mp3 revisited

MP3, Revisited.
Created: 23 October 2000

The Record Industry Still Don't Get It.

Are record companies this clueless?

From Yahoo! News - original story [link dead]: Some of my favorite quotes:

"There are things that are doable and things that are not doable, said Leonardo
Chiariglione, executive director of SDMI, acknowledging that the compromise had not
fulfilled all the recording industry's initial demands.

Music industry: read our lips. Fuck off. You are in a position to demand nothing. You have been making a living for 100 years by ripping off both artist and patron: charging top dollar for media that costs pennies to produce, and only paying the artist a pittance in royalties for their talents. You treat artists like absolute crap. You play 800-pound gorilla games in the distribution channels. Pull your head out of your ass: it's time for you to change, or die.

Continuing...

The so-called "Big 5" major record labels -- Sony Music Entertainment (NYSE: SNE ), EMI
Recorded Music, Universal Music Group, BMG Entertainment and Warner Music Group -- had
initially advocated
making SDMI-compliant players incompatible with MP3 files.

Nice to see they figured out that this would, in all likelyhood, doom SDMI. Anyone remember Beta? Sony's initial limitations directed at the pornography industry eventually decided the Betamax vs. VHS war, with Sony losing in the consumer market. VHS players are still stamped out by the millions, while it is increasingly difficult to find consumer Beta format blank tape.

Continuing...

The new spec, which will accept all music whether it is protected with a digital "watermark"
or not, puts an end to those plans. 

Observers say the agreement marks a significant departure from the
recording industry's demands. "They are completely abandoning the notion of protecting
legacy content," said Lucas Graves,
analyst with multimedia watcher Jupiter Communications Inc.

Okay. So what's to stop me from downloading this great tune, and processing it through a program that removes the digital "watermark?" This can already be done with images.. if nothing else, most likely playing it and re-recording it through an analog cycle will eliminate any watermark, I'd reckon.

Which brings me to my point. Is the record industry really that out of it? Do they really think that such a standard can be created and not be defeated? Let's not forget: for SDMI to be a success, it must also play on PCs, which means that somebody is going to have to develop SDMI compliant player software for computers. Once that happens, do they really think they are going to keep the genie in the bottle?

SDMI-compliant players will begin hitting store shelves later this year in time for
Christmas. Phase 1 players will accept all current musical formats -- which is exactly why
Graves believes record companies have
compromised. Phase 1 SDMI-compliant players will accept all music whether it is protected or
not. 

Starting around the same time, record companies are expected to start imprinting CD content
with a so-called digital "watermark" which will secure music against illegal copying.

Okay, so here's the crux of the argument. You're going to watermark the CD, with some hypothetical algorithm that's going to make it trivial to detect whether a copy is first or second generation. How this is going to work nobody seems to have figured out yet (even though the players are supposed to be available this Christmas). And for all those people who have already bought Diamond Rios and the like, well, we'll just ignore them, and hope they go away.

Huh? I don't understand. Explain something to me, here. I just purchased a product with no moving parts, no reasonable expectation of failure. This isn't a Walkman, with hundreds of little moving parts and belts. It is reasonable to expect that I will probably get 10 years or more of service out of it. It is also reasonable to expect that I may purchase a couple more of these just to "have them around."

So, what's to stop me from continuing to hop around USEnet and download music to my heart's content? Since there are already (apparently) quite a large number of users of this technology (enough that MP3's is second only to "sex" in search terms), what's to stop all us "classic" MP3 users from continuing to use our MP3 players and MP3 software well into the next century?

The record industry is making a big gamble here. The only way this little scheme of theirs is going to work is if the record industry is seriously considering the following scenario. Take a deep breath, for this is a biggie.

The Elimination of the Audio CD by 2002

Think about it. The only way they can thrust SDMI on everybody is to eliminate their entire current distribution model. MP3 players will still exist long into the future, even if they manage to muscle most manufacturers into not producing them. Consider this: there are Taiwanese chip fabs that still crank out pirate Atari 2600's to this day, and they can be purchased in many third-world contries.

But, if the ONLY way to get CD quality music is through SDMI, then the whole thing works rather nicely. Call it a hunch: before too long we'll start seeing consumer rack-system SDMI players, car SDMI players that can play SDMIs off CD-ROMs, etc. The only non-SDMI format will probably remain the good (?) old Philips CompactCassette, and we know how fun cassette tapes are.

For as long as they are still stamping out Audio CDs, piracy will still be possible, and will continue. There are already a ton of Rio's out there, and I would venture to guess that that's just the tip of the piracy iceberg.

While Graves believes the record companies have ceded this round by compromising with MP3
companies, he says the battle is far from over. "It remains to be seen if non-SDMI compliant
players will be legal in the
future," he said. "Once SDMI is available, the companies could argue that consumers must use
it."

ALERT! This is a very telling statement, right here.

It remains to be seen if non-SDMI compliant players will be legal in the future? This is quite disturbing. Now, I understand that the person speaking here is a analyst, and that I may be taking his comments completely out of context. There are lawsuits in the courts right now that are deciding if many of these players are subject to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. But has our government in this country become such a toady to this industry that we can assume that such a law will be passed at the federal level?

This is frightening.

Now, the DMCA law is looking far more ominous. With one fell swoop, the record industry can force their view of the world on everybody, with a licensing model that favors only the Big 5 labels (much at the penalty of small labels, really).

What is really scary (to me) is that one industry has this much power to shape public policy, and that our government seems okay with this. They even pass stupid laws like the DMCA to make it even easier for these monolithic media companies to do business, even if their business model seems fucked up.

What can we do?

First off, buy an MP3 player now, before SDMI gets off the ground. Secondly, don't buy an SDMI player when they come out. Lastly, get the word out now: it can be effective.

Just last week, a similar attempt by a different industry to force consumers to take it down the throat died in flames. I'm talking about DIVX, Circuit City's greatest idea for stealing money out of your pocket every time you wanted to watch Earnest Goes to Jail. It was an equally braindead industry decision. Segments of the consumer populace avoided DIVX like the plague, many retailers wouldn't carry the product, and the quantity of DIVX hate sites across the net blossomed.

It's time once again to get the word out. We need to have our best and brightest also work on a way of "scrubbing" watermarks out of files, and for converting SDMI files to MP3 so they will work with ALL players.

And let's not let the record company bully us around anymore.

i like honey

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mp3-2.shtml, Updated: Monday, 19-Nov-2001 23:28:11 PST .