I personally have no issue with this whatsoever.

There may at some point be a case where is said that this site is sharing copyrighted files. That in of itself can lead to severe financial penalty for those involved.

The files are distributed with a name attached to who released them. Encryption to disallow the separating of audio gives at least some legal barrier with which to work with should the issue ever arise. These songs can only be played on one medium, a medium in which these songs are not able to be purchased or listened to in any other way. This also gives a legal barrier.

You may feel disheartened by not having access to all the audio files, but in reality you are missing out on nothing. I say to keep it as it is so that C3 can carry on without worry.

1) It does not protect anyone from liability.

That is not entirely true. Our first and foremost intention was to prevent what has been attempted twice now: people who have no interest in playing this game but a google search led them to find out we had multitracks for X song. If C3 continues, and more and more multitracks are released, word will get out. And there are a plethora of audio sharing sites where you pay to download and what not, centered around multitracks. We do not want to be a source for these sites. So it protects us by keeping us in the relatively unknown niche area that we are. We don’t want to become visible to larger groups more likely to get into legal issues. By encrypting our audio, it deters anyone from getting it. Anyone who is a part of the community and can justify why they need them can always request them from the original author or an admin.

2) It is short-sighted. What if the future yields a “C3toRB4†or the like, but the people holding the keys are no longer around? GHtoRB3 shows it could happen.

Actually, GHtoRB3 is not a thing anymore, but we’re in contact with the three guys at a moment’s notice if necessary. It’s a little short-sighted perhaps, if you think that we haven’t thought of this already. We have a tool that batch encrypts and decrypts the songs (using our encryption, not Harmonix’s) and if it ever looks like C3 won’t be a thing anymore, I’m sure making this tool available won’t be an issue. Even when I’ve been “gone” I’ve been accessible to the admins, and we all are to one another. We have several ways of communicating beyond the forums, so don’t worry about that.

3) It’s a disservice to the community. Studio multitracks are very difficult to come by, and the only people who need stems as much as we do are the remix community.

Which community are you arguing for? I (and I suspect most of the other admins) do not particularly care about the remix community. That’s not our purpose nor why anything we do is done. The multitracks we have shared have either been created from scratch by OrangeHarrison or myself, or purchased at the expense of our authors/admins. We have no intention of making those available outside of the Rock Band game format, which is what C3 is here for.

So I request that customs released in the future should be DRM-free. Your input and action is appreciated.

I have no say in administrative decisions, but I strictly support and encourage the protection of our multitrack files for the reasons stated above. I not only worked hard at making it possible, but also I personally encrypted all the Beatles tracks and all of my own songs and all the songs of all the admins. I would only hope that our authors have done the same with their songs, but can’t attest to that.

On a separate note, thank you for a good argument and discussion. Very refreshing.

“Digital Rights Management”[/url]“:ezzql0kz]A class of technologies that are used by publishers, copyright holders and individuals with the intent to control the use of digital content and devices after sale… to control executing, viewing, copying, printing and altering of works or devices.

 

Whatever it’s called, the results are as I brought up in my original post. There’s no disputing where the audio for GH converts came from. Many of the audio files in non-convert C3 releases originally came from remix contests, and because I’ve noticed people from these forums active on the sites where old stems get sourced with no strings attached, I know that authors here use them (which is only reasonable, because they’re pretty much the only source for anyone who’s not filthy rich or an audio technician). Original studio tracks are simply not sold by any “legit service,” except in the aforementioned remix contests, and carrying a lot of fine print.

So, the encryption of this audio does not, in any capacity, “control the use of digital content and devices after sale”, nor does it “control executing, viewing, copying, printing and altering of works or devices”. Ignoring the fact that there is no “sale”, you can use the content on any device capable of playing customs. You can execute it, you can ‘view’ it, you can copy it, printing doesn’t really apply, and you can certainly alter the ‘customs’. It also wasn’t DRM when Harmonix, Activision/Neversoft, Apple Records, who the [expletive] ever put it on the audio in official content — the only DRM in play was that which was tied to the licences of (for a 360 example) signed marketplace packages.

Some of the multi-track content is probably sourced from remix contests, sure, assuming those stems are in good working order, and no work above and beyond that has to be done to splice missing parts or remix content. Some of it was pulled from other sources, including people who worked to find out a way to decrypt the content. Both of those sources are probably still available on the internet, likely through the same places we found them, so the people that want it for whatever (ostensibly non-C3) reason they apparently have are more than happy to go hunt them down from the same sources that contributors and authors may have used.

Other pieces of multi-track content were not procured from those sources, often at a tangible expense (in time or in financial resources), and we’re certainly not “beholden” or under any sort of altruistic obligation to provide that content to anyone at all. Not to our community/fans, who we appreciate; not to people who aren’t active and just happen to stumble upon our site looking for stems; and certainly not to people that run thoses sometimes sketchy-as-hell “multitrack audio” blogs that basically host a compilation of GH/RB rips, multi-track stems, shitty-quality 5.1 surround sound “multitracks” from concert DVDs and gate them behind ad-driven file hosting sites to try and make some cash off of them.

Beyond that, some of the multi-track content is provided by the original rights holders. If they want to provide their audio to the public at large, they are more than welcome to do so, but we certainly have no intention of giving easily accessible stems of those works to people we do or do not know over the internet.

But since you posit that the three bullet points you throw up in your original post are truth, let’s run through them.

1) It does not protect anyone from liability. None of the songs in any Rock Band custom are being distributed with the record label’s permission. As far as the RIAA is concerned, sharing music for free in any form is piracy, regardless of the locks placed on it. If an author produced multitracks with frequency-banding, they might feel some “ownership” of the results out of personal pride, but the RIAA doesn’t draw such a distinction. We are all in defiance of copyright just by uploading, or downloading, a custom for free; there’s nothing to gain from deciding to stop the buck there.

Ignoring the fact that several of the songs we have put out are indeed distributed with the rights holders’ permission, it’s critical to note that we’re not postulating that this affords legal immunity against any sort of action taken against the site. It is not pure risk avoidance. It is, however, risk mitigation. Lots of decisions about how we structure the site, how we present the site, and the content we host/share/distribute on the site all have to do with reducing risk of possible action being taken against the site.

Taking this to the other extreme, we might as well just be pirating DLC too, no? But we’re not doing that primarily because we don’t feel it’s right and goes wholeheartedly against the intent of what C3 is — but if we weren’t doing that for that reason, there’s no doubt that it would also be a good way to mitigate risk.

2) It is short-sighted. One of the greatest hurdles to completing the GHtoRB3 project is the challenge of extracting the multis from the later games. C3’s encryption is being treated like a “trade secret,” despite being an open community project. What if the future yields a “C3toRB4” or the like, but the people holding the keys are no longer around? GHtoRB3 shows it could happen.

Furthermore, it blocks out the community from contributing. All of The Beatles’ keys upgrades were authored by transcribing the extracted .moggs; that’s what I used to chart Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. Being able to play extracted files is also essential for fixing messed-up charts, which are often faster and easier to handle by yourself.

a) There are always workarounds to extracting multitrack audio — I use one such method to get audio to help with RBHP charts.

The people holding the keys will probably always be around, in some capacity, and if it looks like we aren’t, there’s a pretty high likelihood we’d look at unlocking the doors at that point, as mentioned.

c) C3 is not an “open community project”. C3 is a closed project with some structure that has a high level of community engagement and is designed towards fostering further development beyond what we do, but it’s not “open”, and thus things like encryption or obfuscated code or ‘secret release lists’ or special visualizer images or other “trade secrets” do not run against it. Don’t take this to mean we don’t love the community, but it should be pretty apparent that our operations are not public knowledge.

d) Consider C3 to be a brand, and a brand with a specific image we want to cultivate (like most brands). Any decision made regarding content for ‘public consumption’ and content for ‘internal consumption’ will always be weighed by considerations for that brand. Speaking personally, I don’t want to see modified versions of our content showing up on other forums (this has already happened) being either a) poor quality “fixed” versions peddled as our content or the original work peddled as someone else’s content (both of these have happened), and this ties into my next point.

e) I don’t want people ‘randomly’ fixing our content and putting fixed versions out there, so the consideration of “playing extracted files being essential for fixing messed-up charts” doesn’t fly for me, especially considering most songs are sourced from fully mixed mp3/FLAC/ogg files. If people are interested in submitting an actual fixed chart, my recommendation would be to approach the author. You might be able to get an actual project file that way, instead of ripping ostensibly lower quality audio and pulling a .mid out of a package.

f) Aside from, perhaps, pro guitar or those fixes, there really is no “Beatles keys”-style case for C3 customs, where you’d want/need audio to author a new part and would be trying to split/re-assign stems.

3) It’s a disservice to the community. Studio multitracks are very difficult to come by, and the only people who need stems as much as we do are the remix community. Aside from decrypted Guitar Hero rips, the primary source for multitracks are stems from old bootlegs and remix contests, most of which disappeared years ago and are only still available thanks to remix enthusiasts who’ve saved the stems and pass them around. That’s the only way we got to experience the awesomeness of the all-multitrack, Led-Zep-and-Radiohead-included, C3 anniversary week. And they’re who I depend on to get multitracks for more awesome customs.

These same enthusiasts rely on music game rips as much as we rely on old remix contests. Leaving our side of the aisle open is only the fair way to repay them.

The problem with this entire argument is that “our side of the aisle” mostly consists of stuff that is accessible elsewhere, particularly to “these same enthusiasts”, assuming they’re just as driven to find/get/use the content as we are. The rare exception to this consists of stuff that our own folks have split into multis or stuff that we have been directly provided by rights holders, which they would be more than welcome to share if they so choose. None of this sounds like a disservice to our community, either.

It’s not like we’re making a rhythm game with a bunch of rare stems of classic songs provided to us directly by studios for our charting purposes — but you can bet your ass that if we actually if we were, we’d be in the same position as someone like Harmonix or Activision and encrypting the hell out of that content (moreso than we are doing now).

To wrap this up, the message is simple: people come here to get files to play songs in game. Anybody looking for MP3 and stems please look elsewhere. This is all finalized to only providing content to play in game.

Without getting into the legality of the customs themselves, I would have to agree with the authors here in that if they are paying for songs they are basically protecting an investment and it is still illegal to upload MP3’s to others anyway!

While I support any decisions they make, sometimes I wish I had access to a project file.

The project files are not protected, the only thing protected is the audio files. You can still get the MIDI and import into REAPER, get a MP3 of the song and use that. Or approach the author for the original REAPER project and get a MP3 of the song and do that. Or you might get lucky and the author might be ok with sharing the stems with you for your purposes. Or do your own due diligence and find them online for free or buy them online as our authors do. You have a variety of options there.

But you can see how an author privately giving access to stems to another author (or fledgling author) for charting/learning purposes is very different from having the unlocked audio stems out there for anyone and everyone to grab for every song.