EFF: Voluntary Collective Licensing Of Music File Sharing

[elektro80]

Voluntary Collective Licensing Of Music File Sharing

http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.pdf



The current battles surrounding peer-to-peer file sharing are a losing proposition for everyone. The record labels continue to face lackluster sales, while the tens of millions of American file sharers -- American music fans -- are made to feel like criminals. Every day the collateral damage mounts -- privacy at risk, innovation stymied, economic growth suppressed, and a few unlucky individuals singled out for legal action by the recording industry. And the litigation campaign against music fans has not put a penny into the pockets of artists.

We need a better way forward.

The Premises

First, artists and copyright holders deserve to be fairly compensated.

Second, file sharing is here to stay. Killing Napster only spawned more decentralized networks. Most evidence suggests that file sharing is at least as popular today as it was before the lawsuits began.

Third, the fans do a better job making music available than the labels. Apple's iTunes Music Store brags about its inventory of over 500,000 songs. Sounds pretty good, until you realize that the fans have made millions of songs available on KaZaA. If the legal clouds were lifted, the peer-to-peer networks would quickly improve.

Fourth, any solution should minimize government intervention in favor of market forces.

The Proposal: Voluntary Collective Licensing

EFF has spent the past year evaluating alternatives that get artists paid while making file sharing legal. One solution has emerged as the favorite: voluntary collective licensing.

The concept is simple: the music industry forms a collecting society, which then offers file-sharing music fans the opportunity to "get legit" in exchange for a reasonable regular payment, say $5 per month. So long as they pay, the fans are free to keep doing what they are going to do anyway -- share the music they love using whatever software they like on whatever computer platform they prefer -- without fear of lawsuits. The money collected gets divided among rights-holders based on the popularity of their music.

In exchange, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them. The more people share, the more money goes to rights-holders. The more competition in applications, the more rapid the innovation and improvement. The more freedom to fans to publish what they care about, the deeper the catalog.

Download White Paper: http://www.eff.org/share/collective_lic_wp.pdf

[elektro80]

This proposal has some problems. Recent research has shown that p2p music filesharing is in fact often used for "try before you buy". This means that "popularity" can not be measured based on number of downloads.
Another fact is that a serious amount of music files shared over the net are just dead files.. because noone ever listens to them. A certain type of P2P users can best be described as colectors, and not music lovers.

.

[paul e.]

perhaps also easy to hack...send a script/virus out to 'share' your songs and get paid for illegitmate plays

[Cyxeris]

You know who's REALLY behind initiatives like this, dont you?

Seagate. Western Digital. Maxtor.

[elektro80]

Well, we have all seen how the storage industry has been selling their drugs..

[paul e.]

perhaps these guys have not consulted
other technical experts regarding the
practicality of such a system..
at first blush it would seem you would need to create
an almost global system with global compatibilty

that seems pretty near impossible to me

others here, namely mosc and elektro 80, could probably fill us in on some of the technical requirements of
such a system

[mosc]

I thought this through about a month ago, not for P2P, but for downloading from electro-music.com, naturally.

The idea was customers would by a ticket for say $5 , $10, or whatever. They could then download a certain amount of music measured by the megabyte. The software would keep track of who's music was downloaded and the artists would get a percentage of the pie every month or so.

This doesn't stop people from "sharing" your music with everyone else in the world on a P2P system. It doesn't do anything to pay the costs of storing artists music that doesn't sell.

But it does solve the problem of the overhead of very small credit card transactions having hugely expensive frees.

There are other issues undelying all this that continue to bother me. Perhaps the first one is that mp3 and the like are not very good. I'm reluctant to sell something I know is inherently low quality. I know it doesn't bother Steve Jobs, but it's still an issue with me.

[elektro80]

mp4 ... ACC.. is actually a lot better than mp3

[mosc]

Hmmm... I just spent a bit of time looking up mp4, downloading encoders and trying it out. For Windows, this is the best I could locate:

http://www.dbpoweramp.com/codec-central-mp4.htm

It has two encoders, Psytel and FAAC. The latter is much better as far as I can see. I encoded a few files at 128 kbs using both encoders. I couldn't see much difference in sound quality from mp3, but the FAAC encoder made about 20% smaller files.

Playing back on windows seems a bit problematical. Quicktime works, but it is a poor player compared to WinAmp. There is an MP4 Codec for WinAmp but I couldn't get it to work. It requires a working installation of iTunes, which I have. I tunes will play back the mp4 files, but using iTunes on windows is very ugly, as it avoids the file system almost completely. It scans your disks for audio files and builds a database. If you want to play a file in a specific directory that hasn't got the tags, you have great problems.

While both of the Windows mp4 encoders are free, they have restrictive lisence agreements. You can use it for evaluation and testing only. If you are going to distribute files encoded with them, then you need another agreement.

In my reading on MP4, I see that there is apparently a lisence required for MP3 files. I didn't know that. Is is possible that someone will sue all of us for using MP3 encoding sometime in the future? Yikes.

Here is a good site with MP4 information: http://www.m4a.com/

Ogg is far better, IMHO, both for sound quality and independance from Corporations. Still, I bet most people who download music would prefer mp3 format.

Does anyone know of any standard reference files that are used to test encoders and decoders?

[Cyxeris]

[paul e.]

is that FAAC or it it FLAC

... the license is for the fraunhaufer[sp] mp3 encoding algorithm, which is paid by the software company that incorporates it into an app , or in some cases the user.. i.e. mp3 export on protools is not a free option because of this license fee...

i also find mp4 problematic... on os 9, but on os x it is stable

yeah itunes has an ego problem ;]

[Cyxeris]

It's like that with everything. Sound Forge only gives you like 15 or 25 encodes before you have to register, Sonar may as well, but I dont output MP3s from Sonar. That is why I hopped over to OGG with such glee once Mosc turned me on to it.

[mosc]

[elektro80]

You can encode mp4/acc files without DRM activated. The whole thing about DRM is what made the iTunes Music Shop possible. If you want to create ACC encoded files without DRM you can of course do this.
If you want to see how offensive DRM is about, then check out the competition. The usual drill is restricting you so badly that you can hardly ever listen to that damned music you bought, and if you do.. then men in black will show up at your door and give you electroshocks. I think cattle mutilation is a part of this too..

[Cyxeris]

[Cyxeris]

[elektro80]

Yup, Microsoft was betatesting their implementation of DRM in WMP9.

I guess we can expect eartquakes, strange lights in the sky and more abductions when they go for the new DRM layer in Longhorn.

[Cyxeris]

Or we can just expect a longhorn itself. I am not an abductee myself, but I have heard proported abductees refer to them as "probes" is it? Same thing. Prepare for the longhorn!

[elektro80]

Prepare!

[Cyxeris]

Perhaps they'll be so kind as to ship each copy of Longhorn with a tube of AstroGlide.

I dont know about all of these diverse corporations getting involved in the music world, be it codecs or download services or whatever. It's getting to sound more and more like... well, I'll discuss that later.

[mosc]

[elektro80]

You can check those old threads about iTunes licenses etc. You get a license for your computer, some iPods and for CD burning etc etc.

The whole mpeg4 thing was mainly about DRM. I could possibly find some text to quote.. but the general drift of it was that MPEG4 would be able to deliver several DRM schemes and this was something the "whole entertainment industry was waiting for".

The DRM was of course the main reason for Apple being able to pull off the whole iTunes online music thingie.

But yes.. you are mainly correct about the rest.

[paul e.]

this may drift a bit off-topic..

but i am worried about apple...

i am not a fan of os x 's cartoon-like appearance and the whole 'log in to use your own computer ' nonsense...i cannot stand having to enter an admin password just to install something..that is not like apple..more like microsoft
i have other more fundamental probelms with os x...



i think mac and pc are virtually equal now, and mac users like myself can no longer scoff at windows

mac vs ps ....the winner is...



us

[mosc]

This is OT, but you're concerns are valid. Loggin on isn't bad because underneath, your personal files are independent from the operating systems. It means you can upgrade to a new OS or move to another computer much easier.

I think Apple did a brilliant thing by adapting BSD Unix. If you think of computing as just personal desktops and laptops, then the impact is probably negligable or not even positive. But now you can run their software virtually unaltered on everything from a wrist watch to a 2000 processor supercomputer. The future of Apple is much brighter now; their market opportunities are vast. Their technological underpennings are fabulous. Microsoft sits on an inferior underlying technical foundation.

It remains to be seen if Bill Gates is as smart as he is schrewd. He could switch to Unix too. When NT came out, Bill said "NT is Unix". That one statement indicates that you can become the worlds richest man selling software, and not know very much about software at the same time.

There's one more giant world changing thing that could happen. Steve Jobs could disconnect his software from the proprietary hardware which is holding him back because it is too expensive and not open. If he did that, then Microsoft's market share would start shrinking and it wouldn't stop for 10 years. Then the winner would really be us.

Back to this thread. I would be happy if Apple would put ogg decoders in their iPod. All my tests show it to be much better than the ACC. When we start selling downloads, I'd like to standardize on ogg because it is the best sounding and the most open.

[Cyxeris]