Music Industry Tells Advertisers to Boycott "Pirate" Baidu 206
An anonymous reader points to a story at PC Authority, which begins: "Music industry representatives have warned advertisers to stop supporting Baidu, China's largest search engine, because they believe it is encouraging music piracy. Baidu is the largest source of pirated music in China, according to the representatives, who describe the company as 'incorrigible.' The Chinese firm's music search engine is accessed through what is described as a prominent link on the company's home page."
Thanks! (Score:4, Interesting)
Why didn't the FTC convict Sony? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sony infected many computers with a dangerous trojan, which would have sent any hacker to 40 years in Prison, and they escaped conviction or even a fine.
RIAA has been ruled against many times in court and ordered to pay lawyers fees to a poor single mom, and still they are loose: No arrest, no seizure of their equipment, etc.
MediaSentry and other RIAA hackers violate state laws in Montana, California, Texas and a host of states and yet continue to operate even though they are illegal. None has been sued yet and their findings are valid in a court of law: Its like a thief acting as a witness to a houseowner against another thief.
RIAA would be happy if the whole internet shut down tomorrow but they still can produce music at zero cost and sell it for $29.99 an album.
The Baidu search engine should show its middle finger publicly at RIAA and also sue them for defamation.
Music is already free. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:cool. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, yes. Don't feed the trolls. But if the article is a troll in itself, why not?
Re:Hey... maybe they're right. (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't see the logic in a search engine whose primary goal is to let you find whatever you're looking for. Yes, people will (ab)use it to look for illegal material or to find a source to acquire goods illegally. That's a given. But that is not the main reason why people go there and use it.
Now, one may argue that a lot of people use any P2P technology to exchange copyrighted material and engage in copyright infringment. But that's not the underlying reason for P2P to exist. Currently, I am hosting about 50 Gigs of software that is available through torrent from my server. All of it is legally allowed to exist there and be shared with anyone who wants it. It ranges from Linux distributions to freeware tools (most of them under the GPL or similar licenses), a fair lot of free music and even a few MMORPG clients (that have been released into torrent distribution by their creators). Now, I don't really play and I don't even like all the music I host, but I see that as a service for those that want to use torrents to get those goods, and I want to prove that there is a legal reason for P2P to exist.
Re:cool. (Score:3, Interesting)
We have this strange notion that music can be given away for free but is somehow also not public and can still be sold?
It's a bit like a book publisher letting anyone have a free copy of a book then complaining when people do not buy it
Re:cool. (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting - in many ways, we're seeing a return to medieval ideas of productivity and "intellectual property". Payment comes from a wealthy patron, not a wider audience. Works are distributed to anyone who has the means to copy them. Anonymity is not uncommon, especially for more controversial writings. Music earns money in performance. Re-working other people's material is not plagiarism, but a means of honouring one's predecessors, learning one's craft and encouraging creativity. I think we could learn a lot from people like Chaucer and Dante.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Music industry to adapt? (Score:5, Interesting)
The business model for the music industry has always been:
1. Buy expensive recording and vinyl pressing machines.
(The price on this equipment gives them a de facto monopoly on production)
2. Pay musicians a song for their work (maybe this is where the expression comes from?)
3. Sell disks for as much PROFIT as possible
In the 'new world' there is no monopoly and ipso facto no music industry.
OK, so this is a personal first (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like nothing better than to boycott Baidu. Their Baidu Spiders arrive in hordes and spend hours crawling my site. They ignore crawl-delays and denies. They're looking for online poker files that were placed there by some illustrious Chinese citizen or other in an attempt to deface my website about two months ago. That lasted about four hours (from the middle of the night, local time, until I woke up next morning and made it go away), but I'm still dealing with the Baidu invasion. They're worse than Genghis Khan. An attempt to contact the email address provided resulted in a bounce stating that my ISP (Comcast) is blocked in China. My next step will probably be simply to block any contact with Baidu at all, and I've been tempted to extend that to the whole of China.
So while I generally deplore the actions of the Music Mafia, my perception is that Baidu has invited the actions by their own behavior, which is by no means above reproach.
Re:Don't all search engines do this? (Score:5, Interesting)
However, some friends of mine, "The Station", an indie jam band with two CDs out and live shows posted at archive.org for several years (lots of shows posted) and the obligatory MySpace page, AND their own URL, returns "do you mean The Situation?" with a list of RIAA songs with "station" in the name.
The RIAA should sue Google. Or considering that the indies are competing with the RIAA maybe the RIAA paid Google to do this?
Now where did I put that tinfoil, I need to make a hat...
Re:Thanks! (Score:5, Interesting)
Their aim isn't to stop downloading of RIAA music; why would they? It's free advertising. If they had a problem with that then they wouldn't let their music be played on the radio. KSHE in St Louis plays seven whole albums, uncut and uninterrupted, every Sunday night [kuro5hin.org] and has been doing so for decades. I had Ted Nugent's Cat Scratch Fever [wikipedia.org] on cassette a week before its release, recorded in full from KSHE. That was thirty years ago! You can sample from a radio even more easily than recording a cassette.
The RIAA's problem is that their competitors, the indie bands, are on baidu. Take all the indies off baidu and the RIAA will have no problem with it.
Nobody takes issue with free advertising unless a) it's their competetitor's free advertising or b) they're incredibly stupid.
Re:cool. (Score:2, Interesting)
Along with many others, I am a firm supporter of using records as advertisements for live shows. That said, it does require a good deal of money to record, produce, manufacture, and distribute an album. Happily, that's where the internet can come in doubly handy: it obviates manufacture and enables near-costless distribution (via P2P).
To be honest, I think that a lot of the record industry's problems could be solved if they improved the quality and lowered the cost of online music. Many people (myself included) pirate music from time to time because it's a) relatively easily available, and b) free. If there were a legitimized version of MP3Sparks [mp3sparks.com] charging the same prices, I think the record companies would see a lot more online sales. I am loathe to spend $12 on a new CD, especially in crappy 128 or 160kbps MP3 format, but give me 256k or lossless for $5 per CD and I'd start buying up a whole collection. Make it part of a social network community with easy music suggestion and you've got a goldmine.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:cool. (Score:4, Interesting)
And who sends out more copies of music than the musicians themselves through radio broadcasts? How many times everyday do they copy the same Top 40 song on the same radio station?
For top musician talent selling 20,000 seat arenas, even if ticket prices average as little as $20 you should be clearing more money per performance than the average worker clears in a year.
How much money do pretty girls walking down the street make per year from men "stealing" their image into their eyes? That's no different than copying any imaginary property.
The existence of paid cable television stations proves that people are willing to pay for content in advance of the content being created. Do you know what you're going to watch in the future? Specific episodes? Boring or exciting news broadcasts? Are refunds ever offered if the content subjectively "sucks"? Nope. This goes for subscriptions, events like concerts, and all sorts of content which cannot be evaluated before paying, like video games, software programs, books.
It's a *miracle* any of this imaginary property obtains value in the first place. Creators complain they can't make a living without copyright protection, but how the hell does anyone ever pay for that content without receiving a significant portion of it for free in advance? It's literally a game of Monty selling boxes that might contain something good or might contain absolutely nothing at all. It's the same old hustle of con artists and circus promoters. But suddenly the price being charged vastly exceeded the present expected value of consumers. Consumers were ripped off far too much for far too long with the pushing of crap and filler, which was just mostly copying the advancements of the few greats anyway.
Yet look at entertainment thriving in the world of professional sports, which is making entertainer athletes richer than ever before. The difference between football players and musicians is football players go to work a lot more during the year, and copyright isn't market interfering inducing a huge percentage of the population to try to seriously make their living by playing football.
Music has just been plagued by terrible marketing and inefficient middlemen dinosaurs. Why aren't music concerts shown on television as much as sporting events? Because the music industry marketing "sucks" and their product has been undercut on price and exceeded on quality by competing entertainment forms.
Yet notice how copyright applies to even professional sports. Is this really constitutionally justified promotion of the advancement of the arts and sciences? Hell no. And disrespect for all forms of imaginary property government protectionism has been thus earned.
Copyright isn't even at all needed for content creators to make a living. How the hell are they affording the ability to create art in the first place if they aren't paid in full in advance? Obviously, there is a lie and a contradiction in the false incentives artists decry copyright is necessary for delivering. For if they can create art without being paid first, then copyright does jack squat for the creation of that art. And if they can be sufficiently paid in advance to produce, then copyright is completely unnecessary.