Paul's Posts — 06 February 2012
By Paul McGowan
This issue about copyrights and protection has so many layers and hooks into society’s fabric that it’s hard to pick on just one but I will certainly try.
It is legal for me to stream music in the form of a radio station. In fact, we do this already through eTracks. Here I can stream pretty much anything I want and pay a yearly license fee. Problem is, it’s 192kbps limited and MP3. It sounds good, but it’s not great and the quality of the sound certainly doesn’t pay homage to the musicians who made the music. What I’d love to do is stream full CD and high-res quality but there’s simply not enough bandwidth to do that.
So I came up with an idea – if the source of the radio station was local then you wouldn’t have bandwidth restrictions. So we place the entire library onto a small hard drive in its uncompressed format, encrypt the data so it cannot be copied, and package the HD in a radio product we sell to folks. Access to it is still the same – as a radio station – but now you get full bandwidth without compression – we could even do multiple stations from the same library – and what a cool product that would be. Maybe 20 stations that cover everything we’d like to listen to – all in uncompressed wonderfulness.
Can’t do it. Copyright laws prohibit this. Same music, same fees paid, same protection from copying and selling.
And that’s the problem of legislating against change and the natural order of things. For now it’s just an inconvenience but one that hurts the musicians as well as the high-end customer who wants to enjoy music without suffering the degradation of MP3.
Change is tough but building fences to protect a dying industry doesn’t work and slows down what will work.
Forward to a friend and help us engage more readers
Related Articles
Share
About Author
(10) Readers Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
David
Totally agree, don’t be afraid of competition. Let the free market work & the consumer will decide what they want.
David
madmacs99
The storage capacity required to do this is not desktop-level yet. The whole notion of the cloud by the way points exaclty to the opposite way. As audiophiles we must wait for the bandwidth increase; before The next big format comes in that is…
bfotk
“Copyright laws prohibit this.” What section? What’s the specific problem? The physical location of the files within the box in the home rather than in the hands of the licensee?
I imagine you’ve consulted heavy duty legal folks on this, but it seems to me that an interpretation could be asserted that would cover what you describe or something very close to it. I could pass along a name or two…
Paul McGowan
The laws governing our license we use for the radio. We purchase a blanket radio license to broadcast eTracks. This license costs us a few hundred each year and is extremely narrow and specific – and among the specific limitations is that
a: the user cannot have any selection choice over what we’re playing (just like on commercial radio).
b: the media cannot be stored locally. It MUST be stored remotely and streamed.
The major licensing agencies are BMI/ASCAP that control what can and cannot be played on internet radio. Currently there’s a ton of pressure to make this even more restrictive in favor of terrestrial radio stations – which is a major lobbying effort from corporate parasites like Clear Channel who have managed to suck the life out of radio and in some cases television. Now they want to suck the life out of internet radio because, guess what, people are turning away from terrestrial radio and going to the alternative.
People are doing this because they’ve managed to remove all the individuality and originality out of radio. So then they see they’re losing numbers. In a free marketplace, this should result in their having to rethink their program material and make it better. In our corporate run government it results in increased legislation and restrictions to limit public access.
Terry Franklin
Paul,
I think we should teach in civics that the four powers of government are the Judicial, the Legislative, the Executive, and the Corporate.
bfotk
Got it. So it isn’t so much copyright law itself that’s controlling you, but the specific terms of the license, those terms being enabled by but not determined by copyright law. Or can the government set the terms for the agreements that ASCAP and BMI enters into with its licensees…right down to disallowing local storage?
Paul McGowan
It’s kind of the opposite. Copyright laws basically prohibit just about everything and the license agreements allow you to squeak by with some exceptions to the laws.
So they start with saying basically “everything you want to do is illegal” and then they sell you a license that allows you to be exempt from certain laws.
It’s mostly a racket.
Paul McGowan
Yup – it’s kind of scary how much corporations actually ARE the government, the judicial, the everything. Gulp.
Rob
Wouldnt that be fantastic to listen to quality music sounding fantastic from your radio, which brings me to a question about Hi Rez downloads, 96/24-192/24 etc.
Q.Paul, if the sound engineer has done a lousy job on the original recording will it make any difference to the new down loaded format that we listen to.I have old LPs that sound crappy and the CD version sounds well, different.I dont feel the same way about my CDs in any way as I do my LPs.However, I really can see the benefits of stored music in an uncompressed way and if it sounds better than CD even better, but if the recording is a shocker, wont that just be like uncovering and exposing us to more shocking work from the studio?.Cheers Rob
Paul McGowan
Rob, that’s a tough one. Most CD versions of LP’s are remastered and when they do the remastering they usually (in my experience) mess things up and they sound worse. Certainly there are exceptions and technically they should be better, but rarely they are.