Digital Music and Commerce (first edition)
A video documentary by João Marrucho.
You can get the video (CDr 20 min., 400x300, Motion-jpeg 2, 44,100 khz, stereo), by sending an e-mail, to joaodaconcorrencia at gmail dot com. Idetify yourself, correctly: (name, adress...). Feel free to copy, quote, translate and spread the information contained on this documentary.
Legendado em português, a partir de Janeiro de 2006, espero.
The most recent events in music industry and all other cultural content production, editing, and distribution have tended to use legal means trying to control the way information and ideas spread. In 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was written in the United States of America in order to up-date the existing regulation for this mechanisms.
The spread of personal computers has allowed to the common user to intervene directly on this processes. The effort to maintain an equilibrated market (that ruled over the last century) has turned illegal what was before a civil right. Now, instead of the fair registration obligation created during the industrial revolution users are also forbidden from changing the product as if they were the cemetery for the information. What's happening?
The Big Idea or The Big Deal?
In the 1970's decade, photocopiers spread, and alerted the book industry to a problem they didn't have to face before. People could possess the information contained on their books, magazines and newspapers writing, editing, design and distribution. This new sense that the idea duplication was now in other hands, that not the ones from the publisher, originated a conservative copyrights movement that didn't stopped until now.
Sony Betamax case, in 1984, was an important judicial moment that made video reproduction a common practice. In that situation, Universal City Studios sued Sony for creating a recording object that had more illegal uses than legal purposes. Sony's lawyers, supported their argumentation turning the responsibilities to the Sony user. Although Universal City Studios had documents proofing the opposite, the court ruled in favor of Sony.
Like guns are sold, so can video recorders and blank video tapes be.
The DMCA
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a USA treaty that turns into criminal act "to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast or communicate to the public, without authority, works or copies of works knowing that electronic rights management information has been removed or altered without authority". It also holds responsible for such, the Internet Service Providers and software providers that can access the user information. And now, they all can. USA Congress has given copyright holders expanded powers similar to those granted to government officials under the USA PATRIOT Act. This means that whether or not you use peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, the recording industry (or anyone who claims to be a rights-holder) can easily gain access to your personal information, without a judge's oversight.
Despite this intents, DMCA castrates a giant amount of scientific researches on mathematics, software, and many other multi-media areas. By banning all acts of circumvention, and all technologies and tools that can be used for circumvention, section 1201 grants to copyright owners the power to unilaterally eliminate the public’s fair use rights. Already, the music industry has begun to deploy "copy-protected CDs" that promise to reduce consumers’ ability to make legitimate, personal copies of music they have purchased.
This kind of protective measures are taking place at the same rate that the worldwide web users work in the opposite way. Open source software, freeware, peer2peer, weblogs, and many other private sites are working hard, and maybe faster, to keep creativity out of this chains.
Opsound, for example, is an experimental record label and open sound pool organized through the opsound.org website. Opsound explores the possibilities of developing a gift economy among musicians, borrowing from the model of the open source software community. Most younger musicians would think that there is no way for making a living out this. The big music companies are, in fact, living a selling crisis. But there is a way to outcome all the small difficulties that made them so conservative. Take Universal City Studios, that stood against Sony blank video tapes, as an example. Universal City Studios increased its business volume from 5 million dollars to approximately 18 million dollars by selling the same technology they sued 20 years before. We can make an analogue analysis for the recent developments. Electronic Frontier Foundation has provided a list of ways to make business without neglecting the fair use of copyrighted material:
I'll pass it along:
Voluntary Collective Licensing
It sounds obvious: major labels could get together and offer fair, non-discriminatory license terms for their music. This is called "voluntary collective licensing," and it has been keeping radio legal and getting songwriters paid for 70 years. It protects stations from lawsuits while collecting payment for the songs they play. (...)
Individual Compulsory Licenses
If artists, songwriters, and copyright holders were required to permit online copying in return for government-specified fees, companies could compete to painlessly collect these fees, do the accounting, and remit them to the artists. The payment to each artist need not directly reflect what each consumer pays, as long as the total across all artists and all consumers balances. (...)
Ad Revenue Sharing
Sites like the Internet Underground Music Archive, EMusic.com, Soundclick, and Artistdirect.com provide an online space for fans to listen to music streams, download files, and interact with artists. In the meantime, these fans are viewing advertisements on the site, and the revenues are split between the site and the copyright holders.
P2P Subscriptions
P2P software vendors could start charging for their service. Music lovers could pay a flat fee for the software or pay per downloaded song. The funds could be directed to artists and copyright holders through licensing agreements with studios and labels or through a compulsory license. In 2001, Napster was considering such a subscription service. Recent attempts at a subscription service (such as Apple's iTunes Music Store) show that consumers are willing to pay for downloaded music.
Digital Patronage and Online Tipping
Direct contribution from music lovers is a very old form of artist compensation. As content has moved to digital form, so has the form of payment. With an online tip jar such as the Amazon Honor System, artists can ask for donations directly from their websites, in amounts as small as one dollar or one euro.
Patronage sites such as MusicLink have also emerged, which allow consumers to seek out the musicians and songwriters they'd like to support. Either way, consumers are given an easy, secure method to give directly to the artists they admire.
Microrefunds
Brad Templeton introduced the interesting idea of making "opt-out" the default for paying for copyrighted works. The system, called "microrefunds," would collect small fees for each copyrighted work accessed and total them into a monthly bill.
Charges that seemed too high or were for songs the consumer did not enjoy could be revoked.
Bandwidth Levies
Several people have nominated ISPs as collection points for P2P. Every Internet user gets web access from an ISP, and most have a regular financial relationship with one as well. In exchange for protection from lawsuits, ISPs could sell "licensed" accounts (at an extra charge) to P2P users. Alternatively they could charge everyone a smaller fee and give their costumers blanket protection.
Media Tariffs
Another place to generate revenue is on the media that people use to store music, also known as a "media tariff." Canada and Germany tax all recordable CDs and then distribute the funds to artists. In the U.S., they have royalty-paid recordable CDs and data CDs. It's difficult to pay artists accurately with this system alone, but other data (statistics from P2P nets, for instance) could be used to make the disbursement of funds more fair.
Concerts
Tried and true, concerts are a huge source of revenue for musicians. Some, like the Grateful Dead and Phish, have built careers around touring while encouraging fans to tape and trade their music. P2P dovetails into this model nicely, providing a distribution and promotion system for bands who choose to make money on the road.
Previous experiences have shown that there is the possibility for taking cultural products into the market without depending from a bigger system capable of supporting the musicians, video artists, software makers and by that helping not to invalidate free speech. For instance, Blender is an open-source software for modelling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations. Originally, the program was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. The program was initially distributed as proprietary software available at no cost (freeware) until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. On July 18, 2002, a Blender funding campaign was started by Ton Roosendaal (creator of this program) in order to collect donations and on September 7, 2002 it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released in October. Blender is now an actively developed open source program by the Blender Foundation.
As you can see there are many options available in the digital world to make sure that artists receive fair compensation for their creativity."
Copyright legislation was created to protect and insure cultural evolution and yet, it is turning against its original purposes. Some, as the anti-copyright movement, refuse to debate more than the nature of ideas. The classic argument for intellectual property is that protection of author and creator's rights encourages further creative work by giving the creator a source of income.
Those against copyrights suggest that intellectual property does not behave like material property.
If someone gives you a physical object he may no longer have use or control of that thing, and may ask some payment in return. But when you give you an idea, you lose nothing. You need nothing in return.
In fact, the copyright law can be perverted to a ridiculous point. Some strange things happened due to this legal obligations:
"The Eiffel Tower's likeness had long since been part of the public domain, when in 2003, it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a distinctive lighting display, copyrighted the design, and in one feel swoop, reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth. In short: they changed the actual likeness of the tower, and then copyrighted it." Even more frightening, on July 6, 2001 Ph.D. student after giving a presentation called "eBook's Security — Theory and Practice", was arrested by the FBI as he was about to return to Moscow and charged with distributing a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures, under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Another curious case is the one from Negativland:
Negativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s.
In 1991, Negativland released a single with the title "U2" displayed in very large type on the front of the packaging.
The songs within were parodies of the group U2's well-known song, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", and included extensive sampling of the original song. The song "The Letter U and the Numeral 2" features a musical backing to an extended profane rant from the well-known disc jockey Casey Kasem:
U2's label Island Records sued Negativland claiming that the "U2" violated trademark protection, and the song itself violated copyright protection. Island Records also contended that the single was an attempt to deliberately confuse U2 fans, then awaiting Achtung Baby.
Funds exhausted, Negativland settled out of court. Most copies of the single were recalled and destroyed. By the mid-1990s, rap had made authorized sampling more common in mainstream music, but the single "U2", for which Negativland did not obtain clearance to use U2 samples, is still illegal to sell in the United States, but is available for free download from Negativland's official web site.
U2 band members were not concerned with this subject and when contacted by Negativland, they even assumed not to know anything about the suing in process.
Public opinion counts, and what's happening in America will probably not happen in the rest of the world.
Japan is a one in a million case. Knowing from its huge consume fever and market possibilities, big electronic enterprises like Apple or Microsoft are now selling MP3 at $4 per song. In USA and Europe the selling price is rarely above $1 or €1. This does not constitute a big surprise when we know that one in each three japanese consumers buys an average of 10.000 original CDs every year. Japanese young people even admit that downloading isn't a common practice. Most of them doesn't get from the web more than mobile ring tones.
Digital Music is now in the center off all this subjects and we may even consider its producers and distributors as the principal responsible entities for the new commercial forms for this business. Nowadays, editing contents has a new democratic meaning. Music in digital formats is in some cases being treated like on-line real-time updated information. Generative works are getting more and more common and lots of web-based platforms, like Opsound and Discogs, are following the Wikipedia models. Copy-editing is the new job that competes the new cultural contents providers to perform. DeeJaying, bootlegging and remixing are now the words for copy-editing in the music scene, and it's mission is as important, and maybe more pertinent, than the actual excess of original producers.
Public domain
You can get the video (CDr 20 min., 400x300, Motion-jpeg 2, 44,100 khz, stereo), by sending an e-mail, to joaodaconcorrencia at gmail dot com. Idetify yourself, correctly: (name, adress...). Feel free to copy, quote, translate and spread the information contained on this documentary.
Legendado em português, a partir de Janeiro de 2006, espero.
The most recent events in music industry and all other cultural content production, editing, and distribution have tended to use legal means trying to control the way information and ideas spread. In 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was written in the United States of America in order to up-date the existing regulation for this mechanisms.
The spread of personal computers has allowed to the common user to intervene directly on this processes. The effort to maintain an equilibrated market (that ruled over the last century) has turned illegal what was before a civil right. Now, instead of the fair registration obligation created during the industrial revolution users are also forbidden from changing the product as if they were the cemetery for the information. What's happening?
The Big Idea or The Big Deal?
In the 1970's decade, photocopiers spread, and alerted the book industry to a problem they didn't have to face before. People could possess the information contained on their books, magazines and newspapers writing, editing, design and distribution. This new sense that the idea duplication was now in other hands, that not the ones from the publisher, originated a conservative copyrights movement that didn't stopped until now.
Sony Betamax case, in 1984, was an important judicial moment that made video reproduction a common practice. In that situation, Universal City Studios sued Sony for creating a recording object that had more illegal uses than legal purposes. Sony's lawyers, supported their argumentation turning the responsibilities to the Sony user. Although Universal City Studios had documents proofing the opposite, the court ruled in favor of Sony.
Like guns are sold, so can video recorders and blank video tapes be.
The DMCA
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a USA treaty that turns into criminal act "to distribute, import for distribution, broadcast or communicate to the public, without authority, works or copies of works knowing that electronic rights management information has been removed or altered without authority". It also holds responsible for such, the Internet Service Providers and software providers that can access the user information. And now, they all can. USA Congress has given copyright holders expanded powers similar to those granted to government officials under the USA PATRIOT Act. This means that whether or not you use peer-to-peer file-sharing programs, the recording industry (or anyone who claims to be a rights-holder) can easily gain access to your personal information, without a judge's oversight.
Despite this intents, DMCA castrates a giant amount of scientific researches on mathematics, software, and many other multi-media areas. By banning all acts of circumvention, and all technologies and tools that can be used for circumvention, section 1201 grants to copyright owners the power to unilaterally eliminate the public’s fair use rights. Already, the music industry has begun to deploy "copy-protected CDs" that promise to reduce consumers’ ability to make legitimate, personal copies of music they have purchased.
This kind of protective measures are taking place at the same rate that the worldwide web users work in the opposite way. Open source software, freeware, peer2peer, weblogs, and many other private sites are working hard, and maybe faster, to keep creativity out of this chains.
Opsound, for example, is an experimental record label and open sound pool organized through the opsound.org website. Opsound explores the possibilities of developing a gift economy among musicians, borrowing from the model of the open source software community. Most younger musicians would think that there is no way for making a living out this. The big music companies are, in fact, living a selling crisis. But there is a way to outcome all the small difficulties that made them so conservative. Take Universal City Studios, that stood against Sony blank video tapes, as an example. Universal City Studios increased its business volume from 5 million dollars to approximately 18 million dollars by selling the same technology they sued 20 years before. We can make an analogue analysis for the recent developments. Electronic Frontier Foundation has provided a list of ways to make business without neglecting the fair use of copyrighted material:
I'll pass it along:
Voluntary Collective Licensing
It sounds obvious: major labels could get together and offer fair, non-discriminatory license terms for their music. This is called "voluntary collective licensing," and it has been keeping radio legal and getting songwriters paid for 70 years. It protects stations from lawsuits while collecting payment for the songs they play. (...)
Individual Compulsory Licenses
If artists, songwriters, and copyright holders were required to permit online copying in return for government-specified fees, companies could compete to painlessly collect these fees, do the accounting, and remit them to the artists. The payment to each artist need not directly reflect what each consumer pays, as long as the total across all artists and all consumers balances. (...)
Ad Revenue Sharing
Sites like the Internet Underground Music Archive, EMusic.com, Soundclick, and Artistdirect.com provide an online space for fans to listen to music streams, download files, and interact with artists. In the meantime, these fans are viewing advertisements on the site, and the revenues are split between the site and the copyright holders.
P2P Subscriptions
P2P software vendors could start charging for their service. Music lovers could pay a flat fee for the software or pay per downloaded song. The funds could be directed to artists and copyright holders through licensing agreements with studios and labels or through a compulsory license. In 2001, Napster was considering such a subscription service. Recent attempts at a subscription service (such as Apple's iTunes Music Store) show that consumers are willing to pay for downloaded music.
Digital Patronage and Online Tipping
Direct contribution from music lovers is a very old form of artist compensation. As content has moved to digital form, so has the form of payment. With an online tip jar such as the Amazon Honor System, artists can ask for donations directly from their websites, in amounts as small as one dollar or one euro.
Patronage sites such as MusicLink have also emerged, which allow consumers to seek out the musicians and songwriters they'd like to support. Either way, consumers are given an easy, secure method to give directly to the artists they admire.
Microrefunds
Brad Templeton introduced the interesting idea of making "opt-out" the default for paying for copyrighted works. The system, called "microrefunds," would collect small fees for each copyrighted work accessed and total them into a monthly bill.
Charges that seemed too high or were for songs the consumer did not enjoy could be revoked.
Bandwidth Levies
Several people have nominated ISPs as collection points for P2P. Every Internet user gets web access from an ISP, and most have a regular financial relationship with one as well. In exchange for protection from lawsuits, ISPs could sell "licensed" accounts (at an extra charge) to P2P users. Alternatively they could charge everyone a smaller fee and give their costumers blanket protection.
Media Tariffs
Another place to generate revenue is on the media that people use to store music, also known as a "media tariff." Canada and Germany tax all recordable CDs and then distribute the funds to artists. In the U.S., they have royalty-paid recordable CDs and data CDs. It's difficult to pay artists accurately with this system alone, but other data (statistics from P2P nets, for instance) could be used to make the disbursement of funds more fair.
Concerts
Tried and true, concerts are a huge source of revenue for musicians. Some, like the Grateful Dead and Phish, have built careers around touring while encouraging fans to tape and trade their music. P2P dovetails into this model nicely, providing a distribution and promotion system for bands who choose to make money on the road.
Previous experiences have shown that there is the possibility for taking cultural products into the market without depending from a bigger system capable of supporting the musicians, video artists, software makers and by that helping not to invalidate free speech. For instance, Blender is an open-source software for modelling and rendering three-dimensional graphics and animations. Originally, the program was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo. The program was initially distributed as proprietary software available at no cost (freeware) until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. On July 18, 2002, a Blender funding campaign was started by Ton Roosendaal (creator of this program) in order to collect donations and on September 7, 2002 it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released in October. Blender is now an actively developed open source program by the Blender Foundation.
As you can see there are many options available in the digital world to make sure that artists receive fair compensation for their creativity."
Copyright legislation was created to protect and insure cultural evolution and yet, it is turning against its original purposes. Some, as the anti-copyright movement, refuse to debate more than the nature of ideas. The classic argument for intellectual property is that protection of author and creator's rights encourages further creative work by giving the creator a source of income.
Those against copyrights suggest that intellectual property does not behave like material property.
If someone gives you a physical object he may no longer have use or control of that thing, and may ask some payment in return. But when you give you an idea, you lose nothing. You need nothing in return.
In fact, the copyright law can be perverted to a ridiculous point. Some strange things happened due to this legal obligations:
"The Eiffel Tower's likeness had long since been part of the public domain, when in 2003, it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a distinctive lighting display, copyrighted the design, and in one feel swoop, reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth. In short: they changed the actual likeness of the tower, and then copyrighted it." Even more frightening, on July 6, 2001 Ph.D. student after giving a presentation called "eBook's Security — Theory and Practice", was arrested by the FBI as he was about to return to Moscow and charged with distributing a product designed to circumvent copyright protection measures, under the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Another curious case is the one from Negativland:
Negativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s.
In 1991, Negativland released a single with the title "U2" displayed in very large type on the front of the packaging.
The songs within were parodies of the group U2's well-known song, "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", and included extensive sampling of the original song. The song "The Letter U and the Numeral 2" features a musical backing to an extended profane rant from the well-known disc jockey Casey Kasem:
U2's label Island Records sued Negativland claiming that the "U2" violated trademark protection, and the song itself violated copyright protection. Island Records also contended that the single was an attempt to deliberately confuse U2 fans, then awaiting Achtung Baby.
Funds exhausted, Negativland settled out of court. Most copies of the single were recalled and destroyed. By the mid-1990s, rap had made authorized sampling more common in mainstream music, but the single "U2", for which Negativland did not obtain clearance to use U2 samples, is still illegal to sell in the United States, but is available for free download from Negativland's official web site.
U2 band members were not concerned with this subject and when contacted by Negativland, they even assumed not to know anything about the suing in process.
Public opinion counts, and what's happening in America will probably not happen in the rest of the world.
Japan is a one in a million case. Knowing from its huge consume fever and market possibilities, big electronic enterprises like Apple or Microsoft are now selling MP3 at $4 per song. In USA and Europe the selling price is rarely above $1 or €1. This does not constitute a big surprise when we know that one in each three japanese consumers buys an average of 10.000 original CDs every year. Japanese young people even admit that downloading isn't a common practice. Most of them doesn't get from the web more than mobile ring tones.
Digital Music is now in the center off all this subjects and we may even consider its producers and distributors as the principal responsible entities for the new commercial forms for this business. Nowadays, editing contents has a new democratic meaning. Music in digital formats is in some cases being treated like on-line real-time updated information. Generative works are getting more and more common and lots of web-based platforms, like Opsound and Discogs, are following the Wikipedia models. Copy-editing is the new job that competes the new cultural contents providers to perform. DeeJaying, bootlegging and remixing are now the words for copy-editing in the music scene, and it's mission is as important, and maybe more pertinent, than the actual excess of original producers.
Public domain
