What Counts as Music and Why? 324
The Importance of writes "There has been much discussion about compulsory licensing schemes. Most of the debate has been about music. But what happens when any file can easily be converted into a sound file and back again? Can shareware authors convert their software to digital music and get paid for sharing it? Can pornographers get paid for turning images into sound? Scott Matthews has written a program (Ka-Blamo) that does the conversion. LawMeme looks at some of the issues. This raises the question, what should count as music and why?"
Re:Transacting the undefined (Score:4, Insightful)
Prose, news, music, poety, pictures, movies -- it is really just o's and 1's.
If pictures were receiving the same laws, we could easily change pictures to music as well. We can change text to music without any difficulty.
Everything goes down to binary... changing it from format to format is trivial.
Davak
Program Renamed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well, IMHO (Score:5, Insightful)
If all you pay is at the concert, you are contributing to skyrocketing ticket costs for concerts. Composing, recording and producing an album takes time, talent and money. Artists and technicians involved in that process deserve to be paid for their work just as you are paid for yours.
I do believe the system contains massive amounts of unnecessary overheat. The meat isn't very lean, so to speak. Record executives rake in huge salaries, while most artists, which pay those execs, are lucky to make gas money. This needs to change. It will be a long, slow and painful process, but I think we are in the beginning stages of that now. Just remember, the execs won't give up their fat salaries without a fight.
I remember when concert tickets for a major act were $20 at a major venue. Going to a concert was affordable then. And I went to a fair number of concerts. Today, the major acts are pulling in $75 for those same seats. Sure, you can go to some shows for $35, but those are generally acts from the 80s or emerging bands. Even so, it's nearly double what it was less than 20 years ago.
If concerts were affordable, I'd go far more often. Paying your fair share at every step of the process (not just for concerts, but for the CDs, too) will help.
Piracy only makes the problems worse and it's a lame excuse to break the law.
Steganogrphic obfuscation of copyrighted works..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Compulsory licensing is a bad idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Compulsory licenses? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can shareware authors convert their software to digital music and get paid for sharing it?
Why would they want to do that? It's better for a copyright holdere not to be forced to offer a compulsory license.
Re:Music is Music (Score:5, Insightful)
If I take a photograph of a tree and encode it into bits, those bits will always represent the content of an image, even if some stupid Baudio-like program presents those bits as though they were some other sort of media. Even if I'm the one pretending it's a
This is crucially different from some of the examples he gives, which don't really apply to his "codec" at all.
In steganography, two different works are combined into a single encoding. This does -not- make the resulting file a single work, nor does it make the included image a song, or the included song an image.
The DeCSS song is a little more complicated, depending on whether you believe it is intended to (and can be) enjoyed as pure music, or whether it is merely intended as a vector for code. In any case, there is real audio content that's been provided.
4'33" was meant to be enjoyed as audio content, so it is, even though the 'art' is actually in the lack of audio content. It's not like the silence (or in Baudio's case, noise) is really meant to be pornography.
Hmm... I think a key differentiator might be what -analog- formats the content exists as. We live in an analog world and digital encoding can really only exist as a means of temporarily storing something inherently analog. Content is analog.
This whole argument just seems... stupid.
Stupid enough to make me actually post...
I know, I know. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Compulsory licensing is a bad idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
Who said this is what compulsory licensing will do?
As I understand it, compulsory licensing means just that: publishers are compelled to offer licenses at a predetermined rate. That means I can download any song from anywhere, and as long as I send the predetermined license cost to the owner of the copyright, that copy is legal.
What does this have to do with collecting money from ISPs?
Re:Music is Music (Score:2, Insightful)
Running an audio file converted to an image through a JPEG or GIF compressor will result in irreversibly useless garbage. This has a lot to do with the vast differences in different media types' notions of space over time. Audio frames are much smaller than video frames.
Considering there are entire musical genres consisting of people just talking (think poetry/spoken word), along with other non-musical copyrighted audio (very popular in reggae and dancehall, for example), I doubt the industry juggernauts would bother to flinch at the idea that audio valuable enough to trade in any significant amounts isn't worth manually examining and cataloguing.
Hey, Guess What? You Have To Use Judgement (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, guess what? You have to use judgement. In fact, they actually have people in court called judges. You know. Those guys and gals in the funny black dresses and/or wigs depending on where you hail from. Last I heard the judges--get this--actually have to judge things. They haven't been replaced by referees who simply follow the rules as written. We know that because they aren't wearing black and white striped shirts, and they don't blow whistles (or whatever it is refs do in other games and countries besides USA football).
Of course there are guidelines. Personally I'd say anything that can be played live and sound enough like the recording for a jury to identify the tune as unique from other tunes, and to name that tune, is music.
Thus, bit barf dumped to a .wav file is not music because nobody can play it on an instrument, and most bit barf would sound very similar to the jury.
But of course you'd have to use judgement. Some wrapper stopping and starting bit barf while bragging about his sexual conquests might fall into the grey area, but if enough people testify that they find it entertaining and prefer Cornrow Groovy bit-barf fine ladies to other works of the same genre, then guess what: It's music.
But the bottom line is that somebody will have to make up their minds, it may be subjective, and the loser will have to live with the answer.
Yeah, that's tough. Nothing's perfect.
How to define music (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1787, Mozart invented A Musical Dice Game for Composing a Minuet [univie.ac.at]. Given the results of the game, I assume that one can derive the dice numbers that created it. (If not, it shouldn't be hard to modify the game to possess that property.) Now, play the game using a fixed string of bits instead of a random number generator. The result is very definitely music, and it isn't steganography.
The use of a Mozart encoder and decoder would be even more powerful than Ka-Blamo.
Re:Music is Music (Score:5, Insightful)
It refers to sound recordings (that's how Shatner "got away with it").
The story's question is phrased somewhat improperly improperly.
Nor is the issue new. It's just more pressing now than before. Without using a computer at all I can convert light (and therefore photoimages) into sound and vice versa. I can turn mathmatics into music and music into mathmatics (Mozart was fond of doing this and developed a method using dice to develop themes). I can turn text into images, sound ( no, that's not a degenerate statement. I can turn text into arbitrarty sound. It's called "reading music" and any text can be used for such).
What is needlepoint other than a set of Cartesian Coordinates with a color code translated into an image?
How about this piece of paper I have here with some symbols on it? Is it my copywritable intellectual property, or is it a chess game? And if I can copywrite it what rights do the players have to it? It was their game, and thus their creation, after all.
Computers just make the process faster, easier and more ubiquitous, but artists, scientists and home experimenters. .
And then there was Dr. Leary. Think about it.
KFG