Posted on 12/17/2001 10:34:47 AM PST by rustbucket
The WSJ has an article about how the record industry may soon try to lease recordings rather than sell them. If you fall behind on your "rent" payments, your music collection evaporates.
Also, new copy-protected CDs apparently redefine the concept of owning a CD. If you buy one of these, you may not be able to transfer the music to your computer or burn your favorite music onto your own CDs or transfer songs to MP3 players.
It gets better than that, the RIAA has tried to muscle bars for RIAA "protection" fees for the songs played on tv commercials! If a bar has a tv (with audio) on, they could be strong armed into paying for RIAA license fees.
What is ridiculous is that the sponsor company (Burger King for example) has already paid for the licensing of that song for the ad.
Cover bands get a free ride from the bars' RIAA agreements but I've even heard of RIAA goons aproaching the bands for a cut of the receipts of the night's take.
Once we are finished with terrorists I think a war against lawers would be a good idea.
The only reason that the "musician" does not actually get that money is usually because most of their "profit" goes to pay back the record company for advances, equipment, clothes etc...Contrast that with book publishing which is, still, a higher-class operation: No respectable publisher would dare charge you for the work of an indexing specialist or copy editor. These charges in musicians' contracts are meant to keep them permanently in debt to record companies by creating an uncontrolable stream of charges that can be added to the musicians' advances. It is highly unethical if not outright fraudulent.
I remember a few years when cable companies went after sports bars for showing pay per view events and scrambled channels. I don't recall what became of the issue.
You don't have to get that archaic!! If you're playing digital audio or video, copy protected or no, at some point it has to go through a D/A converter or frame buffer....which means it has to exist somewhere for some trivial amount of time as raw digital data. As long as this is true, there will always be creative digital methods to "cleanse" protected data.
As one guy said back at an early IEEE1394 DV standards meeting "if you can see it or here it once, you can copy it many times!"
Huey: I have a mathematics question.
Teacher: Yes?
Huey: Let's say a record label gives a new artist a six-figure advance against royalties, but that advance doesn't cover all the costs of making his CD, which he has to pay. Then they give the artist an 8 percent royalty, which doesn't allow him to cover the advance, leaving him bankrupt and enslaved to the record label even though they make a profit off his CD.
Teacher: (sigh) Yes?
Huey: So my question is, how many tons of explosives should we use to blow up the RIAA when they say they're shutting down Napster to protect the artists' rights?
I checked and found that hundreds of thousands of compact disks have already been released in the US without any warning label they were copy protected. Fatchucks listed some of the known copy-proof CDs. Turns out I had one of them, a Universal CD. I stuck it in my computer -- it brought up its own software to play the songs. It worked. So far, so good.
Next I tried to copy some of the songs onto a custom-mix CD. Everything went fine until the computer tried to write one of the songs to my custom-mix CD. At this point, it crashed my computer.
P.S. I won't be buying any more Universal CDs.
The Doors have recently reissued "remasted" discs of all their albums and yet only the "best of" is listed (and none of the ltd edition concert CDs). Joe Strummer (of the Clash) hasn't approached the top 100 in years and yet his album contains this scheme.
I wasn't too surprised that this list didn't jibe with my buying habits. The labels I buy include Norton Records, Estrus, Sympathy For The Record Industry, Sundazed, Bear Family, and Ace.
Gee, I thought it was the Rockefellers, the CFR, Rhodes Scholars, the Committee of 300, the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bild-a-Burgers (with bacon and cheese).
What are they going to do about the 3 or 4 hundred 30-year old vinyl LP's I've got? Just try to recall my Cream collection.
All right! Another Cream fan. They won't get mine either.
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