Karaoke Forums

I just received this email from the staff at MTU. I appreciate that they took the time to write it. It explains lots to me about what is going on in our industry and in particular, the karaoke computer hosting side of it.

It is also disappointing news in that after reading it I predict that legal battles over copyrights and sotfware turf are just beginning.  That makes me really concerned about how all of this will evolve....Will I someday be illegal after converting my whole show to a presently legal format using presently legal and supported tools, or will I end up stranded and have to start over?

Anyway, I thought I'd share the email with all you guys so that you too can see just how volatile and fluid the computer karaoke industry presently is.....And why some software developers are so sensitive to how their products are used.

I feel like we all will suffer until the dust settles and things get more standardized. Hopefully, once all the lawyers finish fighting it out and get paid, we will have better software at a decent price.

Gee, all this fighting!....and all I want to do is play music and have everybody happy.  I guess we all need to do our part to prevent theft. Too bad that all this stealing and fighting over software rights is holding up computer karaoke progress.

Thank you to this forum for allowing the space for me to share this.

Here is the email, I only edited out that which was intended personally for me:

"Thank you Keith,

I truly appreciate your attitude in this email, and wanted to thank you.

I have modified our karaoke-hoster.htm page to note that KMA files play only on our Hoster
series of products. We have been in business for 35 years, and did so by
treating everyone with respect and honor, and obeying the laws over us. We
don't intentionally mislead anyone.

As to importing in other formats, we only do what it legal, and that we can
recover our costs to develop, sell and support.

Thompson CSF, who owns the licensing rights to MP3, has a very well
established royalty structure for encoding MP3, and decoding MP3 within a
product. The minimum per year license is $5,000 to JUST decode. I believe
it is $10,000 a year MINIMUM prepay against $2.50 per copy royalty. Thus,
we choose not to be forced to pay this. Three times I have told their
representatives who contact me, not to contact me until they shut down
and/or remove the illegal products from the market that are available from
Trycerisoft, Toolz, and the lame.dll and blade.dll readily available for
encoding and decoding. There is no way I'm going to pay them when they
don't police what they should. I will NOT be intimidated when others are
stealing from them, and I will NOT be illegal. Thus, we won't offer MP3G.
I'll leave that up to the illegal companies of the world. We offer a legal
product.

Trycerisoft on the other hand, as of the last time I checked the MP3
registration site, does not pay the MP3 licenses. They direct users to the
Lame.dll that is illegal to use in the USA. If you are concerned about
being legal and ethical, stop using their product.

The Toolz product also doesn't pay their licenses, which is why it has been
free. It is illegal to use in the USA.

The Sax & Dotties Hoster knock off will have a major legal problem shortly.
Because they have such poor security, their product is what is illegally
distributed on these $1,500 hard drives with 20,000 MP3G songs and S&D's
player. There is a LOT of energy being spent now by good people to find and
shut down these illegal operators. S&D will be targeted.

As to providing Vorg Orbis compression of CDG files... last time I checked,
Thompson CSF is waiting for a "real company" with any assets at all to use
this compression scheme, so they can sue them as the "legal proof case" to
end anyone else trying to use it. That's one reason there are no major
companies, to my knowledge, who use Vorg Orbis.

We chose to use Microsoft's WMA because it is; 1) LEGAL, 2) FREE,
3)Superior, 4) Available free to every Windows user, and 5) Has excellent
software development tools. I'm not in love with Microsoft by any means!

We will be releasing a low cost Hoster Player that will play encrypted KMA
files. It exists and has been licensed by a major distributor for use in
Retail sales and playback of encrypted KMA files on computers. Forgive my
not giving more details as it is premature to market release.

We also are beta testing Hoster Lite. It does not have our Song Book
preparation feature, and cannot play discs that Singers bring to a show. It
will be $99.95. We'll introduce it after Hoster 3.1 releases, and our KMA
Encryptor product is released so hosting companies can protect their songs
from hired KJs. I did appreciate your post about the whole disc protection
software. We're not aware of that particular tool, but will look into it
further. I know and pay programmers who can crack just about anything, and
disc protection has never stopped them. Our KMA Encryptor will take a true
professional with all the tools to crack it, if anyone ever  succeeds. As
we perceive it, the real answer demanded by many of our hosting company
clients, is to encrypt their songs to only play on that one machine.

I doubt you have any idea how
rampant theft is. We had "light" security on our software in 1999 (not
dissimilar to Sax & Dotties today), and all 4 our out products ended up on
crack sites... mostly in the UK,  Russia and Homestead.com in the USA
(known for protecting copyright violators). For over two years, 75% of our
UPGRADE orders were from those who had an illegal copy. It took a staff
person half-time for almost 2 years to verify ownership and process our
orders. We now have web scripts that do this for us... automatically.

We are the ALWAYS the first to report Identity Theft to unsuspecting
individuals who's credit card has been used at our web site store. I
personally call them to let them know, and help them with what they can do.
I have NEVER once heard or read a single store of a company that does this.
However, that is who MTU is. That is who David Cox is.

We provide excellent, FREE support, unlike Trycerisoft, Toolz, Visiosonics,
S&D that have poor or no support. We are the only Karaoke software company
that gives our phone number on our web site. It has cost us a small fortune
providing free support to those who never bought our products. From 1999
until 2003, I personally spent 2-3 days every month searching for new crack
sites distributing our copyrighted software illegally. My actions shut down
a number of web sites. If I didn't invest this time, I would not be
emailing you because Hoster wouldn't exist. Without protection, I would
have never invested over $400,000 to develop Hoster since 1999.

As a result of theft, ~75% of our engineering investments since 2000 have
been made to secure our products, and soon encrypting KMA files. I abhor
that! Since 1970, engineering teams I have assembled and paid, have
developed over 130 products I conceive of. I enjoy providing the needs of
my users, not wasting our time and brain power on thwarting hackers and
thieves. What a DRAIN on our resources this has been. However, we have
polished our security continuously to try to make it transparent to legal
users, but impossible to steal it. We are adding a $20,000 upgrade right
now to our; web site, installation programs and security code for all 5 of
our programs. Soon, users will be able to "Transfer" their software from
one computer to another without MTU intervention. That will solve about 50%
of our support problems related to securing our software to a computer.

We supply many CDG Producers with software. Thus, they talk with us. We
hear that 20 disc copies are sold by illegal bootleggers for every one the
Producers press. That's 95% theft! I think you would consider that extreme,
and that is what's happening in the USA. It is even worse overseas.

Without forced restraints, even honest users will from time to time "make
an exception". If someone does it once, its easier to do it the next time.
It is a fact of human nature... a downhill slippery slope.

RIAA's going after Napster was a result of massive losses in the Record
industry. Well, I can argue they deserved it for not teaching about what is
legal as to copying. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to find
this out, only to find it is the biggest quagmire I have ever stepped into.
The "industry" wants to run by INTIMIDATION, instead of by law. The
Copyright laws are there to PROMOTE distribution of works such as music and
lyrics, but also to grant those who pay for the right to use those works
the right to make a BACKUP copy for their own use.

Also, the industry has failed to evolve any type of standard. Thus, Apple
did its iPod on its own. When a competitor who came up with a way to get
their songs to play on iPods was sued, the judge upheld Apple's rights to
their proprietary protection. That, is clearly stated in the US Copyright law.

Please understand that I have fought against MP3+G for so long, knowing...
seeing the damage it is doing to this industry EVERY DAY, and SEEING it is
ACCELERATING! If someone doesn't do something to curb the growth of theft,
the LAW will come down on all of us in the form of reduced freedoms.

I hope you can see, my posts about theft and security are not without
backing and merit. My desire is to return to personal restraints, but that
is no longer possible. Pandora's Box has been opened, and theft tools
abound for the common man. It is a shame civilized societies have
deteriorated thusly. It is NOT so much the 3rd world countries, but the so
called "civilized" ones who are the worst."

great read.. a bunch of public relations spin though... he accuses the music industry of enforcement by intimidation, and rightfully so, but what does he think karaoke companies have been doing??? soundchoice (die die die), kapa and many others have forced the KJ's into using mp3+g on their computers because of their unwillingness to allow a KJ to use a format of a product HE/SHE bought to make their company productive, profitable and protected.  try breaking your SC8125 and see how fast SC replaces it.  I am not talking about the thieves who run multi rigs on downloaded or multiple copies of 1 master disk.  they need hung from the nearest tree.  but the industry has thrown ALL PC users into the same category of pirate and this is where the battle line has been drawn.  it has become very apparent that companies like soundchoice etc have taken the position that when you buy their product, you really aren't buying it, you are renting it from them because they want to be able to tell you how to use that legally bought disk.  kiss my (@$%&#!).  if I buy a soundchoiec disk and I want to copy it over to 8-track tape, or reel  to reel, I will, and I will give soundchoice my direct address and they can come take me to court.  wanna see the damage they have done to this industry???  go to their own website and chat forum, where they USED to have hundreds of KJ's talking DAILY, and it is a ghost town.  go back and read how their HARDCORE supporters and staunch opposers of digital karaoke have now left and gone to a digital format.  they have lost practically every legal battle they have brought to the courts and their feeble attempts at copy protection have been a disaster and a joke.  their battle to oppose digital karaoke has enabled pirated multiple rig setups to flourish while the LEGAL KJ company sat on the sidelines thinking that the manufacturers would actually do something about it.  right.  the manufacturers weren't out to protect the legal KJ- they were covering and protecting their own (@$%&#!).  DRM? what a joke. it will take a 12 year old in europe about a week, if that, to crack whatever million dollar protection you design.  ask soundchoiec about how much money they spent on their anti-copy and it was cracked with a black permanent marker... good job guys.  I'll protect my legal investment how ever I want to.  wanna play proprietory games with the files? go for it.. there are too many options available that don't play those games.  until the "industry" goes after the guy who has 5 rigs and 20 shows a week and MAY have bought 1 disk for all of them, I will feel pretty safe with my setup and using mp3g's...

Hey, I understand how you feel buying something and then feeling it's yours to do whatever want with it.

It gets confusing for me too in that everything else I drop in my Wal-Mart shopping cart is "mine" except for music and software....But I got used to the idea that software developers only license you to use their products and can revoke that license if you violate it.

My point of this post was not to debate ownership rights and who in the industry is most correct. My post was intended to reveal just how much controversy is going on in the background and how it will effect KJ's for years.

I hate that every penny I spend on CD+G's and software ends up feeding the battle and just makes it a larger prize for them to fight over.

I feel like my money goes to buy them arms that they may someday use to destroy my most enjoyable past-time.

In fact, I'm kinda considering not going to a PC based setup until things settle out.

and my point was the industry made the situation the way it is by using intimidation and bullying tactics to keep the legit operators from using technology that benefits our business.  the illegal setups don't care what the industry feels and the legal operators suffer by the delay and impotence of the industry to accept change... but hey what do I know...

....And:

This little exerpt from the MTU email demonstrates my point.

"As to providing Vorg Orbis compression of CDG files... last time I checked,
Thompson CSF is waiting for a "real company" with any assets at all to use
this compression scheme, so they can sue them as the "legal proof case" to
end anyone else trying to use it. That's one reason there are no major
companies, to my knowledge, who use Vorg Orbis. "


In it he is refering to the Ogg-Vorbis codex, not his spelling "Vorg Orbis".

As it so happens, Ogg-Vorbis is freeware and fully open code software that is a huge improvement over MP3. In fact it is very similar to MTU's KMA format in that it offers improved sound quality over same size MP3 encode files....Yet, like the guy said, there are folks just waiting to sue anyone with deep pockets who decides to use it.

In the meantime, we KJ's wait.

this excerpt entertains me to no end:

"Thompson CSF, who owns the licensing rights to MP3, has a very well
established royalty structure for encoding MP3, and decoding MP3 within a
product. The minimum per year license is $5,000 to JUST decode. I believe
it is $10,000 a year MINIMUM prepay against $2.50 per copy royalty. Thus,
we choose not to be forced to pay this. Three times I have told their
representatives who contact me, not to contact me until they shut down
and/or remove the illegal products from the market that are available from
Trycerisoft, Toolz, and the lame.dll and blade.dll readily available for
encoding and decoding. There is no way I'm going to pay them when they
don't police what they should. I will NOT be intimidated when others are
stealing from them, and I will NOT be illegal. Thus, we won't offer MP3G.
I'll leave that up to the illegal companies of the world. We offer a legal
product. "

this is the SAME arguement that club owners use to not pay ASCAP or BMI fees- until you make everyone pay, I am not paying etc... and the part time pirate KJ justify illegal usage of tracks etc- until you catch the bigger pirates I am not changing my ways... does anyone else find this odd??? how about soundchoice and their claim to be fighting for artists rights and copyrights??? what a bunch of BS... Soundchoice finds it suitable to send music or an artist they cannot produce in the US, due to law or the artists objections, to their UK affiliate and distributor to get around these laws or objections- they have stated as much on their own forums by BC, the SC representative...

funny how it is ok for them to get around the law when it suits their needs...

what a great role model our industry has become...

Heh, heh....I can see it now. I'm walking home half drunk down some dark alley and singing my heart out...Then out of the shadows steps two suits and they slap me legal papers for singing a copyrighted song in "public"...It's understandable when someone slaps me for singing badly, but I never sing badly when drunk.

I gotta stay outta those dark alleys.

interesting concept, Tig, and one I happen to share.

As for someone telling me the specific sofware I will be using is illegal, yeah, right, prove it in a court case. It's a freely written code that's distributed over the net. Sure it's illegal, that's why so many hardware companies are making players that play that format!

GIMMIE a break!

[quote][b][b]their battle to oppose digital karaoke has enabled pirated multiple rig setups to flourish while the LEGAL KJ company sat on the sidelines thinking that the manufacturers would actually do something about it.[/b][/b][/quote]

How true!!!!  I know I'm not the only one who has been very confused about the "is PC Karaoke legal/illegal?????" game for a while now.  And it doesn't seem there is any Definite answer from the manufacturers either way....  And the game goes on....  Good topic guys!

_________________
Woo-Hoo!!!

 Well lets see with about 850 cd's I better get busy cuz I got about 16000 cd's to burn... Well 17000 whats another 1000 to us bootleggers.  There goes all my gig time

Next I want to know what the difference between an illegal bootlegger and a legal bootlegger is. The legal bootleggers invest millions and  have lobbyists in congress to pass laws for corporate gain and unfair trade advantages.

 Bootleggers like my grandfather and others provided a service when federal laws were running rampant like they are now.. Not only that sir, their integrity, sense of fairness, many generations of passed down moralities, traditions and love for this country seems to be a thing of the past with corporations and big companies.

 For as long as industries try to use laws and agents with guns to protect their shabby business practices and control of the market there will be illegal and legal bootleggers. There will also be a great big smoke screen.. And I will give you three reasons...   Greed   Greed  Greed..  

 If we could go back about 50 years when a man or woman either one could work 40 hours a week and support a big family before greed and money and laws and taxes totally destoyed this economy we wouldnt have these problems would we?  It is a sad state of affairs when a small operator cant provide a few hours of music and entertainment in a bar without worrying about federal and obsure verbalisms about laws that dont hold up in court and  writings and threats from greedy corps. We have some major probems in this country  but the music industry and copywright laws is hardly one of them.  I can remember when singers had to tour bars and work like the rest of us...If it doesnt involve drugs, tobacco, guns, alcohol, sex or seperation of church and state its gonna be on a back burner anyway..  See... I can ramble on too but my ramblings stem from realities  not from some fantasy land mostly.....And notice I didnt take sides either way except for the bootleggers that had good whiskey and moonshine at a fair price. What office was he runnin for?

_________________
Join The Karaokle Singers Social Network. Upload Your Music!!

Ok, some spin in his email - some confusion on the parts of some posters here regarding ripping, etc... I'll try to answer what I can to clear some of this up... and no, I'm not perfect, but I've been doing a LOT of research on this recently.

Regarding ripping and commercial use...
It is illegal to rip a CD or CDG for any commercial use at all.  That's right.  If you rip a CD you purchase to play it from your computer as filler music then you broke the law, period.  None of the laws that allow a home user to format shift, time shift, make a backup copy or anything else you can think of allows the same liberties to commercial entities.  The Home Recording Act of 1992, USC Title 17 Section 107 (Fair Use), the BetaMax Decision (Sony vs. Universal), the Diamond Rio descision, Columbia vs. Aveco, and all the other descesions dealing with copyright do NOT permit commercial entities the flexibility permitted private citizens.

In order to rip a CD/CDG for commerical purposes you'd have to obtain Master Use rights from the copyright owner, and then license mechanical reproduction rights or Digital Phonorecord Distribution rights from the Harry Fox Agency.  All in all this isn't cheap since you can license a minimum of 500 copies at a time - which at the minimum statutory rate of 8.5 cents per song of 5 minutes or less is  $42.50 PER TRACK.  Not a pretty picture.

Willful violation of copyright is punishable through 4 different remedies:
1. Monetary damages - They can just sue for actual damages and for the return of any profits made by you.
2.  Statutory damages - Willful damages are up to $150,000 per infringement - in other words a copy of a single 16 track disc is $2.4 MILLION dollars.
3. Attorney's fees
4. Preliminary Injunction or Temporary Restraining Order - They can just shut you down until you go to court.

Ouch...

As for licensing MP3 encoding/decoding and Thompson they permitted use of the codec in software that was distributed for free for personal use on a desktop pc.  You can read more here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/30 ... nger_free/

Yes, that article says they've changed their stance, but to the best of my knowledge WinAmp was never required to purchas a license until they offered WinAmp Pro - a product that requires purchase.

As to how Thompson could ever sue anyone using Ogg Vorbis is beyond me.  It's patent free and open source.  Always has been, always will be.
http://www.vorbis.com/

It's a REPLACEMENT to MP3.  In other words a COMPETITOR.  Even SCO with the backing of Microsoft and others couldn't shut down Linux.  I don't see Thompson sueing someone using Ogg Vorbis in any many other than frivilous to intimidate.

As for using Blade or LAME it's not a free ride. They will require the use of a patent license to use them in a product in most countries.  LAME is distributed as an educational tool and nothing else.  It's not distributed by the team in a compiled version (only as source code) so it's not required to pay the licensing.
http://lame.sourceforge.net/about.html

BladeENC is no longer supported or developed but it's not a free walk either:
http://bladeenc.mp3.no/

What is the legal status of BladeEnc?

BladeEnc is free software released under the Lesser General Public license (LGPL). However, due to patents held by Fraunhofer IIS and Thomson Consumer Electronics it might be illegal to use BladeEnc for certain purposes in certain countries.

Since MP3+G toolz doesn't include the codecs in distribution they aren't breaking the law.  Your using it to create MP3+G files is potentially breaking the law though and may require a patent license.  I'm not clear on this yet, but perhaps in time.

Tricerasoft isn't a US based company so it's likely that the requirements of that country could be different that here in the US (they're in Canada).

The MP3 registration site he mentioned is here:
http://www.mp3licensing.com/licensees/index.asp

More information on MP3 and patents are located here:
http://www.mp3-tech.org/patents.html

More information on mp3 licensing:
http://www.mp3licensing.com/

The only problem I have MTU is the limitations of the proprietary format.  I don't have a problem with limitations, etc, but what if I don't run Microsoft Windows?  What if I want to use a Linux Distro, a BSD variant, or MAC OS X (ok, it's based on BSD but it's pretty different in many respects)?  I can't as far as I know.

He doesn't have all the facts in some cases, but it's obvious he's frustrated with the state of the software industry and licensing in general.  Unfortunate, but true.  I understand that frustration, but my guess is one of the reasons they used WMA as a basis is because of the built in DRM.  They'd have to basically write it from scratch for Ogg Vorbis which is a costly alternative.  AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) or MP4 also requires a license - but it's cheaper than MP3 and there are DRM implementations based on this already (Sony's for example).

He should state things a little more clearly.  We're buying into Microsoft because they have a DRM implementation based on their own proprietary file format that's free.  We're trying to make money so we're using that instead of paying for someone else's license or to build a DRM implementation of our own for an open source, patent free codec.  We won't be building a version for any other operating system, not because we don't want to, but because Microsoft only requires payment of license fees if you're not using a Windows Operating system!
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/window ... gfees.aspx

Good reply! Thanks!

But I'm left feeling the words of Don MaClean's "The Day The Music Died" were written too soon to be fully appreciated.