Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P

Wed Sep 1 10:40:11 UTC 2004

Michel Py wrote:
> 2) Make audio CD's unreadable in a computer so nobody can rip the .wav
> tracks to .mp3. Totally stupid:
>
> 2.a) Remember the last ones that tried (namely Sony)? Their protection
> scheme could be defeated in 2 seconds with a sharpie. I'm still
> laughing at it. Hara-kiri comes to mind.
...
> 2.c) Anyway, given the audio quality of standard gear today, a single
> digital.wav -> analog -> digital.mp3 pass is not going to degrade the
> audio quality enough to bother anybody. In other words: connect a good
> CD player to a PC with a good soundcard with a grounded gold-plated
> cable and rip to .mp3 from the analog input, nobody will know that
> it's not a direct CD audio track to .mp3 rip.

If it can come out the speaker or the screen *and* we don't collectively 
submit to some in-body DRM tech, then it can be copied and redistributed. 
Any sane media exec (and I use the word in a general sense, not clinical) 
person would have realised that copy protection is only putting another row 
of sandbags ontop of the old to stop the eventual innundation. These folks 
are playing the long game, and are using recent P2P "illegal" distribution 
stories (in a mass media that they control, ipso facto) as the straw man to 
buy better laws for themselves for the future. Reality is something that can 
be legislated against, at least that appears to be the gist of it.

> 3. Finally, and although it is true that copyright infringement is
> very often associated with P2P, I found myself downloading a lot of
> .mp3 files that I actually own on LP, simply because it's faster to
> download the file than it is to rip it from the LP (I know because I
> tried: I actually have a few CDs that I ripped myself from the LP). I
> bought the 33 1/3 album, I am entitled to a backup on another media.

My personal reasons for any downloading of audio, specifically, in it's 
unavailability through retail channels. I keep picking up references to 
older stuff that has been dumped by the pop-bods many years ago and cannot 
be bought for love nor money. I may be breaking some law, but in these cases 
I do not feel a moral problem. If I could find the artist, in many cases I 
would even pay them the equiv. of the CD price directly. Perhaps the new 
business models that will have to be rolled out, either by the existing 
companies or new, will allow for the full back catalogues to be availale to 
those of us willing to pay - and then my minor infractions can stop.

Back closer to topic, networks. P2P is a bandwidth spiral as we all know - 
more broadband, more sharing. Will it ever slow down ? Not in our career 
lifetimes I think. Whether legal or not, content is going to be doing this 
merry-go-round for the forseeable future, and the best we can hope for is to 
build and maintain the networks while it happend.

Peter 