Stupid ass administration crackdown on 'piracy' (illegal to-

[brentsg]

aside from the DRM, that is my main complaint with itunes...really low bitrates....anything less than 320 is retarded in this day and age....hell, gimme flac or uncompressed wav any day.....i would even pay more...196k mp3 sound like shit! might as well be streaming .....

While I generally buy CDs so I can rip my own lossless tracks, I still don't think anyone can tell the difference between 320MP3 and 256AAC. I don't recall seeing any 192 tracks at iTunes lately, and everything I've picked up there has been DRM free for a while.

[Ex-Cyber]

I think Netflix is going the right direction. Pay a monthly fee, watch/stream as much as you want. A solution like this for all media is probably the way to go. Honestly, it isn't even worth storing the media when you know you can watch it/listen to it again whenever you want to. I imagine the companies which hold the rights would get paid in accordance to the number of hits/streams/whatever.

Obviously the flat monthly fee charged to customers would have to be enough to pay the rights holders, but as soon as a company got too greedy, the service could cut their affiliation with them, meaning they'd fall immediate prey to piracy. This would allow for some degree of checks and balances.

I don't pay for any sort of cable now (and haven't for years), but an all media server that allowed streaming access (or downloadable content for music--perhaps that had to be renewed through continued subscription) would not only be worth it, but could ultimately solve the whole DRM problem.

People forget that the current situation of rampant piracy was more or less created by the industry that wanted to charge $20 per album and prohibit sales of used albums (I'm sure the parallels are there for movies and other medium.) The creation of an all media server with flat subscription fees would force the hands of right holders to either get real or get pirated.

It's not a bad idea, but I think it would take a lot of arm-twisting to get enough companies to sign on that it would gain any momentum. I think one of two things would be likely to happen with this sort of service:

1) big media in general ends up being essential to the venture, and leverages that position into demanding concessions (untenable DRM, mandatory payments to them from fees whether people are using their stuff or not, restrictions that keep out the "riff-raff" of independent musicians and filmmakers, etc.) that end up undermining the usefulness and/or viability of the service.

2) one single media company ends up dominating the service and uses that influence to shut out the others, fragmenting the market into one media service per company/alliance.

The thing is, I think the big record companies would much rather have us listening to pirated MP3s of Jordin Sparks and Kelly Clarkson than listening to purchased stuff from independent artists, because that at least means we have some sort of interest in their product. They'll probably fight anything that has the effect of really putting smaller producers on a level playing field.

[CMoon]

Well, I think the record industry has made it clear that somehow it is more profitable for them to sink the whole market than to 'level the playing field' as you've said, or for that matter, charge reasonable prices for albums, or even pay artists fair royalties instead of hoarding it all.

The problem with an All-Media-Server is that does requires a significant buy in for the thing to work. It literally would take all the companies out there to say 'OK, let's play nice for a while and see what happens'. We might get there eventually through blind capitalism, but in the meantime, let's let the current trainwreck run its course, and sue the consumer to make up the difference.

The frustration comes when you realize that the transition to digital media isn't new, and that the industry doesn't seem particularly interested in patching up the holes. I think it is reasonable calling BS on them at this late date, because if they had any interest, they'd have found a solution like the one I suggested above, or something better. How they are benefiting from their claimed loss of revenue I'm not sure, but I have problems believing that in the time since Napster they have been unable to find a better solution than bullying consumers.

[system11]

Oh - and copyright needs to have a finite time. I would suggest 50 years but with no possibility of it ever being extended.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

You might recall back in the early 1980s, those VHS and Beta pre-recorded movies tapes that were offered for sale from the major Hollywood film studios were priced quite high -- around $79.99-$89.99 USD back in the day. The reason why they were so expensive back in those days, was because the movie studios thought that it was a privlege for the consumer with such "disposable income" to view such movie titles in the convienence of his or her own home and pay good $$$ to do so (but the general A/V buying public wasn't budging with that type of reasoning). So there was a lot of super expensive VHS & Beta format movies that the public wasn't buying (and taking up valuable retail shelving space as well). Of course, those VHS and Beta video cassette recorders/player decks weren't cheap either when you're talking about several hundred dollars and up per unit back in those days.

It wasn't until Paramount Pictures studio & Pepsi decided to drop the price down of such expensive pre-recorded movies of video cassette tapes when Top Gun finally debuted at an very affordable $19.99 USD on VHS tape format (but the catch was there was a Pepsi ad to watch before the film actually started). This type of joint effort with both corporations was a resounding success as it made it easier for the general public to buy pre-recorded movies much cheaper. Sometimes, it takes a wake-up call to get the respective industries to finally realize if it ain't selling, just drop it down in price and hopefully, the general public will bite.

And there was the rampant bootlegged VHS/Beta priracy issue going on as well with some folks having huge dedicated rooms filled with video cassette recording decks to record A/V content to sell on the black market -- same thing with the porn industry as well. The U.S. government and the FBI had their hands full trying to bust some of those shady folks whom did those type of crimes.

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~

[Ex-Cyber]

Oh - and copyright needs to have a finite time. I would suggest 50 years but with no possibility of it ever being extended.

I tend to think that more than about 25 years is really hard to justify. The term from the original copyright law, just about 300 years ago (!), was 14 years, renewable once for a total of 28 years. With the modern economy and mass production and transportation technologies, 10 years should really be more than enough to extract a fair return. Copyrighted works usually have a pretty short window in which they actually sell significant numbers anyway. At some point a longer term is just robbing the next generation of producers of 99.99% of the source material that they could be remixing/reinterpreting and denying the public ready access to that material, just so that a handful of authors and publishers can keep milking the most successful .01% (numbers made up, but probably not far from the truth considering that the vast majority of published works go out of print within a few years).

[CMoon]

It's an interesting questions. Should the living beatles still be able to make royalties off their music or should it be public domain by now? I'm really tempted to say that if the creators of the work in question are still alive, then they should be able to get some sort of profit from it--however, if no person involved in the original creative process is still alive, it should definitely revert to public domain. Screw estates, etc.

I think if you actually play out the 10 years thing, you'd realize this would fall apart pretty quick. In the world of movies it would often mean that a director couldn't capitalize on a franchise before it entered into public domain and other people could start making sequels. Hell, imagine a world with five competing Terminator 2's! (Would Arnold star in all of them?) I think the 14 with renewal to 28 is pretty reasonable. If somethings going really well, you can renew it, but if not, let it go. I still say the moment the creators of something die, it should immediately go into public domain.

[Ex-Cyber]

I don't think terms should be based on the lifetime of the author in any way, for several reasons:

1) The actual term length can't be known until the author is dead, and even then the exact date that the term expires may be difficult to determine if it can't be easily determined when (or even whether) the author died. This places an undue burden on those who publish or otherwise utilize public domain material.
2) It unfairly affords some works longer terms than others.
3) It theoretically creates an incentive to kill the author in order to release his work into the public domain.
4) Such terms are useless for corporate/anonymous works, so we need to decide on an acceptable fixed-length term anyway.

As for the "five competing Terminator 2s" scenario, I'd say that's more properly the domain of trademark law. After all, nothing in copyright law really stops me from making a film titled "Terminator 2", so long as I don't actually copy any protected elements from the Terminator films (things like names, titles, and made-up words are generally not covered by copyright).

[KBZ]

what if people start trying to kill you to free up your works in the public domain?

[emphatic]

what if people start trying to kill you to free up your works in the public domain?

[Acid King]

I think Netflix is going the right direction. Pay a monthly fee, watch/stream as much as you want. A solution like this for all media is probably the way to go. Honestly, it isn't even worth storing the media when you know you can watch it/listen to it again whenever you want to. I imagine the companies which hold the rights would get paid in accordance to the number of hits/streams/whatever.

The problem with this model is that a service like that only gets the rights to distribute a movie or show for a limited time, so you would still be faced with the need to purchase real copies or save files for the media.