100 Years of Copyright Hysteria

Nate Anderson pens a fine historical retrospective for Ars Technica: a look at 100 years of Big Content's fearmongering, in their own words. There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music ("What of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"). There was the photocopier after World War II. There was the VCR in the 1970s, which a movie lobbyist predicted would result in tidal waves, avalanches, and bleeding and hemorrhaging by the music business. He compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler — in this scenario the US public was a woman home alone. Then home taping of music, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and Napster, each of which was predicted to lay waste to entire industries; and so on up to date with DVRs, HD radio, and HDTV. Anderson concludes with a quote from copyright expert William Patry in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."

Re:The have fought and lost

[im just cannonfodder]

lets not for get who is actually behind the MPAA - RIAA, these are the companies that need to be targeted and boycotted into changing their ways, purchase only 2nd hand media and do not purchase anything branded sony, why allow the fecktards to dictate Orwellian hardware DRM designed to take away rights not to stop piracy anymore.

Name and shame the companies as all the **AA trade group name is for is to protect the corporate globalists from bad press.


RIAA, CRIA, SOUNDEXCHANGE, BPI, IFPI, Ect:

# Sony BMG Music Entertainment
# Warner Music Group
# Universal Music Group
# EMI


MPAA, MPA, FACT, AFACT, Ect:

# Sony Pictures
# Warner Bros. (Time Warner)
# Universal Studios (NBC Universal)
# The Walt Disney Company
# 20th Century Fox (News Corporation)
# Paramount Pictures Viacom--(DreamWorks owners since February 2006)


============


If Sony payola (google it) wasn't bad enough to destroy indie competition you have this:

Is it justified to steal from thieves? READ ON.


RIAA Claims Ownership of All Artist Royalties For Internet Radio
http://slashdot.org/articles/07/04/29/0335224.shtml [slashdot.org]

"With the furor over the impending rate hike for Internet radio stations, wouldn't a good solution be for streaming internet stations to simply not play RIAA-affiliated labels' music and focus on independent artists? Sounds good, except that the RIAA's affiliate organization SoundExchange claims it has the right to collect royalties for any artist, no matter if they have signed with an RIAA label or not. 'SoundExchange (the RIAA) considers any digital performance of a song as falling under their compulsory license. If any artist records a song, SoundExchange has the right to collect royalties for its performance on Internet radio. Artists can offer to download their music for free, but they cannot offer their songs to Internet radio for free ... So how it works is that SoundExchange collects money through compulsory royalties from Webcasters and holds onto the money. If a label or artist wants their share of the money, they must become a member of SoundExchange and pay a fee to collect their royalties.'"

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/4/24/14132 [dailykos.com]

Re:Do not forget the systematic abuse of the law.

[Anonymous Coward]

The RIAA use of stand-over tactics, mostly sanctioned by courts that failed the little man, is an innovation. . . . . . . They will be swept away in time and few will mourn their passing.

standover tactics

plural noun

Definition:

Australia use of threats to extort money: the use of threats of violence in order to extort money or force somebody to do something

Re:What's being ignored

[dascandy]

Theft: Removing something that wasn't in your posession, in order to have the advantages for yourself and accepting that you are depriving somebody else from their advantages.
Embezzlement: Removing something that was in your posession but not yours, in order to have the advantages for yourself and accepting that you are depriving somebody else from their advantages.
Copying (music, video, software etc.): Making a copy of something, in order to have the advantages yourself, without depriving anybody else from their advantages.

No, sorry, this isn't theft. It isn't even embezzlement. When you steal my car, I am without a car. When you embezzle the money I lent you, I'm left without that money. When you copy my software, I still have everything I had before.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is
being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet
music. So we are not that much more passive than we already
were. We're just no longer in the practice of making our own
mediocre performances at home based off of works that are
sufficiently dumbed down.

OK. Perhaps I should have said performed rather than create (although don't underestimate the ability of people to improvise when they are encouraged to engage with music from an early age)

However your comments about mediocrity are exactly what I'm getting at, not all of us is Mozart or Beckham but music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.

Note that I am not saying we should not also encourage those with elite levels of talent but I believe that there is a healthy balance from which we've long strayed