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DMCA Creator Admits Failure, Blames RIAA
Posted by
Zonk
on Sat Mar 24, 2007 07:45 AM
from the how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people dept.
from the how-to-make-friends-and-influence-people dept.
An anonymous reader writes "DMCA architect Bruce Lehman has admitted
that "our Clinton administration
policies didn't work out very well" and "our attempts at copyright
control have not been successful". Speaking at conference in
Montreal (video
at 11:00), Lehman lay much
of the blame at the feet of the recording industry for their failure to
adapt to the online marketplace in the mid-1990s."
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On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:5, Insightful)
To err is human, to apologize and publicly shoot one's own demonic brainchild in the foot is divine.
Exactly. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:5, Insightful)
What a load of crap.
The RIAA hasn't used, for the most part, the DMCA. The two central tools the DMCA gave groups like those the RIAA represents were a legal backing to DRM (the laws against circumventing Access Control Mechanisms), and a set, established, procedure for taking down content hosted by third parties.
Well, which have the RIAA used? In the former case, "DRM" used by RIAA members has tended to be of the kind of thing that isn't an Access Control Mechanism or a Copy Control Mechanism, instead a "Use bugs in certain popular CD driver implementations to make it easier to use the publisher's own special music software which causes all kinds of problems" variety. The RIAA and its members could, in the late nineties, have settled on an encrypted music format, just as the movie industry did with DVDs, and phased out CDs, but they didn't, and so their ability to use the DMCA to fight piracy was limited.
(I might add I'm glad they didn't, because DVD CSS has proven only to be a burden to non-pirates, not pirates who copy it anyway. But the point remains that the DMCA is utterly irrelevent to the RIAA actions. The RIAA has never seriously tried to make use of the DRM related parts of the DMCA.)
Then there's the take-down system the DMCA provides. Has the RIAA and its members made serious attempts to exploit this? Well, no, because they couldn't. The way the DMCA is worded means it doesn't really apply to distributed systems like the old Napster, and would, indeed, be toothless even if you could make it apply to Napster. So they've been unable to use it at all.
So my question is: why are the words "RIAA" and "DMCA" being used in the same article? One might "criticize" (because, like, we'd all have been better off if the music industry had forced us to buy our music again for the umpteenth time, this time on encrypted DVD-Audio or something. Yeah. Right.) them for not making use of the DMCA, and thus the DMCA not helping them, but the implication they tried to, but it wasn't enough because of their business model or something is complete crap.
The movie industry has made use of the DMCA, in both areas. DVDs were encrypted, much to the detriment of legitimate end users, and take down notices against groups like YouTube are frequent. If the DMCA is a failure, it should probably be measured on how much it has benefited the movie industry, without causing harm to the entire electronics industry, the customers of the movie industry, and other unrelated third parties. I think any reasonable person can call it a failure on the basis of all of these criterion.
Re:On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:4, Interesting)
You seem to be forgetting SACD and DVD-Audio, both heavily-laden with DRM. The market rejected them in favor of regular Audio CDs, and I would say the presence of DRM was an important factor in this rejection, since geeks knew to stay far away from those formats. DVDs were successful due to the drastic improvement in convenience and picture quality over VHS, despite the DRM. BluRay and HD-DVD won't have it so easy since they're not such a drastic improvement over DVDs as DVDs were to VHS, combined with the rise in popularity of electronic distribution in favor of shipping shiny discs... I guess my point is that DMCA or no, content distributors seem to have forgotten on which side their bread is buttered.
Re:On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, VHS to DVD was a HUGE
Re:On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:4, Insightful)
Wait a sec... are you calculating the amount of improvement by just comparing the resolutions differences in the formats? You can't possibly be that simple -- can you? Or do you not remember what it was like to watch VHS? Picture quality was a distant 4th place or lower in my list of things that made DVDs better than videocassette.
1. Do you remember rewinding/fast-forwarding? I mean I hate having to wait for that FBI shit (when watching on my consumer device, as opposed to e.g. Linux where it's not a factor) but that's still quicker than when I would have to rewind the tape because I forgot to the last time.
2. Do you remember how quickly even the best tape would degrade and streeeeetch in certain spots, especially for those favorite parts of a movie which you wanted to see again (this is especially nice for musical stuff: "Blues Brothers" anyone?).
3. Do you remember having to fast-forward to that certain funny scene to watch it or show it to a friend ("wait just another minute; it's almost there").
4. Do you remember lugging around a whole video recorder and TV with you, so you could watch a flick on the train.... wait a sec: we couldn't do THAT at all!
5. Do you remember how much room all those cassettes took up in even a moderately-sized collection.
6. Do you remember being not being able to choose whether to have subtitles on for a foreign language film, and being able to switch the subtitles... even to the language of the film, e.g. for just a little help understanding the language, while still forcing your brain to practice/learn that language. My wife does this with English language films since her English isn't *quite* good enough to follow a fast, spoken dialog, but she can get by if the words are also being shown; for the really difficult parts she can rewind and switch to German or Hungarian subtitles for just that scene.
Oh, and:
7. The picture and sound are significantly better than cassettes. Presumable 3X better according to your calculations.
That's just off the top of my head. I'm not sure how to quantify 1-6 since they were essentially 0 before and 1 after, meaning infinitely better numerically-speaking.
Then we have DVD -> High Def:
1. Significantly better picture and sound (6x presumably, according to your calculations)
and.....
ummmmmm.....
What was number 2?
I'm sorry I just don't see what the big deal is. I mean, sure all other things being equal, I'm sure I'll like the whole high-def thing better than the 'legacy' DVD, but frankly It's not going to revolutionize my movie-watching experience; it's an upgrade nothing more. To use the tried-and-true car analogy:
VHS -> DVD = Horse and Buggy -> Modern car = revolution
DVD -> High def = Toyota -> Porsche = upgrade (an expensive one at that), but just a matter of degree.
But I'm thinking you weren't around for the horse-and-buggy days of home video, to have made the statement you did
-chris
Re:On behalf of all fair use fans (Score:5, Funny)
Good comments for the FTC (Score:5, Interesting)
Passing the buck (Score:5, Insightful)
That's rich. The RIAA can't make law. The RIAA aren't charged with doing what's best for the USA public. That's your job, and you failed miserably at it. You can't fuck over the public because a corporation told you to, and then blame the corporation. It's your fault for listening to them instead of the public in the first place. The RIAA could "fail to adapt" a million times over and it still wouldn't make it any less your fault for pandering to them.
Re:Passing the buck (Score:5, Interesting)
I have to say I agree.... Congress isn't exactly intended to represent the RIAA. And now that they've gone down that path and realized it was a mistake, they want to blame the RIAA?
That makes even less sense because it was clearly in the RIAA's best interest to promote the DMCA and that's why they pushed it so hard. In the end, even the RIAA has a right to lobby Congress (for all their other faults). It is entirely Congress, and more specifically Lehman's, fault that this happened and that everything got screwed up (and that it hurt the American public so much).
You know, this reminds me of the fact that in the 1920s, the politicians passed laws which only helped really large, often shady corporations. What ensued was the Great Depression....
at least they got radio deregulation right (Score:3, Insightful)
And the War on Drugs (read marijuana) that they kicked into gear in the 90's and has netted 750,000 pothead arrests a year since ahs worked
Re:at least they got radio deregulation right (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government/constitution had two things going for it that are now in the toilet. The first was an independent press to expose wrongdoing. Since giant corporations control the media what we get as "news" is now heavily filtered. The second is the ability to vote out bad leaders. Since the political process is controlled by political parties that are two sides of the same coin, funded by the aforementioned giant corporations, we don't really get a choice as to who we elect or what the so-called "issues" are. Pretty much the same thing is happening in europe.
Bottom line: as the western governments squabble over which corporation gets to screw the most people, the chinese are slowly and carefully assuming real power in the world.
Welcome to the dawn of the totalitarian era.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in the real world
Re:Welcome to the dawn of the totalitarian era (Score:4, Insightful)
Capitalism only works well when the competition is strong. you start creating monopolies even short term ones, and competition dries up. Patents, copyrights are federal backed monopolies for a set term.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Not what he is saying. (Score:5, Insightful)
The DMCA, the CTEA and the fucking NET Act. (Score:5, Interesting)
How did that happen again? Any exchange of any value instantaneously became defined as commercial exchange because some bought and paid for Republican congressman tagged a little note onto a bill right before it was voted on? This completely fails the test of logic. Dozens of simple analogies can easily show that this is an absurd proposition. Any exchange of value is a commercial exchange? That is sick.
Congress is indeed evil. Perhaps not as evil as the Bush administration but just as insidious and bought off.
An open Letter to the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
What follows is a short history of my economic experience of music and a simple business model for the labels to recapture my wallet:
Back in the old days, when I had my first CD player, I went out and replicated my sizable record collection at $12-$13 a pop (note that I lived in Berkeley, which was blessed with two awesome non-chain retailers - Rasputins and Ameoba) - this took all of my struggling-student-with-no-loans spare cash. Over the course of a year, I bought 80+ CDs. It sucked hard, but I hated records and tapes (no vinyl nostalgia for me). Back then, the rumor was that the price of CDs was inflated to cover the cost of retooling manufacturing and would come down below record prices because they were cheaper to make.
Five years later, the prices didn't go down and my 200+ CD collection was stolen from my ghetto apartment. I was literally in tears. That was more than $2500 and I was still pretty poor due to the early 90s recession. The upside was that stolen CDs were valuable because there was a budding used CD market in the Bay Area. Once Rasputins & Ameoba started selling used CDs in quantity, I stopped buying new CDs altogether. This is early 90's and I already dropped out of the label's direct market. Here I was, a 20-something kid that was so in love with music that I would spend the better part of my expendable cash on CDs and I dropped right off their books because I could buy "Nevermind" for $9 if I waited a month after it came out.
Funny thing is that I started making serious money. I still wouldn't buy new CDs. I was used to paying $6-9 and there was no way I could go back. I probably missed out on a lot of music, because I was limited to what college kids would buy and return.
Then came burners - I spent many hours burning all of my friends CD collections. Shortly thereafter came MP3s. I was already pirating software on the FTP scene (another economic lesson to be learned for the SW companies, but I'm not gonna stray there), so suddenly, I'm not even buying used CDs anymore.
So where does this leave us? Well, I'm in my late 30s, make 6figs, and I like a huge variety of musical genres. I could spend $100 a month on music and not bat an eye, but I don't. The labels have alienated me. I virulently despise them, but I am a music addicted consumer. If they offered me something that had value to me, I would embrace the bastards with loving arms.
So, what can they do for me that would convince me to give them my money again? Simple:
A reasonable service at a reasonable price. Look to the Russian sites. I select the quality and pay a reasonable price for it. The bottom line here is that I'll pay up to 4 bucks for a CD encoded at 256k VBR with no obnoxious DRM crap - no less quality and no more money.
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s. How much would I be willing to pay for this? Figure 2-4 bucks for 10 songs. That's $.20 -
Ease my conscious - I admit it, I feel bad for screwing the artists by downloading mp3s off Russian websites. The problem is, they are already getting so screwed by the labels. It's kinda like buying Nikes - hard to say whether it helping the poor little Indonesian kid or not. Besides, the less that people give the labels, they less they have to offer the artists who should really all jump ship anyway. I buy Timberland clothes 'cause they make a big deal about how their sweatshops are less satanic than others. Treat the artists well so I don't feel bad about promoting your exploitation of them. Tax the superstars a bit to feed the starving artists - music should be a middle class profession.
This would keep me from downloading music "illegally" - I prom
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) You were poor in the 1990s, buying CDs at retail price, but discovering cheaper used CD prices.
2)
Re:An open Letter to the RIAA (Score:5, Insightful)
1) CDs are of no greater value new at the $12-$15 price to him than they are used at the $6 price. This is the fulcrum of his entire argument. If he accepted the price of new CDs because they were set at that point to help overcome starting costs for a new medium, why should he accept it after the medium is fully adopted?
2) He found other means of getting songs and shows that he knows it isn't right but that he is also willing to spend money on them if they were delivered in a way that reflected the value he has set in his own purchasing already.
3) He proposed a reasonable system to meet his value with their product and that's a very helpful data point for any company. They try to set their prices at a place that will capture their core audience. (ignore the iPhone, Apple knows they pwnzor joo)
If you're confused as to how the RIAA could be blamed for any of the reasons he stated, implied, or possibly could have had for his decisions, you really should hand over your Slashdot account to someone who actually reads this site. It is practically the primary theme of any music-related post. Look up what a "meme" is and you're questions will all be answered. And don't worry, he does NOT need to spell out why the RIAA is at fault to the RIAA itself. Using logic is always your first mistake when dealing with hegemonic a-holes.
Re:An open Letter to the RIAA (Score:5, Interesting)
Normally I am not one to promote any online stores, but I think you might enjoy cdbaby.com. They currently have a 5$ per CD sale, mostly unsigned and unknown bands but absolutely great music from many different genres and you get the physical media which you may rip / encode to your liking. No DRM, no copy protection,
Disclaimer: I do not work for this store, I am just a happy customer. And pleeez excuse ze bad English, I normally talk German or French.
Here's where you lost them (and me) (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Here's where you lost them (and me) (Score:4, Insightful)
This is most certainly ironic... (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that Orrin Hatch (R-Idiot-Utah) wrote the damn bill.
Republicans are best at passing the buck, they take responsibility for nothing. EVER.
Re:This is most certainly ironic... (Score:5, Interesting)
That troll Orrin Hatch may have initiated the bill, but it was passed under Clinton's watch. I am not an american, but I do know he has something called a VETO which is pretty damned hard to override if he had used it. At very least it would have been a strong symbolic guesture of disapproval. No veto = Clinton approves.
If you go to opensecrets.org and look at where the $$$ for both parties comes from, you will see the #1 contributor to the Democratic party is Hollywood.
DRM doesn't work, DMCA means it never will (Score:5, Insightful)
So we have the worst of all possible worlds, the makers of DRM turf around pretending that their broken DRM still works and spread fear that if a publisher releases anything without their DRM it will be instantly stolen. But their DRM is already broken!
It's turned a simple clean purchase into a complicated 'license' where the user is getting totally screwed over.
It's caused a massive loss of sales. All the sales they could have had if they hadn't gone the DRM route are lost. It's going to take them a long time to recover.
It's given the luddites in the copyright industries a means to hold back time. It only takes one shortsighted Valenti to separate an entire industry from it's VHS profits.
It's led to fake claims, a person making a DMCA takedown claim does not need to show any evidence that they are the copyright owner and because the DMCA claim is made to a third party, there is no interest in that third party ensuring the claim has even the basics of legitimacy.
Dumb shit has been slotted in as copyright clauses, like the UK's no parallel imports, so I can't import Vista from the US, even though its half the price, because it's been made an offence under a copyright statute! Now everyone if claiming copyright to block imports of their products from cheaper markets and UK consumer is getting screwed over paying inflated prices.
"DMCA architect?" (Score:4, Insightful)
The phrase that pay (or doesn't) (Score:5, Insightful)
This from the guy who is head of the International Intellectual Property Institute.
I have maintained since the late 80's that the road to the future on this issue is paying a few cents or a few dimes to verify that your copy is a good copy... and doing that direct with the labels or the bands... but some doing it with anyone they "trust."
When street "kids" can sell a terabyte of music on a corner like they used to sell crack, then my friend, copyright for this sort of thing will be dead.
There is one other "blame" besides the two headed griffen of DRM and bad Major Label Music, and that is the Sonny Bono Act and those acts that came before which have strenched out copyright protection so far into the future that let's be honest none of this stuff will ever see the light of the public domain; they killed public domain's cousin too, sweet little Fair Use (but then you knew that!!).
Why so many laws now don't work (Score:3, Insightful)
Fair use is (was) already well established doctrine. Any new law regarding any perceivable restrictions to fair use should be framed from the perspective of the end user (of the people, by the people, for the people) rather than from the perspective of the copyright holder. I BUY a DVD and it's ILLEGAL for me to rip it and put it on a server in my own home or to compress it and put it on a laptop. That's completely absurd. It's what happens when lobbyists write laws and lawmakers pass them without reading them and understanding the consequences.
We've heard what Senator Stevens has said about technology. Can you just imagine the things that get said in those committees discussing laws like the DMCA? I can't even fathom the level of stupidity that goes on when they're discussing complex technological issues.
-S
More Lehmann Doublespeak (Score:5, Interesting)
If this is USPTO Lehmann, then IMO he's a total joke, and a lackey for the legal industry to create law which taxes other industries to the benefit of... the legal industry.
So, he did the DMCA too? Amazing. He is "the architect of the WIPO Internet Treaties". Wow. I didn't know he also "did" the DMCA and WIPO (cast US patent law into global stone), but it makes sense. And I didn't know he was still "in business" ("who now heads the International Intellectual Property Institute"). The more things change, the more they stay the same. I guess Lehmann is getting his dues from the legal industry for all the "work" he did on behalf of the legal industry.
Good to know he's still out there. Amazing to know he did the DMCA, WIPO, _and_ institutionalized software patents. What a joke.
I suggest taking anything Lehmann says with a huge grain of salt, even any apologies. He has known what he has been doing for decades, and to feign ignorance now is unconscionable IMO. I do not buy it, and it's not his style. He's more of a "have your cake and eat it too" kind of policy-maker, which is to say he'll ignore the obvious to forcefeed policy despite all public interest(s), IMO. Again, I'm not buying.
So, Brucee.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Old habits are hard to die.. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the entire RIAA problem in a nutshell and I completely agree that *this* is the root of their problem *and* our problem.
They made a choice. They made this choice when Napster (the old Napster, not the castrated one) showed the world how to share, point, click, and download.
The choice was to hold on to their legacy distrobution cash cow and go screaming, kicking and clawing their way into the internet age instead of seeing the digital tsunami heading their direction.
Their problem now is that theyre loosing their brick and mortar base *and* the digital distrobution war and the only way the can maintain any semblance of their arcane business model is to sue the masses into submission, which of course will never work.
The entire DRM/DMCA/RIAA battle was lost before it began. Those who cant evolve become irrelavent and extinct sooner or later...
It's more of a pendulum effect... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm speaking as a published and agented author here - I need to know what copyright is, and how it works. My livelihood depends on it, partly when dealing with publishers (knowing what rights I'm signing away) and partly when it comes to dealing with agents (making sure that they know what rights of my work to keep from being signed away). A bad contract can nail an author to the wall, and there are very bad contracts out there. So I am very much aware of what copyright is, what it does, and how it works.
And here is the problem - most people in the grass-roots movement don't. And the fault for this lies very firmly in the hands of the RIAA. Frankly, our society needs copyright - it is the single most important tool our culture and society has to advance itself. And, I'll explain why (even though it will take a while, and probably put a few readers to sleep).
We have a society that is very unique in many ways. First of all, literacy is the norm, not the exception. Secondly, we have the technology (and have had it since about the 15th century) to efficiently reproduce the work of creative artists (first literature and visual art, now music and film). Third, we have a capitalist system where the success of an artist is based on the sales of his/her work (rather than a system of patronage). It is, broadly put, a literate meritocracy.
What this means is that there are a lot of creative people out there, and they are able to distribute what they create through a variety of means. We are drowning in content, which is good - the more content there is, the healthier our culture is, and we have a very healthy culture, make no mistake. But, how is this content to be dealt with? Many of these creative artists want to do different things with their creations. Some want to sell it, others want to share it. Some want to keep their characters to themselves, and others want to create shared worlds that anybody can write in. Even in software development, there is a disparity. And there needs to be protection for all of these creative artists, so that they can do what they need to. And that is where copyright comes in.
Copyright is the broad tool that allows the various creative artists to do what they want with their work. It really is amazing in its simplicity - if you don't believe me, look at the Berne Convention. The creative artist owns the copyright to their work until such time as they die and it runs out, or they sign it away. And that copyright simply allows them to say "this work and what is in it will be copied in X way." It provides protection for the specific implementation of an idea, but not for the idea itself. And, it requires reasonability from the creators - hence fair use and the public domain. It's this tool that allows the Creative Commons to exist, that allows the Open Source movement to fight against SCO, and that allows an author to receive royalties on his work from a publisher for copies sold. And the success of the created work is determined by the market, and nothing else.
And this is where the RIAA is so troublesome - they have spent quite a long time abusing both the letter and the spirit of copyright law, and doing it very publicly. So, while I've just described the literal truth of what copyright is, there are a lot of people who just won't believe what I've written. Why won't they? Because while copyright law is about balanced rights of the creator, the RIAA is using it to sue dead grandmothers, students, and welfare moms for copying insignificant amounts of music. And actions do speak louder than words. The irony is
When? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Finally!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:To bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah the DMCA is bad, but one of the worst laws ever? I don't think so. How bout the Patriot Act? or drug prohibition laws? Or the race segregation laws of bygone eras? Cmon, keep things in perspective.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Where is the contradiction? Bush is an evil* president. Before that, Clinton tried his best to be evil**, and often succeeded, but fortunately he was
Re:Wooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
What does this mean? Despite DRM, copying carries on regardless, and despite the copying, the recording industry is making more money than ever.
Only difference now is that when a CD doesn't sell, they can blame copying/file sharing, and not simply bad marketing practices.
Re:Wooo! (Score:4, Insightful)
And they'd still be wrong! If they could pull their heads out of their overstuffed asses, they'd realize that they're not selling records because they're not making records worth spending money on. Plain and simple. I wish I could go buy a record a week, like I used to do on a teenager's allowance! Today, I could buy new records to my heart's content! But my heart's not content with the content (or lack of) they continue to spew at us.
Re:Wooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not really true, though. There are a lot of really great records coming out every year. Problem is, the ones that the record companies market are often the same-old same-old unimaginative pop crap, or the "alternative" stuff that has basically just become pop 2.0. There's still a ton of great music out there, you just have to search to find the records worth spending money on.
Re:Wooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I'm only slightly older, and there is rarely anything on the mainstream music charts that is anywhere as good as any of those. I haven't changed that much in the last few years. I know what's good and what's crap. I can tell what bands are real and what bands have been prefabricated by the record companies based on focus groups.
If there were some new musical style on the pop charts that I just "didn't get", maybe you'd have a point. However, that's not the case. Most everything I see is a poor derivative of various genres that were already done better the first time around.
In fact, one of the main problems is probably that the big record companies are too conservative and stick with the same tired formulas rather than finding new music directions that alienate old people for the right reasons. As it stands, what they're doing is alienating everyone because it's just crap. It's no wonder CD sales are plummeting.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree there's lots of good stuff that's "hard to find". That's the whole problem that the big record companies are facing. Little if any of the good stuff is mass marketed any
Re:Wooo! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you occasionally get a good dance tune out of produced groups: one of the first of these, C&C Music Factory, people are still dancing to, particularly one track of theirs. Did anyone listen to any of their other crap though? And crap it was.
Occasionally a produced popstar breaks out and does their own thing and it actually works. Christina Aguilera is actually producing interesting music now (still pop but so's Madonna)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As opposed to pop that was produced from start to finish in the 60s...
There wa
Re: (Score:3, Funny)