AND THE SURVEY SAYS...
Congress, Copyright, and Copying
Ever since the first home tape recorders hit the streets, the record industry has worried that music lovers would borrow and tape records instead of buying them. To prevent the massive losses they envisioned from this practice, the record companies have long sought technical means of hampering home record copying and sought royalty payments from surcharges on home recorders and blank tape.
Because of the continued debate on this topic, Congress asked its Office of Technology Assessment to see just what effect home taping had on sales of commercially recorded music. The OTA survey has now been released, and both the recording and home electronics industries are citing it as supporting their claims.
According to a summary issued by the Home Recording Rights Coalition, the OTA survey showed the record industry's case to be overstated. To begin with, only about one-fourth of all home taping sessions surveyed involved copying prerecorded music, and only 28% of the people surveyed had copied music from commercial recordings in the preceding year. The vast majority (81%) of this copying was done from recordings owned by either the taper or other members of the taper's family or household. The principal reason for taping was to shift the recording to a format that could be played in portables or in the car. Other reasons were to create customized music compilations, to protect originals from wearing out, and to gain longer playing time.
Only 6% of tapers said their most recent home copy was made to save money or to avoid buying the recording; so few people taped music to help others avoid purchasing it that the OTA considered this activity "marginal." Only about 13% of the music recently taped by adults was from borrowed recordings.
Home taping apparently does not significantly displace prerecorded music purchases. Tapers spend only about 12% of their time listening to home-recorded tapes, and many of these tapes did not duplicate albums that were commercially available in the same form. At least three-quarters of home tapers said that if they could not make home recordings, they would not replace those tapes with purchases of commercially recorded music.
On the other hand, there's evidence that home taping may help stimulate album purchases. Nearly one-fourth of the consumers surveyed said they had heard a homemade tape of their most recent recording before purchasing it. More than one-third of those who bought records on their most recent buying occasion, and about one-sixth of those who bought CDs, did so with the expectation of taping their purchases. The OTA survey showed that home tapers buy albums much more frequently than non-tapers--confirming earlier surveys by the record industry itself.
Are royalty taxes, and technical bars to home taping, fair? Of the consumers surveyed by the OTA, more than half said it would be unfair to build new audio recorders that can't copy commercial recordings or to sell recordings that could not be copied. An even higher proportion disapproved of imposing charges, fees, or royalties on either blank tapes or audio recorders. Nearly two-thirds (63%) felt that "current home taping practices should be left unchanged." And 93% felt that taping for one's own use or to give to a friend was "perfectly acceptable."
To the RIAA, these findings are "frightening." As the RIAA's counterblast to the HRRC's release pointed out, the OTA report confirms that Americans tape more than one billion musical pieces per year, and 40% of Americans have taped prerecorded music in the past year 22% more than 10 years ago. Says the RIAA, "Most consumers don't know that only one out of every six albums recorded makes a profit. It is that one-at the top of the charts that will be copied most frequently.
Ironically, it is also that one that supports the signing of new artists and the diversity of music that Americans have come to expect." Copies of the OTA's 293-page report, Copyright and Home Copying: Technology Challenges the Law, are available for $13 from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402. The GPO stock number is 052-003-01169-7.
Look Ma, No Microphone!
Last June, I saw an engineer at JVC lean down to shout at two tape decks. He wasn't angry, just demonstrating that decks could act as microphones (and, of course, that JVC's newest deck, the TD-V1010TN, had elaborate anti-vibration setups that made it noticeably less microphonic than its predecessors).
Fiber-optic cables can be microphonic too, as another engineer had demonstrated to me a year earlier. He did not show or claim that fiber-optic cables could pick up ambient sound, but did show that tapping such a cable while it was carrying a digital bit stream could cause noise in the analog signal decoded from those digits.
above: Pop-up screen superimposes tuning and control information on
the program currently running.
Music for the PC Bored
Music can ease long sessions of computer work, but computer systems often hog too much desk space to leave room for a radio.
However, Optronics Technology of Ashland, Oregon now offers an FM radio designed to fit into, and be controlled by, PC-compatible computers.
The Desktop Stereo's specifications aren't all that intriguing (S/N of 66 dB, AM suppression of 50 dB, and a nonstandard sensitivity rating of "15 µV for -3 dB"), but Optronics says that their radio is not subject to computer-generated interference, unlike most FM radios and tuners. So it could conceivably outperform your hi-fi tuner when the computer's running.
What is intriguing about the Desktop Stereo is its control interface It has no controls of its own but is operated from the computer keyboard. The software supports a pop-up screen that shows the currently tuned station frequency, volume and tone-control settings, a fine-tuning indicator, and the contents of the 10 station presets (which can be labeled by format or by frequency or call letters). Stations can also be selected by typing in their frequencies or by using the cursor control keys for manual or automatic search. The system can also generate printouts of all local FM stations (including stereo or mono status and signal strength) and lists of strong stations. Outputs are provided for speakers (4 watts per channel into 4 ohms), headphones, or to feed an external stereo system.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Jan. 1990)
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