"Home Taping is killing music"

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DannyL

Wild Horses

Quite amusing 80s parody video comissioned by TalkTalk (the ISP, not the band) to publicise it's campaigh against the draconian Digital Economy Bill. The comments are worth reading - I had no idea that this backwards step was so close to becoming law.

Can't imagine it will really go through - wil it?
 
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mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
It's been passed already, just some of the dodgier bits have been held back :

Critics have pointed to the fact that the bill also grants Peter Mandelson, First Secretary of State, unlimited power to enforce copyright by bringing into law any measure relating to file-sharing on the Internet, without the consent of Parliament.

Eek. Best be nice to Mandy if you see him on the Heath.
 
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Richard Carnage

Well-known member
This video sort of misses the point though. What about all the struggling young artists trying to fund additional equipment and software, never mind supporting themselves on an income from music.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
The home taping analogy is utter fraud and anyone who offers it up in any seriousness should be marched from the building, bound and gagged until the argument is over.
 
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muser

Well-known member
Richard Carnage said:
This video sort of misses the point though. What about all the struggling young artists trying to fund additional equipment and software, never mind supporting themselves on an income from music.
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software is as pirated as music, and who needs equipment when you've got software. :D

From what it sounds like the law will basically mean that if your ISP discovers you have been downloading a song without rights (I think it will only work with "water marked" mp3s) then they will send you a warning letter. If you get something like 5 letters you may have you're bandwidth limited or be taken off the internet, thats after a court trial to proove you've been illegally downloading. ISPs obviously aren't happy about this and probably will make it as rare as possible anyway, aswell as the EU law that's been passed saying having an internet connection is now part of our fundamental human rights..

Whole things a bit of a desperate farce by the music industry. Even if they had a more comprehensive strategy to stopping illegal downloading there technology is only as good as the next hackers ability to find a way to get passed it.
 
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massrock

Well-known member
muser said:
Even if they had a more comprehensive strategy to stopping illegal downloading there technology for stopping it is only as good as the next hackers ability to find a way to get passed it.
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If what you say there is correct then I think even something like an encrypted .zip file would suffice.
 
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massrock

Well-known member
mistersloane said:
Critics have pointed to the fact that the bill also grants Peter Mandelson, First Secretary of State, unlimited power to enforce copyright by bringing into law any measure relating to file-sharing on the Internet, without the consent of Parliament.
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It's this sort of provision for unlimited alteration to legislation without oversight that you've really got to keep an eye on.
 
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muser

Well-known member
massrock said:
If what you say there is correct then I think even something like an encrypted .zip file would suffice.
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Yes I think so, its probably possible to look in these when they have been uploaded but since no-one really is interested in co-operating with the music industry they are going to have a hard time getting the laws to make the file sharing sites do it, and as I say if they did people would still get past it. This generation of music consumers (anyone up to their early 20's) have been brought up on free music, the industry really doesn't have a hope.
 
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massrock

Well-known member
What do you mean crackerjack?

I thought the analogy was simply that the 'music industry' has always periodically shat its pants wrt new music distribution technologies and that the best policy has always turned out to be working with the new technology and its consequences rather than desperately trying to control things, wind back the clock and tell people what to do / threaten customers. No?

See iTunes dropping DRM for example.
 
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cobretti

cobretti

[-] :: [-] ~ [-] :: [-]
massrock said:
If what you say there is correct then I think even something like an encrypted .zip file would suffice.
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There are already lots of private torrent trackers and no doubt newsgroups that insist every release/download is encrypted in to tens of small rar files which combine to make the whole once you've downloaded the torrent/folder/zip file, if folk are already that paranoid about copyright groups and the like, it's very unlikely that anything provided by the slow moving legal system will ever catch up to the pace at which piracy and technology evolves.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
massrock said:
What do you mean crackerjack?

I thought the analogy was simply that the 'music industry' has always periodically shat its pants wrt new music distribution technologies and that the best policy has always turned out to be working with the new technology and its consequences rather than desperately trying to control things, wind back the clock and tell people what to do / threaten customers. No?

See iTunes dropping DRM for example.
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That's precisely how I understand the analogy and precisely why I think it's bollocks. Do I really have to explain why?

I don't know how seriously people took the 'threat' of home-taping at the time, but I guess the answer is 'not very' and it was a short-term preemptive strike in defence of the copyright principle. It benefited - or at least, didn't harm - the industry because it required at least one of your close-ish friends to own a copy and for you to buy a cassette (decent quality: approx £1-2) go round to tape it (or give them the tape and trust them to deliver). All for something that would regularly wear out or snap after a few dozen listens.

Compare with now, where your friend is the whole world and his collection is everything ever made, delivered in decent quality in a few minutes. And if you can't see the difference, then Guy Hands has a company he'd like to sell you.

By the way, as I understand, it's not the 'music industry' that's appealing for this legislation, it's the record industry. One has a future; the other, as things stand, doesn't.
 
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Ory

warp drive
cobretti said:
There are already lots of private torrent trackers and no doubt newsgroups that insist every release/download is encrypted in to tens of small rar files which combine to make the whole once you've downloaded the torrent/folder/zip file, if folk are already that paranoid about copyright groups and the like, it's very unlikely that anything provided by the slow moving legal system will ever catch up to the pace at which piracy and technology evolves.
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just want to point out that the reason for split RAR/ZIP archives is not security (RAR-splitting by itself does nothing to mask the contents of a file), but rather (primarily) to keep the filesize manageable.

say you wanted to transfer a 1GB file over FTP. the nature of FTP dictates that if something were to fuck up during the transfer, you'd have to redownload the entire file. if it's split into pieces, you're fine with redownloading the individual chunk(s) that failed. (with the bittorrent protocol, this isn't a problem, since the whole point of torrents is to "small-chunk" data so you can download from multiple sources simultaneously)

anyway... as a standard, music releases aren't split-RARed (or RARed at all even), since mp3s are tiny to begin with.
 
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massrock

Well-known member
crackerjack said:
That's precisely how I understand the analogy and precisely why I think it's bollocks. Do I really have to explain why?
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No, you don't have to explain what you meant, it's up to you. I asked because I didn't think it was clear, sorry if that's offensive in some way. For one thing you didn't say that the 'analogy' was 'bollocks' , you called it 'utter fraud' ('and anyone...'), which would seem to imply something else. You also referred to 'the argument', but which argument exactly? There are a number of issues and 'sides' involved.

crackerjack said:
I don't know how seriously people took the 'threat' of home-taping at the time, but I guess the answer is 'not very' and it was a short-term preemptive strike in defence of the copyright principle. It benefited - or at least, didn't harm - the industry because it required at least one of your close-ish friends to own a copy and for you to buy a cassette (decent quality: approx £1-2) go round to tape it (or give them the tape and trust them to deliver). All for something that would regularly wear out or snap after a few dozen listens.

Compare with now, where your friend is the whole world and his collection is everything ever made, delivered in decent quality in a few minutes. And if you can't see the difference, then Guy Hands has a company he'd like to sell you.

By the way, as I understand, it's not the 'music industry' that's appealing for this legislation, it's the record industry. One has a future; the other, as things stand, doesn't.
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Yes of course there are differences in the situations, there always are. But home taping didn't kill music, nor did sampling, drum machines or the gramophone, and neither, presumably, will the internet. So while that 'analogy' (really I think it's just being used because it's a convenient pre-existing meme) may not be an especially close one, I can agree with that basic similarity.

By the way, debt repayments aside, isn't EMI operating at a profit? i.e. despite everything they are still selling music.
 
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crackerjack

Well-known member
massrock said:
No, you don't have to explain what you meant, it's up to you. I asked because I didn't think it was clear, sorry if that's offensive in some way. For one thing you didn't say that the 'analogy' was 'bollocks' , you called it 'utter fraud' ('and anyone...'), which would seem to imply something else. You also referred to 'the argument', but which argument exactly? There are a number of issues and 'sides' involved.
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The argument that because the 'home taping is killing music' campaign was a silly farce the current record industry scare campaign can be similarly disregarded. I don't find it 'offensive', just impossible to believe that anyone could advance it in good faith.

Yes of course there are differences in the situations, there always are. But home taping didn't kill music, nor did sampling, drum machines or the gramophone, and neither, presumably, will the internet.
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Nothing will kill music, it's the record industry that's under threat. If you have good reasons (other than these rather weak analogies, or pre-existing memes, if you prefer) why this isn't the case, I know scores of people who'd love to hear them.

By the way, debt repayments aside, isn't EMI operating at a profit?
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Yep, it's called downsizing - 2,000 lay-offs to return to profit after a huge loss the previous year. Here are the most recent revenue figures the IFPI have posted, 8% down on the previous year, which was 8% down on the year before that, which was 5% down on etc etc. (Bear in mind the increasing market share of amazon and supermarkets in the UK means you now have to sell more to make less - no idea how that applies to iTunes, or other markets, but I'd be surprised if it was significantly different).
 
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massrock

Well-known member
crackerjack said:
The argument that because the 'home taping is killing music' campaign was a silly farce the current record industry scare campaign can be similarly disregarded. I don't find it 'offensive', just impossible to believe that anyone could advance it in good faith.
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I didn't advance any analogy, I just asked you a question what you meant. Is it my analogy?

But even so I do think it's similar from say TalkTalk's (and consumers, and most artists tbh) point of view, i.e. it's not and never was MUSIC that's under threat, which I guess we agree on.
 
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