And since I can't go one day without talking about Napster (which I really don't care that much about - really - it just leads to an interesting discussion) here is todays piece: a Salon interview with Talal Shamoon, described as a "key technologist" behind (at?) the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI.) I read this closely, but couldn't really find anything being said. At least he's not claiming they can really protect the music. He keeps falling back to the rather nebulous position that the music industry will make the secure music experience so pleasant that everyone will adopt it. Sounds good, but then when he describes the value-added part that the industry hopes will lure consumers from the already available free product, it starts to sound not so good."You can do things like super-distribution, for example, where you can e-mail the song and say, 'If you get 10 of your best friends to buy it, I'll give you free tickets to the Britney Spears concert next month.' So you get on AOL and you e-mail the thing to 50 of your best friends and so on." How is that good for consumers? Sounds more like his line to sell this to the industry. Anyway, the real meat of the interview comes in the final reply, where he is talking about how the industry is working with the media-player software companies (real, winamp, ect...) and the consumer electronics industry (who build portable mp3 players, ect...) This is key because for any protection scheme to work, it has to be built into the data that is the music, as well as the player that is playing the music (in other words, the data is marked to say 'hey, I'm protected' but it is the player (either software on your computer, or stand alone devices like home stereos) that have to read and respect that message.) The reason why everyone keeps maintaining that you can't protect digital information (including music) is that the industry no longer controls the creation of the playback devices. As much as the music industry would like to get us all to listen to their secure music only on their sanctioned secure music players, the fact is that most people will be listening to this music on their general purpose computing devices. And that means they can choose what ever play back software they want. Some will pay attention to the security protocols, others will not. The ones that don't will probably be free (made by people who just want to play the music) while the ones that do will probably cost money (made by companies in agreement with the recording industry in the hopes of making big profits.) Shamoon as much as admits this after laying out the secure player pipe dream by saying "...[n]ow, there's a lot of twiddles there because computers allow you to do a lot more stuff than consumer electronics devices, but that's basically where we'll stand." Where is that again?
oh yeah. i forgot i saw napster lawyer honcho david(?)boies on charlie rose last night. in a way, he echoed a sentiment you had considered, that the temporary injunction was lifted so that the 25 million aggregated users wouldnt begin to look elsewhere. he said the day napster shut down a napster clone outside the us would start right up, outside the jurisdiction of us copyright laws. mostly, he was towing the company line -- not all copyrighted material, fair use, transfer collection for portability but what was most interesting was his view of why the record companies were most concerned because it lowered the bar of entry for distribution. as he put it, they want to control the bottleneck, or as i put it, the sphincter. ultimately, he felt the laws needed to be rewritten to reflect the new technologies, not through adjudication but legislation. what these laws should say were never outlined. after boies was rob thomas of the band matchbox 20 whose last album sold 10 million world wide. he was also on the santana bandwagon. his pov was conflicted. clearly he felt his record sales were not overly impacted by napster. at the same time he felt napster was unfair to artists who did not want their copyrights infringed upon. one interesting comment he made, interesting because it was similiar to something i had thought earlier, was that if it persisted studio albums would go by the wayside and only live perfomances would be released with higher ticket prices as a consequence. not likely, but fine by me. it worked for the grateful dead.
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- jim 8-01-2000 3:55 pm
oh yeah. i forgot i saw napster lawyer honcho david(?)boies on charlie rose last night. in a way, he echoed a sentiment you had considered, that the temporary injunction was lifted so that the 25 million aggregated users wouldnt begin to look elsewhere. he said the day napster shut down a napster clone outside the us would start right up, outside the jurisdiction of us copyright laws. mostly, he was towing the company line -- not all copyrighted material, fair use, transfer collection for portability but what was most interesting was his view of why the record companies were most concerned because it lowered the bar of entry for distribution. as he put it, they want to control the bottleneck, or as i put it, the sphincter. ultimately, he felt the laws needed to be rewritten to reflect the new technologies, not through adjudication but legislation. what these laws should say were never outlined.
after boies was rob thomas of the band matchbox 20 whose last album sold 10 million world wide. he was also on the santana bandwagon. his pov was conflicted. clearly he felt his record sales were not overly impacted by napster. at the same time he felt napster was unfair to artists who did not want their copyrights infringed upon. one interesting comment he made, interesting because it was similiar to something i had thought earlier, was that if it persisted studio albums would go by the wayside and only live perfomances would be released with higher ticket prices as a consequence. not likely, but fine by me. it worked for the grateful dead.
- dave 8-01-2000 4:36 pm