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Comments: 254 +- Your Rights Online: Virgin-Universal Deal Offers Unlimited Music, Goes After File Sharers on Monday June 15 2009, @05:03PM
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suraj.sun writes "The UK's Virgin Media could start suspending persistent file sharers on a temporary basis, using information provided to it by Universal Music. The ISP announced on Monday that it would, before Christmas, launch an all-you-can-eat music download service for its users, based on a monthly subscription fee. The tracks will all be DRM-free. 'In parallel, the two companies will be working together to protect Universal Music's intellectual property and drive a material reduction in the unauthorized distribution of its repertoire across Virgin Media's network,' a statement read. 'This will involve implementing a range of different strategies to educate file sharers about online piracy and to raise awareness of legal alternatives. They include, as a last resort for persistent offenders, a temporary suspension of internet access.' DTecNet has already been working with UK content companies for some time to do much the same thing, and is also working with RIAA in the United States."
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Sounds like a plan (Score:4, Interesting)
Are they going to suspend Virgin Corporation's internet access if one of their employees downloads an MP3 using it?
Re:Sounds like a plan (Score:5, Insightful)
Are they going to suspend Virgin Corporation's internet access if one of their employees downloads an MP3 using it?
Of course not. They're going to suspend it if Universal alleges that they did.
Prosecutor, judge, jury.
Parent
Re:Fairness in the EU (Score:4, Insightful)
Note the number of manufacturers on that list. Creative Labs makes seven, there are a bunch of "Rios" by Sonic Blue, a couple by Nike (?!?) and ... oh, yeah. Apple.
So, which of those *many* players does my local electronics store stock? Well, I'm not sure cause their online search is hooped. I'm sure at least some of the players on that list are long obsolete.
I wouldn't call that a list of "many non-iPod players." I would call it a list of three companies who did a licensing deal with Apple.
If you meant to imply that the gp was full of it when he suggested that iTunes - for all practical purposes - really only works with iPods, sorry to burst your bubble.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dude. AAC is a standard format. Just like MP3.
And if anything, they should be taken to task for charging so much for music (in NZ, the prices go as high as $2.40 a track - fuck that), rather than the lack of DRM free music (I should note that the entire iTunes catalog is already DRM free, negating 33% of your comment).
Re:Fairness in the EU (Score:5, Informative)
Apple uses the AAC format which is an open royalty free format designed to replace mp3. Alcatel-Lucent owns the patent on MP3. So, Apple chose the more modern and more open format. Any company can support or use AAC without paying any royalties.
You might want to check on your facts [vialicensing.com] a little more.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
AAC blows. My Sony Walkman NW-E0005x uses it and it royally blows. The encoding has more bugs than a 2.0 Microsoft product and doesn't work well even with hardware designed specifically for it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because you didn't buy one of these players [apple.com]. Note the many non-iPod players on that list. If you meant to imply that iTunes was somehow locked to only work with iPods, sorry for bursting your bubble.
That only applies to iTunes on the Mac, not the Windows version, for which none of those will work. And this feature doesn't seem to be offered to vendors or developers anymore, it's a remnant from when Apple was selling iTunes before the iPod came along, and those legacy players were grandfathered in.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow... you actually like itunes? I can't stand the thing. The only thing I do actually like is that I can subscribe to podcasts and it auto-updates them... but i'm sure lots of other music player's software do that as well, I just have never used them.
Itunes is slow as a dog (on a quad core machine with 4 gigs of ram no less)
I despise it's music ordering structure or lack there of (this is probably more of a gribe with the IPOD UI)
Using it with audiobooks has been a frustrating and hair pulling experience
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Itunes is slow as a dog (on a quad core machine with 4 gigs of ram no less)
I find this hard to believe. My mother uses it on her 550MHz P3 and it seems responsive. On my C2D Mac it doesn't cause a noticeable spike in CPU load except when encoding.
I despise it's music ordering structure or lack there of
Personal preference. Some people like to create complex structures, but most don't. This is one of the reasons why programmers make terrible UI designers; almost all programmers fall into the category that does, while most of their users tend to fall into the other category (there was an interesting paper published about this around
Virgin? Pfft (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Virgin? Pfft (Score:5, Funny)
Anal doesn't count.
Parent
Monthly fee (Score:5, Funny)
Net Neutrality implications? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Net Neutrality implications? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Net Neutrality implications? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh no it's not risky.. you are not looking at it right.
Everything for one monthly fee, and they will be going after file sharers and illegal file holders with vigor...
I.E. if you dont subscribe and have music on your computer, you're a criminal. The ONLY way to not get labeled a criminal is to subscribe to the service.
I might be paranoid, but Evil is as Evil does.
Parent
Re:Net Neutrality implications? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Net Neutrality implications? (Score:5, Interesting)
But record companies don't care about being morally bankrupt; They're just in business to make money.
And after all that, if you really think there's still some reason that record companies should exist, and moreover deserve some portion of your income or mine, I'd love to hear it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It's always been that way. US cable companies would get really narky at you if you downloaded tv shows on their services.
Generally speaking ISPs only care as much about piracy as they're forced to because they make money by selling you internet access(it's a little different in the US because the US doesn't have quotas so they get narky if you use too much bandwidth, but not much). However if your ISP produces or distributes the content you're pirating they're all of a sudden really concerned. Virgin distri
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Is it like America across the pond where many municipalities allow broadband providers a legal monopoly?
Virgin Media is the result of a group of mergers between all of the cable companies in the UK. There are basically three ways of getting wired Internet access here:
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting. First off, when they say suspend, does that only go for Virgin Media customers (if there are any, not sure what the UK ISP world is like)?
Second, the all-you-can-download idea sounds reasonable. If the catalog is extensive enough (including classical), and it truly is DRM-free and platform-agnostic, I could actually see myself using this. They had better make sure the file metadata is good (a large collection with good metadata is worth paying for), and it'd be nice if they had something like iTune's "Genius" to find things you might like based on your current collection.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
From a consumer side of things, a pay-per-month model of getting access to a DRM-free library does sound good, but it seems awfully fishy that Universal would offer it. Wouldn't most people sign up for 1 month, download everything they want, and then cancel? Or are they really going to make it cheap enough, and adding new (good) content frequently enough, to make the whole thing worth it? I have my doubts.
As far as suspending copyright infringers, I've always been concerned by how readily ISPs seem to punish their own customers over a civil dispute in which they ought to have no stake. I guess if they're getting a cut of the action with this service, it makes some sense.
Parent
Why help Universal screw artists harder? (Score:5, Informative)
If Universal had a deal where the artist gets half of the take, you'd have far less reason to suspect an all-you-can-hear deal because you'd know you're helping artists and encouraging them to publish more music. As it is, there's nothing in this deal which even suggests a better arrangement for artists (the people corporate copyright holders love to trot out whenever illicit copying and distribution comes up).
The catalogs aren't the same, and neither is the history of pay-for-play, but compare the deal Universal is touting to the deal Magnatune [magnatune.com] has offered for years. Both are all-you-can-hear, but Magnatune lets you set the price (above a specified minimum), you get more choice in what types of files you want (I like FLAC, it's unencumbered, lossless, and I can transcode to something lossy if I choose), the half-goes-to-the-artist deal still stands, and artists license Magnatune which allows artists to retain their copyrights. Magnatune has no history of pay-for-play but all of the biggest music publishers do; I see no reason to reward that history with my sale. I didn't have to worry about risk: anyone can listen to Magnatune's entire catalog online at no charge. I don't have to worry about risking my Internet connection if I share Magnatune tracks [magnatune.com] either; even if Magnatune had the power to suspend my Internet connection I've got license to share. I put my money where my mouth is and I've bought an unlimited subscription from Magnatune. I'll not do the same with Universal until their deal gets a lot better for me and the artists whose interests they claim to care about.
Parent
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Debatable.
It's easily said: download everything they want. Maybe quite a few people will do that: sign up, binge on free mp3s, save them, then quit. But it seems to me that the people who would do that are pirates already. They've already downloaded everything they want.
Meanwhile, if you're Joe Average, can you enumerate all the tracks you want, such that you could grab the lot of them in one mass download? It's a hell of a job. You'd always forget some band or other, then months later slap your head in frustration and go 'Oh... I knew I should have downloaded more of the back catalogue of Oingo Boingo!'
I don't view the service here as 'pay to download music'. It's not really a sale thing. Why would I buy what I can have for free? This service is pitched at the lost generation, at the people aged 30 and down who have completely lost touch with the idea that music is something you pay for and then keep. We now treat music differently. Music is free - and I don't want to hear about copyright: maybe music SHOULDN'T be free, but that doesn't change the fact that it IS free.
What I'll pay for is the service of organising music. My music collection is a total shambles. It's inconsistently tagged. It's encoded at a variety of bitrates and in a variety of formats, such that no MP3 player made since the glory days of iRiver will play them all without a Rockbox hack. And it occupies disk space that could be used for anime or porn. Frankly it's a mess.
So that's what might attract me to Virgin's offering. If it's as complete as The Pirate Bay or more so, and the music is consistently tagged and encoded at a high quality, then a monthly fee is eminently fair to have access to that resource. Why would I download and keep any of it? Why should I go to the bother of maintaining my own collection? It's right there on a service run by my own ISP at the other end of a 20 megabit connection. Music on demand. The colossal cloud jukebox.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point of ISP's suspecting copyright infringing users is pretty simple, and one that has yet to be tried out.
Real simple. There is no safe harbor for what your customers are doing. If they are doing illegal things that the ISP can detect and block - something that is probably not far off - they have an obligation to do so. Failure to do so means they are an accomplice and liable for damages, at least contributory damages.
Today nobody has tried this approach because it is not clear that an ISP can detect copyright infringement in a clear and unambiguous way. Should this change, ISPs will certainly be viewed differently in the US.
You are not correct on this, at least not in the US. One good thing that came out of the DMCA (continue reading once you get off the floor) is the "safe harbor" provision, aka OCILLA. An ISP is considered under section "a" in most cases, as they are providing only a connection, not hosting the material. If they are hosting the material (for example, an ISP who gives each user space to host a personal website), they can still follow the safe harbor provisions for that service under section "b", while remaini
No oversight. Who polices these people? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, where's the due process in all of this?
Oh right, it's business, so it can do whatever it likes.
Someone bring back the mafia, at least they had style.
I wonder how much this subscription will be, and whether it will be mandatory or optional. It won't get money to the non-label bands though, will it, just Universal. Wankers.
Too little, too late? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really a shame that it took over a decade for a music producer to provide what people have been asking for instead of trying to force their own solution down their customers throats.
Oh wait...they still want to suspend accounts.
good luck.. hard to compete with $0 (Score:2, Insightful)
I can already go to the library, or even the radio to listen to free music but I guess it is a small step in the right direction.
It only took them how many years after iTunes and Amazon mp3 was out?
> In terms of both convenience and value, our new music service will be superior to anything that's available online today
Bwuahaha. Let me know when I can download .FLACs
Interesting but... (Score:3, Interesting)
What format for the download? 128Kbit lossy compression? I could not find any mention of that. For it to really work out, I would want at least CD quality lossless compression.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the same company that cries it's customers are using too much bandwidth at the same time as announcing a new faster service. Given the apparent blindness to what their broadband customers want broadband wise I'd be surprised if they manage to offer a music service that keeps mp3 users happy let alone those who want something better. The more companies spend all their effort crying about how their business is hurting because of their customers, the less able they are to offer a service those customer
Re:Interesting but... (Score:4, Insightful)
> Legal or not, if this isn't AS GOOD AS what us pirates can get, then just why would we even think about paying for it?
Some sort of crazy notion of rewarding people who create the content in the first place?
Parent
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a content provider of sorts (I do graphics, icons etc., not music, but it's still "IP"), if I sold the rights to one of my creations with a deal like most musicians get, if I later found out people were downloading my creation for free, thus screwing me out of a cut, I wouldn't be pissed at them. I'd be flattered that they took the time to download my stuff, and I'd ask, if they've got some spare cash they want to reward me for my work, then they could paypal me whatever they like. Kinda like donationware...
I say this because if just 1 in 100 downloaders gave the musician $1, then they'd already be getting about 5 times as much as a lot of record labels give their creators.
If you want to support a band, paypal them, or go see a concert, or buy some hoodies or t-shirts.
If you want to give more money to the soulless scumbags who would literally try and sue the dead, only to then try and sue the living descendants of said deceased for "damages" that could not feasibly be real (on the order of tens of thousands of times the actual value of damages inflicted), then completely wreck the grieving families lives through court cases, legal fees, media scrums etc. only to find said deceased was completely innocent and not even have the god damned common fucking courtesy to say sorry; if you want to do that, buy a record.
I'd rather buy conflict diamonds from africa, and have some vietnamese $1-a-day wage-slave set it into a ring made of nazi-gold than ever buy anything ever made by the labels that are part of the BPI or the RIAA or the MPAA. Only by starving these grubby little parasites of their money can we begin to set right the system whereby an artisan gets paid a fair amount for their work, and their art is allowed to become part of teh social consciousness.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The rest of slashdot is busy making up goals to be met by any service before they will stop pirating, crazy goals, mostly unobtainable goals, just so they can justify their piracy to themselves.
The rest of Slashdot would like a word with you, the word is cluebat. [wiktionary.org]
Perhaps after you have stopped attributing what you worry may be your own failings to others you can jump down off that high horse and appreciate that what you're saying has diddley squat to do with the issue at hand. Do you really think that the vast majority of people who buy music do so out of the goodness of their hearts? I mean, attributing peoples motivations to their use of money says a lot about your own priorities and not a lot a
Re:Interesting but... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, now this is where I have problems. Here is how the arguments have gone over the past years...
1. You shouldn't pirate...
"Well, we don't want to buy the whole CD! We only want good songs!"
Introduce iTunes/Amazon
2. You shouldn't pirate now...
"DRM! AHHHHHHHHHH!"
Remove DRM.
2. You shouldn't pirate now...
"The pricing model is bad and too expensive!"
Introduce scaling pricing with popularity.
3. You shouldn't pirate now...
"We can't get all of the songs we want for one low rate!"
Introduce unlimited downloads.
4. You shouldn't pirate now...
"We can't get the songs in as good of a quality as we want!"
This is stupid. People like yourself are obviously not going to pay no matter what because there is a free alternative. Please just stop trying to justify yourself and just say, "I like free stuff, and since I can get it, I'm not paying!" At least it would be honest instead of hiding behind a thinly veiled curtain of "complaints."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll take your argument one step further. The real fact is that the product, once created, is totally worthless. It has no value. It is raw data. It can be duplicated perfectly ad infinitum at practically zero cost, therefore supply is infinite, therefore value is zero. The only thing that actually has value is the act of creating the product. The time put into the creation, the time the artist spent honing his or her talents, this is where the value truly lies.
We don't know how to deal with this conc
MP3s as a legal download... (Score:2)
So when you introduce legal MP3s, does that mean it is now impossible to detect illegal content?
.
.
You read these stories about police or customs finding pirate content and I wonder what the chances of getting hit with that after just using this service to download MP3s? And if these MP3s contain signatures what is stopping me from altering my existing music library to make it appear legitimate? When everything is an MP3 who is to say what was obtained legally and illegally?
Music publishers won't sig
What you aren't seeing... (Score:2)
Is the law they are crafting that they will call the "RetroActive Pirating Extended Digital Unity" Act. (The RAPEU Act) that will allow copyright holders to get logs of all users who have downloaded music without DRM and force them to pay a media shifting licensing fee of 10 dollars (so that they can have the right to convert the music to CD, MP3 Player etc..) per song.
Has to be said.... (Score:3, Insightful)
1) I'd signup for a month or 2
2) Download everything and anything music related they offer.
3) ???
4) Cancel Subscription
Re: (Score:2)
But music changes..... At some point your friends will abandond you, your girlfriend will leave, and you will be left with your outdated collection.
All to save a few bucks. Or pounds. Or whatever.
Re: (Score:2)
The thing is, they've (Virgin at least) figured out that they're getting money if you do that, rather than that other copyrightey-violatey thing that so many people do already.
And you never know, maybe you end up (somehow) enjoying the service enough to keep coming back from time to time.
Or, you know (Score:2)
Information? (Score:3, Insightful)
The UK's Virgin Media could start suspending persistent file sharers on a temporary basis, using allegations provided to it by Universal Music.
Fixed that for your.
I live in England... (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternative (Score:4, Informative)
An alternative for UK surfers:
http://www.ukfsn.org/ [ukfsn.org]
I have no affiliation with them, but...
"all profits from UKFSN go to fund UK Free Software projects"
"Our policy is that the electronic communications of our customers are private. We do not intercept, censor, scan or otherwise interfer with our customers' internet service."
"UKFSN does not and will not have any dealings with Phorm, the company behind the Webwise system being deployed by some other ISPs to intercept customer internet traffic. We are firmly of the opinion that the Phorm Webwise system is illegal under UK and EU laws. We also believe it to be fundamentally unethical to intercept customer traffic in this manner. It will never happen here."
"There is some suggestion that the UK government would like to mandate some form of interception and possibly censorship. We would encourage all interested persons to make it clear to MPs and the government generally that this is not acceptable."
Hurrah (Score:3, Funny)
I am totally stoked about Virgin Media's forthcoming music download system and fully believe that it won't be an overhyped sack of crap at all. The downloads will certainly be unlimited, fast, cheap, not watermarked and of at least cd quality from an enormous library of popular, familiar tunes the exact same recordings of which will be currently or formerly available in record shops on cd.
Unconstitutional. In ANY country. (Score:4, Informative)
internet is no longer an amenity of modern technology. its a FEATURE of life. which affects many things ranging from, especially, freedom of speech and right to receive information to paying bills online. some european governments are even carrying over all kinds of services that citizens need from a government online. therefore internet is not a luxury anymore, its a BARE necessity of MODERN Life.
just reflected in the french high court decision, striking the dumbfucked 'three strikes and youre out' law as unconstitutional. that is the case in any country of the world.
just wait until virgin and universal gets sued by an angry subscriber who misses to pay his bills online, or cant access his bank site, or cant use new online government services.
no, actually dont wait. its unconstitutional, its YOUR country, YOUR constitution, YOUR rights. stand up for them. give them a piece of your mind.
I'd pay for that (Score:4, Insightful)
Vast library of mp3s, directly from the labels, and DRM free so that I can back them up, thus allowing my purchase to survive hardware failure? (And yes, requiring backup is of course valid; I'm not asking for this in order to facilitate piracy)
Sign me up, Universal, quite seriously. This is a better deal than what someone could hypothetically get on IRC for free, simply because it removes the electronic legwork they would have to do if they want particularly old/rare/obscure files. Pirates generally only trade what's popular; being able to drink straight from the labels' tap means I can get whatever I want, whether it is popular or not, I don't have to waste time looking for it, I can potentially get it at top sound quality, AND I don't have to worry about being prosecuted or sued.
I don't know about the rest of you, but in my mind, piracy is motivated purely by pragmatism; free mp3s are considered a better deal than per-cost CDs. However, give me a service where I can have just about everything since when Cocky was an egg, catalogued, and with a 384 khz bitrate, even better, and I'll be there with bells on, and will be quite happy to pay.
I'm not paying for the actual files themselves here, necessarily. What I'm paying for is a) file quality, b) guaranteed availability and convenience, (due to the source) and c) legal protection.
A flat monthly fee would be preferable to me, but we could talk about just about anything up to around $50 AUD a month. Get 100,000 people to sign up for that, and you've got a $5 million pilot program. I could be wrong, but something tells me that upwards of $10-$20 million a month is something the RIAA could potentially be interested in. ;)
Here's another idea for giving us both some security without the DRM bogeyman, as well. Give me a digital receipt with a unique key every time I download some paid-for files from you, and I'll keep it in the same directory the files are in, and back it up with them as well. That way, if there's ever a question asked, if you keep that key on file, we can both know said mp3s have come from you, and that I haven't pirated them.
It could work brilliantly.
So you're watching what I do on the internet? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can the phone company do that?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
They get paid for doing what pirates are currently doing for free. They get a reliable stream of income from people who don't shut the service off after downloading everything they want. Universal promotes its catalog, which if it includes current artists may mean additional concert revenues. They keep people in the habit of paying for music, particularly the kids who grew up with music downloads being the norm for obtaining music. They create another avenue of advertisement and promotion for artists th