[advocacy] DRM in OGG - A Proposal

[Daniel James]

> When I buy copyrighted material with the permission of the copyright holder
> I have the right to make copies for personal use.

It doesn't say that on the CD. I think it's more a case of custom and practice 
than legal rights. Only a tiny minority of artists have publicly advocated 
home taping or copying - the usual example being the Grateful Dead, who only 
encouraged taping of live performances, not records as far as I know.

I was looking through my 78rpm records last night, some of which date from 
before the introduction of domestic audio tape. I noticed one of the labels 
said just 'public performance and lending prohibited' because in those days 
it was near impossible to make good quality copies in the home.

> "Their vision", Bullshit. They never had any vision. "Vision" is a view of
> the present and future. All they have is hindsight, going on what's worked
> for them in the past.

You're probably right in most cases - they only realised the money they 
*could* have made after Napster became popular. But pay to play downloads are 
not a new idea - Frank Zappa proposed them in his autobiography back in the 
1980's. The technology didn't really exist at the time of course - he was 
suggesting something like midi files over a modem connected to a BBS, as I 
recall. Not that anyone running the major labels was listening to him... 

> In retrospect if the labels had used those resources spent on bullying
> sites down to make a proper service. Then maybe P2P would stand for
> pay-to-play, instead of peer-to-peer. But no, they where to busy fighting
> the technology with their heads up their butts.

We're probably lucky that they didn't understand the technology, otherwise mp3 
might have been halted in the early days and there might be no Ogg. But they 
won't give up so easily, and may insist on fighting to the death rather than 
changing their tune.
 
Cheers

Daniel
--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'advocacy-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.