p2pnet - rss feed: Wither audio cassette tapes in 2008?
p2pnet news view | Music:- Way back in the last century, when Mitch Bainwol was just another political hack, DAT (digital audio tape), “poses the most significant technological threat the American music industry has ever faced,” declared music industry dinosaur Jay Berman, who then headed up Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony BMG’s RIAA, a position filled today by Bainwol.
The comment came in a Joint Hearing in 1987 held by the Senate and House IP subcommittees, says John Patry who was able to unearth a transcript for a post in his Patry Copyright Blog.
He goes on »»»
The lead witness was Jason S. Berman, President of the RIAA. (He was followed as RIAA President by Hilary Rosen and then by Cary Sherman. He and Ms. Rosen now have a consulting company.) The hearing was an oversight hearing, meaning there was no bill on the table, but rather an issue, and that was issue was the existential threat allegedly posed by DAT (digital audio tape). Mr. Berman began by testifying “DAT poses the most significant technological threat the American music industry has ever faced.” (page 4). After invoking such a folk devil, there was of course a solution: more rights!: “At the same time it offers a significant opportunity for Congress to craft a timely and uniquely suitable legislative response as we enter what will be the next phase of the home taping problem, a problem that has worsened over the years.” This much is standard fare: the set-up is so ubiquitous that I could draft testimony like this in my sleep.
What interested me was how analog home taping was put forth as an epidemic (or in the current hyped-up environment what would be called a “global pandemic” and “a dagger into the heart of America’s future economic security,” and how there was no mincing of words that copying of analog tape for personal use was infringing and not fair use.
Wither audio cassette tapes in 2008?
All gone, except, until now, in the book publishing business. But it seems even that final bastion is crumbling.
Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes, says a New York Times headline.
Not so fast, though ……….
We have an mp3 player in our car, but we also still have a tape deck and loads of cassettes of hard-to-find recordings of oldies, including really neat compilations (called mixes, these days). And audio tapes are all but given away for free in second-hand stores.
“I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn’t have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,” the NYT has Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association.
Even if publishers of music and audio books stop using cassettes, people will still be looking for tape players because of “the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept,” as DuBravac put it.
We have a large and, thanks jumble sales and the like, still growing vinyl collection (which I keep meaning to copy to disc but never seem to get around to 
).
Are audio tapes really dead?
Not where we live.
And guess what? It’s easy to turn them into .wavs or mp3s and/or transfer them to discs, and then you can ……..
JN
.
.Stumble It!
Patry Copyright Blog - What RIAA has said about home taping, January 7, 2008
New York Times -Say So Long to an Old Companion: Cassette Tapes, July 28, 2008
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July 29th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Berman was testifying in 1987 about digital audio tape, something that never reached the consumer market because of legislation against it. Like today’s technologies, DAT could produce perfect, exact copies of music with no degradation.
Those cassettes that we all have cluttering a cabinet somewhere are analog tapes, with the “hiss” that your Dolby system helped to mask.
Nevertheless, the point of the story remains. Their business model was dying, and their solution was to legislate a ban on DAT. This only shows that they’ve been riding the same dead horse for over 20 years.
July 29th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I kinda wonder how long it will take for the focus to shift to broadband over power lines. If EVERYONE who had power also had an essentially limitless broadband connection, p2p use ( or, more likely, encrypted email use ) would probably become truly staggering. If they were worried about taping then, they better hold on to their hats if powerline broadband day ever comes.
August 9th, 2008 at 8:29 am
I’ve got a couple of boxes full of analog audio tapes buried somewhere in the depths of a storage room. Quite a few are mix tapes I made for use while driving. This was back when I first got my drivers license and the songs I taped still bring back a lot of good memories. The majority of the songs on these cassettes were usually copied from borrowed sources belonging to friends, family, the library, and even FM radio if there wasn’t any other good alternatives available. During that era the term ‘copyright’ simply wasn’t a word most folks were aware of, especially among youths such as myself. Most of us were raised to believe that sharing is caring, which is why back then the swapping of music and video games among friends was commonplace and seen as completely harmless. Not so much today sadly.