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Download Uproar: Record Industry Goes After Personal Use – washingtonpost.com

Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industrys lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are “unauthorized copies” of copyrighted recordings.

There is no way that this was a good move by the RIAA. The digital intelligentsia is already against them, and most others who have heard about them aren’t too supportive. If they continue to pursue this line however, they will encourage a full scale revolt by the normal folk who never cared too much before. I can’t see them winning this case, but if they do, I would expect congress to enact a law protecting the millions of mp3 player-owners tout de suite.

David Byrne interviewed Tom Yorke from Radiohead about their on-line sales experiment for Wired. It was an interesting article, but David Byrne’s sidebar has been gathering even more attention. Here he tries to spell out the 6 different possible business models for musicians now. I actually thought that he summed it up pretty well. Lets ignore for the moment that if you aren’t Radiohead or David Byrne, your options (at least at first) are really limited to two business models at most. He at least says that he thinks the true independent path will be the only path eventually.

I think these discussions are really interesting and it is exciting to see some folks as smart as Byrne and Yorke discuss it, especially given their perspectives.

Idolator also had an interesting take on this discussion.

Most of us are probably dealing with this on a much smaller scale. I’ve got a bank of drives sitting around with old projects on them. I should be cycling them periodically, but I don’t always get to it. I’ve got some random old video file formats that I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to read. I’ve got stacks of minidiscs, DV and DAT tapes lying around. Plus tons of old CDRs and DVDRs will backups on them. I’ve had some scares. There was a recording session for transPacific that I’d archived to hard drive and also to about 40 DVDs. At one point, I needed some files, so I grabbed the DVDs. NONE of them worked. Luckily, the drive was still good and I was able to copy the files.

Imagine now that over in Hollywood, they are producing 100s of Gigabytes a day. What the hell do they do with it? This article from the New York times is interesting, but I’d love to see an in-depth interview with a major film studio data wrangler.

The Afterlife Is Expensive for Digital Movies – New York Times

Striking writers in talks to launch Web start-ups – Los Angeles Times

Dozens of striking film and TV writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers with video entertainment on the Web.

This has been expected since the strike began. The writers are frustrated with the system and realizing that they can own it all. The musicians have been living this for a while, but it takes a bit more people to produce a tv show than an album. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Look at all the episodic stuff on the web these days. Let a million small studios bloom!

Create Digital Music » Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pioneering Composer, Dies