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Dan Tobias |
12-07-2003 11:40 AM ET (US) |
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This isn't about the content of the article, but the way it's served on the Web...
There are some serious character set problems. Everywhere in the document that a so-called "smart quote" tries to appear, it comes out as a stream of garbage like "’". That makes the page look like a mess. The cause is that the document is coded in UTF-8 (a Unicode character encoding which uses multiple bytes for non-US-ASCII characters), but is served by the server as "iso-8859-1" (a single-byte encoding). Then it attempts to use a "META tag" to say what it really is, but under the HTTP standards the server-sent header takes precedence; thus, the standards-compliant browser (Mozilla) that I use renders the document as iso-8859-1, producing the mess that I see.
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John Chandler |
02-16-2004 03:57 AM ET (US) |
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It is now February 16, 2004, and the complaint about UTF vs. iso-8859-1, posted 12/2/2003 is still in evidence. I wanted to read the article, but have only gotten 1/4 to 1/3 through it and it has become too tedious to keep mentally translating the noise characters into some kind of sense.
Sharing? Stealing? Don't know, I'm Throwing Away and Moving On.
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| | 58 | I’m not seriously suggesting anything as radical as
that we treat music exactly the way we treat facts, or that we dump all
recorded music into the public domain. Copyright has a number of virtues along
with its vices. Rather, I’m suggesting that we apply some of the insight we’ve
gained from watching the expanding exchange of information over the Internet.
Creation and dissemination may flourish without the incentives supposedly
supplied by producer control.[95] One of the lessons we can take from the vibrant commerce in facts
that goes on over the Internet is that allowing, indeed encouraging individuals
to share music, trade music -- engage in non-commercial “stealing” of music if
you prefer – without legal liability is not necessarily going to bring the
progress of science and the useful arts to a crashing halt, and it has lots of
advantages over the distribution system that preceded it. |
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anonymous |
04-25-2004 04:06 AM ET (US) |
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Until 1972 sound recordings were in the public domain. The entire released Beatles oevre is in the public domain. The 1972 revision of Title 17 created protection for sound recordings and the "P-in-a-circle" copyright symbol for "phonorecords."
You could technically release the Beatles albums legally if you made the new records off of the original vinyl records and made it very, very clear that the releases were not authorized. Of course, the attorneys for the Beatles would keep you busy with various spurious complaints, but if you stuck with it and financed your defense, in the end you would win.
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| | 59 | One non-trivial advantage is that consumer-to-consumer
distribution is a lot less costly, and may allow us to free up resources now
spent on CD burning, shipping, storage, shelf space and radio payola, not to
mention the huge cost of legal efforts to stamp out what is commonly called
“piracy.” That money could be used to pay the people who create the music –
something the record companies insist they can’t really afford to do very well
under the current system.[96] |
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mindpirate |
12-05-2003 06:41 PM ET (US) |
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Quote: "... may allow us to free up resources now spent on CD burning..." Not to be pedantic, but I must submit a minor factual correction: The pits representing digital information on mass-produced CDs, CD-ROMs, and DVDs are not produced by laser (burning), but are literally stamped. The final master CD which the factory receives from the mastering house -- which *is* actually laser-burned -- is used to produce the die, or what in the music industry is known as the "glass master". This stamping process is obviously a little less expensive and much less time-consuming than burning on a mass production scale. Here's a further explanation: http://www.azuradisc.com/how_cdmade.htmlCheers. |
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| | 66 | The intermediaries who hold control over musical works
and recordings are also in it for the money, and one might expect them to be
delighted to hand over their control in return for more cash. Not a bit of it.
The current dominant forces in the music and recording business may no longer
need record pressing plants, CD burning plants, warehouses and trucks to
distribute music, but they have a huge stake in ensuring that digital
distributors be limited to those who used to rely on record pressing plants, CD
burning plants, warehouses and trucks. They rest of us, however, don’t share
that stake. Indeed, new distributors who never assumed those expenses may be
in a position to experiment with new variations on digital distribution and
still pay a larger percentage of proceeds to the creators of the material. |
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mindpirate |
12-05-2003 07:02 PM ET (US) |
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My prior comment on CD pressing applies here as well. ;-)
Quote: "...recording business may no longer need record pressing plants, CD burning plants..."
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| | 77 | To enable an opt-out mechanism that won’t deform the
legal and technical architecture encouraging sharing, I suggest that we try to
reproduce the functions that notice and indivisibility provided before we
abandoned them.[128] The key to the opt-out mechanism I
propose is the selection of a single digital file format or family of formats
capable of conveying copyright management information as defined in section
1202 of the copyright act.[129] The format will probably
incorporate digital rights management capability because the people who will be
using it will desire that feature, but there’s no need for any copy-protection
to be hack-proof, or even exceptionally durable. It should also be compatible
with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players.[130]
I’ll call the format “.drm” for short.[131] Any musical work or
sound recording that is made available to the public, under the copyright
owner’s authority, only in *.drm format will be ineligible for sharing or
compensation. To protect copyright owners from having their works kidnapped
into sharable file formats, we should require them to enter the copyright
management information for works made available to the public only in *.drm
format into a single, universal, searchable index of works that have opted out
of digital sharing. The authoritative copy of the database should probably be
maintained by the Copyright Office, although other computers should be
encouraged to mirror it. At such time as the creators or copyright owners of a
work desire to participate in the revenue earned from digital sharing, they may
remove their listing from the database, publish the work in another format and
become eligible to collect compensation. |
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Kevin Marks |
12-03-2003 03:44 AM ET (US) |
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Here's where this otherwise brilliant paper gets on shaky ground.
"The format will probably incorporate digital rights management capability because the people who will be using it will desire that feature' - you mean the publishers will. The people using ti will prefer not to have that 'feature', but may put up with it if it is not too onerous.
This aspiration: "It should also be compatible with the current generation of digital playback devices, including CD players." is impossible. CD players play unencrypted, uncompressed digital audio. A drm'd format would require new players.
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| | 237 | [130] I’ve been unable to get a definitive answer to my question whether
any extant file format (for example, one of the formats generated by the now
moribund Secure Digital Music Initiative, see URL: http://www.sdmi.org), would fit the bill, or
whether a new format would need to be designed. The chief difficulty in
adopting any of the proprietary formats now in use seems to be in ensuring
backward-compatibility with legacy CD players. |
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Kevin Marks |
12-03-2003 03:45 AM ET (US) |
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This is not a difficulty, it is an impossibility.
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