainwash the Kids Before its too Late
09.25.03 by Laura M. Holson (NY Times) | | | | | It seems its vitally important now to launch an in-school "downloading is wrong" campaign. All this will do is show kids how to do it. | |
| | Would you Kill Yourself at a show?
09.18.03 by BayNews9 Staff (BayNews9) | | | | | This fan wants to commit suicide onstage at his favorite band's show. Is this obsession? Promotion? Stupidity? All three? You decide. | |
| | This Man Got What He Deserved
09.17.03 by Associated Press (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) | | | | | This is what happens to you when you sing songs from boy bands or boys who used to be in boy bands. You have been warned. | |
| | Downloaders Thumb Nose in General Direction of RIAA.
09.08.03 by Shawn Langlois (CBS Market Watch) | | | | | The lawsuits apparently aren't working. In fact, they're doing what we thought they would -- piss people the fuck off. Good. It's about time. | |
| | Next Thing You Know, They'll Execute you for Sharing Music
09.07.03 by AFP Staff (Yahoo! News) | | | | | They'll sue you, sure, but in Australia they'll even lock you in prison. Now, granted, these people were maintaining a public website to do it... but it's all the same thing, and I'm sure it's music to the record industry's ears. | |
| | Look What a Little Competition Does
09.06.03 by Derek Caney (YahooNews) | | | | | It seems online music swapping has had another really positive effect: cd prices are being slashed to compete. The raping and pillaging of the CD buyer hasn't ended for sure, but $12.98 is definitely slightly less ludicrous. | |
| | The Downloader Fights Back
09.05.03 by Associated Press Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | The RIAA began suing people for sharing music -- myopic bastards that they are -- but not all of the people being sued are taking it lying down. Some are taking on the RIAA directly. Like this one, NYCFASHIONGIRL... go get 'em! | |
| | THE RIAA IS FUCKING INSANE
09.04.03 by Reuters/Billboard (Yahoo News) | | | | | The RIAA is fucking insane. Demanding photo ids from people, threatening prosecution to intimidate people. Really, who the fuck are they? This is either an enormous bluff, or the beginning of the Spanish Inqusition II. But in either case, it's a colossally stupid idea. | |
| | CDs are on the Way Out
09.03.03 by Jeordan Legon (CNN.com) | | | | | Yes, folks, CDs are on the way out! That's the word in the big labels as the Attack of the Subscription Music Services begins. The last quote in the article is very telling... they don't believe you own the music, and they think CDs cost too much (when they were the ones who were sued for price fixing last year)! | |
| | Colleges Crack Down on Music Sharing
09.02.03 by Associated Press Staff (ABCnews) | | | | | Now the colleges have become the latest whipping boy for the RIAA. You see, the RIAA has problems not only with sharing music over the internet, but your own private network as well. And that's only one of the reasons they're thug-like assholes. | |
| | How the RIAA Spies on You
08.28.03 by Associated Press (CNN.com) | | | | | Want to know how the bastards at the RIAA track what you've downloaded? Well, they gave away some of their secrets when they filed the lawsuits. | |
| | Best Buy and Real Networks Swap Fluids
08.19.03 by AP Staff (Associated Press) | | | | | Yes, Real Networks and Best Buy are sleeping together. Best Buy will begin offering subscriptions to Real Network's music service Rhapsody. And Rhapsody is, you guessed it, one of those services that charges you for downloads and then controls what you can do with the music afterwards. They even make you pay to burn songs onto CD... and per song, too! | |
| | They Say They Want the Big Fish
08.18.03 by Frederic J. Frommer (Associated Press) | | | | | So the RIAA says they just want the Big Fish. Only the people trading a "substantial" number of songs. Only they won't define "sunstantial", they've never kept their word before, and it would be pointless to only stop "some" of the downloading. The fact is, this latest nazi lawsuit maneuver on their part has only pissed people off, and they're afraid to say how long or or how far it will go. | |
| | Here's Who's Being Sued by the RIAA
08.15.03 by AbercrombieDave (Zeropaid.com news board) | | | | | People have been compiling information from the massive supoena dump that the RIAA dropped a few weeks ago. Here's the updated list of who's being sued. | |
| | Nikki vs. Hilary
08.11.03 by Jim Goldman (Tech TV) | | | | | Nikki's the head of KaZaa, Hilary's the former head of the RIAA (and now a commentator on CNBC). Who do we think will win? Well, we have our hopes on Nikki as well as a few others... we won't play favorites, but one thing we're putting out money on is Hilary NOT winning. This is not a struggle between thieves and merchants as Hilary would like you to believe -- this is a clash between an old old old market and a brand new way of doing things. And historically, Hilary doesn't stand a chance. | |
| | RIAA Supoenas Thrown Out
08.10.03 by Bipasha Ray (Boston.com) | | | | | The RIAA has been playing fast and loose with the law... requesting supoenas for personal information for all sorts of regular they find thrying to experience music freely. The trouble is, they really don't care about the paperwork or accurately filling out the requests for supoenas. In fact, they don't even care if the supoenas are issued from the proper jurisdiction. All they want is to sue! sue! sue! and they will do what it takes to get that done, law be damned. | |
| | Big Surprise, Nobody Cares
08.02.03 by AP Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | We didn't need a study to tell us thatThe reason nobody | |
| | Oh, NOW the Senate Seems Concerned
07.31.03 by John Borland (CNET News) | | | | | The recording industry's wave of subpoenas that target individual computer users has drawn the critical attention of at least one influential lawmaker on Capitol Hill. Which is funny, because they really didn't give a shit when they heard testimony about what bastards the RIAA really is. | |
| | Hey, Let's Sue the RIAA
07.30.03 by Matthew Broersma (CNET News) | | | | | It turns out that a good amount fo these record induistry supoenas to stop file sharing have been improperly filed, too broad, and infringe on people's privacy. Of course the RIAA doesn't care; the law is secondary when rich bastards think they're losing dough. It always was. | |
| | Intel Gives them the Keys
07.29.03 by Michael Kanellos (CNET News) | | | | | Intel has announced that they will incorporate file encryption on their chips. This will allow people to control your mp3s. Just watch. | |
| | Secret Networks are Everywhere
07.28.03 by Powell Fraser (CNN.com) | | | | | Constant RIAA pressure has not gotten rid of file sharing, it's only made it more pervasive and harder to track. The latest development is private encrypted networks -- where you have to be personally invited and given access too. The RIAA also claims these are illegal, too. Now you can't even trade cds with your friends without the RIAA getting their panties in a bunch. | |
| | Colleges block RIAA Supoenas
07.22.03 by Jay Lindsay (Associated Press) | | | | | Two colleges step forward to block the RIAA supoenas, because they were filed improperly. The RIAA, bloodlust in it's eyes, simply doesn't care. | |
| | Hither They Come
07.19.03 by Reuters Staff (CNN) | | | | | The moment we have all been waiting for is about to arrive! Yes, the RIAA has requested the names of the heaviest users who were trading music on KaZaa, and the lawsuits will begin arriving as soon as next week. Yay! Then if this run is a complete success, more will follow, to be sure. | |
| | And Here's What They'll do to You
07.18.03 by Reuters Staff (CNN) | | | | | Leave it to two democrats to come up with brilliant idea#44: let's throw all the people who trade music online in jail. | |
| | How Much Does a Congressman Cost?
07.17.03 by Andrew Orlowski (The Register) | | | | | The RIAA just paid $18,000 for this congressman's vote... how much is yours worth? | |
| | Who Gets the Money from MP3 Sales
07.14.03 by Nancy Einhart (Business 2.0) | | | | | Ever wondered where all the money from legal, purchased, mp3s goes? Rest assured that your friendly neighborhood major record label has once again cut up his share of the pie and the artists get the leftovers. Although on the surface, it appears to be slightly better than an actual record deal (the artist will probably get paid this time), rest assured that eventually these numbers will change even further in favor of the labels as time moves on. | |
| | What is Blubster?
07.10.03 by CBS Staff (CBS News) | | | | | Here's an article about Blubster -- the newest file sharing service that will defeat the attempts of the record label to shut it down. Notice the sarcastic biased attitude of the article against file-sharing. Bunch o hacks. In fact, why not just skip the article and go right to www.blubster.com? | |
| | Here Come the Lawsuits
06.25.03 by David McGuire (Washington Post) | | | | | Here it is, the moment we've all been waiting for... the RIAA is promising lawsuits! lawsuits! lawsuits! in 8-10 weeks. And they're not just going to sue file services again, but you and I as well. | |
| | Crazy Guy Caught Without Pants
06.19.03 by Leander Kahney (Wired News) | | | | | Okay, remember a few days ago the crazy guy on the Senate Judiciary Committee that recommended hacking people's sytems if they use copyrighted material? Well, it turns out his website has some unlicensed code... | |
| | FCC Has to Start All Over
06.18.03 by David Ho (Associated Press) | | | | | While we certainly are no fans of many of those in the senate who have gotten their fat asses involved in this area in the past... and while this sort of shit is what took low power FM off the menu... a senate committe is recommending dismantling the FCC's plans to allow these big media mergers. And even though they're generally jerks, and probably doing it for all the wrong reasons; way to go! | |
| | How Crazy is This Guy
06.17.03 by Ted Bridis (Washington Post) | | | | | So this guy is now advocating actually destroying people's computers to stop "illegal" downloading. It's not bad enough that this man has proven himself to be clinically insane; he's also the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. | |
| | Iraqis Have Boy Bands, Too
06.12.03 by Andrew Marshall (Washington Post) | | | | | Funny how it takes Iraqis to put together a boy band that actually writes their own material. | |
| | Inside Apple
06.07.03 by Derek, CD Baby (Gnutella News) | | | | | These are the top-secret notes from the Apple ITunes closed-door meeting that were *accidentally* released to the web by Derek, from CD Baby. | |
| | Something Rotten This Way Comes
05.30.03 by Paul R. La Monica (CNNmoney) | | | | | Regardless of its crap service, AOL is the largest ISP out there right now. So, it has always been an important thing which browser they use as part of their AOL desktop. First it was their own browser, then they went went with Microsoft, then they kicked Microsoft out and went with Netscape, Now they just kicked Netscape out again and are going with Microsoft. Why, you ask? because Microsoft has a new way to "secure digital media" and they want to try it out. | |
| | They Couldn't Kill It
05.23.03 by Reuters Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | Despite every attempt to kill it, Kazaa has just become the most downloaded program in history. | |
| | The FCC is Feeding the Blob
05.22.03 by William Safire (CNN.com/NY Times) | | | | | The FCC is about to loosen restrictions on how many media outlets a company could own. Get ready for radio to suck even more. | |
| | Someone Else Tries the Old Way
05.21.03 by Reuters Staff (CNNmoney) | | | | | Yet another company has decided to do it the old way.., selling mp3s like they were plastic. The only difference is this time they are bypassing the royalty agents and paying the artists directly. This, of course, upsets those at the current royalty feeding trough. | |
| | Providence Invaded Once Again
05.20.03 by IOTW staff (RattleHead Records) | | | | | Once again, RattleHead Records has taken control of downtown Providence and turned it over to the musicians. | |
| | Who Killed the Single?
05.18.03 by Tim Burt (FT.com) | | | | | The record industry used to make lots of money selling singles... now they claim that file sharing is to killing off that market. Our feeling is that the pimp betta find some new hoes and stop complaining that the old one ain't bringing in the dough. | |
| | RIAA Now Targets Students
05.16.03 by Mike Darrah (winamp.com) | | | | | The RIAA bares its fangs again... this time targeting anyone who dares set up filesharing services to trade mp3s on THEIR OWN NETWORKS! A little intrusive, perhaps? Well, that's what the RIAA is all about. | |
| | Everybody Loves Apple Now
05.12.03 by Associated Press Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | Steve Jobs of Apple succeeded in teaching the record industry something fundamental: just sell the music for a reasonable price with no strings attached. People will pay for reliable, quality distribution. (Seems like a no-brainer to us around here, but these record execs are kinda slow.) | |
| | Apple Makes it Go
05.06.03 by Brian Garrity (Billboard.com) | | | | | Wow, someone offers a new online music service that's not patronizing and cuts through all the Digital Rights Management bullshit -- and it seems to be working. Go figure. | |
| | And You Thought They Were Evil Before
05.03.03 by Andrew Ross Sorkin (New York Times) | | | | | A glimpse into the record industry's box of dirty tricks. As if it wasn't bad enough the crap they've done to try and keep control over us... now they're even developing quasi-legal software to knock us offline, crash our computers, and just generally make our lives even more miserable. Is this what you want your relationship with music to be like? | |
| | Where it All Stands Now
05.02.03 by Time Magazine staff (Time Magazine) | | | | | This article was published by Time Magazine, which is part of Time/Warner, which means they are not going to be sympathetic to the actual issues involved in file sharing. And this article is not... it pretty much takes the hardline against the practice. Then, at the end, it seems to regrettfully conclude that it's here to stay. In either case, it's a good description of exactly where we are in this whole music revolution mess. | |
| | The Harrassment Begins
04.29.03 by Sue Zeidler (Yahoo News) | | | | | The record industry has gotten permission from a judge to begin targeting individuals who use file services -- even though these services have been found to be legal -- and the labels are beginning to send threatening messages. The first of which are being sent via instant messenger. Say goodbye to the old-school record label... personally pissing off it's customers one at a time. If they really had some balls, they'd identify the label or the artist that is the source of the complaint, but they don't. | |
| | Hackers-1 Madonna-0
04.28.03 by Reuters Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | Madonna tried to get in on the newest big label anti-piracy technique: flood the servers with bad decoys of your song. She thought she'd be clever, so she recorded her own diatribe about file sharing... then, had it co-opted and resampled and mixed all over the web. | |
| | Apple Sells Music for 99 Cents
04.27.03 by Peter Thal Larsen and Scott Morrison (Financial Times) | | | | | Apple has entered the fray, and now offers users legal downloads for 99 cents per song. Could the announcement have anything to do with the Verizon verdict two days ago? Hmmmmmm... | |
| | Federal Judge Bitch-slaps Recording Industry
04.25.03 by John Borland (CNET News) | | | | | The verdict we all have been waiting for. A federal judge has finally come to their senses and realized that file agents like KaZaa, Bearshare, Morpheus, etc. are completely legal. | |
| | Verizon Forced to Reveal Kazaa User
04.24.03 by David McGuire (washingtonpost.com Staff Writer) | | | | | This is Earth-shattering: A court has once again order Verizon to reveal the identity of the Kazaa user who has been using their network to download music. This will unleash a virtual flood of cease-and-desist lawsuit letters to literally tens of millions of users. Do they really think that is such a good idea? | |
| | Pirates and Posses
04.16.03 by James L. Gattuso, Bruce Mehlman, Alec French, Gary Shapiro, James V. Delong (Heritage Foundation) | | | | | This is a transcript of a Heritage Foundation lecture about digital copyrights. It features the usual pro-copy control political hacks, but also a stellar thought-provoking argument from James V. Delong. | |
| | RIAA Targets College Students
04.04.03 by Frank Ahrens (Washington Post) | | | | | Yes, the day has come that we've been warning you about for almost a year, since the RIAA had young cadets expelled from a miltary academy for downloading music. Today the RIAA has started suing colleges that allow downloading on their networks. Now, they're really going to begin pissing everyone off, just watch. This is the beginning of the backlash. | |
| | All Pearl Jammed Up
04.03.03 by Mark Brown (Rocky Mountain News) | | | | | A round of anti-Bush remarks from Eddie Vedder cause fans to leave a Pearl Jam concert in disgust. Eddie then answered people's boos with a quick diatribe on free speech. What Eddie really wants is free speech without consequences. He wants to be able to cough up any righteous political view he can and wants everyone else just to agree and shut up. Like most liberal artists these days, Vedder seems to think that free speech only applies to his views... any opposition seems to cramp his style. | |
| | Madonna Pulls Anti-War Video from US
03.31.03 by AFP Staff (Yahoo News) | | | | | Madonna has pulled the US release of her new video, which contained images of transvestite soldiers, Iraqi children and a grenade being lobbed at a lookalike of US President George W Bush. The problem appears to be that she filmed the video before the war began and now doesn't think it makes as much sense. But, it was released in Germany, where such images make that much more sense. We guess. | |
| | Musicians Divided on Iraq
03.24.03 by Howard Cohen (Miami Herald) | | | | | You'd think based on a lot of the media attention given to anti-war musicians, that most musicians were anti-war. That is not the case. Just because pro-war in Iraq people feel a war is the correct decision, does not mean they are "warmongers" in any sense of the word and will probably not gather publicly to support killing. But don't think they aren't there. As this story will show, not only are they there -- but fans are identifying with them. | |
| | Another Piece of the Robotic Music Puzzle
03.12.03 by Annanova Staff (Annanova.com) | | | | | So it's not enough that they've reduced the mass marketing music to shelling out chunks of mindless bullshit to the lowest common denominator, now they're going to let a robot pick the mindless bullshit for them. Problem is, it's still mindless bullshit. | |
| | You Said it
02.18.03 by Sue Zeidler (Reuters) | | | | | Arbitron claims that it's survey shows that people like you are much happier today with their radio choices. And, you are saying that it's a good idea for the government to allow more radio stations to be owned by the same people. That way the people in Los Angeles can now program sheep in Wyoming as well as Rhode Island. Just ask Clear Channel about San Diego -- they own all of the stations in the market, plus 3 broadcasting from Mexico. Already working around the rules, it seems. | |
| | Now They Sue Your Boss
02.14.03 by Associated Press Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | The music industry is busy dismantling the greatest device for distributing music ever created: the internet. Now, if they see you downloading music at home (and they can), they will sue your ISP. If it's at work, they'll sue your boss. And if you're a Navy cadet, you can be discharged. All this just to protect their distribution network and feed their obsession with little pieces of plastic. | |
| | Listen to This Person
02.02.03 by Janis Ian (LA Times) | | | | | Janis Ian provides a first hand description of how free music has helped his career and how the labels want it gone to push people like him into obscurity. | |
| | 1200 Could be Too Many
01.31.03 by Fredric Frommer (Associated Press) | | | | | People are starting to ask questions about this whole idea of loosening radio ownership restrictions. No one we know will say that radio actually is better these days; most people thinks it's stagnant and homgenized. And after you hear what's going on in San Diego, you'll think they're trying to take over the world. | |
| | KaZaa Fights Back
01.28.03 by AP Staff (Washington Post) | | | | | Finally, the little guy strikes back. The RIAA has sued KaZaa for copyright infringement, so KaZaa has sued the labels right back. They claim that when all the labels get together and file these suits, that they are acting as a monopoly. (Hey, if it walks like a duck...) And, while they're at it, they threw in a nice dig about how the labels are dinosaurs that just don't understand the market changes. | |
| | Music Industry War Plans
01.24.03 by Reuters Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | Nope, the big labels are not backing off. Like lemmings, they are attempting to remove copyrighted content from the digital domain. | |
| | The Bastards Win Again
01.22.03 by Andy Sullivan (Yahoo News) | | | | | A judge has ordered Verizon to hand over the personal info of a customer to the RIAA, so they can sue the living crap out of some poor guy who traded mp3s online with Kazaa. This will unleash an assault of automated lawsuits as the RIAA thinks they have found a way to stop online music trading. In actuality, what they will do is put the last nail in the coffins of the big labels. After all, who's going to listen to Britney Spears anymore when you lose your DSL line just because you downloaded her piece of crap song? | |
| | Another Great New Idea From the RIAA
01.20.03 by Jack Russell (The Inquirer.net) | | | | | Now the RIAA has launched another thuglike attack on online music downloading -- now the RIAA will sue ISP's who give you access to online downloading services. So, Verizon DSL will get sued if they continue to allow you to access to Kazaa, for example. Regardless of what you intend to do with Kazaa... and even if it doesn't involve music. Funny how our basic freedoms to access information are suddenly a threat to these corporate bastards, eh? | |
| | Microsoft or Microsuck
01.19.03 by Bernhard Warner (Yahoo News) | | | | | Microsoft has formally announced -- on a weekend when no one was watching -- that they have finalized their plans for copy controls and will be integrating them into the next Windows operating sytem, Palladium. If you think this will stop professional pirates, you're insane, all this will do is inconvenience the rest of us. We will need permissions and licenses now to even access our own music. Brought to you by Microsuck. | |
| | MPAA and RIAA -- different spellings for asshole
01.17.03 by AP Staff (Associated Press) | | | | | There's no trying to get these people to work together. They all want to control the way you use music and movies, but none of them can agree on exactly which weapons to use. Some want to require manufacturers to disable copying mechanisms, some want to hacker attack you when you download music, some want the service providers to be sued, others want the government to get involved. But none of them are even suggesting "doing nothing"... in fact, they're beating each other up for a place in line to jam us all up the ass. The only consolation from our end is that it's incredibly entertaining watching dinosaurs die. | |
| | Supreme Court Once Again Makes Sense
01.06.03 by AP Staff (CNN.com) | | | | | A hacker had placed a snippet of code on his website that allowed people to copy DVD's. The Motion Picture Industry sued, and had a judge order it off the site. In protest, hackers in quite a few places sold t-shirts with the code printed on the back to help pay for the defense costs. It all paid off today... the US Supreme Court has overturned the lower court's decision and once again reaffirmed that in the United States people can say and write whatever they want. Whether it's code or on the back of t-shirt. And on a related note, isn't it funny how we protect people's rights to post bomb-making instructions on the internet, but sue the crap out of anyone interfering with a giant corporation's wallet? | |
| | The Complaints, "Criminal Mind"
09.14.02 by J. Hunter (Inside Society) | | | | | J. Hunter reviews the Complaints new CD, "Criminal Mind". See what Hunter has to say about it inside... | |
| | CD Reviews
09.02.02 by IOTW Staff (Columnist) | | | | | Here's some quick n nasty CD reviews by the IOTW staff for Pray for Nothing, The Cautions, Ripwikit, Shiver, Lamotta, Illustrious Day, Train of Thought, Fred's Bowling Ball, Betty Finn, The Haymakers. | |
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This group contains the latest headlines in the world of interest to local musicians. They can be local or national, and often consists of ongoing coverage of the war over digital copyrights and the emergence of new markets for musicians. |
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