Girding Against the Copyright Mob (Cato ponders DMCA)

Wired.com ^ | 2:00 a.m. Aug. 2, 2002 PDT | Brad King

[weegee]

PALO ALTO, California -- It's a sunny summer day and you pull your CDs from your home stereo, toss them in your bag and head out. In the car, you listen to your music, and when you reach the beach, you slip a CD into a portable boom box.

[RightWhale]

Recorded music and movies are not nearly as good as live performance. In fact, they are stale and ought to not be recorded in the first place. Those who make recordings and hope to get rich are no more than dot.commers. It's a scam.

[Mike-o-Matic]

(RIAA && Greedy Record Companies) = "diginazis."

[TommyDale]

These people who are pushing for this are totally stupid. They don't realize that the public will not purchase multiple copies of the same product. The end result will be buyer resistance, and the system will collapse. There just isn't enought demand for the bland content now being offered.

[Dimensio]

Except that if the system collapses, the RIAA will blame piracy and get Congress to pass even more stupid and restrictive laws. Why else do you think that blank CD media is "taxed" with the revenue going directly to the RIAA?

It's this tax that justifies music piracy. If I am paying the RIAA for every blank CD that I purchase even though they have nothing to do with the production of said CDs, then I figure that I'm legally entitled to 80 minutes of music per disc. Since I'm still working on a spindle of 80 minute CDs, not one of which has been used for music, and I currently have about 30 hours worth of music in MP3s, I figure I'm owed another 100 hours or so.

[TommyDale]

Do you live in Canada? In that great Socialist country, the assumption is that everyone is a music thief or pirate, and they pay "up the wazoo" for blank CD-R's.

Here, only the "Music CD-R's" are taxed/overpriced, since they are clearly for music recording. On the computer/data CD, they are not.

The point is, why should people be denied the technology that is afforded them? If the RIAA or Hollywood studios don't want people to make LEGITIMATE copies for archive purposes (after we have already purchased the material) then they should find some other media. Let them invent their own system that will replace the CD or DVD...then we'll see how many people would by their equipment!

[ThinkDifferent]

Let them invent their own system that will replace the CD or DVD...then we'll see how many people would by their equipment!

Exactly, and they're smart enough to know that nobody would voluntarily buy their crippled products (see Divx). Their solution is to have government criminalize the production or sale of any equpiment that does not conform to their ideas of what rights consumers should have (i.e. none), thus revelaing themselves as enemies of capitalism.

[TommyDale]

One more thought -- who are these people that assume that all blank recording material is for music or videos? Have they never heard of backing up a hard drive to a CD-ROM?
Talk about egos -- they assume this is all about the entertainment industry, which it is not.

[Dimensio]

No, the situation is worse in Canada (and come Feburary it'll get downright criminal, with the national recording industry extorting $21 per gigabyte of storage on portable MP3 players). I am aware of the asinie situation there, though the US tax has no distinction between music and data (geez, it's just dye on foil under plastic -- a "music" CD-R is going to be just as effective at holding data as a "data" CD-R is at holding music). I buy 100 "data" CDs and the RIAA gets a cut...so I figure that since I have over 30 hours of MP3 music (much of which comes from stuff I actually own on CD) and I've paid them for over 130 hours worth of CDs, they owe me.

[Greeklawyer]

The goal is to control distribution. The music distribution industry is trying to prevent its self created rebelion by legislation. We would not be having this discussion if they knew how to price their product.

If the RIAA were to be in control of "napster" and the consumer paid a one time fee for ownership then we are done. At pennies a song they will make money becuase there is no product to distribute. Of course there are no trucks moving product and no disks being cut, so that distribution network will have its business reduced. This is a often cited solution.

This is not the issue control, control, and control is the issue. The RIAA does not want to be reasonable they want absolute, unquestioned, and complete control.