Copy protection

Interesting article from today's "New York Times":

Buy, Play, Trade, Repeat
By DAMIAN KULASH Jr.
Los Angeles

THE record company Sony BMG recently got in trouble after attempting to stem piracy by encoding its CD's with software meant to limit how many copies can be made of the discs. It turned out that the copy-protection software exposed consumers' computers to Internet viruses, forcing Sony BMG to recall the CD's.

This technological disaster aside, though, Sony BMG and the other major labels need to face reality: copy-protection software is bad for everyone, consumers, musicians and labels alike. It's much better to have copies of albums on lots of iPods, even if only half of them have been paid for, than to have a few CD's sitting on a shelf and not being played.

The Sony BMG debacle revealed the privacy issues and security risks tied to the spyware that many copy-protection programs install on users' computers. But even if these problems are solved, copy protection is guaranteed to fail because it's a house of cards. No matter how sophisticated the software, it takes only one person to break it, once, and the music is free to roam and multiply on the peer-to-peer file-trading networks.

Meanwhile, music lovers get pushed away. Tech-savvy fans won't go to the trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better version free. Less Net-knowledgeable fans (those who don't know the simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don't use peer-to-peer networks) are punished by discs that often won't load onto their MP3 players (the copy-protection programs are incompatible with Apple's iPods, for example) and sometimes won't even play in their computers.

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it's the right thing to do, just get insulted. They've made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that's at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.

As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software.

The truth is that the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. This is not just our megalomania, it's Marketing 101: the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to catch the ear of someone new. It doesn't do us much good if people buy our records and promptly shelve them; we need them to fall in love with our songs and listen to them over and over. A record that you can't transfer to your iPod is a record you're less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with and less likely to tell your friends about.

Luckily, my band's recently released album, "Oh No," escaped copy control, but only narrowly. When our album came out, our label's parent company, EMI, was testing protective software and thought we were a good candidate for it. Record company executives reasoned that because we appeal to college students who have the high-bandwidth connections necessary for getting access to peer-to-peer networks, we're the kind of band that gets traded instead of bought.

That may be true, but we are also the sort of band that hasn't yet gotten the full attention of MTV and major commercial radio stations, so those college students are our only window onto the world. They are our best chance for success, and we desperately need them to be listening to us, talking about us, coming to our shows and yes, trading us.

To be clear, I certainly don't encourage people to pirate our music. I have poured my life into my band, and after two major label records, our accountants can tell you that we're not real rock stars yet. But before a million people can buy our record, a million people have to hear our music and like it enough to go looking for it. That won't happen without a lot of people playing us for their friends, which, in turn, won't happen without a fair amount of file sharing.

As it happened, for a variety of reasons, our label didn't put copy-protection software on our album. What a shame, though, that so many bands aren't as fortunate.

Damian Kulash Jr. is the lead singer for OK Go.

 

Some sense from within the industry... long may it continue.

 

The loss in profit can be viewed as as the cost of advertising to that target group after all is not word of mouth one of the more trusted (from consumers point of view) forms of advertising?

You could always follow the Sony RootKit fiasco, was that good word of mouth advertising for Sony? Suck it up, this just another cost of doing business in todays world.

 

Interesting. Tones whats the law on owning LP, tape versions of a album then copying the digital version? May i be right in saying one would be able to do this, as one would already own the copy right.

 

That, Gazz, is a very good question to which I wish I had an equally good answer. AFAIK (and I acknowledge that I'm no expert on copyright law) the position in UK Copyright law is that recording a cassette off a record or CD you already owned is technically a breach of copyright as the playing rights are limited to the form in which you purchased it. This would imply that copying the digital version, if this is the subject of copyright, is illegal. However, I'm interested to know the answer and I'll have a look into it, when I get the time.

 

You used to be allowed to make "fair use" copies of something you owned (eg making a tape for the car).

However, British law was changed quietly to come into line with the american DMCA, and this is no longer permitted.

 

Isaac
I think you're wrong. You were never allowed to, its always been illegal in the UK.

 

A small but important point here - you never own the copyright. It might remain with the artist or with the music company depending on their contract but it does not pass to you. All you are paying for is the right to play to yourself the disc or tape that you have purchased.

By the way, don't you all realise that music is dead!

The record industry spent most of the 70's and 80's telling us that home taping was killing music and I know plenty of taping went on so music must be dead, n'est-ce pas?

Yesterdays home tapers are todays hifi fans with 300+ CD collections.

The music industry seems to be trying ever so hard to make sure that this time round they really do kill off all their future custom

 

Isaac,

To the best of my knowledge, the "fair use" provisions related only to libraries and the like, so that people could make a single copy of, e.g., an article for purposes of private study. I don't think it ever extended to music.

 

Absolutely. I used to have boxes and boxes of copied cassettes, and now I have several hundred vinyl and CD albums. Home copying of music displays a healthy interest in music on the part of the perpetrator. Granted file sharing makes it easier to spread copied music around but as the article points out; this allows much greater exposure of the music to a wider audience.

I don't give two hoots about piracy laws*, I'll copy and download to my hearts content whenever I find the opportunity - and the bonus to the music industry is that I've bought loads of CD's as a direct result of listening to those copies, I would never have bought some of the CD's I now own 'on spec' without having heard my illegal downloads.

It was a good article, and reflects most peoples opinions I reckon. That anti-piracy software on CD's sucks, and there are always ways of getting around it if you really want to.

* Although I draw the line at buying or selling copied stuff, I mean for personal use.