In “Where Nobody Knows You’re a Music Thief” by Daniel Akst in the Sunday, October 5, 2003 New York Times we find the first serious advocation of letting the RIAA monitor all Internet activity so as to prevent file sharing:
“The answer is probably authentication. Sooner or later we will need to know who everyone on the Internet is, and who confirmed their identities. Internet access providers who admit unauthenticated users will have to be shut out, even if that means shutting out whole countries.
“In such a world, there would be no doubt about who was violating copyright laws or otherwise misusing the electronic commons. It’s sad, I know. The ability to shed one’s identity online seemed a dream for a while, but as the poet Delmore Schwartz reminds us, ‘in dreams begin responsibilities.'”
This is sort of an echo of an idea put forth here in this blog on Thursday, September 25:
Prediction: RIAA will get a law passed making it illegal to email sound recordings. To enforce the law the RIAA will have the right to read anyone’s email at any time. Encryption of email will need to be outlawed so as to thwart terrorists and music thieves.
[Of course as noted here on September 5, the most likely explanation for the declining sales of clunky physical objects containing brief musical recordings (e.g., CDs) is that the product is unappealing compared to subscription music services such as XM, Sirius, and 500-channel digital cable (which includes 50 channels of commercial-free music), $12 DVDs at Walmart, and other entertainment options that did not exist when Edison cylinders were introduced 125 years ago (or when CDs were introduced more than 20 years ago). It is a testament to the power of the RIAA that their posited connection between Internet file sharing and their sagging sales is accepted uncritically in the mass media.]
Update: I mentioned this story to Robert Thau, author of the core of the original Apache Web server. He said “If the Chinese government had proposed this scheme, the New York Times would have editorialized against it.”
Hasn’t Steve Wozniak told the story of how, during the Microsoft antitrust trial, he wrote an op-ed for the NYT saying that Microsoft was in fact a monopoly, and they edited his article to make it say that “Microsoft innovates” instead? IIRC, Wozniak mentioned that he later found out that some VIP at the newspaper was friendly with some VIP at Microsoft… Ever since then, I’ve been a bit skeptic of the supposed prestige of the New York Times.
Ever read an article in the NYT about something you’re actually familiar with? The reminder in my social group every time someone gets a little too credulous about an article in the “paper of record” is: “Somewhere there’s a terrorist saying ‘oh, what an interesting and well researched article on technology’.”
A rather more in-depth analysis and predictions for the future of this sort of thinking can be found at http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/digital-imprimatur/
Paul, El Pais, the Spanish equivalent of The NY Times in terms of sales, influence and “prestige” is actually the biggest advocate of enforcing copyright laws to the most absurd extremes. And I still remember that editorial in which they said that Microsoft was a “natural” monopoly, whose position of dominance of the market actually benefitted consumers. When the media, even the “serious” media, are in their hands, what can be done?
And Dan, you’re totally right. As my father, a Physics Prof., always says, “if journalists don’t have a clue whenever they write about science, and I find their articles full of mistakes, why should I trust them in regard to stuff I know nothing about?”
The “Authentication” of internet users will only lead to virtual identity theft (even worse then physical world identity theft–perhaps?) Why not just pretend to be someone else?
I can easily imagine law enforcement officials getting truly excited about joining with the RIAA (and presumably the MPAA as well) to fight the scourge of piracy. It would be another “War,” like the ones currently being waged against Drugs and Terror, ostensibly intended to eradicate something that anyone with half a brain knows can never be eradicated. Although “victory” is neither possible nor definable (nor desirable), these Wars do provide excellent opportunities for agencies to build limitless empires, and for agents to enjoy recession-proof careers with guaranteed advancement.
The only true success the current Wars have achieved is the systematic erosion of rights and liberties that long stood in the way of those empires and careers. A War on Piracy would surely produce similar success, and would provide similar unlimited opportunities for building empires and careers. Indeed, it would probably provide even more opportunities, since the Enemy in this War is even more insidious, pervasive, and implacable. Most people do not need much convincing that Drugs and Terrorism are indisuputably EVIL (as is anyone who criticizes the War and its conduct). Conversely, the EVIL of piracy seems lost on millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens who think nothing of downloading all the music they want, despite the RIAA’s massive deployment of legal heavy artillery. Thus, prosecuting the War will require even more resources, intrusive searches, and (one can only hope and pray) demolition of those so-called rights and liberties that the Criminal Evil Enemy shamelessly exploits.
If you notice John Ashcroft’s halo glowing particularly bright, it’s probably because he has just emerged from behind his favorite closed doors, having met with Pioneers and Rangers from the RIAA to plan the War on Piracy.
Exactly where is every snoop going to be once the P2P programs start implementing hybrid (ie. synchronous and asychronous) cyphers a la SSL?
Next the RIAA will be bitching about strong cryptography.
The NYT article begins “Imagine that you sell newspapers on the honor system. You put some papers out on a table, along with a can for the money. It would surprise hardly anyone if, at the end of the day, more papers were taken than were paid for.”
Isn’t that basically what newspapers do now using newspaper vending machines? Is there a big problem with people paying for one paper, and taking the entire morning run? Is it time to require authentication before we can buy a newspaper on a street corner?
Well, copying music is wrong and is stealing, there is no denying that.
Price-fixing is also wrong and so is getting special legal powers by falsely accusing that it is killing the industry, but three wrongs don’t make a right.
Have I leached music from Napster and other services? You bet; it is the best way to sample music before buying. I now have a massive high-quality 3000 song MP3 music collection. I got this the easy way: put my CDs in a drive and hit the rip button.
Please stick to the issue: RIAA abuse of the legal system is wrong and should be stopped, music sharing not legalized. We’ve made our point to the industry that we want online access. If we stop doing that illegaly and still not buy CDs, they will probably get it.
In the mean time, I will continue to buy music I like. Have you ever seen the makeup of the price of a CD? The retailers take an even bigger cut than do the record companies. And I don’t see anyone shouting at Amazon for price fixing and profiteering!
Ion: interesting that you mention “El pais”, since I live in Spain :-). And your father’s attitude is exactly the one I got after seeing all the brouhaha over the “RPG killer” story here a few years ago.
(For those not in Spain: around 1994, a couple of college kids who were, erm, mentally unstable killed a random man they found on the street, as part of a role-playing game they were playing. RPGs were mostly alien to the mainstream spanish society back then, and you can’t imagine the amount of idiocy and stupidities published by the media about the “dangers of these games that our children are playing”…)
So, conclusion: the Grey Old Lady might be old, but that doesn’t mean that she is pure or chaste.
No, copying is NOT stealing. Stealing an object means to displace it physically from the possession of one into the possession of another, thus denying and depriving the original and/or current owner of said object. Copying does not remove an object, it merely adds another imperfect copy (from the originating medium, not the copy of another copy).
Even the U.S. legal system does not term it “theft” as it does not treat copyrights and patents like physical object property rights.
It’s been a triumphant ruse by the lobbyists of the BSA, MPAA and RIAA to equate physical wanton destruction and violent plunder that *real* pirates and criminals have engage in to making imperfect copies of media. Imperfect copies that do not replace the original, do not financially harm the producer of the original media (research and studies NOT subsidized by the aforementioned lobbyist groups have all proven the converse of their narrow minded conclusions – that copyright infringement or unauthorized copying dramatically increased product sales and did not harm the producers. Sony playstation and Microsoft Windows are two prime examples where so called piracy vaulted these products into ubiquitous household possessions and have been massive revenue sources, paying back a hundred fold (at least, probably more) any possible cost for the instances whereby a purchase was not made because of a copy.
Naum, settle down!
Again, multiple wrongs do not make a right. Just that US law (like _that_ is such a good benchmark) doesn’t name it theft doesn’t mean it is not against other laws, which it clearly is.
This doesn’t mean I condone the course of action being taken, the RIAA is close to getting close to demanding the same ludicrous right given to the BSA, and that is wrong.
Let me re-state that I not for one minute believe MP3 sharing is to blame for the industry’s alleged problems. There is too much research proving that.
While the copying of Windows made more people comfortable with the product and subsequently causes business to us use it is a very different case than this. There, the illegal copy used by one person, made someone else buy legal copies.
If someone downloads an album, decodes the MP3s and puts them on a CD, it is not going to make anyone else buy that CD. And while some people use it to sample albums and then buy the real thing, like I do (for the quality and just because it feels like you actualy own something (even though you don’t)), there are many who do not.
What pisses me off is that the industry does virtualy nothing against the professional pirates, which (again, independent) research shows sells 1/5th of all CDs and instead goes for the little guy. I guess there are a lot less of these professionals and they are a lot harder to catch. And when you do, it turns out the have no more money than average joe filesharer, so they use economies of scale and go for the ones they can find the cheapest, and shake money out of, in greater numbers.
What’s bizarre is how the proposal is completely ineffective. How is wearing a driver’s license around your neck (i.e. not being anonymous) at all like having a mirror project your actions?
A non-anonymous Internet will only broadcast your identity to the people you download songs from, most of whom are presumably accomplices and don’t care who you are or that you’re committing a crime.
Meanwhile the RIAA, the only people who would actually bother to look up people’s identities, has already abused the legal system to get Earthlink and all the major ISPs to reveal people’s identities, and will probably soon have it set up so they can do this automatically.
Since this is effective for 90% of the music sharing population, I don’t see what excluding whole countries from the Internet really gets them on this particular issue. (Other than the satisfaction of knowing they’re incredibly evil.)
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