Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

cc-nz - Re: [Cc-nz] Peter Jenner says "DRM is dead"

cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Danyl Strype <strypey AT riseup.net>
  • To: cc-nz AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Cc-nz] Peter Jenner says "DRM is dead"
  • Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 15:29:32 +1300

Kia ora koutou

Quoting Damian Stewart <damian AT frey.co.nz>:

the model i've heard explained that makes the most sense to me (as a
musician) is that some collective that represents musicians, a la APRA,
bills ISPs for music downloaded (because it's the ISPs who are profiting
from file sharing).

To me this is fundamentally wrong. ISPs provide a road. What people carry along that road in their car or freight around on it in trucks is nothing to do with the ISP. Holding the ISPs responsible for the use of the road they provide creates all sorts of problems and seriously threatens the openness of the net and the freedom of information. See the Electronic Frontiers Foundation articles on Network Neutrality or this article by CC's Lawrence Lessig with Robert McChesney:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/07/AR2006060702108.html

IMHO flatrate broadband needs to come in just as flatrate dial-up did otherwise you have some justification in claiming ISPs are making money from file-sharing but there are good arguments for flatrate. After all bandwidth is a capacity not a consumable - you don't 'use up' a resource that needs to be remanufactured when you transfer data. The costs of maintaining the bandwidth aren't increased per MB transferred by customers. Traffic-based charges are pure greed and as soon as some brave ISP does what Ihug did with dial-up or Slingshot did with I4free the capitalist feeding frenzy is over.

perhaps you could have some system where the major filesharing applications
(Soulseek, Shareaza, Limewire, ..) keep track of this... this is kind of how radio works (musicians get paid for radio airplay) but since radio is centralised it's much easier to administer and police. <<

Actually radio stations play a flat fee to APRA and RIANZ for unlimited playing of music owned by their members. But this is exactly the model Hamish is criticising and quite rightly IMHO. There are a whole series of mediators erecting toll gates between musician and listener; radio station, RIANZ, record company. Yet although these mediators are all on salaries there are still very few artists making a living from their work.

Besides modern file-sharing applications are nothing like radio stations. They're more like a stereo with a CD player and a tape deck. They allow you to exchange reduced-quality demo versions of music with other people. The idea of paying artists per download for these exchanges is like paying them per listener when their music is played at a party. Surely there's a better way for artists to make a living that doesn't tie everyone into super-complicated compulsary accounting systems?

The disintermediation of the
incumbents and connection of producers to consumers (accepting that in
different contexts those roles reverse) directly will test if the
incumbents do anything necessary, or better, something that people
want to pay them for.

hold on. this model completely ignores file sharing. the big hooha where
the internet and music is concerned centres around filesharing. the point
of file sharing is that the 'consumer' (music lover) doesn't have to
connect with the 'producer' (musician) in order to get a hold of the music

Sure but the model that's emerging and which I think CreativeCommons is playing a part in facilitating is where people download their reduced-quality demos (.mp3 or preferably .ogg vorbis) directly from the artist's homepage.

Software like Songbird (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_%28software%29) encourages this kind of use of multimedia content on the web. The artist uses a BitTorrent system like the Broadcast Machine (http://www.getdemocracy.com/broadcast/) to share the bandwidth costs around the users or uses a hosting service like Archive.org or (cringe) MySpace.

This way a direct connection is established between artist and audience and if people like what they hear/ see/read they can come back to the homepage and order CDs/DVDs/books etc. Sci-fi author Cory Doctorow is an example of a published artist working on this principle:
http://craphound.com/

If the artist is touring, again the homepage serves as a point of promotion and ticket sales to an audience who are already engaged rather than trying to driftnet them through costly mass advertising and further mediator monopolies like Ticketek.

how does the producer-consumer connection idea fit in to this picture? i
don't think it does. i'm not a producer of music who gives my music to
consumers of music, i'm an experiencer of emotions and i just happen to put
the effort in to sharing them through music, with the aim that my music can
produce emotions in others. i don't think the producer/consumer model can
apply in any meaningful way when the product being consumed is so
fundamentally ephemeral.

I totally agree with what you are saying and in fact this is precisely what I intuitively cringe at complicated revenue models involving pay-per-listen DRM-style approaches. In my ideal world each person is a special kind of artist rather than an artist being a special kind of person (to paraphrase Hakim Bey). However I still agree with the thrust of Hamish's argument although I would swap producer/consumer for artist/audience.

RnB
Strypey

--
"But libertarians do not defend the right of people to smash holes in the hull
of a crowded ship, or to let off bombs in city centres. Freedom does not
include the freedom to trash the habitat we all depend on for survival."
- Johann Hari, Independent, 5.9.06

mobile: 021 11 77 578
Community Access News: http://www.indymedia.org.nz/
Artist Rights: http://www.creativecommons.org/

Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free by using Mozilla
Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express. Windows on a PC
block viruses like windows on a house block sunlight ;)




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page