From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Wed Jul 16 2003 - 19:18:25 MDT
An interesting excerpt from a selection of articles which I found at Xiph.org (http://www.xiph.org/about.html) (minor reformatting) while researching this issue further. In particular, the article, "A History Lesson" is particularly enlightening.
Music isn't an Art, it's an Industry.
Internet media issues don't apply solely to source code or information format. Controlling the music itself is a burning issue for the music industry.
—and industry is the key word here. Music is no longer an expression of the soul or the work of an artist; it's a 'product' that is manufactured, packaged, catalogued, distributed, managed, regulated, and above all sold. Music is just another vehicle for maximizing profits. The RIAA, mainly a front for the recording industry that supports the status quo, trumpets loudly that the Internet is the greatest threat to artists that the world has ever known... at the same time that the RIAA is making a desperate grab to control this new distribution infrastructure. The great irony is that the Internet might indeed be an artist's worst nightmare-- if the RIAA succeeds:
...corporate mergers are squeezing hundreds of musicians out of the business without even giving them the rights to their recordings, and executives of major record labels are meeting behind closed doors to develop a way to police and control the distribution of music on the Internet.
[...]
Putting control of the Internet in the hands of the corporations means that a utopian musical vision may be dying. ...the chances of a dystopian world are increasing, one in which record companies have even greater control over music distribution
--the New York Times, Monday, May 17, 1999, article by Neil Strauss
One major push in the RIAA effort to control the music distribution infrastructure of the Internet is to legislate mandatory 'digital watermarks' for playback. Players that do not look for these 'watermarks' or play the music anyway will be illegal. Make an educated guess as to who will control the watermarks.
the record industry has a plan to force hardware and software companies to exclusively adopt its Secure Digital Music Initiative as the standard for delivering music online. ...SDMI backers want manufacturers to build a time-bomb trigger into their products that, when activated at a later date, would prevent users from downloading or playing non-SDMI-compliant music. The hardware would initially support MP3 and other compressed file formats, but a signal from the RIAA would activate the blocking trigger.
--Wired News article by Christopher Jones (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,19682,00.html)
A History Lesson
The current position and function of the music industry is an invented one. Approximately one lifetime ago, recordings were not technologically possible. With the advent of recorded sound, enterprising businessmen (Thomas Edison, a worthy predecessor of Bill Gates, and Columbia Music, just as tough and nasty) found that prepackaged recordings could be turned out in endless, identical quantity for very little cost and sold.
This wasn't an entirely new idea; an example of a preceding 'packaged performance' technology is the player piano roll. It is interesting to note, however, that these rolls were held by the courts to be uncopyrightable; the music itself was protected, but the 'performance' was not. The music industry originally lobbied the courts and Congress to keep these formats copyright-free so that it would not owe artists any royalties; in 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that phonograph records and player piano rolls did not fall under copyright.
It is important to note that selling recordings was a tenable business plan only because the average person could not produce a recording. If the phonograph record were cheaply reproducible in that day, the prepackaged music industry would never have existed as it would have been impossible from the very beginning to prevent people from making copies which were, at the time, entirely legal.
Congress changed the copyright law in 1909 to explicitly grant composers royalties on recordings sold. At the time, the music industry protested the decision bitterly; eventually it settled for requiring artists to sign over copyright on all work as a standard element of a recording contract.
The copyright protects the record label, not the artist.
(an article on the subject from CNET (http://news.com.com/2009-1023-224257.html?legacy=cnet))
Fast forward to the 1970s
The undoing of the distribution profit juggernaut began with the compact cassette tape, a development greeted by as much wailing and gnashing of teeth within the walls of Music Inc. as MP3 is causing today. Although the copy wasn't as good as the original, it was cheap and easy to make. Copying commercial music was once only the domain of organized crime; now any individual could make a copy trivially. The industry tried to outlaw the compact cassette, then settled for taxing it and legislating against copying.
Digital audio tape (DAT) caused the next uproar; a perfect copy was now possible. The music industry players, forerunners to the RIAA, sought to destroy this technology and mostly succeeded; DAT never caught on at any sizable level. It is interesting to note that "small-time" artists depend heavily on DAT for production and recording; this is practically the only music segment that ever bought into DAT. Clearly the RIAA didn't have their interests at heart.
Computers, the Internet and especially MP3 have now made the copy easier, cheaper and more convenient than the prepackaged content on sale.
That the copy costs nothing concerns intellectual property, a real worry for artists. That the distribution costs nothing is what really motivates the anti-MP3/anti-Internet effort. Copyright, once bitterly contested by the music industry, is now clung to as a weapon to preserve the distribution chain.
Copyright law has always been more about protecting the interests of publishers than those of creators. The Internet in general, and MP3 in particular, have drastically reduced the costs (financial, convenience, material, distribution) of creators getting their material out to their audience, and have *almost* made it trivial for audience members to *directly* pay creators for access to their work.
The middlemen have become irrelevant. The smart ones are devising new business models --- O'Reilly isn't going away because they are perceived as genuinely adding value and lots of their customers would buy their books even if they're available for download.
I just paid $20 for Neal Stephenson's new book; he probably got about $3 of my money, if that. The other $17 went to the distribution chain, of which *maybe* $1 goes to people who actually contributed to the book --- editors who actually edited, proofreaders, etc.
Eventually, a favorite author will release a new novel and I will pay $5, of which the majority will go to the author and all but a few pennies to other real contributors, for access to it with rights to print one copy.
The middlemen are merely fighting a rearguard action against the tide of history; a delaying action that may alter *when* I will buy a book that way, but not the ultimate reality.
—Carl Alexander xela@mit.edu
The music industry finds itself in a position where the basic assumption behind its original business model (the recording is too expensive for a person to reproduce him or herself and the distribution can be tightly controlled for maximal profit) is no longer true. The music industry feels extremely threatened. It should. This is a major evolutionary pressure.
Evolutionary? Of course; commercial music is faced with extinction only as long as it refuses to adapt, as long as it refuses to loosen its grip on the endless easy profits it believes it is entitled to. The industry is not acting to protect artists or the artists' interests (bards, musicians and storytellers thrived long before there was an industry to 'protect' them), it is not acting to prevent musicians from being 'driven out of business' (it impoverishes artists itself); it is acting to preserve the status quo and its own profit-inflated bulk. It's quite possible for the music industry to refashion itself, but rather than evolving and thriving in a new niche, the Dinosaurs, staggering under their own smothering weight, are trying to legislate the Mammals out of existence.
The double-whammy
From one side, we see groups (Fraunhofer, IBM, Thomson, Progressive Networks, Microsoft et al.) trying to control music technological infrastructure (MPEG, TwinVQ, etc) to be used as weaponry against their competitors. On the other front, we have the music industry trying to squeeze all the cash they can out of the content to maintain their enormous, recently obsolete bulk. In case they don't succeed in eliminating electronic music formats, they too are making a major bid to control the infrastructure.
There are multi-trillion dollar interests represented in the above clash. Businesses that only have a few million dollars are entirely outclassed.
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