Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Kazaa, Grokster, Napster, P2P etc.
Read the whole article here at The Register
The latest news in Australia is that the Music Industry Privacy Investigations (MIPI) who are affiliated with the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) raided the University of Queensland, the University of New South Wales and Monash University in order to obtain evidence in a trial against Kazaa's owner Sharman Networks.
Long and short they are trying to sue Kazaa and possible the Universities with illegal distributon of copyright material.
The defendants have a smple answer and it is tied up with precedent from other court cases. Eg. Is Xerox held liable for some one using their copier to illegaly reproduce copyright material? No of course not, and niehther is the universty that makes the coipier avaibalbe to students. A recent court case in Norway aqcuitted a programmer who created a dvd ripper because his creating it didnt mean he was in control of how people used it.
I think the court case is a joke to be honest. The music industry is archaic in their approach to this, and are already receiving a big backlash over the RIAA / Pepsi / Apple ads at the superbowl.
In the past if you played your music loudly enough for the neighbours to enjoy, no one cared. If you taped a tv show or a song from the radio to use for you own enjoyment no one cared, if you lent that tape to your friend who didn't record it themselves no one cared. But now there is a file transfer system that can potentially move huge volumes of this stuff around they care.
Now don't get me wrong. I agree with the concept of rewarding effort, and the artists should definitely be being paid. In my mind the distribution medium should also make some money, but the huge superprofits being enjoyed by the music companies are ridiculous and its time for a change.
My solution would be tagging each song download from a P2P distributor with a small fee, using paypal or some other similar system and forwarding a royalty to the artist, and the distribution system keeping the rest. Then we would see true competition for distribution of the actual music. P2P distributors would need to ensure the integrity of the files being transferred through a rating system similar to ebays seller rating system and screen out viruses and malware.
How many times have you bought a cd and not liked all the songs, but had to buy them all becuase they were all on the same cd? Well with this proposed model, you could try before you buy with a sample (like in a physical cd store) and then only purchase the songs you want.
Questions
What do you think about this? Do you have an alternative?
Have you or would you use a P2P file sharing service?
Read the whole article here at The Register
The latest news in Australia is that the Music Industry Privacy Investigations (MIPI) who are affiliated with the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) raided the University of Queensland, the University of New South Wales and Monash University in order to obtain evidence in a trial against Kazaa's owner Sharman Networks.
Long and short they are trying to sue Kazaa and possible the Universities with illegal distributon of copyright material.
The defendants have a smple answer and it is tied up with precedent from other court cases. Eg. Is Xerox held liable for some one using their copier to illegaly reproduce copyright material? No of course not, and niehther is the universty that makes the coipier avaibalbe to students. A recent court case in Norway aqcuitted a programmer who created a dvd ripper because his creating it didnt mean he was in control of how people used it.
I think the court case is a joke to be honest. The music industry is archaic in their approach to this, and are already receiving a big backlash over the RIAA / Pepsi / Apple ads at the superbowl.
In the past if you played your music loudly enough for the neighbours to enjoy, no one cared. If you taped a tv show or a song from the radio to use for you own enjoyment no one cared, if you lent that tape to your friend who didn't record it themselves no one cared. But now there is a file transfer system that can potentially move huge volumes of this stuff around they care.
Now don't get me wrong. I agree with the concept of rewarding effort, and the artists should definitely be being paid. In my mind the distribution medium should also make some money, but the huge superprofits being enjoyed by the music companies are ridiculous and its time for a change.
My solution would be tagging each song download from a P2P distributor with a small fee, using paypal or some other similar system and forwarding a royalty to the artist, and the distribution system keeping the rest. Then we would see true competition for distribution of the actual music. P2P distributors would need to ensure the integrity of the files being transferred through a rating system similar to ebays seller rating system and screen out viruses and malware.
How many times have you bought a cd and not liked all the songs, but had to buy them all becuase they were all on the same cd? Well with this proposed model, you could try before you buy with a sample (like in a physical cd store) and then only purchase the songs you want.
Questions
What do you think about this? Do you have an alternative?
Have you or would you use a P2P file sharing service?
