resurrectionsong

October 28, 2003

Interesting Comment

Occasionally, I like to hi-light comments that were posted to older blog entries. Usually, it's because someone says something annoying, offensives, irritating, or otherwise mock-worthy.

This time, though, it's a comment that was simply interesting to me. In the end, I'm not sure I agree entirely, but it's an interesting viewpoint. The comment was posted to this entry concerning the RIAA's lawsuits against people who make music available through peer-to-peer networks.

My thoughts on this subject have hardened. I have rarely purchased a CD at full retail price.
I do buy and sell CD's at a used CD place and I buy CD's at shows from local artists or independents.
I have not, nor will I, purchase music from the "Big 5" until this copyright fiasco is figured out so that it is a win/win for all.
I also agree that mp3's, at 128kbps or less, should be free. The only quality of compressed lossy that I find acceptable is an ogg vorbis at a -q 7.50 VBR.
But even then a 4 minute song will be about a 6.5 meg download... a good 30 minutes on a dial up, at best.

I haven't had occasion to use the Ogg Vorbis format yet, but I've heard quite a bit good about it. I might play with it later tonight just to get an idea of the quality differences.

I've wondered whether, under copyright law, a 128kbps MP3 or lower could be considered a new work or derivative work. It is substantially different from the original work, but it is not truly new.

I don't think music wants to be free, but I do think that draconian measures by the RIAA to stop reasonable use of purchased music has done more to convince people of the "righteousness" of their cause than any other single factor. It's easy to feel like the good guy when the RIAA and the big record companies seem to work so hard to screw consumers and smaller bands.

Of course, that viewpoint is simplistic and leads to a misplaced Robin Hood complex. The fact is, we aren't really sticking it to the RIAA so much when we download music that we'll never purchase. We're sticking it to absolutely everyone in the food chain of the music industry. We aren't robbing the rich to give to the poor; we're robbing from the rich to give to ourselves.

I like the idea of not buying from the "Big 5" to protest the way they treat artists and customers, but I doubt that I have the self-control to not buy the next Queens of the Stone Age album. I do embrace the new online music services, though, and hope that they keep growing, expanding, and improving. Perhaps the moderate success of a service like Apple's Music Store can help improve the relationship between consumer and company. Unfortunately, that does nothing to address the relationship between the artist and the company.

As I said, interesting comment.

Thanks, Ken.

Posted by zombyboy at October 28, 2003 11:17 AM | TrackBack

Comments

An interesting side note is the extremely high prices at places like Barnes and Nobles, etc. for brand new albums. $19 for a new album is ridiculous, especially when at least one company lowered their price for new albums to $12.99.

I think the mp3 at 128Kbps should be free argument is B-O-G-U-S. The average listener isn't going to notice any difference in quality, and you're asking people to let you have something for free simply because it's an inconvenience for you to download it? Puh-leeeze!

Posted by: bryan at October 29, 2003 08:09 AM

There is no "but I made a crappy copy" defense to a copyright action. I suppose that a fair use argument could be made if there were some format that was bad enough to make people want to go out and buy the full version.

As to the "robbing" analogy, here is where the copyright-as-theft analogy breaks down: we're not sticking it to anybody when we download music we weren't going to buy anyway. And copyright was only supposed to protect, well, copyright - so anybody else in the food chain of the music industry shouldn't be getting any protection anyway.

I'll start taking the RIAA's "you bought a license not a product" argument a bit more seriously when the record companies themselves start applying it to their own practices. They could start by allowing consumers to trade in their old, scratched up LPs in exchange for new CDs at cost.

Posted by: Xrlq at October 31, 2003 11:56 AM

Copyright is certainly something that it wasn't initially intended to be. That may or may not be a good thing--protecting, to some reasonable level, the companies that distribute the art isn't such a bad thing. They do like to have it both ways, though--treating the distribution as licensed use, but treating the medium as physical property.

I still say it's stealing, though, at some level. While I doubt that the effect of file trading is as extensive as the RIAA would have us believe (the financial problems are about product quality, product cost, and the fact that people like me spent a lot of money "upgrading" our tape collection to CD--and that market has about run dry), I also can't believe that file trading doesn't have some effect on sales.

Posted by: zombyboy at October 31, 2003 12:07 PM