Letters

Passionate hoo-ha about intellectual property: Readers respond to Andrew Leonard's "Music Rules."

Apr 4, 2005 | [Read the story.]

After digging out his long-abandoned records from basement purgatory (apparently able to go years without listening to "Ziggy Stardust," something I'll never understand), Andrew Leonard shakes off the powerful feelings that he admits come from having actual records (with covers) to hold his music. He decides it's OK that his kids will live in a world where music exists only on computers, MP3 players and so on, since "It's the music itself that carries the most evocative force, not the delivery mechanism."

He may have a point about material possessions, and certainly one about convenience (clearly it's an insufferable burden to get up and flip a record over for many people), but obviously it's not actually the music he cares about. MP3s, and all digitally compressed files, and all files that have been digitally copied off of records and, inevitably, altered, simply don't sound as good as the records do. "Rock and Roll Suicide" or "Gimme Shelter" out of an iPod, or even off the CD remastered from the original meant-for-vinyl master, sound flat, brittle, lifeless, mushy and basically terrible. The albums have presence, bass, warmth, power and detail MP3s will never have.

I guess Mr. Leonard's kids will be OK in a world without record covers, but they -- and Mr. Leonard himself -- clearly aren't in this for their ears. Those of us who are willing to ignore all this file-sharing, ripping, ear buds in your head 24-hours-a-day "convenience" get in return having Gang of Four and the Wailers and Bowie actually sound good.

-- Olivier Strauch

In all the recent hoo-ha about "intellectual property" (a concept that should not go without challenge in its own right) we have all been led down a garden path, where what is at stake is whether or not we should be able to share with each other digital copies of music. Might I suggest that this entire episode be turned around?

Look at it this way. For the past few decades the vast majority of us have been replacing our vinyl music collections with CDs. Now, anyone who's ever looked on the packaging of their CDs has seen the legalese that states that we have not actually purchased the music, only a license to play that music. What we have purchased is a small plastic disk and a cheap plastic box (together worth well under a dollar), with most of the money we've spent (often almost 20 times the cost of the media and packaging) going to purchase the license to play that music and feed their corporate distribution network. Very little goes to the artists who create the music. The costs of producing and distributing CDs is much less than half that of vinyl -- the difference is pure profit for the record companies, yet the prices of music went up, not down when the industry moved to CDs.

Let's remember that. We have purchased not the plastic, but the license to play the music. And when we buy digital music we are purchasing licenses from the music industry. In many cases, say in the case of BlueNote-era jazz, the artists and engineers who created that music are long-since dead, and the complete "property" is now "owned" by the recording industry. Yet, these back-catalog jazz CDs cost as much as contemporary artists. And in many cases, we've owned the vinyl, the CD, and now we are being asked to purchase the digital file.

Let's turn this around. It's time to demand the legal rights to listen to the music we've already purchased in digital form rather than being forced to repurchase it. For all music licenses that each of us can demonstrably show we already have purchased, we should be able to legally demand that the music companies supply us with digital copies of that music for a fee based on the costs of digital transmission, administration and a profit commensurate with those costs. Since the per-gigabyte cost of maintaining an online server with hundreds of gigabytes is extremely low, if we added reasonable profit margin over the administrative cost we might be looking at what? Something like 50 cents per CD maybe?

So if one has hundreds of CDs, we should be able to take them into a record store, wand their bar codes, and receive digital keys to be able to download that music. We already own the rights to it. The local record store would get its cut of the profits of the transaction. We already have purchased the rights to listen to that music, according to the music industry itself. Now, if we've all been misled in purchasing CDs, and those licenses are no better than the few pennies of plastic they're printed on, then we've been horribly ripped off.

But then again, a lot of people have been feeling that way about the music industry for a very long time. Including the artists themselves.

-- Murray Altheim

In "Music Rules," Andrew Leonard writes, "When an individual downloads a copy of a new Ashlee Simpson single from a P2P network without paying for it, that is a violation of copyright. Just how morally wrong that might be is a debatable issue. But its illegality is not."

In fact, downloading unlicensed music on the Internet has never been determined to violate U.S. copyright law. Only uploading has. This is an important distinction that often gets lost -- the RIAA has never sued anyone for downloading music from a P2P network, only for sharing music. In fact, in Canada courts have explicitly ruled that while uploading is illegal, downloading is not. The same thing may or may not happen here.

-- Nathan Kennedy

As I was reading Andrew Leonard's piece on MGM vs. Grokster, something occurred to me. Isn't this the exact same thing that Congress absolved the gun industry from recently? I seem to recall the logic behind that law was that gun makers couldn't possibly be held responsible for what people did with their product. So let me get this straight. A company providing a legitimate service that could be used to violate copyright is liable for how its customers abuse said service, but the company that provides a product whose sole purpose is to launch a high-velocity hunk of metal isn't? My brain hurts.

I hate to be cynical, but it sure does seem like laws are being creating of, by and for big campaign donors these days. In the future, my children won't have the right to share a song with their friends. But if one of those friends shoots them, at least no gun company exec will have to suffer. And that's what's really important, right?

-- Bill Hanna

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