UK Musicians Back Watered-Down "Three-Strikes" Rule 229
A brace of anonymous readers sent along coverage of UK musicians who have turned around to support three strikes, or a milder variant of it. What they suggest is more like "three strikes and you're hobbled" — after a third offense a downloader would be not disconnected, but rate-limited. The artists involved include Lily Allen, George Michael, and Sandie Shaw. The Guardian has more details. The final quote from the music industry, striking out at UK ISPs, is priceless: "BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading. That's not only unfair to artists and creators, but penalizes BT's many customers who use the Internet legally."
That's fine, you just lie there and be ironical (Score:5, Insightful)
"BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading."
Doesn't that pretty well describe the music industry to a T right now?
Be that as it may (Score:5, Insightful)
Illegal downloads hurt all of us
So do laws which find the accused guilty based on the accusation alone.
It doesn't matter how mild the punishment is. Accusation alone, no matter how many there are, should never be sufficient to determine guilt or impose a sentence.
In any civilized society, the accused must have an opportunity to defend himself, and guilt must be determined by an impartial party.
The pillars of justice are more important than the profitability of business models built upon artificial scarcity.
Re:Lilly Allen quitting over this (Score:5, Insightful)
Never heard of her. But I have heard of Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Ravel.
Maybe it would be a good thing if the modern music business died.
Re:Lilly Allen quitting over this (Score:1, Insightful)
Apparently, despite her repeated claims to the contrary, Ms. Allen really IS a whore.
Somebody should remind her that the other 99.9% of musicians who aren't "stars" haven't ever made a living at music, and do it because it's something they enjoy.
arg (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone hasn't been convicted of breaking a law there can be no punishment. If they had anything of substance against someone they wouldn't be pursuing a three strikes law; they'd be in court. If the music industry doesn't want to follow the law but instead act on a hunch then I'd say the entirety of their limited monopoly should be done away with entirely. The law should not be used to intimidate; its purpose is to serve society not serve the greedy to the eclusion of all else.
Free Speech is worth more than Profitable Music (Score:4, Insightful)
That's all I've got.
It is basically just old technology against new (Score:5, Insightful)
And as allways before, the old technology will lose and be a historical footnote. So will the companies and artists that do not understand the new one or are unwilling to switch. No law will help. This has happened countless times before and the outcome was always the same.
True, the times were you could get rich distributing creative works by others are over. Distribution is now extremely cheap. Also true the times of insanely richt musicians are likely over as well. Those that adapt will still be able to live very decently, as long as their product does apeal to a reasonable number of people. Examples exist. On the plus side, all those that had problems earning anything, now have the chance to distribute globally with very little cost. Getting a global small audience was pracitcally impossible before. And any audience contains a significant number of people that are willing to pay or donate. I do not see the music culture losing anything overall, just a few rich, lazy and inflexible peole that cling to the old status quo. I do see "big music" dying however.
What counts as "a strike"? (Score:5, Insightful)
What counts as a "strike"?
I know the obvious smartass response of "anything the RIAA/MPAA wants", but in practice... Let's even say, for the sake of argument, that "they" can 100% reliably detect when I download something copyrighted. We then have a problem in that everything (in the past 75 or so years, varying a bit by country) has a copyright on it. When I visit the totally legit New York Times website, I have downloaded copyrighted material. When I buy a song on iTunes, I have downloaded copyrighted material.
So now we need the qualifier of "unauthorized", which becomes much more subjective. Who can authorize me? If I have Trent Reznor in my office and he tells me to grab a copy of his latest unreleased album off Kazaa, then I have "authorization" from the artist himself. Yet my ISP has no way of knowing that.
Okay, too unrealisitc? How about MySpace, which Ms. "Can't even write her own anti-piracy rant and has to steal it" Allen used to great effect to promote her own career... Any moron can upload tracks there, even under the band's name (if the band didn't already think to make an account). How can the ISP ever know which count as legit and which don't? For that matter, how can we know the difference?
So yeah, I have a problem with effectively taking away my primary means of communication with the rest of the world, by force of a law that I can't accurately know whether or not I've violated.
Call it overly dramatic, but I don't think the courts realize yet that for anyone under 40, depriving them of internet access amounts to a "dead to our entire peer group" sentence. Just wait, we will see people going on mass killing sprees over this.
Re:About Lily Allen (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And Be That As it May... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lilly Allen quitting over this (Score:3, Insightful)
I would like to get paid for my comments on slashdot. Doesn't give me the right to lobby congress to pass laws that force readers to pay me.
Re:Lilly Allen quitting over this (Score:3, Insightful)
That's rubbish. I know several musicians who only play pub gigs and sell CDs out of the back of their station wagons, and they're still very much alive. Perhaps they aren't living la dolce vita, but the fact is that they're alive. Imagine if Lily Allen adopted this model - are you suggesting that she would perish from malnutrition, unlike my musician friends? The fact is that just because these "chart-toppers" have gotten used to being paid squillions for stringing together a few songs, doesn't mean they deserve to continue to receive squillions. Times are changing. Modern computers enable people to produce music for a fraction of a percent of what they used to cost. If they were really in it just to make music (as they claim they are), then why would piracy be a problem? Pubs will always need musicians to play gigs, and that's a liveable wage if you're halfway talented.
Re:illegal downloading is hard to stop (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can download music for free, why bother purchase it from itunes?
The problem has gone far beyond that. When the *AA wants Apple to pay for each 30 second sound sample, when they try to remove all independent internet radio stations, and remove YouTube videos with music on them, that is too far. Seriously, how many songs has anyone bought without knowing them? No one buys songs without at least knowing the artist or at least hearing some of their other songs. If I can't even hear what the artist sounds like why am I going to buy the album?
Re:And Be That As it May... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, it isn't far off from what we have now. There are too many crimes out there that are too heinous to be found innocent of; simple accusation warrants the worst punishment. The legal system may still be applied, but the minds of those in it, and those who make the laws, are too clouded by knee-jerking to actually think rationally. Innocence? You were accused; innocence is no excuse, and you will be punished.
Outcry has replaced justice, and pundits have replaced judge and jury. What the sparkly box with faces in it says is true cannot be argued with; what is written in Wikipedia must be fact; what the drudge report aggregates must be news. Welcome to the Information - or perhaps, Media - Age.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And Be That As it May... (Score:5, Insightful)
OTOH, accusation is sometimes enough to warrant corrective action. Which while it might be inconvenient, should not be so harmful that it can't be resolved afterwards, should the accused in fact be innocent.
You are a danger and a menace and should be removed from posting on Slashdot.
See how that works?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's fine, you just lie there and be ironical (Score:3, Insightful)
"BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading."
Doesn't that pretty well describe the music industry to a T right now?
That, of course, is the joke, but I think even more silly is that the accusation doesn't make any sense in the case of BT. "Old business model"? Huh? If anything, it's the newest business model around.
One gets the impression that the music industry heard themselves accused of said offense, but are hoping to grab the initiative in the public eye.
I think it's actually a common propoganda technique: accuse your opponent of that which you are guilty of, and do it early, and often. If you're lucky, it will stick in the public eye, even if it doesn't make any sense; when the (uninformed) public hears your opponent making the same charge of you, they may think he's "just copying", and will dismiss the accusation, even if it actually makes sense in that case.
Re:Finally, some sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Dude, you're missing one big point.
Motley Crue sold like 40000 copies of "red white and crue", a compilation album. That alone netted a total income of about 7 million bucks.
Do you think they're going to give up the ability to make such a massive profit on a couple days' worth of work and tons of marketing? That's really their money machine, the marketing. It has nothing to do with the bands being good in alot of cases (Cases in point: Jonas Brothers, Britney Spears, and a million others). They can just sell the bejesus out of their product.
Imagine what would happen if these dudes got shut down, anyway. The guys in their marketing departments would end up in other industries, and I imagine many companies would end up going bankrupt extremely quickly because of pure marketing destruction.
They might still be voting... (Score:1, Insightful)
> So have any of those three stated a position on this policy?
I'm not sure that they've made any statements (unless they're still voting), but the RIAA seems to think that retroactively extending copyrights by 20 years every 20 years will incentivize them to produce more music...
Re:arg (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Finally, some sense (Score:4, Insightful)
No matter how illegal, how immoral, how unethical a down loader's conduct might be - those people who wish to punish him need to go to court to punish him. The ISP has no authority to punish anyone, nor do the rights holders. Only the court has that authority. Attempting to delegate that authority to anyone other than the court for any reason undermines any claims of "justice". It's really that simple.
I will not change my mind for some argument of "Woe is me, I can't afford to file an injunction and a suit against everyone who "steals" my song!" To that, I say, "Tough shit, dude. Find another way to make money from your work, or find another line of work!"
Re:Lilly Allen quitting over this (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe it would be a good thing if the modern music business died.
The music business actually died a long time ago. What we have now is the *record* business. They're only concerned with moving plastic, and view the artists who supply the music only as contract labor hired to make that physical product. The artists are the only people in the record industry that actually care about the music. Everyone else is only concerned with slapping a price tag on anything that will give them a nice turnaround to bump up that figure on the company's quarterly earnings sheet, and it doesn't much matter what that is (as will be obvious any time you turn on your radio).
Speaking as a musician, and as a fan of music, it brings me no end of joy to know that technology has made these dinosaurs superfluous in nearly every regard. From recording, to distribution, to promotion, musicians just don't need them anymore. And that's a beautiful thing, especially considering how shamefully artists are generally treated by the big record houses.
Also, Lilly Allen is a hack.
Re:George Michael supports it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, very funny, make fun of poor old George.
But don't forget many reputable artists support this - like... em.... Lily Allen.
And what about Sandie Shaw? Downloads of "Puppet on a String" must be crippling her career.
Re:And Be That As it May... (Score:3, Insightful)
Where did this "distribution" thing come from? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing saying that you have the right to control distribution in the constitution, is there.
You've make that up just so you can say that P2P is wrong.
And free speech means I can say what I want, even if someone else said it before.
Even if I say it to a tune.
And play an instrument.
In front of lots of people.
Even if they paid to get in.
THAT is free speech.
Censorship is what you want and it is the antithesis of free speech.
Now if you want us to agree to censorship, you'd better pay up to get your control. You get nothing for nothing. So if we're going to give up our own free speech, what will YOU give US?
Re:George Michael supports it? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why are the opinions of these 3 people held-up as worthy of newspaper attention? How many musicians are there in the UK (including orchestras, DJs, folk musicians, etc, not just "the record industry") and why are their opinions not equally valued by the major newspapers?
Re:Finally, some sense (Score:3, Insightful)
I think such long copyrights are a wonderful idea. But surely if life+70 years is so important to the profitability of creative art, it must also be so retroactively. If we are granting rights to dead people in the future we should also grant them to dead people in the past.
And now on behalf of the danish family of H.C.Andersen and the german family of the brothers Grimm I would like to charge the Disney corporation and all it's resellers for criminal copyright infringement (theft and piracy) to damages of 150'000$ pr instance and jail sentences all round.
That Disney can argue that such a long copyright term is necessary, when their own business model is and was to steal works that would be under copyright when using their own definition, is a display of a mind-bogling amount of hypocrisy.
Re:What counts as "a strike"? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not just dead to peer group; most modern jobs require use of the internet in some way. It's a sentence of poverty (which coincidentally is becoming essentially more illegal every year...)
Re:That's fine, you just lie there and be ironical (Score:4, Insightful)
Lets provide the answers for the most disingenuous of fools.
1) Cheap hi-def video phone calls (typical family times that by four).
2) Typical wedding, christening, birthday, anniversary videos, distributed to all guests.
3) Hi-def web cam feeds from all over the world, the scenery channel like it's never before been seen.
4) Web parties, vid cam links ups with big screen displays.
5) A whole world full of legally free creative commons work, remember it never stops going back and forth because it keeps getting added to, complete with, shock horror, free publishing and, oh my god, an absence of commercials (yes, I know it is the ultimately threat to locked up world of dead end media).
6) Live streams from every political chamber from all over the world, complete with speech feeds from every standing and potential politician, the end of corporate for profit and corruption, broadcasting of political commercials, a new era in politics.
Now I know that someone like you might find that last one the most threatening of them all but you have no idea of my level of contempt for your ignorance. Just think sex, drugs and rock and, roll and it's greedy drunken drugged minstrels and publishers will completely and utterly lose their ability to influence politics via political donations.
Re:You pay anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
The point being is that it is not free and if the RIAA/MPAA or local equivalent is upset about that, then it's the ISP who will be faced with some form of tax or levy because presently there is no other way around it.
They know that's the road to hell paved with dubious intentions. Once you introduce a tax or levy, people feel entitled to download since why else are they paying? If you don't try to meter it, chances are people will download everything because it's a sunk cost and kill sales. If they try to raise the levy to a point that matches sales income, it'll be absurdly high and everyone not interested will cause a huge backlash. If they make the levy variable they're back to the impossible task of monitoring all forms of P2P. Starting off down that road will only lead to even more accusations of being leeches on the Internet infrastructure and will only give them even more bad will. They are losing the political maneuvering room all over Europe, according to the parliament elections (Bundestagswahl) in Germany today the pirate party got 2% of the votes. It's not enough to break the 5% limit but it will be if the music industry keeps being so hostile against people.
Re:Finally, some sense (Score:3, Insightful)