p2pnet - rss feed: What next - Golden Arches?
By Bill Evans, IMIRA
On November 18th Macrovision, one of the companies who produce DRM for the recording industry, said the number of protected tracks distributed on its CDS copy-protected music CDs reached a new industry record in excess of 2 billion tracks.
That’s right - 2 Billion DRM music tracks from over 200 Million CDs.
Macrovision’s statements in their puff press release - in which they say this is good for artists, their "content partners" (labels) and consumers - are pure and simple hogwash.
PLEASE NOTE: Copyright expires, DRM doesn’t. After a copyright expires, to break the copy protection to exercise your fair use rights, you would still be guilty of a felony under the DMCA.
Since the recording industry likes to use real world comparisons, lets do that.
Imagine you go to your local grocery store and they have a great buy on ground sirloin. There are a lot of things you could do with that ground sirloin. But imagine they restricted its use to one of those helper products, and furthermore require that you use an electric stove to cook it. And if you do anything else with it such as grill burgers, you’d be guilty of felony and subject to up to $500,000 in fines and up to 5 years in jail.
This is what DRM and The DMCA have given us.
But it even gets worse …
Imagine farmer McDonald grew his beef especially for burgers and doesn’t want his ground beef sold to make those one-pan dinners, but prefers that it be sold only for burgers and only in 10 pound packages. Now you have the situation in which you must be sure of which rights you can utilize. So much for the concept of the artist controlling the work. Great in theory, but loses all credibility when applied to the real world.
A perfect example of this is the Beatles music. The remaining Beatles will not allow downloads via the internet, opting instead for CD sales only. (They do allow streaming.) But yet hit any filesharing program and every Beatles track ever recorded is available for free. I don’t want the entire collection, (10 pounds of ground sirloin) but prefer instead to purchase selected tracks that have special meaning to me. (I want, 1 pound and I want to be able to do with it as I please. Gas, Charcoal, or Electric …)
Once you offer a product for sale, what the user does with it is out of your control. I’ll cook whatever I want to with my ground sirloin, and however I want. Most consumers feel the same way about their music. I spend no less than 12 hours a day on my PC. This is where I want to listen to my music. And I want CD quality. I don’t want a compressed MP3 or WMA file that’s played only by proprietary software.
I want to listen to it as the artist intended.
To use a line from Verizon Wireless…"CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? GOOD!"
