Re: The Eric Eldred Act

At 07:37 AM 2/4/2003 Tuesday, Linda wrote:

>Hello Dan,
>
>A week or two ago I heard a broadcast and read an article on the same day,
>but my memory is foggy. (I'm pretty old too.) I can't be very specific on
>the facts or even remember where I heard and read them now. In the
>broadcast, a major CD chain store was filing bankruptcy. Reportedly,
>internet music swapping was the main reason for their financial situation.
>The article I read didn't mention that bankruptcy. It may have been
>written earlier. The writer believes that the music industry as we know it
>is dying, and soon, there will be no more CD stores.
>
>A lot of people seem to think it's a good thing that the music moguls are
>being cut out of the equation, but I wonder how new artists can manage
>marketing and promotion without someone fronting the money. It takes a
>lot of expensive broadcast marketing to get a recording to go platinum.
>Maybe it would be different if I were a kid in high school with classmates
>talking up a particular new artist, but foggy, old fogey that I am, if I
>heard a song on the radio that I liked and wanted to buy, it's unlikely
>that I would remember it long enough to go looking for the artist's
>website. I need TV ads to get me interested.
>
>I really don't think the recession can be blamed. I've been through a
>number of recessions, but I've never seen record sales suffer like this.
>When I was a just out of high school there was a recession. It was the
>late sixties. I was making $50 per week, paying $50 a month for an
>apartment over a music store, and driving a Honda 50 scooter. I could
>barely make ends meet, but I still bought a few 45's for $.99 each. Young
>adults still love music, and they are generally much more affluent today,
>but I suspect they do a lot more free downloading than buying. (I get that
>info directly from many young adults who have expressed the opinion that
>if it's on the internet, it's up for grabs.)
>
>Linda Gruber
>Novel Art
>http://www.novelart.com

Sorry this is such a late reply but I've been having a great deal of computer troubles, Linda! At any rate a number of people have made other relevant comments and I'll just throw out one more article about CD sales and then an interview with Jack Valenti that goes right to the heart of the CD/DVD copyright issue. Nothing new about his opinions but the interview is new.

First, from Connected Home Express
(Connected Home Magazine Online, the unique resource to help you tackle home networking, home automation, and much more.) http://www.connectedhomemag.com

>* THE RIAA IS LYING TO YOU!
>Late last year, musician George Ziemann published a well-researched
>article about the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
>When the RIAA isn't busy fending off intruder attacks on its Web site,
>the organization is apparently busy spreading misinformation about the
>effects of Internet piracy on the recording industry. According to
>data outlined in Ziemann's article, the record industry has cut its
>inventory and artist investments by 25 percent but sales have dropped
>only 4.1 percent. Considering the shape of the economy, that number is
>pretty impressive. More important, online file-sharing services don't
>appear to be having as much of an impact on music sales as the RIAA
>would like us to believe. We highly recommend you check out this
>detailed article.
>http://www.azoz.com/music/features/0008.html

Although this agrees with my disbelief of the RIAA's claim that each act of illegally downloading a song represents an actual loss of a CD sale, I do believe the end is in sight for the CD as a medium of distributing music. It's customer inefficient and unfriendly. Too many times I've spent $16 or so on a CD that contains one or two songs I wanted and thirteen or more that I didn't want but had no way of avoiding. Good for the industry but quite bad for the customer. Almost everyone now knows that type of forcing something on a customer is not necessary, and fewer and fewer people will be willing to go along with it.

Second

> From http://www.hpronline.org/news/347207.html?mkey=628413

>Institute of Politics
>Harvard University
>
>
>Valenti's Views
>The MPAA president and former LBJ aide opens up on a range of topics
>
>By Derek Slater
>Jack Valenti has led a prolific political life. A decorated World War II
>pilot, Valenti served as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson
>until 1966. Since then, he has served as the President of the Motion
>Picture Association of America (MPAA), turning the entertainment studio
>consortium into a lobbying juggernaut. Valenti helped pioneer the movie
>industry's voluntary rating system and has tirelessly fought government
>censorship. He has also headed the Motion Picture Export Association,
>protecting American film studios' interests in other countries.
>
>In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight
>against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities,
>Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the
>eventual death of the movie industry. To defend its copyrights, MPAA
>successfully sued publishers of a program that undermined the copy
>prevention technology on DVDs and is currently suing several file-sharing
>services. In addition, Valenti has taken his case to Congress, pushing for
>mandated copy prevention technologies in all digital devices that play
>movies, music, and other media.
>
>But many people have criticized Valenti's hard-line stance, calling it
>anti-technology and anti-consumer. These critics assert that Valenti's
>copy prevention mandates will harm innovation, forcing all technologists
>to ask the MPAA's permission before creating the next generation of
>amazing gadgets. Copyright holders have always fought new technologies,
>from Marconi's radio to cable television to VCRs, and in no case have
>their apocalyptic visions come true. Furthermore, copy prevention
>technologies will go beyond ending piracy by limiting how consumers can
>make personal use of their legally purchased movies.
>
>After delivering a speech on "Persuasion and Leadership" at Harvard's
>Institute of Politics, Valenti sat down with the HPR to discuss his side
>of the digital debate and his life in politics.
>
>HPR: You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the
>Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Even though the movie
>industry profits from video rentals, the MPAA still fears new technologies
>like digital VCRs and the Internet. What are the significant differences
>between the threat posed by the VCR and by today's technologies?
>
>Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR. The MPAA tried to establish by
>law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the
>Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes
>and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette
>piracy].
>
>I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette
>analog piracy. It was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that determined VCRs
>were not infringing, which I regret. As a result, we never got the
>copyright royalty fee, but everything I predicted came true.
>
>Now the difference between analog piracy and digital piracy is the
>difference between lightning and the lightning bug. For example, it's very
>cumbersome to deal in piracy of videocassettes; it costs a lot of money.
>But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can
>send a film hurdling around the world.
>
>The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in
>revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the
>music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's
>going to produce it?
>
>It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD; it costs $80 million to make
>and market a movie. Big difference. The MPAA could live with the fifteen
>million homes that currently have broadband internet access. But when
>sixty million homes have broadband, plus the people on fast connections in
>universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes...
>
>We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going
>into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no
>compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong
>to them. Why? I don't know.
>
>HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention
>technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's
>"fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can
>we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
>
>JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
>
>Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom
>without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a
>copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the
>encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself.
>
>HPR: Even if breaking the encryption is for a legitimate purpose, to make
>a back-up copy?
>
>JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In
>the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never
>wears out. It is timeless.
>
>The minute that you allow people to break an encryption, you lose all
>security. If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we
>protect the artists?
>
>Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy
>a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing
>wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations.
>
>HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies?
>
>JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or
>later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules.
>For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC
>because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all
>railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
>
>If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either
>regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in
>Taiwan, I can say, "Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to
>do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, "Well
>if he does that, then I want to do it." We always operate on the fact that
>everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a
>standard.
>
>HPR: You served as special assistant to President Johnson at the formative
>stages of the Vietnam War. Given your experience, what do you consider
>most crucial to keeping the war on terrorism, in light of conflict in
>Iraq, from becoming a quagmire?
>
>JV: Nobody realizes that when Johnson became president on Nov. 22, 1963,
>we had 16,000 fighting men in Vietnam. Nobody remembers that.
>
>The problem in Vietnam was that we couldn't get these people to negotiate.
>Johnson always believed that there was no such thing as victory--only
>negotiation. He never could get the Vietcong to the negotiating table. A
>lot of people urged him to go all out, as Richard Nixon did later, to bomb
>them into the Stone Age; he refused to do that, ultimately to his detriment.
>
>I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The
>people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight." If you're
>going to go to war, you must have the people with you. If you lose the
>confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem.
>
>So long as George Bush has the majority of the American people on his side
>in the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq, he'll be just fine. But
>if he ever begins to lose that support, he will not do fine. That's what
>you learn from Johnson.
>
>HPR: In an interview with CNN.com, you discussed how costly the lack of
>censorship was to President Johnson during the Vietnam War. Having fought
>against the government's attempts to censor the movie industry, how do you
>think the government should approach censorship during wartime?
>
>JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in
>war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the
>only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without
>censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in
>any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment.
>
>HPR: How do you view the influence of lobbyists in government and campaign
>finance reform? Do organizations like the MPAA have an undue influence
>because they have money?
>
>JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying
>to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give
>them a lot of facts they didn't have before.
>
>Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though
>money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there
>are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists
>in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit
>it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the
>money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
Received on Sat Feb 08 2003 - 14:52:54 GMT