It’s a good thing the legal assaults on Napster thoroughly eliminated the Internet and computer science in general. ‘Cos otherwise the attempts to bugger DNS to block all Hollywood-disapproved Internet sites might have inspired MAFIAAfire, a P2P alternate-DNS plugin for your web browser (Firefox: Tools->Add-Ons->MAFIAAfire).

There is the minor detail of trusting a bunch of leeches with a sense of entitlement with your computer, and that the existing shadow DNS proof of concept was invented to redirect your money to the Russian mafia. However, the proof of the pudding will be in the network effects — people already install all manner of dubious rubbish for the promise of telly at their convenience, all this network needs is users.

And the fundamental point remains that the Internet is a giant copying machine, and that every gadget imaginable plus computers — televisions, phones, record players, cameras, drawing boards, recording studios — equals computers. Everything that can be conceived of as information can be done on computers. There’s a reason it’s called “universal computation.” Call it as evil as you like, but while computers and networks exist, you just can’t assume copying is rare, difficult or expensive any more.

The execs have finally noticed and, as usual, are channelling their inner Gollum. Streaming services (YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, last.fm) are now considered a bigger problem than piracy, because they’re not the cash cow CDs were. Note that this is the legal and paid-for channels they’re complaining about.

The kids don’t listen to radio, or any similar rigidly controlled stream fed to them on a provider-consumer model. The execs’ dilemma now is how to advertise the music without people being able to hear it. Or something. Analyst Russ Crupnick suggests creating some form of “artificial scarcity.” Let me know how that works out for you.

“We never really made the digital transformation,” says Crupnick. No shit.

Thomas Hesse from Sony says: “We are very uncomfortable with a model where you can just throw anything into the cloud and stream it, if what you threw into the cloud was not legitimately purchased.” Never mind we already have that — it’s called RapidShare. YOU’RE ALREADY COMPETING WITH FREE. PEOPLE WANT TO GIVE YOU MONEY ANYWAY. YOU’RE REFUSING IT. AAAAAAAA

This is someone who should know better. I’d thought the point was always the spread of music and culture without the gatekeepers of the labels, press and radio impeding its communication. Wish accomplished.

Note the quote “The Internet could easily stop this situation but there are darker forces at work and the value of music hits rock bottom.” The “darker forces” are the unforgiving hand of microeconomics — basic business — as marginal cost goes to zero.

I am not rightly able to apprehend the confusion of ideas that leads people to propose a Chinese-style firewall on the whole Internet just to preserve the old record industry. I want some musician holding this view to explain, in a manner that doesn’t treat computers as incomprehensible malevolent magic, how precisely “the Internet” could easily stop this situation. In detail, showing their working. What is the origin of such notions, apart from magical thinking? Give me something to work with here.

Note the upward curve of music industry (and, yes, record industry) revenue, even as someone else eats into the disposable income. The actual claim in the original post is provably false.

This question as approached by authors may be of interest. There’s been a teapot of kerfuffle lately about just how privileged a first-world problem it is to be able to complain that “oh no, people are copying my art!” Link collection; why the entire intellectual property regime is best understood as a mechanism of empire, and why its utter destruction is a moral imperative; author whines, is slapped upside the head with her own privileged cluelessness as to the world not actually revolving around her books. Physical books being obsolete as far as the actual readers go.

Meanwhile, the world continues to be as it is and not as it used to be.

We Internet types are so busy haggling over video games with DRM that we’re not grasping the scale of this. We’re like a dog who’s been cooped up behind a fence his whole life, and now a storm has knocked down the gate. The dog looks out and thinks, “Wow, out there is the front yard!”

No, Fluffy. Out there is the whole world.

The answer? Digital Personal Property! Which is certainly not Digital Rights Management or Digital Consumer Enhancement, no no. It’s an entirely different wrapper for physically and mathematically impossible snake oil.

As Penny Arcade put it about similar schemes elsewhere: “Chief among these bizarre maneuvers is the idea that, when manufacturing their flimsy dystopia, they actually ported the pernicious notion of scarcity from our world into their digital one. This is like having the ability to shape being from non-being at the subatomic level, and the first thing you decide to make is AIDS.”

Meanwhile, Nokia’s only-a-wafer-thin-slice-of-DRM Comes With Music service is all but dead, with 23,000 users total in the UK. Gosh, etc.

“Oh dear God, kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé’s a car crash, I wish I could be laid off, Google won’t call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I’m the walking dead, man. The walking dead.”

“Pay, er, PlayNow Plus is completely unlimited, covers all major labels, no DRM, get all you want any time you like,” said spokesdroid Mobile Salestwat. “This is the biggest deal in mobile music ever! Of course, it’ll only play on your phone, for the duration of the contract, all songs then disappearing. Well, just a little DRM. Honest.”

(more at the other site)

(Before the Internet, only music industry professionals got their faces shoved in just how many bad records are released. Why do you think so many come to hate music? The worst musical slushpiles are songwriter competitions — worse than band demos because they don’t require the lifewaster to get anyone else to agree. “All unsolicited demo recordings to be submitted on SDHC or CompactFlash card of 8GB or over. Extreme III or better, please.”)

The gist is that it’ll be using the Liquid Audio system, which is proprietary, Windows-only and DRM-friendly.

To see what’s likely to be in store, I went and checked out liquid.com, which just happens to already be handling quite a bit of music.

It could be worse. It could also be a whole lot better. You’ll need a player that can handle Liquid Audio files (or maybe, just maybe, Windows Media). This pretty much means you’ll need a Windows PC.

If the new stuff is anything at all like what liquid.com is already doing, then you’ll need to look very carefully before buying anything. Many albums are restricted to being playable only on the computer to which they’ve been downloaded, without even a burn-to-CD option, and the user interface at liquid.com uses icons to display permissions which aren’t all that easy to distinguish from one another.

This may in the longer term open up some of the Universal back-catalogue. Some hoop-jumping will be required to listen to music thus obtained on anything but a Windows PC, but it’ll probably be better than nothing.

(I may succumb to temptation and buy an album. Purely in the interests of research, of course. Nothing at all to do with wanting a copy of Kinky Friedman’s Sold American at all. If this happens, I will be sure to regale you all with tales of just how crap an experience it is.)

The suit against Streamcast over Morpheus is still pending.

Meanwhile, users looking for a spyware-free client for one of the remaining peer-to-peer networks might find what they’re looking for at Clean Clients, which offers de-loused versions of Grokster, KaZaA, Bearshare, Morpheus, Limewire and SongSpy. (And Audiogalaxy, for now-historical interest.)

Update: We hear tell the RIAA are apparently planning to sue someone over Gnutella … if they can find who to sue. Of course, suing the current developers (who are not the original developers) won’t do a thing to stop a fully open protocol with an open-source reference implementation available.

Kuro5hin has a nice history of Audiogalaxy up, written by one of AG’s programming team. Also talks about the RIAA suit in some detail.

(Kuro5hin has some good stuff. Read it.)

Analysts consider the products of Musicnet (BMG/EMI/Warner) and Pressplay (Sony/Universal) unmarketable – the companies having failed to meet consumer expectations due to excessive paranoia and prices.

See also analysis from InternetNews and especially from MP3 Newswire. “Let’s just say that governments have bigger worries than chasing Napster clones right now.”

The point of this exercise in futility, from Velvet Rope poster ‘Thousandaire’:

“I worked for one of the majors, and it was a supposedly “tech savvy” label (that’s all I will say publicly about where I worked). Nobody in their new media division believed that the download programs would work, they viewed it as “we want to show that there is a dollar value on a download to establish damages.” The attempts to build systems can be viewed as a way to prove damages when suing other download services. (i.e. “you have 50,000,000 members, and that is cheating us out of $500,000,000 a month that they would otherwise be paying if you weren’t around). Heck, the labels made a business model out of suing the likes of MP3.com out of existence.”

That sounds alarmingly plausible. “These MP3s had a street value of one million billion zillion dollars …”