Copyrights, Copywrongs, and all the bullshite.

What set me off this time

I downloaded my first ever track from the iTunes Music Store today. I'm disappointed that it's AAC instead of Apple Lossless, but that's rather a side issue. I'm irritated by that somewhat, yes. I even sent a feature request to them for the option to download Apple Lossless files instead of AAC.

What set me off is the "DRM" features of the files you download. Now, I can't say I didn't know in advance, or that I don't expect copy protection as a matter of course in any for-pay downloadable music. I know that sort of shite is unavoidable these days.

What specifically set me off, however, was this:

posted by TBIproductions

Other than for cases of personal use - NOT for distribution, sale etc. I would sincerely hope we all have the moral integrity to avoid this sort of issue. Just think you are a content creator, you produce a piece, copywrite it and put it out for sale. A person of less character sees what a great job you did sees that it is selling like hotcakes and decides to make knockoffs cutting into your sales. How would you feel.

Now on the personal use scale, you don't need anything special to use iTunes music. You are by agreement allowed to burn as many copies of a song to your own CDs as you like. So what if you have to change the other songs on that CD after 7 times. Once you make the first audio CD and re-import the file back to your harddrive, FCP has no problems using that file. FCP doesn't count how many times that CD audio file has been played. The difference is that in case one you are distributing copywritten materials to others for personal gain. Case two is for personal use.

Step three: take the time to learn GarageBand, Soundtrack or buy royallty free music and use SonicFire, or gets Use rights authorization from the artist for the specific project. Cheep no, Free definitly not, Legal absolutely!

The response I posted was only to the middle paragraph. I said this:

posted by TBIproductions

Now on the personal use scale, you don't need anything special to use iTunes music. You are by agreement allowed to burn as many copies of a song to your own CDs as you like. So what if you have to change the other songs on that CD after 7 times. Once you make the first audio CD and re-import the file back to your harddrive, FCP has no problems using that file. FCP doesn't count how many times that CD audio file has been played.

reply by me

This is ridiculous. I don't have an iPod. Suppose I had one of the competing products because my aged aunt gave me one for christmas. I can't use the music I legally bought on this OTHER product without taking an extra step and burning the tracks to a cd first?

The fact is, you do need something special to listen to iTunes music: you need iTunes. And if you want to take it with you, you need an iPod.

Using Hymn appears to be a much more reasonable solution than burning a copy to a disc, or exporting to AIFF—we are talking about lossy compression here, after all.

It's not a matter of integrity to want to play, on the equipment I own, the music which I legally bought the right to use. This is equivalent to advocating a Sony music store from which you download files that can't be played on a Yamaha stereo. Or advocating Sony cds that won't play in a Yamaha cd player.

I realize, of course, that I can take my business elsewhere. I'm not obligated to buy from the iTunes store. I can just buy cds in the first place, and not worry about all this. Unfortunately, that's what I do. I wish the iTunes music store were more of an option. I guarantee, though, that if it were possible for the music industry to prevent me from importing my cds into iTunes without adding copy protection, they'd do it.

---

What is copyright really for?

This is ultimately the heart of the problem. People now assume that copyright law is meant to protect the artist. While it sometimes has that effect, that is not the original intent. The original intent of copyright law was to protect the investment of book publishers in the books that they published.

Copyright law began—worldwide, as far as I'm aware—with the Statute of Anne. It is very easy to read into the opening paragraphs a notion that the artist is the one protected, but notice that they say, "artist or proprietor." Further notice that they say, "to the Ruin of them and their Families." So, in other words, whoever had—either through creative production or through licensing—the right to publish a book was the only one empowered to do so. Cui bono? Whoever has made an investment in publishing the work is the only one who directly benefits from this law. All intellectual property law, to this day, continues to protect investments, not people. This makes sense: after all, the problem they were trying to solve is that companies who took the risk of publishing a new book were not able to reap the benefits of having done so. Other companies would notice the popularity, and make their own edition, for their own profit. In that kind of economy, who wants to publish new books? (In actual fact, the Chinese seem to do just fine. Pirated cds are very readily available, despite being against the law, and new cds are still released every bit as often as they are here.)

Further, it is worth observing that the music industry takes out as much as possible of the risk on the artist. You can, in fact, be quite successful as a band, touring, selling a lot of records, and owe the record company money. Copyright law certainly isn't protecting people like that.

Back to the idiot

posted by TBIproductions

Other than for cases of personal use - NOT for distribution, sale etc. I would sincerely hope we all have the moral integrity to avoid this sort of issue. Just think you are a content creator, you produce a piece, copywrite it and put it out for sale. A person of less character sees what a great job you did sees that it is selling like hotcakes and decides to make knockoffs cutting into your sales. How would you feel.

Now, please take a moment and consider for me how exactly you'd make money selling copied music. I can't think of one. It's too easy to get it free.

I can't think of anything else to say about this: it's just foolish.

What we are missing

Copyright law still retains a fairly broad set of "fair-use" rights to the end-user. As I understand it, the core of the standard is "whether your use will deprive the copyright owner of income." It's extremely complex to determine what constitutes fair use and what does not, because the relevant bits of law are very subjective. Basically, it's down to whether you a judge will agree with you or not.

It has been long said that fair use allows one to make a backup copy of copyrighted material. If this is actually true, (I am not a lawyer) it is an implied right. It is implied by the fact that a portion of a copyrighted material may be reproduced to replace or repair an original that was damaged. With this in mind, consider this: if I have the right to reproduce a work so as to repair the damaged original, I have to have a copy of the original to work from. Therefore, I am presumably empowered to make a copy from which to reproduce material to repair the original. It is implied that this copy must be archived, and cannot under any circumstances be made publicly available—even in ways in which it would be legal to display the original.

The DMCA

I don't presume to know what other rights are implied by the fair-use portion of our copyright laws. I do know, however, that there is certainly no violation of copyright law itself in transforming a music file so that I can play it on a different machine from that provided by the distributor of the music. What this violates is the DMCA, which disallows one from circumventing electronic copy-protection schemes.

The DMCA essentially makes it illegal to do anything with copyrighted material other than what the copyright holder intends. The fact that the iPod is the only portable you can legally use to play music from the iTunes music store is disturbing. It really is tantamount to what I suggested above: buy a Sony music cd and you can only play it in Sony devices. Is your computer's optical drive a Sony? Do you even know? Mine isn't. I also don't own a Sony cd player. I do own a lot of Sony cds.

Where does it all end? Obviously there are practical limits to what they can do. The market will not now put up with certain things, and the music industry is losing market share because they can't possibly enforce their rights. But the situation is out of hand, and it isn't helped by people who refuse to take a realistic look at the problems we currently face.