What if record companies hadn’t been asses?

At Truthdig.com, Danny Goldberg has reviewed Steve Knopper’s book, Appetite for Self-Destruction. According to Goldbert, Knopper asks asks some good questions. Was it really necessary that the record companies had to suffer their massive economic collapses? Here are many of the excuses you hear:

If only they hadn’t charged so much for CDs even after the per-unit manufacturing cost went down; if only they hadn’t abandoned the commercial single when it ceased to be sufficiently profitable; if only they hadn’t cooperated with Best Buy and Wal-Mart at the expense of indie stores; if only they hadn’t sued customers for illegal downloading, etc. etc. Referring to the fact that some of Sony/BMG’s ill-fated watermarked CDs damaged some computers, Knopper writes: “This lack of empathy reinforced Napster-era beliefs that the music industry was more interested in suing and punishing its customers than catering to them.”

Goldberg disagrees with all of this. He points to the newspaper industry, which made none of these mistakes, but is also suffering massive economic losses.

This litany of real and imagined insults to the consumer [caused by record companies] ignores the central reality of what caused the decline of record sales: the ability of fans to get albums free.

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Never pay for textbooks again, in six steps.

A college education (and even more, the "college experience") costs a lot of money. One of the most bemoaned college-related expenses is textbooks. Every quarter or semester, students trudge through their local bookstores and shell out hundreds of dollars for the heavy, price-inflated compendiums of glossy photos, useless asides, and (maybe) small slivers of information. The pattern of behavior is always the same: the students scan the bookstore shelves for cheaper, used editions (perhaps $70 a pop instead of $100). Some classes require multiple books; some classes require ten. The students carry the stack of texts to the counter and pony up hundreds. In class, the books may never be used- it's impossible to tell when they will actually be relevant. Later, these students gather the books up and try to return them to the store for a pittance (maybe $20-30). Often a book is not returnable because it is an "old edition"- a new version has just come out, with minor updates such as a new cover photo and a table with a new layout. Next quarter, everyone will be buying the full-priced new editions. The textbook industry is a racket. The books are made unnecessarily expensive, for they are puffed-up with frilly nonsense. My school drove up the price of Psych 100 textbooks by requesting a special "Buckeye Edition"; the only difference was a black-and-white photocopy inserted into the first page, which acknowledge the student reader as a member of Ohio State. It's a hose. Last year, however, I realized that I never really have to pay for textbooks. For the past four quarters of school, I have not laid a cent on a bookstore's counter. As I see it, there is no reason for any student to ever pay for textbooks, ever again. Here are my simple steps to attain free textbook access:

Continue ReadingNever pay for textbooks again, in six steps.

MPAA to teachers – fair use needs a VCR!

According to the MPAA the fair use provision in our copyright laws is flawed and needs to be qualified. During the continuing DCMA hearings they have again surfaced the claim that ripping a DVD shouldn't be allowed, since the teacher can copy the video using a video camera pointed at the TV screen. Seriously! That's as ludicrous as requiring that teachers may only copy from a photocopy, and not from the original book! They even created a video to demonstrate the process. Anyone concerned about fair use and copyright should be aghast at this blatantly stupid, but well financed, attack on rights. This 'process' is not only more cumbersome and time consuming (but teachers have loads of free time, right?) but also significantly more costly (you need a camcorder, tapes, and a tripod - in addition to the equipment you already have). MPAA shows how to videorecord a TV set from timothy vollmer on Vimeo. via [Ars Technica] video after the fold

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Public court proceedings aren’t very public, and that’s the way they like them.

Would you like to monitor our government at work? What if there’s a really interesting court proceeding in Massachusetts, but you live far from Massachusetts? But you’d really like to hear the court proceeding live, because this case is about some of the lawsuits that record companies have been bringing under the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 501, alleging that individual defendants (many of whom were students) were copyright infringers—that they had illegally used file-sharing software to download and disseminate copyrighted songs without paying royalties. The Plaintiffs were a large group of record companies including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Bros. Records, Inc., Atlantic Recording Corporation, Arista Records, LLC, and UMG Recordings, Inc. In a case styled In re Sony BMG Music Entertainment, 2009 WL 1017505, 7 (1st Circuit, (Mass) 2009), the Court of Appeals recently ruled that I don't have the right to listen to court deliberations over the Internet, at least in the First District. In the trial court, Joel Tenenbaum (one of the persons whom the record companies had sued) moved to permit Courtroom View Network to webcast a non-evidentiary motions hearing that was scheduled for January 22, 2009. Presiding Judge Nancy Gertner, citing the keen public interest in the litigation, granted his motion over the objection of the record companies. She thought it would be a good idea to permit webcasting of the motion hearings. She thought that anyone interested in the exercise of the Court’s power should have the opportunity to listen in remotely through a computer. On April 16, 2009, however, the Court of Appeals struck down Judge Gertner’s decision, holding that it was inappropriate to make the inner workings of the private PUBLIC courts easily accessible to the public. The Court of Appeals said something that a sarcastic lawyer might paraphrase like this: No more of that webcasting nonsense, Judge Gertner!

Continue ReadingPublic court proceedings aren’t very public, and that’s the way they like them.

Culture and Copyright in the 21st Century

On 24 March, 2009 Lawrence Lessig delivered the keynote speech, Getting the Network the World Needs, at the OFC Conference in San Diego, CA. This is a revision of a REMIX talk, distinguishing between parts of the 20th Century that were Read-Only and parts that were Read-Write. His brilliantly delivered thesis discusses how culture prior to the 20th century was essentially read-write, everyone consumed and created the culture interactively. During the 20th century centralization and control of media and distribution transformed our culture to a read only - where creation was almost exclusively the province of professionals and professional distribution channels (tv, movies, music). He then suggests that the 21st century brings the promise and the demand for building a read-write culture once more, and for moving far beyond the mash-up of the past decade. He also discusses the necessary legal and infrastructural changes needed to accommodate this changed reality. Warner Music has tried to serve a DCMA takedown, based on his inclusion of some music and media clips - despite the obvious and clear "fair use".

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