Recently, in a groundbreaking move, the BBC made available for download full, high-quality copies of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies. This was part of their Beethoven Experience. The files were available for seven days, with the following terms:
The BBC granted you a 7-day, non-exclusive licence to download this Beethoven Experience audio.
You may not copy, reproduce, edit, adapt, alter, republish, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use this audio in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use.
Unfortunately, I got there too late to get copies of Symphonies 1 through 5 (and I particularly wanted 5 – ta da da daaaa!), but that’s just bad luck. Still, it’s great that the BBC is improving access to classical music in this way. I’ve been listening to them at home while working for the MoFo, and I know I wouldn’t have been listening to classical otherwise.
So it’s really depressing that people are taking the BBC’s generosity and committing copyright infringement by making the files available after the download period has finished. These are not public domain – putting them up is just as illegal as putting up copies of the latest #1 single.
Is any company ever going to do DRM-free online music if every experiment in that direction ends with widespread theft?
“Is any company ever going to do DRM-free online music if every experiment in that direction ends with widespread theft?”
You are right about this. If I was staff member of the BBC, I wouldn’t make these DRM-free media available again. But like every other situation in normal life, the good people allways have the disadvantages because of the actions of the bad people.
But where there are rules, like the 7-day license, they are allways broken by some people.
You assume that a DRM’d download would *not* be made available. This is clearly wrong and invalidates your point almost completely.
Also why use the correct term, “copyright infringement” in one sentence, if you’re just going to revert to calling it “theft” in the next.
DRM is ‘inevitable’ only insofar as people like to protect their current business models because a) they’ve made lots of money that way, and b) that’s all they know. Luckily it works so poorly for both the end user and the producers that organisations like the BBC, who don’t need to worry about selling their content as much, and seem a bit more clued up about alternatives can provide much better services by avoiding DRM just like they avoid slicing movies up into advertiser friendly chunks.
obligatory Doctorow at MSFT on DRM link:
http://junk.haughey.com/doctorow-drm-ms.html
lets also not forget that technically, as a license payer, i paid for that performance anyway.
but yes, drm or no drm, makes no difference, content remains available as always.
Maybe this ‘wish’ for a world in which companies don’t have to secure everything they publish, but users are using this all fairly, is an utopia.
I have to ask….
Do you really think that if there was demand for these recordings, and they had been DRM’ed up the wazoo, that they would not be available via bittorrent?
The anti-DRM argument is not that infringement won’t happen. Its that infringement will happen whatever you do, so don’t go out of your way to make your product worse than the derived product.
The next step after that is to release under a licence that matches with common usage and morality, eg Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial or something. Of course this is probably “giving in to the terrorists” in some peoples minds. But when your expectations match that of your market, you are far more likely to succeed in that market.
As the BBCs self interest consists of “make it politically impossible to suggest changing our funding model”, I hope they don’t bow to commercial pressure. Of course they must be wary of the sicko “ayahtollahs of the free market” both in power and in opposition… and I suspect that is the only reason for this silly little licence.
Gerv, I take it you haven’t seen bleep.com which does… DRM free online music. Range taken from the UK Indie labels essentially so anything from Royksopp to Franz Ferdinand and all points beepy in between.
Er… huh? I don’t follow what you are saying here at all.
Copyright infringement is theft, where theft is “taking something which doesn’t belong to you and you have no right to take”. I avoided the term “piracy” intentionally – as I’m sure you know, that term has problems. I defend the right of anyone to license their code and music how they choose (although I would argue for lower time limits on copyright) and, if they license it in this manner, I think theft is an entirely appropriate word.
Or are you saying it’s not theft now, but it suddenly becomes it if the BBC start selling CDs or downloads of those recordings?
Er… huh? I don’t follow what you are saying here at all.
He’s saying that even if the recordings were available with DRM, it’s enough that one person strip the DRM and share the files to make it available to everyone. So the only effective result DRM has is to make the product harder to use for legitimate customers.
Copyright infringement is theft, where theft is “taking something which doesn’t belong to you and you have no right to take”
The term theft is usually used to mean depriving someone else of their property, which is not the case here.
I wasn’t expecting to be slashdotted. I woke up to an email inbox full of comment notifications on that post and then I checked my logs… completely unexpected.
I wasn’t aware (until this morning) that I was infringing upon any copyright. I did not download the symphonies from the BBC, and I never agreed to any license. I thought that the music was now available in the public domain, and thus was free game. I really was just trying to do those people a favor that didn’t get them when they were available because they hadn’t heard about it (like myself). *sigh*
Exactly. And I’m a legitimate customer, so I’d rather not have DRM. Which means I get annoyed when I see people abusing (seemingly unintentionally in this case) other people’s DRM-free experiments.
It is usually used to mean depriving someone else of something. While it’s certainly not true that everyone who downloads an illegal copy of a recording would have bought the real thing, it’s indubitably true that music copyright infringement does reduce the sales of the songs in question. Although I don’t think it stops being theft if the songs don’t happen to be for sale at the moment.
It should be up to artists to decide if their songs can be shared, not up to us.
Well it was there, in normal-sized type, directly under the Download links. And the audio does say “available for seven days”…
But thanks for taking them down :-)
That’s well and good, but I didn’t get them from the BBC, so I never saw the terms and conditions. I just assumed that it was now public domain. (And I actually thought I was doing them a favor.)
The music is public domain, but as much as I understand british copyright law people can legally take public domain works and put it out as their own under a different license. Now does this mean that you have to go to these people for the relicenced piece of art? no. A lot of the music can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_van_Beethoven as well as in other fansites.
So please people do not use DRMed or relicensed music thats just a blight on our culture.
Is any company ever going to do DRM-free online music if every experiment in that direction ends with widespread theft?
Clearly, the obvious solution is to sell music so cheaply, so it’s not worth stealing it. If the fee is reasonably low people will choose the legal sources, instead of messing with DC HUBs, BitTorrent, P2P and stuff.
The Long Tail will ensure that the whole business is profitable (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html).
poningru: The score is public domain, the performance is not.
This is the same way copyright works in most of the world.
I think the first time I saw someone bemoan the death of the honor system on the internet was 1994. It’s getting a bit silly at this point. If you give away things for free with no way of getting them back on the web then it will be shared endlessly regardless of what your EULA is. All these “experiments” of trusting the entire world to not copy that floppy are doomed to failure the instant some genius proposes them.
What leads people to the copyright infringement is the behavior of content providers of not providing a legitimate channel to get the content digitally. Certainly, there would be no copyright infringement of these symphonies if the BBC hadn’t chosen, for reasons that elude me, to make the content available for only 7 days.
They could even charge a reasonable fee for it — I’ve purchased non-DRM music before and I’d do it again. The problem isn’t with DRM per se: the problem is that content providers aren’t content to merely enforce the rights granted them by copyright law: DRM allows them to expand the “rights” they have, and remove the rights of consumers. If I could trust them not to follow this path in a DRM-ubiquitous world I’d have no problem with DRM.
Unfortunately, they have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted.
I think that as music distributors put more effort into DRMing their products, people will turn towards illegal methods of distrobution so that they can get music that will ‘just work’ and not require a seiral number that you forgot or living on the proper continent or whatever. I think the growing amount of piracy is largely the music industries fault.
There was an issue recently with the BBC in which people wondered why a video they put online was only available for a week. The link below has a comment explaining (at least for the video, but probably for the audio as well) why it is only up for seven days. The link is here.
Hope this helps!
So let me get this straight, these MP3’s were of Beethoven’s public domain music, performed by the publicly funded BBC Philharmonic and broadcast by the publicly funded BBC Radio 3. But the downloads are limited to 7 days because the music labels are pissed because,
“You are leading the public to think that it is fine to download and own these files for nothing.
The real crime here is that music labels are preventing all of us from enjoying music that rightfully belongs in the public domain.
Oh, and Gerv, for some reason you keep completely missing the point that DRM is useless, it will always be circumvented.
miguel: I’m not missing that point at all. You are missing my point which is that if every time someone tries something DRM-free it gets abused, record labels will think “well, DRM is better than nothing” and use DRM all the time, inconveniencing law-abiding consumers.
Well it’s the Record Label fault for such high prices for cd’s, for mp3’s and basically for ripping off people that would be happy to buy music if it was affordable and not such a rip off,
I still buy cd’s but it’s a lot more expensive for me now since alot of my cd’s got stolen and I have to rebuy alot that I lost.
I’m gonna download music until the record labels make music affordable to buy
I have no problem buying cd’s or buy music but when it’s so outragous
and DRM is useless just a bad way to protect the music, I am positive there are better ways to protect copyrights on music that we purchase