Karaoke Forums

....the online exchange of karaoke tracks through iRC channels or via Torrent?

While the hard drive sellers are all over eBay and CraigsList, one of the primary ways they update their libraries is using Torrents or automated iRC channels. I have seen no comments in the forums about this form of piracy and it is by far the most prevalent form I have ever seen. It certainly isn't as in your face as the hard drive sellers, but the sheer volume of karaoke music being traded on these sites is mind boggling.

I see PHM and Sunfly monthly updates posted regularly to Torrents. There are currently active Sound Choice Torrents that when combined are distributing over 50 gigabytes of Sound Choice intellectual property.

Several years ago I was at a show where a karaoke host was leveraging iRC *during his show* to download music that he did not already have on his hard drive.

This, in my opinion, is what killed Sound Choice and threatens the rest of the karaoke industry. The hard drive pirates are fed by the online pirates and are likely one and the same. I would like to know how the industry is addressing this form of piracy.

-Chris

_________________
-Chris

The problem is the de-centralized nature of Torrents themselves. You will also see every major movie, operating system as well as every Wii, Playstation and Xbox game that exists there torrented as well. Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo & Universal Studios have much deeper pockets...yet they can't seem to stem the torrent tide either.

What would you suggest they all do?

We're always looking for solutions to that problem. Not everything we're doing to stop it can be talked about, however.

With torrents, the major problem is that there is not an especially good way--insofar as I am aware--to get enough information about the users to bring a lawsuit. The courtrooms are littered with content owners who have sued thousands of John Doe defendants, identified only by IP address, then sought subpoenas to obtain identity information from ISPs. Some have been successful at that, but most courts have thrown those kinds of suits out on technicalities.

The key, then, is to have a reliable way to identify the person who is obtaining the counterfeits through a torrent or an iRC channel that doesn't require a subpoena. But I'm less concerned about going after that person than about getting the guy who's making it available. The ideal situation would involve identifying the server that is hosting the channel and taking it down. (Of course, with a torrent, that won't work due to the distributed nature of torrents.) And it would probably just pop up again. If it's outside the U.S., that is yet another layer of complexity.

To begin an action, I need to know the answers to at least these questions:

1. What is being done, and what proof of it exists?
2. Who is doing it, and where are they located?

I'm a big fan of technological solutions to answering these questions, if we can get one, so I'm open to suggestions, which can be sent to me at jharrington (at) harringtonlawpc (dot) com.

Does streaming of YOUTUBE Karaoke in a commercial/bar setting fall into this category?

_________________
"You know that I sing the Blues and I do not suffer fools. When I'm on that silver mic, it's gonna cut ya, just like a knife"-The SWINGCAT

I don't own/run any IRC software and never have -- that being said -- I know that IRC's are treated as "private property" signed into law by President Clinton and that's part of what makes it so difficult to pin down who runs them and is ultimately responsible. ISP's are not under any common jurisdiction to reveal an operator unless there is a subpoena or a warrant of some kind.

Of course someone posting a torrent is not really a potential customer....

Chris--are you following the debates on the Stop Online Piracy Act? This would require that access to pirate sites or any site selling counterfeit goods be blocked by Google, et al. The media industries endorse it while the tech industry says it will lead to govt. censorship of the internet, among other things. Anyone with an interest in this either way should probably give it a look as it is making it's way through the legislature now.

That SOPA Act will not stop or even dent piracy. If it passes (and I am against it) there will be some high profile busts to make people feel good about it, but piracy will be just as rampant. Blocking things at the Google/Bing/Yahoo level does not prevent word of mouth discovery. In fact, every iRC channels that I am aware of I found out about via word of mouth. Some are discoverable through search engines, others are not.

It is not possible to legislate the end of piracy. It absolutely requires technological solutions. We have legislatively made prostitution illegal yet anyone can get a prostitute in a matter of minutes in a major mteropolitan area (or so I have heard). Of course, it would be technologically impossible to prevent prostitution, but that is not the case for karaoke music. There ARE technological solutions that can be put in place. Giving law enforcement greater control is rarely the solution and one I am generally against (seperate topic....don't get me started).

The Industry is going to have to take it upon themselves to create technology related solutions that make it difficult for the piracy to take place in the first place. The current state of technology where a disc can be dropped in a tray, ripped, tagged, and zipped in a matter of minutes by someone with very little computing skill is something the industry has known about for over a decade now. Yet the industry has made zero investment in stopping this process in making this process more difficult if not impossible.

The Industry is going to have to invest their money in solutions in order to survive. That investment may raise the final cost of the product. But that also means the $500 system Pirate goes out of business leaving the legal folks willing to actually pay money to support the industry. We were here 20 years ago, we will be here tomorrow. The best part is, the industry raises costs but elimnates piracy and drives out the pirates, leaving the legit folks to charge an excellent rate to the venues that know they are protected by the industry and the legitimate KJ's.

-Chris

from being so easyThere will be costs associated with this and there may also be reduced convenience for the consumer, but that is the trade off. An example of this would be

_________________
-Chris

I disagree that the industry has failed to embrace technological solutions that exist. Even SC attempted to use DRM on discs it released some time ago, which proved not to be an effective solution to the problem (easy to break) and created more problems (couldn't be played on standard disc-playing hardware). There may be effective solutions by switching to a different delivery mechanism, but the manus are subject to rules established by the publishers that make the available mechanisms virtually impossible to use.

I'm not a big fan of SOPA for a lot of reasons--the ineffective nature of the remedies, the China-style "blocking" mechanism, the potential for abuse. What would be far more effective would be opening the courts to an effective mechanism for identifying infringers. Congress could easily change the law regarding joinder of cases in the early stages for the purposes of identifying infringers based upon their conduct.

I disagree regarding the technological solutions. I stated that there would have to be an industry change and it would mean a fair amount of churn for the manufacturers as well as the consumers. There is absolutely no reason why the industry can't develop technology to make it very difficult to copy and require specialized hardware for playback. The industry has already adapted going from Tape to CD and some adapted further by going to digital.

There are ways to make it happen but it will require the manufacturers to pony up the cash to do it. They will have to make a bet on the future and put some of their own money on the line.

I am willing to plunk down $50,000 of my own money to create my local karaoke show business knowing the industry is in a state of decline and things are not looking good. The manufacturers should be willing to drop 10x, 100x or even 1000x that amount to stay alive and go into the future.

-Chris

_________________
-Chris

If you totally ignore the 15 years they spent playing ostrich as people told them that digital music was coming.....

_________________
[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Nah it was 2 years of denial it was coming and 13 years of denial it was already here.

I'm with you Chris, it took them years to realize what was happening and still today, I'm not sure they really understand... It's sad, they were really a good manufacture...but just the way they threat their loyal customers today, they should be officially out of business shortly

I'm counting it from 1983, when DAT was first being done. I remember Bill Joy in 1987 at a conference talking about the day when everyone would have 2G of RAM and a terabyte of disk. He said "it's not if, it's when". It seemed like pie in the sky at the time, when 640K of RAM was still a loaded PC, and the 386 had just come out. But at that point it was clear that digital media would be the thing of the future. The record companies did nothing in the way of planning for that day, and by 1998 the writing was on the wall. They could have saved a lot even then with their own streaming setups and reasonable licensing structures such that legal stores could compete with Napster and the like, but their insistence on the DRM everyone told them wouldn't work doomed that effort.

People might have bought music, except that using it was such a bloody hassle. If the pirate versions had been a hassle compared to legal, as they are now, then something like iTunes could have happened much earlier. A product like KJ Media Pro could have happened for karaoke. And the pirate culture wouldn't have become quite as entrenched.

Hindsight is 20-20, I know, but whole battalions of people were telling them they needed to do something -- and they did nothing.

_________________
[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.