As many of you have pointed out, enforcing things through the fear of punishment rarely works in the long run. Humankind has been trying this since the dawn of civilization - and it always ends up creating a bigger mess than what it sets out to solve. Take the example of religions. Time and again cultures have created religions, and gods and all sorts of nasty consequences for doing supposedly bad or immoral things, and look where it has got us ... a complete mess!!! … but I am digressing.
I think there would be a lot less IP/copyright infringement if people clearly understood that stealing music and movies is really no different from stealing a car. Most of the people who engage in media piracy simply haven't realized that what they are doing is wrong. If they were to comprehend, then I am willing to bet that a significant amount of people would stop doing it. As for the RIAA & MPAA, that is just a whole different rant. They continue to prove their stupidity and lack of understanding of their customers with alarming regularity. Today's stunt with Pandora is just another clear example of the insanity of organizations like the RIAA and MPAA. They have managed to shoot themselves in the foot by cutting off access to genuine users like me, who would have gone out and bought real physical CDs after discovering artists on services like Pandora. The record companies and movie studios keep harping about how they are protecting their artists rights and those of the users by not confusing them with too many choices. I am sure no one here believes that they are indeed acting in the artists' best interests - each time they negotiate new deals with the artists, they manage to give a smaller and smaller percentage to the artists. In fact with internet distributed materials, the artists get less than what they used to get with physical records and CDs. This is just ridiculous considering how much is saved in terms of distribution and inventory costs. Sometimes I feel like stealing the material from the internet and directly sending the artist a cheque. As for knowing what the customer wants, no one could be more clueless than the record companies. As is demonstrated with the Russian allofmp3.com fiasco - instead wasting energy fighting governments tooth and nail, and coercing users and credit card companies into withholding payments, they should have opened their own competitor to allofmp3, and beat the Russian site on value. I for one would have easily paid reasonable amounts for a site that legally offered everything the Russian site does. Lossless files should cost slightly less than what physical CDs cost (because you take out a whole bunch of expenses including physical media, distribution & inventory) and Lossy files should be a little cheaper (because after all, you are offering an inferior product). What the record companies need is certainly not DRM. What they need to do is learn to listen to their customers. All of them need to read a bit about Toyota's Lean Thinking Principles, especially the concept of pull. The Womack & Jones books are a good place to start. DRM itself is doomed to failure. We’ve seen it time and again. In spite of all the security built into the new optical formats like HD-DVD and Blu-ray, hacks have appeared in record time. In fact today’s news controversy on the Digg HD-DVD key issue only highlights the fact. As for the high-resolution audio formats (that all of us would have liked to embrace), the boneheaded decision to have two incompatible formats, SACD & DVD-Audio probably contributed as much to their demise as their having draconian DRM, that restricted digital outputs. DRM on these formats is completely ludicrous, when unprotected redbook CDs with the same material were floating around. If you look at the bulk of pirated material on the internet, it is miserable 128kbps mp3 files – not something that could have potentially been extracted from an SACD or DVD-A. However the high end users who would have liked to run the output through their fancy DACs and room correction DSPs were alienated. A complete disaster if you ask me. P.S….BTW right wing and smart don't go hand in hand :). It’s like an oxymoron :). Right wingers can’t handle complexity - everything has to be a simple right or wrong. ‘You are either with us or against us’. P.P.S.. FWIW, I fall about -5 on both the Economic Left/Right and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian Scales - close to the Dalai Lama :) -- Nikhil ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nikhil's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=993 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=34928 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
