The Recording Artists Safety Guide to the beach

May 17, 2002 10:46 AM

The Recording Artists Safety Guide to the beach is a great critque on the RIAA debacle, in the vein of get your war on [via geriatric punks].
posted by mathowie (24 comments total)

Hmmm. I swore I saw a larger version of that out there somewhere...
posted by mrbula at 10:53 AM on May 17, 2002

I can hardly wait for the double-posting crowd to jump all over this guy.
posted by yhbc at 10:55 AM on May 17, 2002

Larger version. (Self link.)
posted by mrbula at 10:57 AM on May 17, 2002

Forget double-posting, it's stupid and offensive.

Call it file-sharing, claim that it helps the industry, call the labels soulless pimps all you want, but throughout this debate, I've never heard anyone satisfactorily explain how it's not stealing.
posted by UrbanFigaro at 11:06 AM on May 17, 2002

Hmm. Great critique? A bit simplistic and sophomoric for my tastes. Also, I can imagine pro-RIAA guys laughing their heads off at this.

Who let this guy into metafilter?
posted by vacapinta at 11:08 AM on May 17, 2002

I can hardly wait for the double-posting crowd to jump all over this guy.

Yeah, I can't wait for Matt to open a can of sysop on his ass.

oh wait...
posted by Hackworth at 11:09 AM on May 17, 2002

and the cartoon is really about fair use of mp3's, not file sharing in general. but you probably knew that already.
posted by Hackworth at 11:10 AM on May 17, 2002

Well, UrbanFigaro, in the issue addressed in the comic, it's not stealing because it's not. Copying for personal use (transcribing a CD to tape, to play in the car, for instance) is covered under fair use. It is legal.

Downloading music from albums you haven't bought, however, and which hasn't been licensed to the public, is theft - but I think you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees.

Oh hey, cool; "UrbanFigaro" is an anagram of "Hilary Rosen"!
posted by Marquis at 11:12 AM on May 17, 2002

Marquis, I presume your last word was supposed to be "agrees". With that assumption, how is that situation any different from recording songs off the radio onto a cassette tape? Again, for your personal use - not to sell to others. Is that also theft?
posted by yhbc at 11:16 AM on May 17, 2002

Call it file-sharing, claim that it helps the industry

Actually, I call it not reading the link and then bitching about it. The mp3s in the strip were made from the user's cds, not downloaded from another user. This is not a strip about file sharing, but copy protection vs. fair use.
posted by eyeballkid at 11:20 AM on May 17, 2002

whoops, just read Marquis post, sorry for the second helping.
posted by eyeballkid at 11:21 AM on May 17, 2002

I like the pee panel, is he signalling in morse code.
posted by bittennails at 11:24 AM on May 17, 2002

nice scimitar
posted by clavdivs at 11:27 AM on May 17, 2002

thanks clavdivs, i just had it polished.
posted by eyeballkid at 11:28 AM on May 17, 2002

A bit simplistic and sophomoric for my tastes.

Yes, let's return to the normal MetaFilter fare like giggling about Momo's Balls and griping about how much Star Wars sucks.
posted by mikemonteiro at 11:29 AM on May 17, 2002

Copyright is theft.
posted by xowie at 11:43 AM on May 17, 2002

So, xowie, if someone took all the HTML and images from your website, and put it up as their site, you'd say 'good show, old chap'?
Pomo bullshit aside, copyright has its uses—but its current implementation leaves a whole hell of a lot to be desired.
posted by darukaru at 1:11 PM on May 19, 2002

Copyright is theft in the same sense that all property is theft, i.e., not.
posted by kindall at 1:38 PM on May 19, 2002

Copyright is great - it gives one the exclusive right, for a limited time period, to make money off their intellectual properties. But mp3 sharing is simply not a violation of copyright regulation nor is it theft. In order to steal something, the person being robbed must lose something and I must gain something. That's not how it works with mp3's. It's entirely different from walking into a CD store and stealing a CD in that "mp3 theft" costs the recording industry nothing more than if I were to lend my CD to a friend or borrow a book from a library.
posted by Kevs at 3:42 PM on May 19, 2002

yhbc: I think Marquis actually meant what he said when he said "Disagrees." As much as we hate it, most people will admit that copying mp3s off of Napster, KaZaa, Morpheus or anon ftp is still stealing music, but that's not the issue raised in the comic, in Marquis's comment, or in the general debate against the RIAA.

In your comment: "How is that situation any different from recording songs off the radio onto a cassette tape? Again, for your personal use - not to sell to others. Is that also theft?"

No, that is not theft, any more than taping a movie off HBO for your personal use is. It's not theft because the courts ruled it's not. In the case of radio, there are strict rules regarding the frequency a station can play the same song, songs by the same artist, or how far ahead they can let the audience know what's going to be played. Also, they almost always 'walk on' the lead in and lead out of a song, either with voiceovers, station identification, or another song, in order to make it less valuable as a rippable item, much as commercials mitigate a loss from recording television.

Fair use is actually pretty well-covered territory, and though the laws are still pretty nacent (and DCMA seems to be a rather new industry-catering direction which may or may not hold up in court challenges) it's not like they don't exist, or that these aren't issues that have been raised before.
posted by kfury at 3:46 PM on May 19, 2002

kfury, the line between the file-sharing and fair-use (as in ripping your own CDs to MP3s) controversies is a bit blurred, which is why I felt that it was okay to cover both issues in this thread. You make a very good point, though, that at least in the fair-use category there ARE court rulings upholding the common practice of committing copyrighted material to a form in which it can be viewed or listened to over and over, so long as it is done for "personal use" only. Napster notwithstanding, I don't think there are any comparable rulings in the larger file-sharing area, so that will continue to be debated until there are. At least in my mind, the two situations are analogous, if not identical.
posted by yhbc at 4:31 PM on May 19, 2002

The issue I have with the comic is that I don't see a great deal of effort going into saying it's illegal to rip your own CDs to MP3s. In fact, though the comic may indicate otherwise, I haven't seen anything of the kind.

the only thing similar is the new 'unrippable CDs' coming out, but that's not so much a statement that ripping your own CDs is illegal as it is a statement that it's not illegal for lables to try and make it harder.

are there legal efforts that I'm missing that are trying to make ripping illegal? Or is it the spectre of encrypted music which, if circumvented, will ignite the DMCA fires even if the circumvention is only being used for personal archiving?

This whole battle has many fronts, and I'm not sure how well they can adequately be summed up in comic form, at least in only 6 panels...
posted by kfury at 12:45 AM on May 20, 2002

thanks eyeballkid, heres a quarter.
posted by clavdivs at 7:08 AM on May 20, 2002

Downloading music from albums you haven't bought, however, and which hasn't been licensed to the public, is theft - but I think you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagrees.

I'll disagree, as will any lawyer (or even first-year law student) worth his salt. Theft is the unlawful taking of physical property. Copying copyrighted materials, without permission, and in a way not covered by a fair use exception, is copyright infringement. I work with IP lawyers frequently, and they never refer to copyright infringement as theft.

I'm not defending copyright infringement, but to refer to copyright infringement as theft is, at best sloppy thinking, and at worst a deliberate attempt to confuse the issue.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 11:45 AM on May 20, 2002