Purported ACTA Wishlist Would Put DMCA To Shame 348
ulash writes "Ars Technica has an article about the (alleged) leaked 'wishlist' that RIAA submitted to the US government back in March of this year listing what they wish to see as a part of ACTA. The list includes such gems as forced filtering of materials by the ISPs, gutting the parts of the DMCA that provides safe harbor to the ISPs, and even restricting supplies of 'optical grade polycarbonate' in countries 'with high rates of production of pirated optical discs.' While the effectiveness of such a 'wishlist' on the law is not by any means objectively measurable, if one takes into account how *AA was instrumentative in the passing of DMCA, I think it is more than likely that they will get at least some of their wishes."
Re:Go ahead (Score:3, Informative)
Not that the US has some kind of monopoly on 'optical grade polycarbonate' but I'd love them to restrict access and see where it gets them.
Hint: All fiber used for telco/datacomms infrastructure is made from glass.
The concern is not for optical fiber, but for CD / DVD / BlueRay discs, which are optical grade polycarbonate.
Re:At what point (Score:5, Informative)
Well, except for the fact that the RIAA is controlled by four large multi-national firms. EMI is British, Universal is owned by Vivendi, a French company, the head of Warner music is Canadian and Sony BMG is about as multi-national as you'll find anywhere. If anything, the RIAA and the companies that control it are trying to do this everywhere. US politicians are going along for the ride, but so are governments all over the world.
Presumption of guilt (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting excepts:
Section D.1 basically says that when you pirate something, they can confiscate anything they deem "related" to the infringement (all your PCs are belong to us).
Section I.1 says that all optical disks must be approved by MPAA/RIAA thought police prior to pressing.
Section J.6 requests that ISPs are guilty until proven innocent.
Section J.10 says that MPAA/RIAA should be able to directly spy on your Internet use.
Section K.1 implies that IP pirates are tied to terrorists and organized crime.
Re:What about when the **AA's are out of business? (Score:2, Informative)
Most of their product follows those guidelines, but not all. They do that because people buy it. Blame the people buying it. Their model is not to sell bad music, it is to sell a lot of music. If bad music sells, they'll keep selling it.
As for the price, if the price is too high, don't buy it. (A price that you think is too high does not justify breaking the law to get it.)
As for the compensation, their upstream suppliers and their contractors are willing to sell or work for that price. They don't have to. They are completely within their rights to raise their rates and see if anybody will buy.
If you just don't like paying the middle man's markup, buy directly from the musicians.
Re:the printing press (Score:3, Informative)
It's interesting that you chose books as one of your examples. They provide an excellent mirror to today's copyright problems.
American colonists (and early American citizens) were huge consumers of pirated European books (often printed in Scotland). Part of the reason for Scottish supplies was that London printers had a gentlemen's agreement not to lower the wholesale price of books and this made early shipping owners unwilling to risk losing such expensive cargo for a minimal payoff. Scottish printers had no such qualms with dropping the wholesale price (of course, they also weren't paying the authors) As paper and presses became more affordable, American printers became engaged in wholesale copyright violations.
Remember that although you could always find bootleg discs from some guy on the corner, the internet piracy era really took off when the perfect storm of dropping CD burner prices and expanding broadband hit.
Canada was still an English territory, so although England was powerless to stop the piracy in the United States, they attempted to level import duties on books moving into Canada. The idea was to allow whatever books across the border, but to collect the duty, record the titles, and remit the money so that it could be distributed to the authors. You can guess how well that worked with customs agents, who basically ignored the extra work or were simply bribed into accepting shipments. Through cheap pirated work, the entirety of the American book-printing industry was built. They could undercut production costs from anyone due to the fact that American printers didn't pay out royalties.
There are certainly many legitimate sources for electronic music, but it's difficult to imagine the success of the MP3 player without bootleg MP3s. Joe Average - to this day - is more likely to know how to pirate a song using some program his kid installed than he is to know how to rip a CD. Plenty of legitimate sources of music exist online, and the prices are quite reasonable; it's very difficult to compete with $0. Although Napster bowed out of the DRM market, they were a legitimate company who built their name on pirated goods. One might even argue that much of the success of Apple is owed not just to a quality MP3 player design but a ready supply of bootleg music with which to fill the iPod.
Ultimately, Governments passed more and more preposterous copyright laws relating to novels. In order to obtain copyright in America, for example, you had to deposit a copy of your book with Washington BEFORE you started selling overseas. Copyright law at the time was an amalgam of author/publisher's and printer's concerns, with several countries enacting protectionist measures relating to imported books. The English had further problems with copyright on homegrown authors in their colonies (India, Canada, Australia). Things only finally sorted themselves out at the beginning of the 20th century when enough American/Canadian/Australian authors were "big" enough that both sides found it worthwhile to call a truce. American publishers stood to lose just as much money to overseas pirating as the English publishers had. Major countries met, agreements were made, and things settled into the current system.
And so we find ourselves in the "more and more preposterous copyright laws" stage of the game. Restricting optical-grade polycarbonate? Removing common-carrier status by forcing filtering? It's going way beyond reasonable. If history is to be believed, a large meeting of the major countries and a treaty is needed, but the unfortunate answer is that such treaties already exist. The wholesale piracy houses are located in countries who don't yet have enough to lose; They're 1800 America instead of 1900 America. So while we can cross our fingers and hope for their IP cultures to take hold, we also have to address the problem of the individual file sharer - he or she will never be 1900 America and will thus always have an incentive to shoot for the bottom.
It was a fund
Re:At what point (Score:4, Informative)
The problem as I see it is the fact that they even can be owned, and that is because they are professional politicians instead of the original citizen-statesmen that was envisioned by the founding fathers.
They act more like an aristocracy than a representative body, but because they are constantly on the re-election tread mill, money has great influence over them, and these types of organizations (i.e. RIAA/MPAA) have lots of money.
It would seem, then, that a simple solution would be for the individual States to enact term limits. And this doesn't need to be a US Constitutional Amendment to limit Congress Critters as the 22nd Amendment limits the Presidency, because Congress are not Federal employees (which means they actually shouldn't get Federal pensions either). They are elected solely by their State, so a given State should be able to enact term limits that affect their own representation. Only the President and VP are nationally elected, thus the need for the 22nd Amendment.
If you eliminate the permanent politician in Washington, then there wouldn't be as much need for the money chase and we might actually get better laws.
Of course all the Congress Critters would scream bloody murder and pass all types of legislation to prevent term limits that would need to be challenged to the Supreme Court, but based on how they responded to Gore vs Bush, indicating all voting rules are the province of the State to decide, it would be an interesting fight.
Pipe dreams, I know.
Re:Exactly (Score:3, Informative)
Why is that relevant? Either their business model for selling things is good or it is bad. When you bring up arguments like this, you are implicitly saying (and I doubt you mean based on the rest of your comments): Enforcement of copyright laws would allow the RIAA and its member companies to continue to exist, so the copyright laws should be ignored for the greater good of destroying an industry that treats its workers like shit.
That's a poor analogy. E-mail is a competing product. Note that the RIAA, as much as it wants to, isn't advocating shutting down independent artists (the equivalent of e-mail in your analogy). They advocate people not making copies of their songs. More like the mail provider who is upset people are duplicating his stamps on photocopiers. It's a loss of revenue that he would otherwise get, from people using his product. You may claim that the lack of a marginal cost is a distinction, but I fail to understand why. The fixed costs still need to be amortized over many sales to be worthwhile.
The market doesn't say that. CDs still sell. But, guess what, counterfit goods always have a market. That doesn't mean there is no market for Gucci bags.
Re:What about when the **AA's are out of business? (Score:3, Informative)
The idea of selling music is JUST fine. The success of iTunes is a testament to that. The trouble is that they want to overcharge for music, and thus people no longer want to pay for it. The existence of a "black market" which allows near cost-less redistribution of content (and which people collaborate in to share music with each other) is a genie which I don't think we can get back in the bottle. The entertainment industries need to adapt to this, rather than try to ignore it (or try to crush it with legislation).
If I were inclined to buy music (I rarely listen to music), I'd prefer to either buy used CDs, or buy non-DRM-encrusted songs from iTunes. My other options are to infringe copyrights to get it (which I don't feel is ethical or prudent), or to pay more than "market value" for an album. I prefer not to do the latter, because I feel that the RIAA has been abusing their monopoly position, and I just generally don't feel that music has the value they put on the price tag.
This is merely a matter of supply and demand. They're unwilling to supply music at a price I feel is reasonable, and I don't find myself feeling a demand for music atthe price they set. I'd be more likely to BUY CDs if I could sample an album for free (in a convenient manner), and just pay less for an album. I'd buy more music at $5/CD than I would at $15-$20/CD... but would even then be more likely to buy individual tracks that I like.
The costs that the recording companies charge for music includes costs for:
- artist
- recording service/equipment/expertise
- profit
- advertising
- packaging/manufacture
- distribution
- ???
I'm OK with the first three (yes, even profit), but electronic distribution means that I no longer value packaging or distribution costs AT ALL. Bandwidth costs are miniscule by comparison. Additionally, if I can listen to an album for a while before buying it, or just hear songs (even in crappy net-radio bitrate), advertising and packaging design no longer mean as much. Sure, the shiny package is pretty and stuff, but ... I look at that maybe twice in the lifetime of a CD. I'm not going to pay $10 or more for the experience of opening a CD case and looking at the liner packet.
A third option is to discourage people from breaking the law by pricing their music competitively, and have it be available in such a way that it's more convenient than infringement is. Yes, this won't stop people from infringement, but MOST people would say, "meh, I can just buy it and have it in my music library." iTunes gets this right, for the most part. I'd prefer to be able to listen to a WHOLE song, or even a playlist, multiple times (and would even probably pay a subscrption if I were into listening to music), before buying a song.
I argue that this is precisely the problem with their business model. Kinko's no longer gets as much fax volume now that we can e-mail eachother PDFs, for example. The entertainment industry is built around the idea that Music should be scarce, and that we should pay for the priveledge of listening to it. They're wrong: music is plentiful, distribution can be (and is) nearly free. It's like trying to charge money for the shade from your tree, when people can walk around with umbrellas. For a car analogy, it would be like Amtrak or other public transit trying to prevent people from carpooling, as that reduces their potential revenue. (I know, weak car analogy. ;))
Re:Who is that behind the curtains? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes! We need this. And we should post all their email addresses. And we should email them. Perhaps I'll go to the trouble of finding all the email addresses, or better... US Mail addresses.
RIAA Board of Directors: http://www.riaa.com/aboutus.php?content_selector=who_we_are_board [riaa.com]
Mitch Bainwol Recording Industry Association of America
Victoria Bassetti EMI Recorded Music
Jason Flom Virgin Records America
Bill Hearn EMI Christian Music Group
Deirdre McDonald SonyBMG
Joe Galante SonyBMG
Kevin Kelleher SonyBMG
Rob Stringer SonyBMG
Jeff Harleston Geffen Records
Steve Bartels Island Records
Lawrence Kenswil Universal Music Group
Mel Lewinter Universal Music Group
Zach Horowitz Universal Music Group
Craig Kallman The Atlantic Group
Tom Whalley Warner Bros Records
Michael Fleisher Warner Music Group
Kevin Liles Warner Music Group
Bob Cavallo Buena Vista Music
Glen Barros Concord Records
Mike Curb Curb Records
Michael Koch Koch Entertainment
Tom Silverman Tommy Boy Entertainment
Jose Behar Univision
Alan Meltzer Wind Up Records
MPAA Members: http://www.mpaa.org/AboutUsMembers.asp [mpaa.org]
Paramount Pictures Corporation;
Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.;
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation;
Universal City Studios LLLP;
Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures; and
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.