Pointless Piracy War

Posted on 2002/07/11 11:45:39 (July 2002) by rob.

A rant about the piracy war

The digital age has heralded the ability to copy media quickly and without loss. With the internet came file sharing and with mp3 compression came the ability to squeeze whole songs across it. And because of this the music business has, for the first time since the sixties, experienced a drop in revenue from audio sales.

So what are they going to do about it? The first shot in the war against mass privacy was copy protection. By protecting a CD, they could be assured that no CD ROM could copy it. Unfortunately the standard either was easily broken through or the CD with protection would not play on many standard CD players. It's reported that many car showrooms have had brand new cars returned because the CD player was broken. This was often not the case, a CD with over-protection stopping the player from reading it.

However, as soon as you transfer from digital to analogue to an audio device you've lost the protection war. Sure, you can't take bits directly from the CD but you can re-encode the audio stream with next to no loss (only rounding errors). So it's pointless. All it takes is one person to have a rip of a CD and then the whole world might as well have it.

The second shot was by closing down Napster. An interesting legal move but now the idea is out there within the internet consciousness, a million other programs have popped up, eDonkey, Kazaa... the list goes on. File sharing is here to stay and you're not going to kill it.

Another attempt was maded by the music industry in the form of their own downloadable format. A program, like Napster but with some major drawbacks. First, you have to pay for it. Secondly, if you stop paying for it all your songs go out of date immediately. Anything you download has the lifespan of your contract. Also, you can't move the files or burn them. This is an invasion of privacy as they are restricting the use of something you have bought.

An idea from Machiavelli-Central was from the Motion Picture Association of America who suggested altering digital to analogue converters such that they detect audio and visual 'watermarks'. Without the watermark, the device (be it DVD/CDROM) would shut down. How shit is that?

Why can't they embrace the technology? Find a way of using it to their favour. They certainly did for video and for cassettes. Although, I can not think how they might.

My solution to this problem is to stop publishing crap music that people have no worries about stealing. If there is a band you really like (Cake, Korn, whatever), you buy the music because you really like it and want to support the artists. They should just cut the rubbish and publish bands only worth hearing.

I concur, I find it all a bit annoying. Especially huge bands like Metallica, who must be absolutely rolling in it anyway, making such a big fuss because they've had a slight drop in their hugely bloated incomes due to piracy.

Radiohead did say once (I'm paraphrasing a bit) their main goal was just to get people to listen to their music. Sure it's nice if they pay for it too, but they'd rather people got it for free than not listen to it at all. On Cake's website you can buy band t-shirts, and on the order page they recommend you try to find them second hand first. However, I feel these may be the exceptions to the rule. Yes I do kind of agree that if you contribute something worthwhile to the world, then you ought to be able to make your living from it. But on the other hand I find myself really losing respect for any artist that makes such a big deal about "loss of revenue" due to piracy, you can't help but question whether they are in it for the art or for the money.

Yes, it's really bad the record companies don't embrace the technology too. Especially during that whole napster thing, I remember a lot of record company executives giving themselves incredibly bad PR by speaking out and sounding so utterly behind the times.

I've always thought it's a bit hard to enforce copyright of anything, especially things that can be reduced to a digital representation (and I struggle to think of an example of anything that can't). As a friend of mine once said, and I'm sure there's been lots of other people saying similar things, if somebody wrote a program that output strings of random 1s and 0s to a disk, eventually they'd come up with the executable for Microsoft Word, an exact likeness of the Mona Lisa, or Enter Sandman by Metallica. Would they then be prosecuted for copyright infringement?

Besides, this isn't such a new issue is it? Punks allegedly never used to buy tapes, they'd just record from the radio. The first album I ever owned (Men at Work, Business As Usual) which is pretty dated now, has a dire warning on it about how "home taping" is killing the music industry. The seem to have just about struggled though since then though, don't you think?

I'm sure in some way it's all a just punishment for the music industry - having turned everything so commercial and manufactured, it is probably fitting that they're now in danger of losing a load of money. If that really is the only thing they're worried about, I kind of struggle to muster a lot of sympathy for them.

Posted by john at 2002/07/11 13:28:38.

I have loads of MP3's. In fact I converted my WHOLE CD COLLECTION to MP3. Why? Not to distribute it around, but so that I can access the music that I have paid (through the nose) for in a conveinient and random manner. So that, to me anyway, proves that the technology is not the issue.

I used to tape CD's from my friends. Then I'd get bored with the lossy quality, the linear access and went and bought the CD. Try-before-you-buy at it's best.

I still buy CD's. Usually, I can only get the popular songs off the album from LimeWire (or whatever). What if I want the rest? I buy the CD. I quite like the little booklet and song lyrics, and stuff. I buy the CD.

...and so does everyone else that I talk to!

Come on Music Industry - embrace the technology.

Posted by rowanboy at 2002/07/12 17:59:58.

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