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.

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.

This discussion space is for comments on the document "Sharing and Stealing - Jessica Litman".

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.

Edited by author 12-05-2003 06:48 PM
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.html

Cheers.

My prior comment on CD pressing applies here as well. ;-)

Quote: "...recording business may no longer need record pressing plants, CD burning plants..."

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.

This is not a difficulty, it is an impossibility.