WAR AGAINST CHEAP POPULARITY

INTERNET

Now I know who the copyright defenders are. Earlier, I still doubted whether I was right in condemning the practice when music downloaded from an online store can only be played on your home computer, but no longer in a car. When me...

Now I know who the copyright defenders are. Earlier, I still doubted whether I was right in condemning the practice when music downloaded from an online store can only be played on your home computer, but no longer in a car. When they can arrest me and bring me under a criminal article just because I shared a song I liked with like-minded people via the Internet - mind you, I didn’t sell it, I just shared it completely disinterestedly and honestly paid for access to the Network. When $500 Blu-Ray and HD DVD players want to automatically break if a disc without a copyright signature is inserted into them. When a licensed CD that I honestly bought contains a malicious virus program that not only infiltrates my computer and secretly monitors all my actions, stopping attempts to play left-handed melodies, no, it also does it with hacker tricks, in violation of all security standards.

So in all these cases, I still doubted: what if they, copyright fanatics, are right about something? After all, this is an industry, it really wants to earn as much as possible, and I, the user, interfere with it. Therefore, I myself tried to interfere as little as possible - simply by not buying any music, neither licensed nor pirated, for exactly the same reason that I basically stopped riding Moscow buses after they announced entrance only through the front door. They give me discs by Sukharev and Nikitin, sometimes by other authors, and I have enough - since the authors themselves or their representatives do this, I know for sure that I have not violated any copyright.

But yesterday I stopped doubting. Yesterday I learned about the latest action of copywriters - at the initiative of the "labels" Sony and EMI, hundreds of sites are being closed where amateur guitarists select chords for their favorite songs. It turns out that tablature is a "derivative work" (derivative work) and also falls under copyright. Even if you picked the wrong chords, it still hits! And thus, trying with clumsy fingers to press the strings to the melody of his idol, a fourteen-year-old kid from some Arizona causes simply monstrous damage to the entire world industry!

Now I know for sure that we are not faced with the industry in this musical history. We are dealing with a sect of crazy fanatics who, through some misunderstanding, have managed to create the most powerful political lobby around the world. Cover yourself with a blanket and listen to the iPod - only then you obviously do not violate any "digital rights". Otherwise, you can’t be sure of anything like that - if a random passer-by hears the music, you are already violating, as you are committing an act of “public performance”.

Meanwhile there are indications that neither do I think so. And, fortunately, even in the management of large companies come across reasonable people. For example, Yahoo! - a company from which no one expected anything like this - suddenly opens the Music Unlimited service, where users get unlimited access to compositions that are not protected by any copyright technologies for a fixed fee. Then it became clear that this was done simply to spite Apple, since protected files from its iTunes music store cannot be played on anything other than the iPod. For which Apple has almost come under antitrust proceedings in France and the Scandinavian countries. And progress is observed - suddenly there was a message that Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, entered the board of directors of Apple. Google, as you know, favors any freemen, and on the sidelines there was talk about the possible reorientation of iTunes to Google's business model: a free service through advertising.

But all these people and companies are clearly not from that impenetrable sect of copywriters in question. They are incapable of listening to any reasonable argument, and to the detriment of their own business for the second year (or already the third?), they are hindering the start of sales of the mentioned Blu-Ray and HD DVD for fear that they will promote "piracy". Suddenly, “they are there” saw the light - after three years of zealous struggle with users of peer-to-peer networks, it turned out that peer-to-peer networks are not the main enemy at all (16% of the music leaked past the box office), but real pirates, that is, those who trade without demand (29% ). If they had asked me three years ago, I would have told them right away without any calculations. And now all the forces - to fight the pirates!

PS In my book on programming, published a year ago, I used an excerpt from the lyrics of the song "One day the world will bend under us" with chords as an example to illustrate the procedures for encrypting text. Now I know that I violated the copyrights of the Time Machine group, I beg Andrei Makarevich not to sue me and am ready, if necessary, to compensate the team for property damage inflicted out of court.

PPS Read about how the copyright lobby is trying to subdue Russian legislation in the October color issue of Novaya.