Music Industry to Abandon Mass Suits
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If the major ISPs cared about their customers this wouldn't be happening to begin with.
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.
After: If you get busted you have to switch from cable to DSL (or vice versa).
I suspect many people will welcome this change (until they get their sixth strike).
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...
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.
Could you be more specific about the apps you use and the caching features?
I'm interested in moving my music into the cloud as well.
Thanks.
Edit: were you referring to a theoretical service or a real one?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Less financial 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.
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.
-fixed
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.
I also heard of some companies trying to apply this to specific cases.
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.
What other group of bumbling idiots would sue/lash out/isolate their customers & users while ignoring the latest & greatest technologies.
Actually, they have a lot in common with the auto & publishing industries. I'll enjoy watching them crumble.
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)