Recording Industry Nails Another One - Into Their Coffin, That Is

Here's an article from The Washington Post.

Basically, the RIAA is claiming that if you copy a CD to your hard drive, you have stolen music:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/28/AR2007122800693.html

For Christ's Sake! Can you believe this? What about a backup copy of the CD itself? The article makes no mention of that scenario. If you simply wish to make your CD collection portable, you have broken the law, they claim.

I know the fall of record companies isn't something that's good for those artists that make their living from CD sales, and the promotion, and backing record companies provide.

And, I know that for each person that copies a CD and either distributes a physical or digital copy, it devalues the work of those who put their life into it.

It's just, the recording industry is making itself an adversary to the buying public.

Seems like the only new source of revenue is coming from the collections of their lawsuits.

I guess buying a CD is a perilous activity. How about you stop selling {censored}, huh? How about you do something customer based and offer refunds for {censored} music?

Whatever. Short live the record industry!

I don't really see any solution for digital rights management. I think we've had to fall back on the "honor system" and it's not working for DVDs, for music CDs, for software titles.

The alternative is to create increasingly odious hurdles for legitimate users to activate and use their purchase, and that's bad too.

I notice the one piece of software / musicware that you can never find cracked on a torrent is BFD (Big F'ckin Drums). And that's just because nobody wants to host a 20 gig download.

So maybe the solution for music is to sample it at such an outrageous bit rate and depth that it takes a double sided DVD to deliver it and ridiculous bandwidth to download cuts off it. And maybe, by some magic, it needs to sound horrible or not work if compressed down to MP3 format.

Beats me.

Terry D.

Don't worry, it's on the newsgroups.

Don't worry, it's on the newsgroups.

Link?

Just kiddin'

Terry D.

FXPansion BFD v1.5.46 VSTi DXi RTAS

That's the one I found. It's amazing what is hiding in Usenet for the seemingly more-patient subset. But this is not about "trialware" or "evaluation extenders," this is about the morality of the situation from both sides.

Mr. Knobs long time no see. It's nice to know you're still logical & solution-oriented.

It's over guys. Visit the Far East. The RIAA is pathetic, suing poor, hapless American downloaders. There are two billion people over here who are outside the system. They send music to each other via bluetooth on cellphones. They download videos on their i-phones. Nothing the RIAA can do will even make a dent on what they're doing.

The horse is out of the barn. Time to shop for a new horse.

its true.. they both need to give up.

And maybe, by some magic, it needs to sound horrible Beats me. Terry D.

That part, at least, has been accomplished by typical modern mastering practices...

Reminds me of something I

That will have no chance in court whatsoever, as precedence still counts for a lot. The ability of consumers to make copies of what they own for private, noncommercial use is well-established.

So...if I copy a song to my computer, I'm "stealing"? What am I stealing? Do the record companies offer a service for putting music on a hard drive that I can buy instead of a CD?

What about Sony's software that rips CDs to their portable players? Better sue Sony. And Creative, too, because they make software that lets you put CDs on your computer. And Microsoft, for that matter.

It is just unbelievable that the RIAA is targeting the few friends they have left: People who buy CDs. Are they saying that when I go on the road with my laptop, instead of having my favorite songs on my hard drive to listen to back at the hotel I have to carry along my CD collection? Well that's absurd, and stupid -- and indicative of people with no brains, no understanding of the rights of consumers, and frankly, no future in this industry because that type of idiocy will kill what's left of this industry.

I'm going to go calm down for a bit.

i still buy CD's... but im NOT their friend. in fact i loathe them. i think they are basically douchebags. downloading mp3's legally or not is moot, they are mp3's... i BUY CD's because i dont want songs i like as mp3's. and the RIAA can suck my balls if i copy a CD i bought to my computer for my media center.

Okay, I did some more digging and apparently, he's being sued for having copies in a shared folder for Kazaa. There's more info at http://blogs.zdnet.com/ip-telephony/?p=2851 .

That makes more sense than suing someone because they put songs on their computers.

Hmmm... I bought Pink Floyd's "The Wall" on 8-Track when it first came out.... I later bought it on vinyl (and the 8-Track player got phased out by the industry), later I bought it on double cassette for my car.....the industry decided that cassettes should get phased out so, for my new (at the time) car, I bought it on CD.....I purchased this album FOUR times....I can say the same for Rush's "Moving Pictures" minus owning it on 8-Track and a few other albums.......Once again they were ready to switch formats on me again (MP3)and, lo and behold, it backfired........... Maybe I should counter-sue the industry for monopolizing..........

hmmm, wow... people still using kazaa?!? i have mine on a shared private network folder that gets distrubuted through out my house to computers/media centers. i wonder if they ever expect every member of the family to have purchased "listening rights" to the music?

i guess if i was unfortunate enough to have someone [like the RIAA] hack into my network, they could sue me as well?

WHAT A BUNCH OF {censored}ERS!!

sorry if I derailed the meaningful discussion with out of control swearing and BLASPHEME!!

excuse me.....

I think "private, non-commercial use" still counts for something.

What's sort of gotten lost in all this is that the Washington Post did really, really shoddy research and reporting.

Yeah -- this news story is completely bogus!

(The only thing true is that the RIAA are jerks.)

The reporter for the Washington Post picked up a blog entry from someone who had his head up his backside and took it as fact -- like an idiot -- when it would have been really easy for him to check his facts just by following links.

But as this article points out, sensationalism sells -- true or not, and lots of people ran with the story on the weight of it being in the WP...

http://www.cio-today.com/news/RIAA-Not-Targeting-CD-Ripping-After-All/story.xhtml?story_id=13300C81I5JE

They're not complaining about transfers to an iPod (yet) because that's controlled. What else can you do but listen to them (unless you give your iPod to someone else). As far as I know, even if you lend me your iPod, it won't let me copy your music on to my computer or my iPod.

The article was about someone who had music files on her computer, where they were free to copy to anyone else's computer (whether they were or not).

The first version of the Home Recording Act allowed us to make a copy for backup or for listening from an alternative medium. The first time this was questioned was when people started making cassette copies of their LPs and CDs so they could play them in their cars and on their portable cassette players while jogging (nobody went to "the gym" back then). The record companies realized that they were losing money because they also sell that material in cassette form and they wanted people to buy that version rather than to make their own.

And it went downhill from there.

thats what im saying, i have a public shared folder of my music to distribute throughout my house... any member of my family can access it and copy it to their machine IF THEY WANTED TO.... but the point of it is to have a centralized storage point so they can stream it from there rather than store it locally. the network is private to the outside, but is that technically sharing music? its not on the world wide level, but it is between 3 members of my family... all of which have the same access to the physical CD i bought as well.

certainly there needs to be a line where the consumer is safe behind... but it seems the RIAA is intent on crossing that line where ever they can.

Update: Check out this link from Fox news, who actually seem to have a done a much better research job than the Washington Post...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,319276,00.html

What I'm getting from this is that the RIAA's left and right hand don't know what they're doing. Clearly the lawsuit is based around the shared P2P folder thing, which I undestand, but the lawyer injected the opinion that copying files from a CD you own to a hard drive is illegal...even though the RIAA web site waffles on the issue, saying it's not that much of a problem if it's for personal use and you paid for the CD.

As Craig pointed out above, it turns out that the guy was sharing his collection. So it's just another of those stories about the evil RIAA that fly around the net and get quoted and requoted, but in reality it was nothing of the sort.