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Musicians Demand the Internet Stay Neutral
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Mar 29, 2007 08:47 AM
from the bits-is-bits-man dept.
from the bits-is-bits-man dept.
eldavojohn writes "124 bands — including R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Pearl Jam — and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep Net traffic neutral. The Rock the Net campaign wants all traffic to be equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign, which has the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in its camp. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., spoke at the campaign's kickoff. I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independents and small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."
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RIAA Forces YouTube to Remove Free Guitar Lessons 341 comments
Bushido Hacks write "Is it so wrong to learn how to play the guitar? According to NPR, a record company ordered YouTube to remove videos of a man who offered to show people how to play the guitar for free. One of the songs that he taught was copyrighted, and as a result over 100 of his videos were removed from the internet. 'Since he put his Web site up last year, he has developed a long waiting list for the lessons he teaches in person. And both he and Taub say that's still the best way to learn. If someone tells Sandercoe to take down his song lessons, he says he will. But his most valuable videos are the ones that teach guitar basics -- things like strumming, scales and finger-picking. And even in the digital age, no one holds a copyright on those things.' How could this constitute as infringement if most musicians usually experiment to find something that sounds familiar?"
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Musicians Demand the Internet Stay Neutral
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Well, if REM (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, if REM (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously don't know their history or it would make perfect sense to you. R.E.M. got their start on I.R.S. Records, which was an independent label. It was a large and successful independent label, but this was largely through good management that signed a lot of really good bands at the time. R.E.M. was the kind of band that the majors wouldn't have touched in their early days, but they toured and built up a following on the college circuit and eventually signed a major label contract and became big stars. However, without I.R.S. Records, probably nobody outside of Athens would have ever heard of them.
Re:Well, if REM (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the 80's radio scene. My local rock station was pretty much like this from 1981-85:
Van Halen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Pink Floyd, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith. There was no R.E.M. or U2 or INXS or Husker Du or The Cure any alternative band being played on mainstream radio.
While you may consider these guys corporate now, they were not corporate bands in the early to mid 80's. 1987 seemed to be the breakout year for U2, R.E.M., The Cure, and INXS and alternative music in general to get actual air play. Then Nirvana came along in 1991 and alternative became mainstream.
Re:Well, if REM (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday November 01, @12:01PM)
Well, if REM says so, then it must be a good thing. That really helped me solidify my stance.
I'm waiting until the Pet Shop Boys weigh in.
Well then it's settled (Score:1, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday June 07, @02:55PM)
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
-Mohandas Gandhi
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.vanderlee.com/)
Remember; just because you're not stupid, doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't.
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://earthanarchy.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 12 2004, @03:14AM)
Of course their opinions matter. They are well known people with large followings, they can help get the message out there. What matters more is that more and more people speak up.
Re:Yeah, because gov't regs will "save the interne (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://whatsmyip.org/)
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Thursday July 12, @12:30PM)
Britney (Score:1, Funny)
She raises her fists in the air and says, "No! we will not stand for this!"
CNN.com... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://whatsmyip.org/)
Re:CNN.com... (Score:5, Insightful)
What would really help ... (Score:1, Offtopic)
... is when bands, especially those who have made it already and don't need more money (I'm talking to you R.E.M.), just dump their records labels and publish their music freely. They can ask you for a contribution if you like, or for you to come to their shows. Here's an example [vankatoen.nl] from the Netherlands, all their music for download as long as you "promise to let all your friends listen to it".
In general, I think if you want to be an artist, then you want to have as many people as possible to have access to your material, and if can also make a buck, it's an extra. Otherwise you're just an "entrepeneur" (I quote Rock the Net) and part of the system that aims only for consumers' money, and you should not complain.
The definite article (Score:5, Funny)
(http://robvincent.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 09, @01:55PM)
Re:The definite article (Score:5, Funny)
Because spam and viruses must be allowed... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why shouldn't ISPs be allowed to implement QOS? Do I have to give up decent ping times on VOIP calls solely because the idiots next to me absolutely have to BitTorrent the latest episode of American Idol? Should someone sending spam be given equal priority to the 'net as someone trying to send emails to colleagues?
Net Neutrality means throwing up our hands in the air and allowing the Internet to become a useless mess of spam and viruses since the power to handle them would be stripped from ISPs. It means giving up on streaming video and audio. It means giving up on VOIP.
I don't think it's worth it. Why the hell shouldn't I be allowed to pay more to get a better connection?
Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should someone sending spam be given equal priority to the 'net as someone trying to send emails to colleagues?
Oddly, if you QOS port 25 the spam goes through just as fast as the legit email. Incidentally, this is an argument for quarantining systems, not net neutrality.
Net Neutrality means throwing up our hands in the air and allowing the Internet to become a useless mess of spam and viruses since the power to handle them would be stripped from ISPs. It means giving up on streaming video and audio. It means giving up on VOIP.
Plus it's not giving up on video/audio and VOIP...it's giving up on third party streaming video and audio and VOIP. Why should Verizon allow Vonage's VOIP (yea, i know the patent issues, bear with me) to travel as fast as Verizon's VOIP solution? Without competition, Verizon has no reason to improve their service either.
Net neutrality = competition allowed to exist = better for consumers.
Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://wire-head.org/)
To do a real-world analogy, let's say that you have an eight lane highway. Normally, any car can use any of the four lanes in either direction. Now, we're going to do the telco money-grab on the road. I'll pay for "high priority" service on the highway. If I'm traveling down a lane, you, as a non-payer, must get out of my way, no matter what the traffic congestion looks like. This will result in me getting to my destination faster, and it taking longer for you to get to yours. In other words, I would be effectively paying to slow down everyone else while allowing me to go faster.
I have a problem with this, since I pay for my Internet connection. I agreed that I wouldn't always get the full bandwidth I paid for, due to various circumstances beyond my ISP's control. I *did not* agree that the ISP could deliberately tamper with my traffic to make some things slow, and some things fast. I would imagine that my ISP did not agree to that with their upstream provider, and they with theirs. It is a radical change in the way the infrastructure works, and makes it a different beast.
If a company wants to charge more for a connection that tends towards lower latency (a T-3 instead of a cable modem), that's fine. If someone wants to charge more for 10Mb of upstream bandwidth than for 5Mb, then that's also fine. It is *not* fine to say "we're making other companies' traffic get precedence over your traffic, unless you pay us more".
Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed... (Score:4, Interesting)
Google has to pay an ISP for service. now that ISP wants to not only charge google for data coming out of there services but also for giving that data premium bandwidth at the cost of something else.
Net neutrality is to prevent the AOL'ing of the Internet. the ISP's want to nickel and dime you to death to increase their revenue. Just like how when AOL, Prodigy and compuserv first came online you couldn't send email between them, unless you were a premium suscriber if at all. Now ISP's want to do that to IM's emails, videos, file transfers. If you want music from itunes but your ISP only supports Zune-live then your screwed and have to pay more per megabyte for a slower transfer.
That way only the rich companies could afford the bandwidth and premium charges to make them popular. Companies like Youtube wouldn't be able to even get started under such a situation.
The solution (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what I think ISPs should be prohibited from doing:
1.Discriminating or throttling or blocking based on source/destination addresses (and that includes forcing companies like google to pay more if they want full speed over the ISPs network)
2.Applying any kind of throttling based on port number. QOS is fine (that is, giving VoIP packets priority over BitTorrent packets) but throttling is NOT. If a network link is 1.5MBps and no-one wants to send traffic other than BitTorrent traffic over that link, the BitTorrent traffic should be able to use the entire 1.5MBps link (obviously if someone starts sending VoIP packets, then the network link wont accept as many BitTorrent packets and the BitTorrent download will slow down). This would specifically prevent the (increasingly common) practice where ISPs give you 1.5MBps or whatever speed but no matter how perfect the network conditions, BitTorrent or Emule or whatever else is limited so it can never go over 128KBps or 256KBps or whatever. Write in an exemption for cases where there is a direct threat to the network or to another network (e.g. someone spewing out packets as part of a DDOS attack)
These measures would still allow ISPs to completely block ports used by malware as well as measures like blocking port 25 to cut off spam zombies. And it would allow ISPs to apply QOS so that your VoIP packets have higher priority than the BitTorrent packets. But it would prevent ISPs from deciding that if you access CNN.com you can have the full 1.5MBps speed (assuming the rest of the network can handle that) but if you access YouTube.com or download something over BitTorrent, you cannot ever get more than 256KBps unless you pay extra for it (or google pays extra for it in the case of YouTube)
Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed... (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://phoenixfestivals.com/)
You can choose to pay more for a faster connection right now. In our area, you can still buy dialup, multiple flavors of dsl, cable, t-1's, t-3's, fibre, WiFi.... and other choices that I have forgotten about. Each come with different prices and speeds. More remote situations are limited in connectivity choices, certainly. But in all cases, the contract between me and the provider involves connection speeds. I don't have to, and do not WANT to, have to pay more to use iTunes or BMG music, because it's not on the favored list.
Why the big fuss? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.man.ac.uk/~zzcgudf/)
Re:Why the big fuss? (Score:4, Insightful)
Situation #1: providers oversell "priority access", leaving the "critical" applications fighting it out for bandwidth just like they do now (and the "non-critical" apps wishing they had their 56k back)
Situation #2: Providers ration "priority access", which keeps speeds high for "critical" applications but drives up the price of that access via the laws of supply and demand. Providers realize that therey have no incentive to use those higher profit margins to invest in better infrastructure, as the poorer the infrastructure, the more they can charge for "priority access". (Think Enron pulling plants offline to make electricity rates spike and California brownouts)
Situation #3: Government, quasi-gov't (ICAAN), or NGO control of access. Does ANYONE think this is a good idea?
Here's another thought - maybe telesurgery isn't that good an idea.
Cat and Mice (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Friday April 06 2007, @12:32PM)
Yawn.
Re:Cat and Mice (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.parallelrealities.co.uk/)
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. Mice couldn't have made this statement as they don't have opposable thumbs to grip a pen with.
Miss Toomey's at it again (Score:1)
(http://evil.google.com/)
Musicians? (Score:2)
This "threat" is nonsense. (Score:2, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday April 12 2007, @04:02PM)
I think it's obvious that musicians (and too many other people) don't know how the Internet works.
Nobody "owns" the Internet. If some ISPs or backbone companies decide to limit bandwidth to certain sites, then they will simply lose business to the service providers who don't limit bandwidth.
And what would prevent musicians and their fans from using P2P techniques for distributed streaming?
The whole "threat" is nonsense.
Experts weighting in... (Score:2)
(http://cafepress.com/phototravel?pid=5934485)
I'm so glad, musicians — the real experts — are finally weighting in on this issue. Why are the FAG [wikipedia.org] still quiet, I wonder?
Good for REM (Score:1)
didn't like, something that worried the government and politicians and that is what made
it so appealing. So I guess when a few bands come out against the "man" that makes
news today.
Rock The Net (Score:2)
The Internet is dead (Score:1)
(http://www.iamparanoid.co.uk/)
And what did we do with it? We used it for porn, greed and libelous behaviour. Much worse than that we propogated the publication of ill-informed opinion, of which I freely admit this is a part. Not only did we propogate it, we actually preferred our opinions to come from unqualified sources, because what we were being told from those that were qualified did not fit with what we wanted to hear. You only have to look at the myth of man made global warming to see this in action (and I know I will get flamed for that sentence, but that will only serve to prove I am right).
Wikipedia is the largest collection of ill-informed crap on the face of the planet, an admirable quest that has descended into a miasma of gibberish. It is now no more than a loose collection of opinion that may or may not be right. Certainly no use as a source of vital information - precicely because we cannot verify where the information came from and who is accountable.
However, the Internet's day has passed, the social experiment has failed and like radio, film and television before, it will descent into an over-regulated, commercial, empty shell of what it could have been.
QoS is the first step towards this regulation, it is the logical step towards the closing of the gate - you can say whatever you like but unless you have the bandwidth you will be unlikely to be heard. The loudest voices will be those that have the largest budget, just like every other aspect of our lives. The quality of your content will be naught compared to the size of your bandwidth, conversley the more bandwidth you have will affect the information you can receive.
In an ideal world the quality of information would be a factor in its propogation, however that does not lend itself to this medium, or any other for that matter. This is a lost cause, before it even started. I am not going to waste my time fighting it, instead I am going to find an alternative - perhaps the human social network is the only true forum, I don't know, but I do know that the wheels started falling off this cart a few years ago.
What has the world come to... (Score:1)
Aiding the enemy? (Score:1)
CDNs provide premium delivery already (Score:1)
(http://blankbadge.com/)
Much ado about nothing? (Score:2)
I'm like most discerning music lovers in that I pretty much know what artists I like and what music (on CD in my case) I am going to buy. Therefore, I'm not going to go buy a particular CD by one artist because it's cheaper than a CD by another artist - instead, I've pretty much decided which CD I want and just go looking for the cheapest place to buy it.
Other than that, I may buy a CD by an artist I've never heard before purely because I'm browsing through a CD retailer's web site and see a CD worth trying based on it being a good price.
And because I'm particularly passionate about the music I like anyway, if some big record company tries to foist a particular artist on me through advertisements, the chances are that I'll ignore it even more and go find something else - only because *I* decide what I will and will not listen to, not some record company.
Unfortunately, we seem to be breeding a younger generation that is programmed to treat music as a "throwaway commodity" like a washing machine, rather than something you carry with you throughout your life. The iPod generation typifies the viewpoint that when you're bored with it, just format the hard disk and start buying some new music.
Me personally, I've got albums that I first listened to 30 years ago on a noisy copied cassette tape through owning on vinyl to now having on CD. Sure, I've MP3ed my CD collection to carry round with me easily but there's no way I'd sell the original CDs, even though they only now get played occasionally on my reasonably good hifi system, because I *LOVE* the artists and albums so much.
"brands" (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Which actually made more sense to me.
Can someone explain how the 'fee' would apply (Score:1)
And what if I'm a content provider in another country, would I have to pay a fee to all the USA ISPs to ensure my content gets to Americans quickly?
Sounds unreasonable just on the basis of logistics. Add to that the sheer stupid unfairness of it and I don't see how politicians can even consider it.
Isn't this like airlines charging overweight people more for their tickets? Or wait... charging famous people or frequent fliers more?
Bah!
The internet was not designed (Score:1)
(http://www.boole.org/)
Jury's still out here... (Score:2)
Music solves everything... (Score:2)
(http://1-4-4.home.comcast.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 01 2006, @03:16PM)
And who can forget the protest songs of the 1990s and early 2000s? All those protest marches in DC, with the youth of America singing in unison, "This function is void, it takes two parameters..."
But as impressive as those mass protests are, it always comes down to just one person - one person with the spirit and vision to pursue his dreams of peace, love, and music, in spite of all odds. One person to charge out onto the battlefields of the world with his guitar, shouting "Ore no uta o kike!" Hear my song! And put an end to your senseless conflicts. This man will be the leader, and the rest may at first question his methods or his senses but ultimately they'll all be singing his song.
in the end (Score:1)
Can you please dump this net neutrality! (Score:1)
(http://heddate.com/)
Please let this crap discussion die! Now.
Re:So cute, they think that they are relevant (Score:2)
But in our capitalist society, it doesn't matter enough to change anything. If companies (the RIAA included, despite their inability to cope with technology) can make more money by destroying the net they'll do so in a heartbeat. The only thing that has stopped them is the uncertainty of whether they really WILL make more money or not. It's entirely possible that charging even more for net access will piss people off so badly that they invent another internet and drop this one. It might be satellite, or wifi-linkup, or something we've not dreamt of yet. But it would happen eventually.
Re:So cute, they think that they are relevant (Score:2)
(http://robvincent.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 09, @01:55PM)
Of course I can only speak for myself, but when I participate in a protest, I'm not there to change people's minds who don't agree with me. I'm there to make my voice heard, show solidarity with others who do agree with me, and most of all to educate people who might be curious about whatever issue inspired us all to show up and protest. If someone sees me protesting and asks about the issue, I'll happily explain my side of it. Whether they take that as gospel or tell me I'm an idiot isn't important.. what's important is they have more information on which to base their decision. In my eyes, the main point of a protest is simply to let everyone know what you think and why you think it.
If someone is inspired to learn more about the Net Neutrality issue, whether by a bunch of stereotype hippies holding signs and chanting or their favorite musicians throwing in on something like this, surely it's still a good thing that they went and learned about it? Whichever side you take on this or any other issue, educating the masses enough so they can make their own informed decision and then go forward in their beliefs is really the key.
Re:yeah, but what's their stance on the RIAA? (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.demodulated.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday January 05 2006, @01:38PM)
You bring up a great point though. If your favourite band works for the RIAA then you are not their top priority, money is.
Re:Bad car analogy (Score:1)
(http://127.0.0.1/ | Last Journal: Thursday September 20, @12:52PM)
Re:yeah, but what's their stance on the RIAA? (Score:1)
(http://whatsmyip.org/)
Shut Up And Code (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:yeah, but what's their stance on the RIAA? (Score:2)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Actually, many of the bands referenced have been publically telling the record companies that consumers should be allowed to use their music in whatever way they see fit.
I seem to recall that very recently bands like the The Barenaked Ladies [canada.com] have been saying they really don't agree with the practice of suing music fans, or the use of DRM.
Many artists do not agree with the tactics of the RIAA, and are on record as such.
That's a little harsh. Fighting within the system is a perfectly OK way of dissenting; and I wouldn't expect them to give up their paycheques to show solidarity with everyone who doesn't agree with the RIAA.
I think when these artists stand up and say "this is idiotic", a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't be engaging in these conversations get to hear about the issue.
Cheers