An Industry Unwilling to Play by Rules of 'Fair Use'

[Teutatis]

Scarcely a week passes without the entertainment industry warning us that its business model is about to be exterminated by some new technology.

The Internet, satellite radio and TiVo are among the mortal threats that have sent media executives scurrying to Washington with proposals to rein them in, tax them, even ban them. The music labels, TV networks and movie studios never propose to alter their own models to accommodate new technologies — they merely insist that everybody else change to accommodate them. When they don't get their own way with lawmakers, they take it out on consumers.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-golden12dec12,1,7477940.column?coll=la-utilities-business

[jimmalenko]

<sets up deck-chair, waiting for ROF to start an argu ..... ahem, have his say on the matter>

[guns1inger]

<sets up deck-chair, waiting for ROF to start an argu ..... ahem, have his say on the matter>

At least it's keeping the deck-chair industry going . . . . . . (unless, of course, you downloaded the deck-chair ?)

[jimmalenko]

<sets up deck-chair, waiting for ROF to start an argu ..... ahem, have his say on the matter>

At least it's keeping the deck-chair industry going . . . . . . (unless, of course, you downloaded the deck-chair ?)

Let's just say that I "acquired" it <nudge nudge>

[guns1inger]

Say no more . . . .

[lordsmurf]

warning us that its business model is about to be exterminated by some new technology.

Boo ******* hoo. I don't recall hearing about horseshoers trying to pass anti-horseless-carriage laws. Either move with the time, or become part of professions/industries only mentioned in history books.

[GullyFoyle]

<sets up deck-chair, waiting for ROF to start an argu ..... ahem, have his say on the matter>

Or Adam's legal wisdom presenting the corporate interpretation of the law as the end all and be all.
Nothing for poor end users to do but bow down to the wisdom of big media and their political payed hacks.

You are in breach of the forum rules and are being issued with a formal warning. Taking issue with a fellow member is ok, but doing so consistently without good reason can be disruptive and may be seen as baiting/stalking. Immediate bans can be enforced, in such cases, without the usual warnings.

/ Moderator offline

[smearbrick1]

<sets up deck-chair, waiting for ROF to start an argu ..... ahem, have his say on the matter> :D :lol:

Or Adam's legal wisdom presenting the corporate interpretation of the law as the end all and be all.
Nothing for poor end users to do but bow down to the wisdom of big media and their political payed hacks.

That's actually not true. I used to believe this myself, but have recently been very surprised by how much change in politics a handful of pissed off people can incite.

In PA, the legislature voted themselves (this included the judicial branch, the governor, etc) a raise. In some cases, this raise was over 25% of an individuals salary. Currently, we are having issues with budget deficits, shortfalls, budget cuts... you name it... we have it, and the legislature passes a raise for themselves in mid July in the middle of the night right before the legislature recesses for the summer. Long story short: a lot of pissed off people began writing to there reps, senators, and everyone else about their outrage. Demonstrations were held almost daily.

They repealed the raise. They had to return all of the money they received as part of their raise up until it was repealed.

Just an example of how the little guy can make a difference.

[ROF]

Is this really latest news? I see nothing new in this article that doesn't already have a zillion topics of discussion here.

[BJ_M]

warning us that its business model is about to be exterminated by some new technology.

Boo ******* hoo. I don't recall hearing about horseshoers trying to pass anti-horseless-carriage laws. Either move with the time, or become part of professions/industries only mentioned in history books.

there were anti-horseless-carriage laws passed in many areas ....


plus- oddly , a strong opposition to turn signals on cars , as being to dangerous compared to hand signals, because people wouldst know what the lights meant ...

[ROF]

Change is always hard for some people to accept.

is this really latest news?

[guns1inger]

If it were old news, then surely the industry would have stopped being concerned and carrying on like old women by now. They apparently haven't.

[waheed]

is this really latest news?

Yes it is latest news. You reported this thread and it has been checked by a mod, no problem there.

The link to the article is dated 12 December 2005 (todays date), so it is latest news. Yes, there are some aspects of the article that overlaps with discussion already brought up on this forum, but this is actually a seprate topic on An Industry Unwilling to Play by Rules of 'Fair Use'

From the article:

Media companies detest fair use. They regard your ability to make a backup copy of a CD as a lost opportunity to sell you a new disc.

I couldn't agree more with the statement.

[ROF]

Where in the fair use clause does it say you have the right to make a 1-1 backup of your media purchase?

[jimmalenko]

Where in the fair use clause does it say you have the right to make a 1-1 backup of your media purchase?

Bingo !


Only took 5 hours

[ROF]

5 hours for what? I didn't know fair use was part of todays legislation?

[adam]

Or Adam's legal wisdom presenting the corporate interpretation of the law as the end all and be all.
Nothing for poor end users to do but bow down to the wisdom of big media and their political payed hacks.

I will only respond to you one last time and then go back to ignoring your childish posts. All I have to say is that I'm not biting so you can stop baiting me.

GullyFoyle is a horrible troll, the worst I've seen. He is the reason these threads always get locked. The sooner the mods realize this the sooner some sanity will be brought back to the Latest News forum.

[Bronx]

<sets up deck-chair, waiting for ROF to start an argu ..... ahem, have his say on the matter>

[somebodeez]

I'm not able to read the article.

The story you requested is available only to registered members.

[gadgetguy]

I'm not able to read the article.

Me either. And I'm not willing to give my email address (or any other info) to the LATimes.

[GullyFoyle]

Or Adam's legal wisdom presenting the corporate interpretation of the law as the end all and be all.
Nothing for poor end users to do but bow down to the wisdom of big media and their political payed hacks.

I will only respond to you one last time and then go back to ignoring your childish posts. All I have to say is that I'm not biting so you can stop baiting me.

GullyFoyle is a horrible troll, the worst I've seen. He is the reason these threads always get locked. The sooner the mods realize this the sooner some sanity will be brought back to the Latest News forum.

Yes, anyone who is pro-consumer pro-end user or who doesn't agree with you is a troll.
Anyone who desires a more liberal interpretation of the law is a troll.
Anyone who doesn't think that laws are set in stone is a troll.
Anyone who feels that pro-big business laws are restrictive and draconian is a troll.
Anyone who feels you defend the big media view point is a troll.
Anyone who goes with EFF ideaology is a troll.
Since I agree with my statements I must be a troll.
Surprising how you would not consider Rof a troll.
But then again he tends to agree with you quite a bit in your pro big media stance.
And thank you for making me so powerful that my opinions get threads locked. I appreciate my new godlike status.
Or would I be a fallen Angel?

[rkr1958]

I'm not able to read the article.

The story you requested is available only to registered members.

Me too ... It'd be nice if someone quoted the story or gave us a link to where we could read it.

[adam]

It was working 5 mins ago. The site probably removes general access after so many hits. But I still had it in my cache so...

An Industry Unwilling to Play by Rules of 'Fair Use'

Scarcely a week passes without the entertainment industry warning us that its business model is about to be exterminated by some new technology.

The Internet, satellite radio and TiVo are among the mortal threats that have sent media executives scurrying to Washington with proposals to rein them in, tax them, even ban them. The music labels, TV networks and movie studios never propose to alter their own models to accommodate new technologies — they merely insist that everybody else change to accommodate them. When they don't get their own way with lawmakers, they take it out on consumers.

The most brazen recent example of the latter approach was a copy-protection program that Sony BMG Music Entertainment added to 52 of its CD titles by artists ranging from Sinatra to Van Zant. When any of these CDs was played on a personal computer, it secretly installed software designed to prevent copying of the disc. But the program also surreptitiously transmitted data to Sony about what was on the PC, rendered it vulnerable to hackers and was configured to wreck the machine if the owner attempted to uninstall the program.

After all this was exposed this fall, Sony recalled the CDs and gave buyers a safe way of eradicating its coded mole. (The label still faces lawsuits, and possibly government action, in the matter.)

Sony's rationale was that the ability to make flawless reproductions and distribute them over the Internet could destroy its business. It's not alone in exploiting this supposed threat as a pretext for imposing new limits on what consumers of CDs, DVDs, TV programs and books can do with them.

To this end, DVDs bought in one country sometimes can't be played on players bought in another. Buyers of songs from Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store are subject to tight restrictions on how often they can copy the songs to CDs or computers. Hollywood is asking Congress for restrictions on the design of TV recorders like TiVos, so that consumers will have to pay a fee for each recorded show.

Plainly, the media companies are engaged in an all-out attack on the principle of "fair use."

Fair use is a legal limit on the rights of copyright holders. It's a compromise: In return for the exclusive right to profit from the initial sale of a work for a given term (in the U.S., up to 70 years after the death of the creator), the copyright holder allows some non-commercial copying, limited quotation by critics, parodies and a few other uses.

Media companies detest fair use. They regard your ability to make a backup copy of a CD as a lost opportunity to sell you a new disc. They worry that a song parody by "Weird Al" might be mistaken in a store for the real thing. They don't understand why a critic with the knives out for a book should be permitted to quote from it in a review. If they had their druthers, you'd pay them a few bucks every time you played a DVD at a party or put songs on a mix CD to give to a friend.

Fair-use rules are constantly changing because new uses keep emerging, and then landing in court. In perhaps the most famous case, the Supreme Court ruled in 1984 that recording a TV show at home to watch later, or "time-shifting," is fair use. The justices rejected the movie studios' demands for a ban on the pioneering Betamax videocassette recorder and for damages from Sony, its manufacturer. (This was years before Sony, as a copyright owner, landed on the other side of the fair-use debate.)

The next court case might well involve Google Print, the search company's proposal to scan the full texts of millions of published books into its database. A search would return only a few sentences of context on either side of a search term, but the publishing industry has already called this process a potential copyright violation.

It's true that copying entertainment content is much easier today than it was in the days of analog LPs and audio cassettes. Back then, you couldn't easily distribute copies of a song or movie to millions of strangers. Moreover, every copy you made was less crisp than the original.

Today, a digital copy of a digital content file is identical to the original and every file can be exposed almost instantaneously to the entire world online. That's a prospect the entertainment companies say could cost them billions.

Yet, it's a mystery why anyone believes the entertainment companies' claims about their losses from online piracy, given their record of ludicrously inflating the dangers of earlier technologies.

Consider the studios' long campaign against home VCRs. In 1982, Jack Valenti, then president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, wrote himself into the history of cocksure misprediction by warning a congressional committee that "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone." He demanded a steep tax on recorders and blank tapes, to compensate for the damage they would do to Hollywood.

We all know the punch line: The movie industry survived, nay, thrived in the VCR era. Most VCR buyers used them exactly as the Supreme Court anticipated — to tape TV shows for viewing a few hours later. Rates for commercial airtime didn't fall, and the VCR didn't make free TV disappear.

Are today's technologies any different? CD sales have declined in the years since free file sharing became possible, but there's evidence that this has more to do with the dearth of exciting new acts than with Napster and its successors. Bootleg songs and video clips often enhance, not suppress, interest in the commercial product.

The industry wants our money, but they also want to dictate all the ways we can use their products once we own them. As the copyright expert Lawrence Lessig says, this "permission culture" will only make us less free. In short, the media moguls are making arguments that we shouldn't buy.

[somebodeez]

It was working 5 mins ago. The site probably removes general access after so many hits. But I still had it in my cache so...

Thank you very much

[GullyFoyle]

Some related topics
http://www.mp3newswire.net/stories/5002/tempo2005.html
psos-Reid: Only 2% of Consumers Care About Legal Issues With Downloading Music
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/051209/sff010.html?.v=32
worldwide leader in business-to-business digital media solutions, today announced an important step in its effort to focus its business and reduce its cost structure. Loudeye announced that Overpeer, Inc., Loudeye's wholly-owned content protection subsidiary, has ceased operations effective immediately and will continue to pursue options to maximize the value of its assets.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051209-5730.html
Industry groups going after scores of scores and lyrics sites

12/9/2005 7:32:07 PM, by Charles Jade

The Music Publishers' Association (MPA) can be compared to the more widely known RIAA and MPAA, in that the industry organization protects copyright holders of sheet music. In contrast, just when you thought representatives of such trade groups could not get more outrageous, along comes MPA president Lauren Keiser.

Mr Keiser said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can "throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective".

It's hard to argue with logic like that, but if throwing people in jail for trading sheet music seems excessive, keep in mind that MPA members have suffered from technology run amok for several decades.

"The Xerox machine was the big usurper of our potential income," he said. "But now the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we're taking a more proactive stance."

Dumb and dumber it becomes. But the Overpeer thing shows big media and it's tools are losing the battle for hearts and minds.

[ROF]

Surprising how you would not consider Rof a troll.
But then again he tends to agree with you quite a bit in your pro big media stance.

Another classic reason why you are a troll. You don't read. Adam has corrected me more times then he probably cares to. You really need to open your eyes and see that my posts are not trolling but are nothing more than posts which disagree with your illegal activities you claim to be fair use. The majority of my posts aren't even in such topics anyways.

[GullyFoyle]

Surprising how you would not consider Rof a troll.
But then again he tends to agree with you quite a bit in your pro big media stance.

Another classic reason why you are a troll. You don't read. Adam has corrected me more times then he probably cares to. You really need to open your eyes and see that my posts are not trolling but are nothing more than posts which disagree with your illegal activities you claim to be fair use. The majority of my posts aren't even in such topics anyways.

Corrected and accusing are two different things.
I guess you missed that part.
By the way which Rof are you anyway? The one who uses the term RIP as applying to copying dvd's and music or the one who demands people buy multiple copies of the same dvd?
I guess the RIAA hardline strategy wasn't working so they had to modify it. Maybe bring in a ringer with more subtle social skills.

[painkiller]

With regard to sheet music, it doesn't take a genius to realize that lyrics a just a portion of them.

Why posting lyrics is a problem makes no sense at all to me.

As a musician myself, I have had the ability to re-create an entire song on guitar and keyboard just by listening and practicing.

It simply requires listening. As for the lyrics, that also requires listening then writing them down.

The MPA is way off base here. What are the really trying to do, have all musicians register? We aren't loaded weapons.


P.S. Jimmalenko - - that was too funny. 5 hours.. ha.

[GullyFoyle]

From the same link

The National Music Publishers' Association is also gearing up with similarly questionable statements, such as that of David Israelite, the group's president.

"Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing," he said.

Except that if copyright infringement were synonymous with theft it would be called theft. It's called copyright infringement for a reason.

Original article
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers' Association, added his concerns.

"Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing," he said.

"Music publishers and songwriters will consider all tools under the law to stop this illegal behaviour."

Sandro del Greco, who runs Tabhall.co.uk, said the issue was not serious enough to warrant jail time and sites like his were not necessarily depriving publishers of income.

Learn

"I play the drums mainly but I play the guitar as well. I run the website and I still buy the [tab] books," he said.

"The tabs online aren't deadly accurate so if someone really wants to know it they'll buy the book.

"But most of the bands I listen to don't have tab books to buy so if you get them online, that's the only way you can really learn it unless you work it out yourself."

And the stupidest logic award goes to

he campaign comes after lyric-finding software PearLyrics was forced off the internet by a leading music publishing company, Warner Chappell.

'No alternative'

PearLyrics worked with Apple's iTunes, searching the internet to find lyrics for songs in a user's collection.

"I just don't see why PearLyrics should infringe the copyright of Warner Chappell because all I'm doing is searching publicly-available websites," PearLyrics developer Walter Ritter said.

"It would be different if they had an alternative service that also provided lyrics online and also integrated [with iTunes] like PearLyrics did. But they don't offer anything like that at all."

A Warner Chappell statement said the company wanted to ensure songwriters were "fairly compensated for their works and that legitimate sites with accurate lyrics are not undermined by unlicensed sites".

"We have requested that PearWorks provide us with information regarding the sources of their lyrics, and have further asked that they discontinue the service if these sources are operating without a licence."

[somebodeez]

P.S. Jimmalenko - - that was too funny. 5 hours.. ha.

I'm all set for the show