Over at El Reg they’ve been running a few pieces lately about responses from record label “customer relations” departments to purchasers who’ve complained about corrupt audio “CDs”.
The response from EMI is particularly enlightening. No further comment is really needed: EMI have said it all.
Ah,
“There are 250 Million blank CDRs and tapes bought and used this year for copying music in comparison to 213 Million prerecorded audio media. This means the owners are only being paid for 46 per cent of the musical content.”
Is a terrible justification. For one, how do they account for the the number of recordable CDRs running through EMI offices (which presumably are for “legitimate” uses like “Hey, my mate Dave wants a copy of the Vines album, oh and my girlfriend wants the new Robbie Williams…”)? Did they also forget about the software industry and the use of CDRs to backup software? What about the publishing industry distributing images, page layouts on… CDRs. Weak justification.
The software industry gave up on copy protecting software, why/how is the music industry going to succeed when the boffins failed? There is so much variety in the way the CD players read CDs that no scheme (ie. “hack”) will successfully play legitimate CDs on all CD players.
Concerntrate on developing new revenue sources and making purchased CDs more attractive, stop being lazy and wasting money on technology companies that are misleading to you – they CANNOT deliver the copy protection system you think they will/want them to.
It all comes down to the fact that the record companies have to do as much as they can, even though THEY probably also acknowledge that it is largely a futile exercise. As one hacker – I think it was one of the l0pht crew – explained it, the reason that that things like copyright protection and network security will never really work is that the creators of this technology do this for a job, then they go home… the people who want to break it, see it as a mission. There are far more of them than those who create the products, and they don’t stop working at 5pm, they are working around the clock. It is a reality that whatever copy-protection measures are put in place, give it no more than a week, and there will be a way around it. Now where did I put that black felt pen…
It all comes down to the fact that the record companies have to do as much as they can
Why? They don’t lose their copyrights if they fail to come up with increasingly stupid copy-protection mechanisms, and if they did think they were wasting their time then they wouldn’t be bothering — the recording industry (at that level, anyway) is purely about maximizing profit, so spending money on things they think are ineffective shouldn’t happen…
No, I’m pretty sure that the people at the PHB levels really do think it’s a good idea, and that it’ll save their arses. It is, after all, easier than thinking creatively (or even, ghods help us, rationally) about the situation. The DMCA in the States and the Copyright Directive in the EU encourage this sort of idiocy by making attempts to break the schemes illegal. Suits understand lawyers.
They’ve got this crazy idea that declining sales are all about piracy and nothing at all to do with economies going down the shiiter making people less likely to purchase the dross they push. Mariah Carey being dumped was a nice start, but it was probably just a fluke.
the beauty of it is of course, that the corporations that make the CD burnign technology are the ones that are desperately trying to protect their affiliated companies copyrights. ironic no? case in point. Sony Music and Sony CD-R drives and Mini Discs. hello cycle of stupidity anyone? we live in the ‘information’ age, information is the commodity, increasingly making copyright a passe legal fiction maybe?
I’m not sure that intellectual property rights should be a “passe legal fiction” — I think they have a place as a means of rewarding the creation of intellectual property in whatever form.
But just as home taping didn’t finish off the recording industry, and the VCR didn’t kill Hollywood, I’m not convinced that CD-R or digital audio files are going to destroy the record labels.
What they are doing is making the mass “shove this shit down everybody’s throats” methods that have shown up over the last few decades less viable. Which is a good thing for just about everyone.
Except, that is, from those in the recording industry who are unable or unwilling to adapt.
I would hope it isn’t a passe legal fiction, as a copyright lawyer I am naturally fascinated at the length the commodifiers of copyright will go, when the authors or artists have varying approaches to new technolgies (whether records, radio, tapes, CD’s, MP3’s whatever) with inspiring degrees of flexibility.
I also find it interesting that the well documented evidence that the record and publishing companies knew about the impending explosion of new formats and did the usual head in ground action adn failed to embrace it. regardless of the commodifiers bitch and moan, as always the commercial and economic impact on artists is always the point of interest, mind you that is always pass in parcel of profits of companies and how they (for want of a better word) re-invest to artists- aaarrrrrggghhh the co-dependency?
naturally there are independednt artists, but regardless of personal opinion of what is “quality” music and what audiences want (insert chuckle as to the diachotomy between marketing, uneducated music consumers, and what record/ publishing companies want to sell), necessarily must include the likes of Brits and Christina in the debate. and what does it come down to: the asset of selling copyright.
my interest is more about the valuation of information/ data, which of course includes copyright, but not all data is naturally subject to copyright. how is the broader value of information (user mentality) v’s copyright owners (commodifiers) reconciled considering the rapid developments of communication, rather than the rapid developments of copyright.
this is a babble for ideas, not an argument as such, always open to criticism, which no doubt I will get!!