[xiph-commits] r9851 - websites/xiph.org/about
giles at svn.xiph.org
giles at svn.xiph.org
Thu Aug 25 09:59:46 PDT 2005
Author: giles
Date: 2005-08-25 09:59:44 -0700 (Thu, 25 Aug 2005)
New Revision: 9851
Modified:
websites/xiph.org/about/index.shtml.en
Log:
Update marketing speak for revised branding.
Modified: websites/xiph.org/about/index.shtml.en
===================================================================
--- websites/xiph.org/about/index.shtml.en 2005-08-25 12:06:19 UTC (rev 9850)
+++ websites/xiph.org/about/index.shtml.en 2005-08-25 16:59:44 UTC (rev 9851)
@@ -1,338 +1,338 @@
-<!--#include virtual="/ssi/header.include" -->
-<!-- Enter custom page information and styles here -->
-
-<title>Xiph.org: About</title>
-<style type="text/css">
-<!--
-.wiki_ {
- margin-bottom: 1.4em;
-}
-
-.documentation_ {
- margin-bottom: 1.4em;
-}
--->
-</style>
-
-
-<!--#include virtual="/ssi/xiphbar.include" -->
-<!--#include virtual="/ssi/pagetop.include" -->
-<!-- All your page content goes here -->
-
-
-<h1>About Xiph</h1>
-<h2>A little bit about us, what we do, and why you should care</h2>
-<p>A market-speak summary of the Xiph.Org Foundation might read something
- like: "Xiph.Org is a collection of <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open source</a>, multimedia related
- projects. The most aggressive Xiph.Org effort, the <a href="ogg/">Ogg project</a>, works to put the foundation standards of
- Internet audio into the public domain, <em>where all Internet standards
- belong</em>." ...and that last bit is where the passion comes in.</p>
-
-<p>Xiph.Org is about open source and the ideals for which free
- software stands. Open source is not a fad any more than the Internet
- is. It is a necessary force driving innovation and the Internet
- forward while protecting the interests of individuals, artists,
- developers and consumers.</p>
-
-<p>We're about bringing open source and open source ideals to
- multimedia...and media on the Internet needs us.</p>
-
-<h2>"Why do I need open source? I'm not a hacker."</h2>
-
-<p>Closed source software is not evil, nor is it necessarily inferior in
- quality to open source. What is certain, however, is that closed
- source and closed protocols do not serve the public interest; they
- exist by definition to serve the bottom line of a corporation. The
- foundations of the Internet today are built of a long, hardy history
- of open development, free exchange of ideas and unprecedented levels
- of intellectual cooperation. These foundations continue to weather
- the storm caused by the corporate world's rush to cash in.
-</p>
-<p>It is not a coincidence that Microsoft was blind to the phenomenon of
- the Internet for so long. The burgeoning Internet was against their
- very way of thinking; a Microsoft Internet (tm) would have been
- profit-directed, designed by the same people who considered 'on-demand
- TV' the great innovation of the future. Microsoft Internet, if
- profitable, would have been followed by the release of IBM's
- marginally compatible OS/Internet, Borland's TurboInternet, ad
- absurdum. The Net, as designed by warring corporate entities, would
- be a battleground of incompatible and expensive 'standards' had it
- actually survived at all.</p>
-
-<p>The Internet exists today and continues to move forward
- <em>despite</em>, not because of, corporate self-interest; critical
- mass passed the point of no return long before Microsoft and Netscape
- tried to salt the earth of their rivals. The great advances in
- computer engineering and science came from research labs and
- universities, freely shared with the rest of the world. You would not
- be reading this at your PC, workstation or iMac today if Microsoft
- held a patent on TCP/IP. </p>
-
-<p>The point is not that companies that try to make money on the new
- popularity of the net are in some way inherently immoral or greedy.
- Rather, the point is that companies must not be allowed to use the
- infrastructure we all depend upon as a weapon against their rivals to
- the detriment of all others. The Internet is a common resource and as
- with other cooperatively shared resources, the "Tragedy of the
- Commons" looms large. Competitive behavior dictates that eventually a
- company will act on their own interests to the detriment of all others
- <em>unless a mechanism exists to prevent it</em>.</p>
-
-<p>Commodity standards and software must be free because open source is
- that controlling mechanism. We're the only mechanism we've got.</p>
-
-<h2 id='fraunhofer' style='margin-bottom: 0;'>"Why does multimedia specifically need open source?"</h2>
-<h3 style='margin-top: 0;'>Example: An 'open' standard closes</h3>
-
-<p>In September of 1998, the world of Internet media took an unexpected
-(but long dreaded) turn when Fraunhofer IIS sent a "letter of
-infringement" to several small commercial and open source MPEG audio
-layer 3 development projects.</p>
-
-<blockquote>
- <p>In the letter, [Fraunhofer claims] that due to patents
- they hold related to MP3, they are entitled to
- royalties for any commercial players, all encoders
- (whether sold or <strong>given away</strong>), and
- also works of art sold in MP3 format.</p>
-
- <p>The letter of infringement had an immediate effect on
- the free encoder programs with many being removed from
- their official web site. Affected encoders include
- Plugger, CDEX, soloH, 8Hz, Blade, Canna, and
- others. [...] Fraunhofer is demanding a royalty
- payment beginning at $25 per encoder. Additionally, a
- 1% or .01 per file royalty is also put forth as being
- required.</p>
- <p>—mp3.com article by Michael Robertson</p>
- <!-- formerly http://www.mp3.com/news/095.html -->
-</blockquote>
-
-<p>The projects affected had based their work on code long freely
- available in the ISO MPEG audio standard. The debate about whether or
- not Fraunhofer was within their rights or not is beside the point;
- this is an illustration of the amount of control commercial entities
- will attempt to exert over commodity standards; this meddling is
- detrimental to open efforts and deadly to business (except for members
- of the MPEG consortium that is). Keep in mind that MPEG is considered
- among the <em>most</em> open multimedia standards (at least until the
- 800-lb. gorilla members of MPEG manage to sue the smaller encoder
- efforts out of existence); there are few or no cutting-edge open
- standards for streamed audio or video on the Internet today. Closed
- competition has just made matters worse; now there are several
- dominant and entirely incompatible closed 'standards'.</p>
-
-<p>Our purpose is to open the field up a bit. Unfortunately we're not
- fighting on this front alone. Music and media on the net today also
- face corporate domination of the <em>content itself </em>...</p>
-
-<h2>Music isn't an <em>art</em>, it's an <em>industry</em>.</h2>
-
-<p>Internet media issues don't apply solely to source code or information
- format. Controlling the music itself is a burning issue for the music
- industry.</p>
-
-<p>—and <em>industry</em> is the key word here. Music is no longer an
- expression of the soul or the work of an artist; it's a 'product' that
- is manufactured, packaged, catalogued, distributed, managed,
- regulated, and above all <em>sold</em>. Music is just another vehicle for
- maximizing profits. The RIAA, mainly a front for the recording
- industry that supports the status quo, trumpets loudly that the
- Internet is the greatest threat to artists that the world has ever
- known... at the same time that the RIAA is making a desperate grab to
- control this new distribution infrastructure. The great irony is that
- the Internet might indeed be an artist's worst nightmare-- if the RIAA
- <em>succeeds</em>:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
- <p>...corporate mergers are squeezing hundreds of
- musicians out of the business without even giving
- them the rights to their recordings, and executives
- of major record labels are meeting behind closed
- doors to develop a way to police and control the
- distribution of music on the Internet.<br/>
- [...]<br/>
- Putting control of the Internet in the hands of the
- corporations means that a utopian musical vision may
- be dying. ...the chances of a dystopian world are
- increasing, one in which record companies have even
- greater control over music distribution</p>
-
- <p>--the New York Times, Monday, May 17, 1999, article by Neil Strauss</p>
-</blockquote>
-
-<p>One major push in the RIAA effort to control the music distribution
- infrastructure of the Internet is to legislate mandatory 'digital
- watermarks' for playback. Players that do not look for these
- 'watermarks' or play the music anyway will be illegal. Make an
- educated guess as to who will control the watermarks.</p>
-
-<blockquote>
- <p>the record industry has a plan to force
- hardware and software companies to exclusively
- adopt its Secure Digital Music Initiative as
- the standard for delivering music online.
- ...SDMI backers want manufacturers to build a
- time-bomb trigger into their products that,
- when activated at a later date, would prevent
- users from downloading or playing
- non-SDMI-compliant music. The hardware would
- initially support MP3 and other compressed
- file formats, but a signal from the RIAA would
- activate the blocking trigger.</p>
-
- <p>--<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19682.html">Wired News article by Christopher Jones</a></p>
-</blockquote>
-
-<h2>a history lesson</h2>
-
-<p>The current position and function of the music industry is an
- invented one. Approximately one lifetime ago, recordings were not
- technologically possible. With the advent of recorded sound,
- enterprising businessmen (Thomas Edison, a worthy predecessor of Bill
- Gates, and Columbia Music, just as tough and nasty) found that
- prepackaged recordings could be turned out in endless, identical
- quantity for very little cost and sold. </p>
-
-<p>This wasn't an entirely new idea; an example of a preceding 'packaged
- performance' technology is the player piano roll. It is interesting
- to note, however, that these rolls were held by the courts to be
- <em>uncopyrightable</em>; the music itself was protected, but the
- 'performance' was not. The music industry originally lobbied the
- courts and Congress to keep these formats copyright-free so that it
- would not owe artists any royalties; in 1908, the Supreme Court ruled
- that phonograph records and player piano rolls did not fall under
- copyright.</p>
-
-<p>It is important to note that selling recordings was a tenable business
- plan only because the average person could not produce a recording.
- If the phonograph record were cheaply reproducible in that day, the
- prepackaged music industry would never have existed as it would have
- been impossible from the very beginning to prevent people from making
- copies which were, at the time, entirely legal.</p>
-
-<p>Congress changed the copyright law in 1909 to explicitly grant
- composers royalties on recordings sold. At the time, the music
- industry protested the decision bitterly; eventually it settled for
- requiring artists to sign over copyright on all work as a standard
- element of a recording contract.</p>
-
-<p>The copyright protects the record label, not the artist.</p>
-
-<p>(<a href="http://www.news.com.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,34963,00.html">an article on the subject from CNET</a>)</p>
-
-<h2>Fast forward to the 1970s</h2>
-
-<p>The undoing of the distribution profit juggernaut began with the
- compact cassette tape, a development greeted by as much wailing and
- gnashing of teeth within the walls of Music Inc. as MP3 is causing
- today. Although the copy wasn't as good as the original, it was cheap
- and easy to make. Copying commercial music was once only the domain
- of organized crime; now any individual could make a copy trivially.
- The industry tried to outlaw the compact cassette, then settled for
- taxing it and legislating against copying.</p>
-
-<p>Digital audio tape (DAT) caused the next uproar; a perfect copy was
- now possible. The music industry players, forerunners to the RIAA,
- sought to destroy this technology and mostly succeeded; DAT never
- caught on at any sizable level. It is interesting to note that
- "small-time" artists depend heavily on DAT for production and
- recording; this is practically the only music segment that ever bought
- into DAT. Clearly the RIAA didn't have their interests at heart.</p>
-
-<p>Computers, the Internet and especially MP3 have now made the copy
- easier, cheaper and more convenient than the prepackaged content on
- sale.</p>
-
-<p>That the copy costs nothing concerns intellectual property, a real
- worry for artists. That the <em>distribution</em> costs nothing is
- what really motivates the anti-MP3/anti-Internet effort. Copyright,
- once bitterly contested by the music industry, is now clung to as a
- weapon to preserve the distribution chain.</p>
-
-<blockquote>
- <p>Copyright law has always been more about protecting
- the interests of publishers than those of creators.
- The Internet in general, and MP3 in particular, have
- drastically reduced the costs (financial,
- convenience, material, distribution) of creators
- getting their material out to their audience, and
- have *almost* made it trivial for audience members
- to *directly* pay creators for access to their work.</p>
-
- <p>The middlemen have become irrelevant. The smart
- ones are devising new business models --- O'Reilly
- isn't going away because they are perceived as
- genuinely adding value and lots of their customers
- would buy their books even if they're available for
- download.</p>
-
- <p>I just paid $20 for Neal Stephenson's new book; he
- probably got about $3 of my money, if that. The
- other $17 went to the distribution chain, of which
- *maybe* $1 goes to people who actually contributed
- to the book --- editors who actually edited,
- proofreaders, etc.</p>
-
- <p>Eventually, a favorite author will release a new
- novel and I will pay $5, of which the majority will
- go to the author and all but a few pennies to other
- real contributors, for access to it with rights to
- print one copy.</p>
-
- <p>The middlemen are merely fighting a rearguard action
- against the tide of history; a delaying action that
- may alter *when* I will buy a book that way, but not
- the ultimate reality.</p>
-
- <p>—Carl Alexander <a href="mailto:xela at mit.edu"><xela at mit.edu></a></p>
-</blockquote>
-
-<p>The music industry finds itself in a position where the basic
- assumption behind its original business model (the recording is too
- expensive for a person to reproduce him or herself and the
- distribution can be tightly controlled for maximal profit) is no
- longer true. The music industry feels extremely threatened. It
- should. This is a major evolutionary pressure.</p>
-
-<p>Evolutionary? Of course; commercial music is faced with extinction
- only as long as it refuses to adapt, as long as it refuses to loosen
- its grip on the endless easy profits it believes it is entitled to.
- The industry is not acting to protect artists or the artists'
- interests (bards, musicians and storytellers thrived long before there
- was an industry to 'protect' them), it is not acting to prevent
- musicians from being 'driven out of business' (it impoverishes artists
- itself); it is acting to preserve the status quo and its own
- profit-inflated bulk. It's quite possible for the music industry to
- refashion itself, but rather than evolving and thriving in a new
- niche, the Dinosaurs, staggering under their own smothering weight,
- are trying to legislate the Mammals out of existence.</p>
-
-<h2>The double-whammy</h2>
-
-<p>From one side, we see groups (Fraunhofer, IBM, Thomson, Progressive
- Networks, Microsoft et al.) trying to control music technological
- infrastructure (MPEG, TwinVQ, etc) to be used as weaponry against
- their competitors. On the other front, we have the music industry
- trying to squeeze all the cash they can out of the content to maintain
- their enormous, recently obsolete bulk. In case they don't succeed in
- eliminating electronic music formats, they too are making a major bid
- to control the infrastructure.</p>
-
-
-<p>There are multi-trillion dollar interests represented in the above
- clash. Businesses that only have a few million dollars are entirely
- outclassed.</p>
-
-<p>As an individual, I expect I'm no longer on the map.</p>
-
-<p>Or am I? Ogg and other projects of Xiph.Org are my way of doing
- something about the imbalance; a good programmer can still change the
- world. Big players may want to utterly dominate the Net, but they
- don't yet. If the rest of us are lucky, Xiph.Org, the Open Source
- community and Ogg will help make that impossible.</p>
-
-<p>—Monty (<a href="mailto:monty at xiph.org">monty at xiph.org</a>)<br/>
-May 14, 1999</p>
-
-<!--#include virtual="/ssi/pagebottom.include" -->
\ No newline at end of file
+<!--#include virtual="/ssi/header.include" -->
+<!-- Enter custom page information and styles here -->
+
+<title>Xiph.org: About</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+<!--
+.wiki_ {
+ margin-bottom: 1.4em;
+}
+
+.documentation_ {
+ margin-bottom: 1.4em;
+}
+-->
+</style>
+
+
+<!--#include virtual="/ssi/xiphbar.include" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/ssi/pagetop.include" -->
+<!-- All your page content goes here -->
+
+
+<h1>About Xiph</h1>
+<h2>A little bit about us, what we do, and why you should care</h2>
+<p>A market-speak summary of the Xiph.Org Foundation might read something
+ like: "Xiph.Org is a collection of <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open source</a>, multimedia-related
+ projects. The most aggressive effort works to put the foundation standards of
+ Internet audio and video into the public domain, <em>where all Internet standards
+ belong</em>." ...and that last bit is where the passion comes in.</p>
+
+<p>Xiph.Org is about open source and the ideals for which free
+ software stands. Open source is not a fad any more than the Internet
+ is. It is a necessary force driving innovation and the Internet
+ forward while protecting the interests of individuals, artists,
+ developers and consumers.</p>
+
+<p>We're about bringing open source and open source ideals to
+ multimedia...and media on the Internet needs us.</p>
+
+<h2>"Why do I need open source? I'm not a hacker."</h2>
+
+<p>Closed source software is not evil, nor is it necessarily inferior in
+ quality to open source. What is certain, however, is that closed
+ source and closed protocols do not serve the public interest; they
+ exist by definition to serve the bottom line of a corporation. The
+ foundations of the Internet today are built of a long, hardy history
+ of open development, free exchange of ideas and unprecedented levels
+ of intellectual cooperation. These foundations continue to weather
+ the storm caused by the corporate world's rush to cash in.
+</p>
+<p>It is not a coincidence that Microsoft was blind to the phenomenon of
+ the Internet for so long. The burgeoning Internet was against their
+ very way of thinking; a Microsoft Internet (tm) would have been
+ profit-directed, designed by the same people who considered 'on-demand
+ TV' the great innovation of the future. Microsoft Internet, if
+ profitable, would have been followed by the release of IBM's
+ marginally compatible OS/Internet, Borland's TurboInternet, ad
+ absurdum. The Net, as designed by warring corporate entities, would
+ be a battleground of incompatible and expensive 'standards' had it
+ actually survived at all.</p>
+
+<p>The Internet exists today and continues to move forward
+ <em>despite</em>, not because of, corporate self-interest; critical
+ mass passed the point of no return long before Microsoft and Netscape
+ tried to salt the earth of their rivals. The great advances in
+ computer engineering and science came from research labs and
+ universities, freely shared with the rest of the world. You would not
+ be reading this at your PC, workstation or iMac today if Microsoft
+ held a patent on TCP/IP. </p>
+
+<p>The point is not that companies that try to make money on the new
+ popularity of the net are in some way inherently immoral or greedy.
+ Rather, the point is that companies must not be allowed to use the
+ infrastructure we all depend upon as a weapon against their rivals to
+ the detriment of all others. The Internet is a common resource and as
+ with other cooperatively shared resources, the "Tragedy of the
+ Commons" looms large. Competitive behavior dictates that eventually a
+ company will act on their own interests to the detriment of all others
+ <em>unless a mechanism exists to prevent it</em>.</p>
+
+<p>Commodity standards and software must be free because open source is
+ that controlling mechanism. We're the only mechanism we've got.</p>
+
+<h2 id='fraunhofer' style='margin-bottom: 0;'>"Why does multimedia specifically need open source?"</h2>
+<h3 style='margin-top: 0;'>Example: An 'open' standard closes</h3>
+
+<p>In September of 1998, the world of Internet media took an unexpected
+(but long dreaded) turn when Fraunhofer IIS sent a "letter of
+infringement" to several small commercial and open source MPEG audio
+layer 3 development projects.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+ <p>In the letter, [Fraunhofer claims] that due to patents
+ they hold related to MP3, they are entitled to
+ royalties for any commercial players, all encoders
+ (whether sold or <strong>given away</strong>), and
+ also works of art sold in MP3 format.</p>
+
+ <p>The letter of infringement had an immediate effect on
+ the free encoder programs with many being removed from
+ their official web site. Affected encoders include
+ Plugger, CDEX, soloH, 8Hz, Blade, Canna, and
+ others. [...] Fraunhofer is demanding a royalty
+ payment beginning at $25 per encoder. Additionally, a
+ 1% or .01 per file royalty is also put forth as being
+ required.</p>
+ <p>—mp3.com article by Michael Robertson</p>
+ <!-- formerly http://www.mp3.com/news/095.html -->
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The projects affected had based their work on code long freely
+ available in the ISO MPEG audio standard. The debate about whether or
+ not Fraunhofer was within their rights or not is beside the point;
+ this is an illustration of the amount of control commercial entities
+ will attempt to exert over commodity standards; this meddling is
+ detrimental to open efforts and deadly to business (except for members
+ of the MPEG consortium that is). Keep in mind that MPEG is considered
+ among the <em>most</em> open multimedia standards (at least until the
+ 800-lb. gorilla members of MPEG manage to sue the smaller encoder
+ efforts out of existence); there are few or no cutting-edge open
+ standards for streamed audio or video on the Internet today. Closed
+ competition has just made matters worse; now there are several
+ dominant and entirely incompatible closed 'standards'.</p>
+
+<p>Our purpose is to open the field up a bit. Unfortunately we're not
+ fighting on this front alone. Music and media on the net today also
+ face corporate domination of the <em>content itself </em>...</p>
+
+<h2>Music isn't an <em>art</em>, it's an <em>industry</em>.</h2>
+
+<p>Internet media issues don't apply solely to source code or information
+ format. Controlling the music itself is a burning issue for the music
+ industry.</p>
+
+<p>—and <em>industry</em> is the key word here. Music is no longer an
+ expression of the soul or the work of an artist; it's a 'product' that
+ is manufactured, packaged, catalogued, distributed, managed,
+ regulated, and above all <em>sold</em>. Music is just another vehicle for
+ maximizing profits. The RIAA, mainly a front for the recording
+ industry that supports the status quo, trumpets loudly that the
+ Internet is the greatest threat to artists that the world has ever
+ known... at the same time that the RIAA is making a desperate grab to
+ control this new distribution infrastructure. The great irony is that
+ the Internet might indeed be an artist's worst nightmare-- if the RIAA
+ <em>succeeds</em>:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+ <p>...corporate mergers are squeezing hundreds of
+ musicians out of the business without even giving
+ them the rights to their recordings, and executives
+ of major record labels are meeting behind closed
+ doors to develop a way to police and control the
+ distribution of music on the Internet.<br/>
+ [...]<br/>
+ Putting control of the Internet in the hands of the
+ corporations means that a utopian musical vision may
+ be dying. ...the chances of a dystopian world are
+ increasing, one in which record companies have even
+ greater control over music distribution</p>
+
+ <p>--the New York Times, Monday, May 17, 1999, article by Neil Strauss</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>One major push in the RIAA effort to control the music distribution
+ infrastructure of the Internet is to legislate mandatory 'digital
+ watermarks' for playback. Players that do not look for these
+ 'watermarks' or play the music anyway will be illegal. Make an
+ educated guess as to who will control the watermarks.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+ <p>the record industry has a plan to force
+ hardware and software companies to exclusively
+ adopt its Secure Digital Music Initiative as
+ the standard for delivering music online.
+ ...SDMI backers want manufacturers to build a
+ time-bomb trigger into their products that,
+ when activated at a later date, would prevent
+ users from downloading or playing
+ non-SDMI-compliant music. The hardware would
+ initially support MP3 and other compressed
+ file formats, but a signal from the RIAA would
+ activate the blocking trigger.</p>
+
+ <p>--<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/19682.html">Wired News article by Christopher Jones</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<h2>a history lesson</h2>
+
+<p>The current position and function of the music industry is an
+ invented one. Approximately one lifetime ago, recordings were not
+ technologically possible. With the advent of recorded sound,
+ enterprising businessmen (Thomas Edison, a worthy predecessor of Bill
+ Gates, and Columbia Music, just as tough and nasty) found that
+ prepackaged recordings could be turned out in endless, identical
+ quantity for very little cost and sold. </p>
+
+<p>This wasn't an entirely new idea; an example of a preceding 'packaged
+ performance' technology is the player piano roll. It is interesting
+ to note, however, that these rolls were held by the courts to be
+ <em>uncopyrightable</em>; the music itself was protected, but the
+ 'performance' was not. The music industry originally lobbied the
+ courts and Congress to keep these formats copyright-free so that it
+ would not owe artists any royalties; in 1908, the Supreme Court ruled
+ that phonograph records and player piano rolls did not fall under
+ copyright.</p>
+
+<p>It is important to note that selling recordings was a tenable business
+ plan only because the average person could not produce a recording.
+ If the phonograph record were cheaply reproducible in that day, the
+ prepackaged music industry would never have existed as it would have
+ been impossible from the very beginning to prevent people from making
+ copies which were, at the time, entirely legal.</p>
+
+<p>Congress changed the copyright law in 1909 to explicitly grant
+ composers royalties on recordings sold. At the time, the music
+ industry protested the decision bitterly; eventually it settled for
+ requiring artists to sign over copyright on all work as a standard
+ element of a recording contract.</p>
+
+<p>The copyright protects the record label, not the artist.</p>
+
+<p>(<a href="http://www.news.com.com/SpecialFeatures/0,5,34963,00.html">an article on the subject from CNET</a>)</p>
+
+<h2>Fast forward to the 1970s</h2>
+
+<p>The undoing of the distribution profit juggernaut began with the
+ compact cassette tape, a development greeted by as much wailing and
+ gnashing of teeth within the walls of Music Inc. as MP3 is causing
+ today. Although the copy wasn't as good as the original, it was cheap
+ and easy to make. Copying commercial music was once only the domain
+ of organized crime; now any individual could make a copy trivially.
+ The industry tried to outlaw the compact cassette, then settled for
+ taxing it and legislating against copying.</p>
+
+<p>Digital audio tape (DAT) caused the next uproar; a perfect copy was
+ now possible. The music industry players, forerunners to the RIAA,
+ sought to destroy this technology and mostly succeeded; DAT never
+ caught on at any sizable level. It is interesting to note that
+ "small-time" artists depend heavily on DAT for production and
+ recording; this is practically the only music segment that ever bought
+ into DAT. Clearly the RIAA didn't have their interests at heart.</p>
+
+<p>Computers, the Internet and especially MP3 have now made the copy
+ easier, cheaper and more convenient than the prepackaged content on
+ sale.</p>
+
+<p>That the copy costs nothing concerns intellectual property, a real
+ worry for artists. That the <em>distribution</em> costs nothing is
+ what really motivates the anti-MP3/anti-Internet effort. Copyright,
+ once bitterly contested by the music industry, is now clung to as a
+ weapon to preserve the distribution chain.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+ <p>Copyright law has always been more about protecting
+ the interests of publishers than those of creators.
+ The Internet in general, and MP3 in particular, have
+ drastically reduced the costs (financial,
+ convenience, material, distribution) of creators
+ getting their material out to their audience, and
+ have *almost* made it trivial for audience members
+ to *directly* pay creators for access to their work.</p>
+
+ <p>The middlemen have become irrelevant. The smart
+ ones are devising new business models --- O'Reilly
+ isn't going away because they are perceived as
+ genuinely adding value and lots of their customers
+ would buy their books even if they're available for
+ download.</p>
+
+ <p>I just paid $20 for Neal Stephenson's new book; he
+ probably got about $3 of my money, if that. The
+ other $17 went to the distribution chain, of which
+ *maybe* $1 goes to people who actually contributed
+ to the book --- editors who actually edited,
+ proofreaders, etc.</p>
+
+ <p>Eventually, a favorite author will release a new
+ novel and I will pay $5, of which the majority will
+ go to the author and all but a few pennies to other
+ real contributors, for access to it with rights to
+ print one copy.</p>
+
+ <p>The middlemen are merely fighting a rearguard action
+ against the tide of history; a delaying action that
+ may alter *when* I will buy a book that way, but not
+ the ultimate reality.</p>
+
+ <p>—Carl Alexander <a href="mailto:xela at mit.edu"><xela at mit.edu></a></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The music industry finds itself in a position where the basic
+ assumption behind its original business model (the recording is too
+ expensive for a person to reproduce him or herself and the
+ distribution can be tightly controlled for maximal profit) is no
+ longer true. The music industry feels extremely threatened. It
+ should. This is a major evolutionary pressure.</p>
+
+<p>Evolutionary? Of course; commercial music is faced with extinction
+ only as long as it refuses to adapt, as long as it refuses to loosen
+ its grip on the endless easy profits it believes it is entitled to.
+ The industry is not acting to protect artists or the artists'
+ interests (bards, musicians and storytellers thrived long before there
+ was an industry to 'protect' them), it is not acting to prevent
+ musicians from being 'driven out of business' (it impoverishes artists
+ itself); it is acting to preserve the status quo and its own
+ profit-inflated bulk. It's quite possible for the music industry to
+ refashion itself, but rather than evolving and thriving in a new
+ niche, the Dinosaurs, staggering under their own smothering weight,
+ are trying to legislate the Mammals out of existence.</p>
+
+<h2>The double-whammy</h2>
+
+<p>From one side, we see groups (Fraunhofer, IBM, Thomson, Progressive
+ Networks, Microsoft et al.) trying to control music technological
+ infrastructure (MPEG, TwinVQ, etc) to be used as weaponry against
+ their competitors. On the other front, we have the music industry
+ trying to squeeze all the cash they can out of the content to maintain
+ their enormous, recently obsolete bulk. In case they don't succeed in
+ eliminating electronic music formats, they too are making a major bid
+ to control the infrastructure.</p>
+
+
+<p>There are multi-trillion dollar interests represented in the above
+ clash. Businesses that only have a few million dollars are entirely
+ outclassed.</p>
+
+<p>As an individual, I expect I'm no longer on the map.</p>
+
+<p>Or am I? Ogg and other projects of Xiph.Org are my way of doing
+ something about the imbalance; a good programmer can still change the
+ world. Big players may want to utterly dominate the Net, but they
+ don't yet. If the rest of us are lucky, Xiph.Org, the Open Source
+ community and Ogg will help make that impossible.</p>
+
+<p>—Monty (<a href="mailto:monty at xiph.org">monty at xiph.org</a>)<br/>
+May 14, 1999</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/ssi/pagebottom.include" -->
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