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Audiogalaxy: dead

  
  

Page: 12(3)

 
 
The Apple-Picker
12:31 / 20.06.02
One might say that if you value an item, and value retaining said item, and would be annoyed should you be unable to retain said item - or if someone took it from you - then you also are in the process of viewing said item as a commodity.

I've never studied economics. But this seems awefully broad to me. I don't think this question challenges the information argument. If someone took my box of diskettes (yes, I still use those), I would be pretty ticked. Not because I give a darn about the a 3.5" slice of plastic, but because I'm annoyed that I don't have access to the information that was stored on that slice of plastic. If someone took my favorite cookbook away from me, I'd be mad because I don't have the information to make my favorite recipes anymore.

Are you saying that information is and should be treated as a commodity, too?
 
 
The Apple-Picker
12:32 / 20.06.02
Just to clarify--that was a real question. No note of sarcasm intended.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:32 / 20.06.02
Well, the logical thing to do would perhaps be for the record industry to accept that they cannot possibly control the Interwebnet, but invite the major P2P sites to become subscription-only in exchange for a promise of non-liability for the content available within, while retaining the right to prosecute individuals (which it will only bother to do if somebody is behaving egregiously), then go after the operators who refuse to do this, aided by the "licensed" sites, which will be eager to get rid of competition which offers for free what it charges for. If, after some have decided not to bother, 40 million people all pay, say, $10 a month, that generates a reasonable slug of revenue for the big record companies to divide up. Other labels or acts could receive a fraction of the profits from banner adverts on the site, so that popularity provided funding, as well as the usual "order the album" and "PayPal some money for a higher-quality version/to show your support/for merchandise". The opportunity to offer related material (official merchandise, concert tickets, PPV concerts) gives the big labels another channel to market, and the sites can symbiotically take a cut from that, like Tom's Amazon links.

Meanwhile, by cutting the cost of CDs a little, the big companies can start using the sites as a launchpad to stimulate interest in artists rather than seeing it purely as something that will eat into their sales.

It's not an ideal solution, but it may be a way to broker a compromise. Because at the moment, as far as I Can see, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the case, the industry is attempting to shut down a technology by attacking its individual proponents, which seems a rather Lernean response, and ultimately not one that will work.
 
 
The Natural Way
12:45 / 20.06.02
Absolutely. This isn't technology that can be controlled or moderated....and it's just going to proliferate, get bigger, get "worse". D can prattle on about the LAW and morality (which, like Flux, I'm sick of him equating), but it's not going to change a thing.

Creative thinking, not draconian legislation. Backwards into the future!
 
 
cusm
12:50 / 20.06.02
Just FYI, in the US it's perfectly legal to duplicate media you have paid for provided it's for non-commercial use.

You know, you're right there. Copyright law previous to the DMCA stated it was legal to use and copy the materials so long as you didn't make any money off them. It was actually quite legal to make bootlegs. You just weren't allowed to sell them. As soon as $$ becomes involved, its illegal as a portion of that money should go to the copyright holder.

Now under the DMCA, its distribution itself that has been made illegal, not sales. Providing unauthorized access to copyrighted materials or even linking to a site that does is grounds to have said access revoked. Its not about the $$ anymore, its about the data itself, and I think that's where this has all gone wrong.

Its the DMCA that we need to overturn, cause that's what the lobbiests pushed through and what the RIAA is abusing to increase their stranglehold over the data.
 
 
Ria
17:00 / 20.06.02
August 2002 boycott and petition and so on against the RIAA:

links:

Boycott RIAA membership

Boycott RIAA main site

Death to the RIAA

Save Audiogalaxy group
 
 
Turk
17:52 / 20.06.02
"Just FYI, in the US it's perfectly legal to duplicate media you have paid for provided it's for non-commercial use."

Oh dear. Possibly www.RIIA-sucks.com isn't quite bastion of plain truth it may claim to be. In anycase, Napster, Audiogalaxy and the rest are commercial enterprises.

"Are you saying that information is and should be treated as a commodity, too?"
Certainly from one point of view the commodity is in the work put into creating that information, a commodity often best quantified by adding a commercial value to the information.

"So you've never driven over 55 then?"
Boy are you asking the wrong guy.

"I'm just wondering, incidentally, what D's - or anyone else's, for that matter - view is on making a tape or a CD copy of a disc for a friend? A compilation tape or MD selection would be the process of sharing in a different way, right? I'd be very surprised if there were people here who hadn't taped things for their friends in the past: where's the difference?"
Nobody is actively encouraging or creating a system directed at that duplication. Unlike Audiogalaxy it's impossible to close down and prevent, I could go on but I'm bored. What a silly question.
I really don't mean to be so rude, but it's irksome to see arguments people would normally laugh used by them because they like the cause. Ignorance in the name of good, isn't really ignorance to cheer.
 
 
some guy
18:58 / 20.06.02
Just FYI, in the US it's perfectly legal to duplicate media you have paid for provided it's for non-commercial use.
Oh dear. Possibly www.RIIA-sucks.com isn't quite bastion of plain truth it may claim to be.

I've never been to that site. Duplicating media for personal use is a legally protected act in the US, and all attempts to change that prior to the DMCA (notably the Sony suit) have been smacked down. The DMCA appears to to violate this fair use protection, and at some stage the courts will have to hand down a ruling overturning one or the other. But it hasn't happened yet.

In anycase, Napster, Audiogalaxy and the rest are commercial enterprises.

How is AudioGalaxy a commercial enterprise if it doesn't charge any money? What about the underground P2P systems that are set up specifically by music fans as free exchanges?

Nobody is actively encouraging or creating a system directed at that duplication.

The very existence of the blank media market hinges on the widespread duplication of media. It's why the movie studios went nuts when Sony first launched blank videotape. To rail against file sharing but not blank media sales is just stupid, because they enable the same things. P2P just allows it to occur on a wider scale. It's worth noting that many libraries now carry CDs, which enables the same thing. Should audio art be removed from libraries?

Unlike Audiogalaxy it's impossible to close down and prevent

There are alternatives to AudioGalaxy that have no centralization to sue or terminate. Before long there will be P2P networks that will be literally impossible to turn off. Even if completely decentralized P2P networks turn out to be too unwieldy to use, all it takes is a single server in Vanuatu and the next Napster is back online and immune from legislation or legal action.

This is why the actions of the RIAA are so stupid - rather than create workable solutions that benefit everyone, as detailed above, they are alienating both the consumers and recording artists that pay their salaries. When the indestructable P2P net rolls along in three or four years with no central infrastructure or management to focus on, the RIAA will have blown their chances of adapting to a new paradigm for music sales.
 
 
_pin
19:11 / 20.06.02
Notes and addenda:

I appear to have forgotten to mention explicetly that I feel there should be subscriptions to P2P systems to fund artists.

D appears to have to forgotten to mention explicetly what the fuck his point about mix tapes actually was.

I don't know, maybe he just hasn't noticed that tape-swapping goes on all the time. There are sites set up for people to trade tapes with people they've never met. There a re systems for this, and the tools for it are readily and cheaply avalible. Yes, it can't be practically stopped. Neither can this. Do you even have points any more?
 
 
Turk
19:39 / 20.06.02
"To rail against file sharing but not blank media sales is just stupid, because they enable the same things. P2P just allows it to occur on a wider scale."
Misleading once more. P2P, Audiogalaxy in this case explicitly REQUIRE duplication of material, whereas buying a blank cassette does not. False comparisons again, you guys never learn.

"How is AudioGalaxy a commercial enterprise if it doesn't charge any money?"
Advertisements, t-shirts and what have you, both dependant upon the brandname and traffic created by the free service that 'encourages' the duplication of copyrighted material.

I'm bored of this, toodles.
 
 
nikon driver
19:40 / 20.06.02
kinda off the point right now.
but is it just me or has soulseek disappeared?
i can't access the sight through my satellite thingy and the web pages don't seem to be working either.
 
 
Jack The Bodiless
19:56 / 20.06.02
I'm beginning to suspect that D just enjoys playing 'Devil's Annoying Kid Brother'.

Haus, thanks for that... that's an example of a potential compromise solution that could benefit everyone, except the corporations that everyone (Audiogalaxy, you, the artists) would be better off without.

We need to make sure the artists get some cash for their contribution, yes? Because without them, we don't have anything to discuss, right? If you think that buying the occasional T-shirt or going to the occasional gig is enough, you are embarrassingly mistaken. When was the last time you saw a Richard Thompson T-shirt? What about artists whose music is not predisposed to gigging in the conventional sense? Or what if the nearest gig is six thousand miles and several oceans away?

If we get rid of the record industry, how do they get paid? Independent labels, I hear someone (probably Flux) cry... great. Except that the Catholic church started out as a small set of people meeting in Simon Peter's living room, and EMI started out as a small concern too. All you're doing is substituting one piranha for another.

So artists have to have complete control over their own stuff, and be able to market and distribute it themselves, which is finally both possible and practical on the net. Except that people like Audiogalaxy are giving tracks away for free. Certain tracks - yeah, great advertising. All of them? In this record-company-free environment in our heads, who's going to pay for songs they can get for free?

Safeguards need to be set up, and they need to be commonplaces in society and in law before such a situation becomes a probability rather than a possibility. That's what I think, anyway... what about you? Speak me a tidal wave...
 
 
some guy
21:39 / 20.06.02
Misleading once more. P2P, Audiogalaxy in this case explicitly REQUIRE duplication of material, whereas buying a blank cassette does not. False comparisons again, you guys never learn.

Blank media is pointless without duplicating material. The duplication is therefore the sole reason the blank media exists. In fact, P2P networks are merely a linkage of this media. There's no tenable reason to view them as different animals except in scale. If AudioGalaxy is in the wrong, then so too must be Maxell and anyone else selling blank media, including the company you bought your hard drive from.

If you're so bored, why do you bother to respond? Surely there are more interesting places to troll...
 
 
Matthew Fluxington
21:40 / 20.06.02
Misleading once more. P2P, Audiogalaxy in this case explicitly REQUIRE duplication of material, whereas buying a blank cassette does not. False comparisons again, you guys never learn

Wow. That's insane. How ELSE do you make a mix tape/cd other than by duplicating material? Recording music on blank cassettes, blank cds, blank minidiscs - are they that different from storing music on a harddrive? If I give a tape to someone they have several options available for them to duplicate the sound on that tape to tape, digital files, minidisc - just the same as a person who downloads something from my harddrive. Why is personal trading of mixes different than file sharing, other than simply being an improved version of the same process?

There is no stopping technology at this point. Pretending that we can suddenly go back to the 1960s is not going to happen. If artists and corporations do not embrace change, and try to negotiate compromises (like the sensible one Haus offers, for example), there stand to be far greater losses for more people, the people who will be burned horribly by technological and economic progress that passed them by.

The RIAA (and our beloved Mr. D) are being overly conservative, and are forcing themselves to distinguish black and white in an ocean of grey. The simple fact of the matter is that they've been out-voted, and out-moded. I understand that being idealistic and clinging desperately to old distribution models is attractive for these people, especially if they are the ones who stand the most to gain from keeping the current status quo intact. We can't go back to the old system. Everything has changed, and will continue to change. Just because the morals and legality of the new paradigm are difficult to sort out and have even some degree of control over doesn't mean that this situation can't be figured out in a way that is both foward-thinking and fair.

I think most people agree that artists deserve to be paid for what they do. I certainly do. I think that the biggest point of contention in all of this is that we all don't agree that the RECORD INDUSTRY needs to be paid as much as they are for enabling artists to do what they do.

I think that the record industry has to make the first move - they NEED to drop cd prices, at least by 50%. If they need to become less bloated and excessive, then that's just going to be a sacrifice they will have to make. If they don't make their market more friendly to the common person, the common person will continue to seek out ways to get around them. They can fight bootlegging and copyright violations all they want, they'll never stop them. It's just as same as why severe drug laws have never done anything to discourage people from taking drugs.
 
 
some guy
21:46 / 20.06.02
I like the idea of a subscription service in which downloading MP3s is "free" but the artists get a cut of the pie depending on how many downloads they received. Another idea is micropayments, in which you would pay a fraction of a cent for an MP3 of say, So Hard (KLF vs PSB mix) but the scale of millions of users would translate into sizeable cumulative royalty payments for the artist.

One point nobody seems to have made yet is the positive aspect of record labels - namely providing the money for studio time and experienced producers. Of course computers are changing this, but only for certain types of music. In a subscription P2P world that bypasses the record labels, how would you finance production, especially for small artists working on what would otherwise be their "major label debut?"

The interesting thing about the labels' behavior to me is that pricing albums at $5 would not only still return millions in annual sales, but go a far way to stamping out popular use of pirate P2P services. Corporate greed is helping to foster the piracy...
 
 
some guy
21:51 / 20.06.02
One other thing to consider, if I can keep tossing stuff out. Eventually, the RIAA will be unable to pursue legal action against popular P2P networks, because they will be completely decentralized and owned by no one. At that point, they will have backed themselves into one option - suing individual consumers.

Anyone care to speculate what will happen at that point? Especially when filesharing has already surpassed the public attitude toward marijuana (ie: Government says no, People say yes)?
 
 
Grey Area
22:04 / 20.06.02
Would this be a good time to metion that the record companies kicked up a similar fuss back when cassettes were introduced? Cassettes were seen as being the doom of the recording industry. Now, more than 30 years later, the recording industry is still around and stronger than ever.

I believe that this supports Flux's point that we are at the point where a paradigm shift has to occur with regard to how music is distributed. Like it or not, digitally encoded music will become a commodity that we all have to pay for. It's just that right now, the music industry is focussing more on stamping out the rampant online distribution of their products than on a sensible method of controlling this distribution.

How come did the RIAA not kick up a fuss when Sony launched it's advertising campaign for the MiniDisc format that hyped it as a medium that let you create your own "perfect mixes for perfect moments". As a result of Sony's decision to tout MD's as a mixing-medium rather than a pre-recorded medium, sales of MD units soared. Yes, so the lack of fuss probably centred around the existing legislation allowing for one copy to made as long as you didn't distribute it, and the MD format has safeguards to prevent digital copies to be made of digital copies. The point I am trying to make is that Sony is also a huge music company...they're perfectly happy with a copying medium as long as they still get some money out of it, through the sales of recording units and media. Once this obstacle (terminology might be a bit off here but I can't think of a better word) to MP3's is removed, I think we'll find that the industry opposition to MP3's will die down very quickly.
 
 
cusm
23:50 / 20.06.02
Isn't Gnutella a decentralized P2P network? I haven't looked into it much, but that's how I thought it was supposed to work. Kind of like IRC relaying, but for Napster.
 
 
cusm
23:53 / 20.06.02
Oh yea, and speaking of IRC, that's been used for years as a decentralized P2P network to swap Warez. mIRC remains a usable alternative for unkillable music swapping. Only, it requires a little more clue than Napster and the like to use so the crowd is limited to the 7331.
 
 
videodrome
02:46 / 21.06.02
One point nobody seems to have made yet is the positive aspect of record labels - namely providing the money for studio time and experienced producers. Of course computers are changing this, but only for certain types of music. In a subscription P2P world that bypasses the record labels, how would you finance production, especially for small artists working on what would otherwise be their "major label debut?"

Record producers and studio time cost a lot of money because labels will pay the asking price. If there's less money circulating in the system, the prices will drop. A producer and good studio does not have to be expensive - the ones that are have fixed their prices to take advantage of big-label budgets, but there are many ways to do a quality job for little money. I know half a dozen people who've been recorded by Steve Albini, and they're all people who work in bars, coffee shops, record stores. These ain't millionaires, but they've had their record produced by a world-famous guy, in a damn fine studio.
 
 
_pin
08:00 / 21.06.02
Can I point out again that I did try and say that a subscription service that creates a big pot of money that goes to people as and when they deserve it was what i tried to propose in my first post, before Haus, but I'm an ignorant, vitriolic, unguigded and unfounded teenager and so fucked it up.

Thank you Haus for being beeter then me.

Anf for real, that wasn't sarcastic.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:00 / 21.06.02
Not at all. I was just adding my own thoughts to your idea, based on the sad truth that the big record labels (or entertainment brands, or whatever they are) will have to be bought off before the artists ca even think about benefitting.

Micropayments is a very good idea, although how much of that pot would have to be divvied up and how much attemtion something would need woudl be a worthwhile question.

Hooom. Take Curve. They have a small but devoted following, they release albums by Internet order, or by download, they own a studio (AFAIK) so their actual outcosts are pretty limited...they don't need to sell many albums to make it worthwhile, or at least justify the time and expense in the name of art. Possibly the problem is that the profits do not appreciate as they would if you were selling a million albums at $18.99 rather than $14.99...
 
  

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