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On the Time Preference for Information...
LL asks: "Altering the price of digital content is a common tactic to capture the time-preference characteristics of consumers (e.g. movie tickets for immediate first releases down to free-to-air a couple of years later). We would all like to get the latest and greatest, but are people willing to tolerate restrictions such as paying more for music that they can share with friends? The polarization of views from the share everything (FSF) to everyone is a selfish individual (digital distribution industry) is being contested through new business models on the Internet with players such as (AOL+InterTrust)|Sony willing to experiment with novel and more subtle forms of control. However, will prosumers protest over the increasing technological obsolescence if they purchase music/software and find out a few years later their hardware is not supported and their music/software collections become worthless? Are we buying a life-time's right to own or merely licensing access for a short time? If an individual/company releases/sells stuff, whether GPL or EULA, should they explicitly warn people of the downstream implications (e.g. if we discontinue hardware support you will be forced to pay for software upgrade fees)? Curious minds would like to know if there is a fairer system."
With any product if the company survives to continue to support the product you purchased is a bet. Of course in the past it has been a fairly safe bet. You don't expect Ford to go under. However, with the economy now and the businesses that do fold and the ones the currently are worth so much, but don't actually provide a service the bet is more risky. Buying something from a start-up with little to no business plan can be risky. What if rather than being bought out they just fold? I don't have a solution for the support, but with the way things have changed there is a need. When my computer broke six months into warrenty I was able to take it back and get a new one. If that support didn't exist I would have been out a mother board. Not a comfortable feeling.
Kate
_________________________ Visit me at http://pornforcomputers.com
The thing to remember here is that our physical characteristics don't change. We can only perceive 44Khz worth of audio, and no more than 45 frames per second of video, and as long as our rods are happy, resolution beyond that is wasted. So technological revolutions just change the way it's sold, or the usability of the technology (e.g. nobody ever invented a Walkman 12" vinyl disk player). The content doesn't lose quality (yeah, yeah, audiofiles can supposedly tell the difference between copper and gold connectors, just as they can supposedly tell the difference between transistor and tube amps, and between vinyl, cd's and mp3's. I ain't no audiofile, and yes, we're still in a parenthetical comment.)
-russ
p.s. It's supposed to be a pun, but if you don't think it's punny, don't laugh.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
In search of a fairer system, I think we have to start from the beginning - and that is, we do need to rethink what copyrights really mean.
The problems you have outlined are all very real, and they are all because someone is using the copyright issue to squeeze money out of the people.
I read somewhere (perhaps in
Think of it, if in the current use of copyright laws were used back in the era of Beethoven or Bach, those of us who enjoy the symphonies of those great master would have to fork out $$$ for our enjoyment ! One can't even play the ta-ta-ta-taaa (of the 5th symphony) without violating Beethoven's copyright !
And that's what the people in the future era would be facing, if we allow our copyright laws to be altered to suit the greedy lawyers.
Hopefully one day someone will get to their senses and stop all these madness.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Its like most other things, it'll probably react like a sine wave; people buying things up and not thinking -to- noone buying anything because of the greed of corporations.
People know when things are hokey or not. They won't let things get too far out of control. When corporations see that they can't attract a base of consumers for their product, they'll change their business model to something looser and more attractive.
Joe
--
Peace has had *enough* chances, baby. It's time to give Violence a chance. -- GuilloTina
Fairer system? What are you talking about? There's something called a market economy that you're dealing with here, and the only way that you could possibly make it fairer is to take the damn government out of it completely.
What could be fairer than this: they have a commodity. They want a price for that commodity. They don't force you to pay that price. If you want it enough, you pay, and if you don't, you don't pay. It's very simple. If they start charging more and more for their product, well, that's what the market will bear, and if people are willing to pay that much, then they have no right to complain about high prices.
In short: a price becomes too high or a license becomes unacceptable the second you decide that access to the product (or intellectual property) isn't worth adhering to the license or paying the price. Complaining while still buying and using what you're complaining about is sheer hypocrisy. Breaking the law to obtain access to whatever you're not willing to pay for is downright criminal and should be punished harshly. They don't let you go into Tower Records and tape CD's out of the listening stations, why should the Internet be any different?
In short: if the industry's terms are unacceptable, don't deal with the industry. Theft is not an acceptable solution (it should, in fact, be punished very harshly). Clear enough?
You know, if an questioned item is not backwards compatible with perviously used media/algorythms/programs/whatever, then it is really not that much of an advance forward.
We are at a technologicl point where we can do this. It is a question of if a producer is willing to do it because of cost issues of adding that feature to the product or looing out on the consumers possibly having to buy titles on all new media.
Look at the Playstation 2. Backwards compatibility is a HUGE feature and everyone knows it.
Hhmmm.... this leads me to think. If I own a movie on VHS, do I not own the rights to watch this movie on DVD, or any other medium? I would love an answer to this.
i think the biggest problem is that many view the whole IP situation as an either/or one shot deal.
Unfortunately, it's not so simple. Courts have ruled that reselling CD's is ok - i can go down to my local Recycle Records and sell them a Metallica CD (not that i own any) for $5. At that point - they can sell it to whoever they want for however much they want. Metallica doesn't get to see one red cent. In this instance, it's easy to argue that you're paying for the CD - or you're paying for your right to own that music. 'nuff said.
On the other hand, you've got programs like Napster. I rip that very same Metallica CD and listen to it on mp3 - everyone's happy. But the minute I distribute any of those copies to friends, or anyone else for that matter...the RIAA throws a shit-fit. And we've already seen what Lars thinks of the good ole Nap.
So it pretty much boils down to two questions. 1)Are you paying for the music, or the right to listen to the music. and 2)If you're actually paying for the media....do you have the right to do whatever the hell you want with that media.
What does this have to do with legacy media? Vampire Hunter D perhaps? - Simple....the later cost shouldn't be a factor. 10 years after a movie comes out, everyone should have rights to view that movie for free. 10 years after a song comes out, everyone should have rights to listen to that song for free. Fuck royalties. If you're Don MacClean and you haven't written a good song in 20 years - you should either A)Get your fatass up and write another one or B)Get a new profession. Should i still get royalties off a shell script or a program i coded for a company 10 years ago? Hell NO!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
The consumer should simply avoid products that are based on closed, proprietary standards. This protects the consumer from falling victim to a company using its market power to discontinue and thrust something into obsolescence at its own whim to make more money off of the consumer.
As it is now, we have free reign. the internet is a virtual playground. no one has any idea how to control it. great. this proposed change to music distribution won't make a difference until the internet is policed/stifled/censored/etc. after all, what difference does it make it to release a new way to buy music if we can still get it for free? as for concerns about technological snafus (backward compatibility, costly software/hardware upgrades, etc), I don't know how they should handle it. in the past, it was your tough luck. if you bought a vinyl, you had a vinyl. you don't get a free upgrade to a CD just because technology jumped ahead. the argument here is, how should they handle the fact that a digital medium in this day and age can become obsolete within a matter of months?
How long till the Intertrust system is hacked?
I'm sorry, but WTF??!? It took me two or three reads to work out what "time-preference characteristics of consumers" meant. Why do people have to dress up what they mean as some kind of buzz phase?
They would be better off if they looked for ways to add value to the bits. Offer the customer something they will be willing to pay for, such as quality, convenience and selection.
I get the impression that these companies are "drinking the kool-aid" of Digital Rights Management because they yearn for a world where they can extract a fee for every use of their bits.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
quoth the poster:
... or a license becomes unacceptable ...
please explain to the class the meaning of the word "license" in a completely government-free economy? and exactly how it would be enforced? the [U.S.|World] does not operate as a free-market economy, nor did it ever, nor is it ever intended to.
come on - no one (re: very few) really wants the government out of the economy; people just want to make sure that the government benefits them more than the other guy.
copyright, patent, trademark - all those are 100% dependent upon the government, unless you want corporations building their own jails and private armies. in a truly givernment-free society, only one person would need to pay $20 for the latest Britney Spears cd; everyone else would pay whatever it cost the first person (or second, etc.) to rip it.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Spammy bastard.
(That's how you get to the point, when there is one!)
You know I can't tell the difference between copper and gold connectors. I also can't tell the difference between CX and DX options on a Honda Civic. But the fact remains that I need the DX because my neighbor has a CX and I need the gold because my friend has copper.
If they make it better, well we all know that somebody will pay for it. If for nothing else but to out do someone.
Kate
_________________________ Visit me at http://pornforcomputers.com
If the media giants hope to stay alive, they will have to adapt. Currently, they are trying to take control by offering downloadable music in proprietary formats with strict 'copy protection'. Ideally, they would like to charge a person $0.25 every time they listen to a song, but this sort of pricing scheme turns off consumers. Per use charges limit the freedom of the consumer, if only psychologically. This is one of the reasons that all-you-can eat style entertainment is the most popular. People spend $60 a month on cable movie channels, and the majority of internet accounts sold today are unlimited access.
So, perhaps a subscription based model to all the media you could ever want is the answer. Rather than having to download amateurly ripped MP3s from the bogged down cable modems of Napster users, the consumer could pay $80/month and have access to all the media they could ever want, with a guaranteed level of signal quality, and from fast dedicated servers. The average person probably doesn't spend more than this on their monthly entertainment anyways, so the media giants might make even more money than they do today.
This sort of revolutionary change is similiar to the outcry the movie studios had when VCRs first came out. They claimed that the technology would put them out of business, when in fact VCRs spawned a whole new distribution method in the form of video rentals and the retail sales of videos. Perhaps these media giants should stop being scared of 'new technology', and instead use it to offer new services to the consumer.
Download a fast DirectX Tetris Clone [276 k]
As the proud ownder of 3000 vinyl, 33.3 rpm, Long-Playing records I gotta say:
1. Yes, people will put up with it. There were a few holdouts against the CD revolution (yrs truly included... digital is for data, art is inherently analog). But the "upgrade" went smoothly.
2. Dramatic switches in media are rare because they are truly qualitative switches. Sure, the introduction of the caseette tape in the 60's looked threatening to the vinyl record, but ultimately they were both analog formats. A $5 cable from Radio shack allowed for conversion to the new medium. Currently, it's all digital so media switches are even less dramatic. We won't need a $5 cable... just a free piece of software.
3. Hardware for old media will always be an non issue. Try finding a turntable today. Now try finding one that plays 78's. Not easy, but far from impossible... as long as a reasonable amount of old media exists, the hardware to use it will be available. Period. Sure that hardware may be "obsolete" but if you're using "obsolete" media and are willing to put up with the limitations of said media, the hardware won't be an issue at all. Player piano rolls suck. So do player pianos. But they're no worse than they were a hundred years ago. If you want better sound, get a better system (media and hardware), but if you like player pianos, you're getting the same quality as you would have 100 years ago.
2 1337 4 u!
Discrimination based on time is essentially no different from any other form of price discrimination. By this, I mean that the ultimate goal of a supplier is to sell to each customer at the maximum value that customer is willing to pay for the product.
In a one-price system, supply meets demand at an equilibrium point that describes an agreed fair price for the system as a whole. The graph looks somewhat like a big 'X' marking the spot. Charging less gets you more customers, but revenue is maximized by targeting that point. Now, there's a lot of empty space under that graph where the product could be sold for a different price. If you can get the people who are willing to pay more to do so, you get more revenue. If you can then charge less (down to production cost) to those who are under the price, they suddenly become customers.
Anyway, a good example of this is movie tickets. They charge an adult rate that covers the highest-paying people. Then they give discounts for those they can determine are not willing to pay as much -- elderly, students, early birds, large groups, etc. By this practice, and in the future by determining a finer pattern by which to discriminate, they maximize revenue for a product that essentially has fixed production (operating) costs.
Now we turn our attention to the topic at hand, that being temporal discrimination. Everything of utility is more valuable now than it is in the future. This is the essense behind interest. A dollar now is worth more than the same dollar later. And it's not because of inflation or exchange rates or any of the other red herrings we have thrown at us. It's simply a natural preference related to the excercise of choice. As long as we hold on to that dollar, we may change our minds about what to do with it. It may become valuable in a way we don't see at the present.
Going back to movies, an efficient way for a theatre to take advantage of temporal price discrimination would be to charge a lot for a movie on opening weekend, then allow the price to decrease until the film is finally dropped from the theatre. All the while, the price would be set such that the theatre continues to be filled and thus revenues are maximized.
So what does this have to do with a debate about being allowed to continue to use music in the future? It is simply that there is nothing special about this particular brand of price discrimination. If the People decide that the practice is evil and un-American, it can be prohibited. If we decide that each customer should be allowed the liberty of deciding for himself what he will or will not pay, then so be it.
The point is that this should be done across the board, not cherry picked by industry based on what the hot topic for the day is.
Nerd Rock In Progress
Do you work for the MPAA, RIAA, or Microsoft? Notice, large quantities of screen real estate being taken up by "nothing", serving no purpose, obstructing the view of useful material. Just curious. As for my stuff, anyone who can succeed in making a digital copy of my stereo, is more than welcome too.
First of all, I'll agree with those who say that this question makes very little sense. From what I can gather, there are two main thrusts to this question. The first involves "intellectual property" and the second involves devaluation. Both questions can be answered simply: the market decides.
/. ...
First of all, you can theoretically charge whatever you want for music/movies/etc. I say theoretically because nobody in their right mind will pay $80 for a Metallica CD. The market has pretty much decided that people will pay around $12-$18 bucks for a CD on the average. Now, with Napster, the market is undergoing a sea change. Digital distribution means that the consumer doesn't have to pay $12-$18 for the same music. Now, there has to be a balance between free (Napster) and ripoff (RIAA). It's all a matter of time. Somehow, people will figure out how to make money of MP3 and Napster. Those that charge too much will get axed out by consumers, those who charge too little will starve to death. In the end, the market will tend towards equilibrium until the next Napster comes along to change the system. So basically, any commerical enterprise in a free market system is driven by the consumer. People will pay what they want, be it a micropayment for a single song, or $80 for one of those Diablo II collector's edition sets. (One wonders if Blizzard knew that everyone in their dog would buy this game, so the jacked up the price $10-$20 above normal knowing that the consumers would still take it.)
Now, the second part of the question. Obviously, you're not going to pay as much for an old Abba CD as you would for Britney Spears or whatever moron is on the top 25 this week. Everything devaluates unless it's wine or Renoirs. Once again, the market is going to decide what price they're willing to pay. That's why they have bargain bins.
Now, in the case of hardware and other equipment, that's also a real no-brainer. If you're buying from Bob's House of Komputers, yeah, you're probably not goning to get any support after the three second lifespan of the business. Once again, caveat emptor. That's why name brands are always arond. Sure, you may pay up the wazoo for a Sony, but you know that they're going to be around for a while.
Finally, here's the gratuitous Open Source plug. Because older hardware has probably already been hacked, you can usually find OSS drivers for it. Yeah, they won't be shiny and new, but they'll work, and they might even have some developers still working on them. In the end, even an old 486 has value. My POS 486 built by companies that no longer exist still serves as my OpenBSD firewall. Once again, the market (me) places value in a commodity (that POS 486) based on what they perceive it to be worth (not much, but I'll still pay a few bucks for it).
So, now I've managed to praise both market-driven laissez-faire capitalism and Open Source in one diatribe. All I need to do is put in a plug for gun rights (NRA4EVER) and mention how in the post-Columbine world geeks are perceived as social outcasts and I'll have managed to impersonate ESR *and* Jon Katz. If I only had a Beowulf cluster of petrified young actresses pouring hot grits down my pants I could be a one-man
So it pretty much boils down to two questions. 1)Are you paying for the music, or the right to listen to the music.
Actually, technology has made this question obsolete. The question isn't whether you have some "right" to listen to an mp3. It's whether you have the means.
The RIAA will crack down on Napster. If the win that case, they'll go after gnutella users, and mp3 irc channels/ftp sites/newsgroups. The simple act of evading this persecution guarentees your "right" do listen to that music. If the RIAA, MPAA, and other four-letter words had their way, there would be NO rights at all. My friend, you must create your own rights. And the Internet lets you.
2)If you're actually paying for the media....do you have the right to do whatever the hell you want with that media.
Once again, it doesn't have anything to do with money. Money was simply the old way to control access to media: if you paid cash, you got a CD. Nowadays, as the corporate assaults on personal rights is at almost unbelievable proportions, the way to prevent access is to attempt to make it impossible (or not worth the effort) to physically obtain a copy of an mp3 file. Their tactics in this new battle are lawsuits and threats, rather than the old practice of price-fixing. It's all the same in the end: the RIAA will continue to control all but a few, those who have the time, equipment, and tech-savvy to evade them.
It's a crazy world ahead, but no worse, I think, than what we have now.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
Ok, I keep seeing these sentiments, and I'm getting very goddamn sick and tired of them.
So-called 'intellectual property' has very little in common with physical property, or the rights thereto appertaining.
Property is property. There's a reason that we use the same noun in both phrases.
For a crime of larceny or 'theft' to occur, several elements must be present, not the least of which is the taking from the possesion of the owner.
Must it?
The copying of music or software cannot be theft, because the 'stolen' object is still in the posession of the owner.
Wrong. The owner's power to sell his work is reduced, and its control over its distribution is reduced. Both these things have been stolen from him. How is this not theft?
The main question that has never been answered is what security system out there can actually work. All these dumb startups can proclaim to have some system that does x, y, and z, but really once the encryption is broken it doesn't matter.
A DIVX type system, even without circumvention, won't succeed because consumers have rejected it, and will reject any other pay per play system that is released.
Therefore I beleive that in the end, any business model will have to rely on some level of trust with the consumer, for these additional reasons:
* You can't throw everyone in jail for copyright infringement. We already have the highest incarceration rate in the world, which is under increasing scrutiny as it is. Seeing a 13 year old that was running napster being hauled off to jail on the 5 o'clock news will turn into a PR nightmare for all parties involved.
* The government is inefficient, and increasingly under corporate control, but I think they still understand (I beleive this more so after Hatch's comments a few days ago) that if the US is to maintain technological leadership, it can't allow "old world" copyright laws to continue to dominate. The longer they do, the more any new technologies will get sucked directly into the legal system from where they will not return, while China, Japan, Europe, etc goes along with the new technology and finds a way to make it profitable.
* Capitalism in general. American consumers have been trained to have very little morality when it comes to how they spend their money, and simply buy the lowest price product if possible (of course advertising/marketing can change that, but this basically holds true here). They don't care about what affect those purchases might have on the world and others (fuel inefficiet SUV's for example). Now the corporations get to reap what they sow. Mp3's cost nothing more than the bandwidth you need to get them, and the risk of being punished is near zero.
* Bandwidth. This is a legitimate issue today when napster use might clog up an entire university's bandwidth, but the day will come when downloading mp3s doesn't bog down the network, and limit the number of mp3s that can be passed around day to day.
* The internet as a consumer/social force. This is highly debateable as to how much of an effect it has but the internet is obviously suited well for consumer empowerment. I think a lot of the reason DIVX failed was because of all the websites that proclaimed how pathetic it really was. These websites are all run by regular consumers, and therefore gave a fairly unbiased debate. Magazines and other corporate controlled sources tended to give DIVX a lot more credit than it deserved (although even they were fairly rough on it). Now I'm not claiming this will eventually lead to the end of capitalism and some sort of marxist revolution, but I think I see a consumer attitude forming of "we're not going to take this BS anymore."
Based on this I think at best record companies could get a monthly flat rate pricing model for unlimited unrestricted music access, similar to how ISP's charge for their service. With the unrestricted (no copyright) measures comes the trust. It might be able to work. All media have had to deal with piracy for some time now, granted today's issues make it tougher to deal with. In the past, oh 20 years maybe, piracy was kept low by making the barrier to piracy fairly high, keeping the number of people involved low. Today that barrier is near 0, making it very hard for this to work. Consumer "morals" might be the only hope.
Personally I don't care if it works or not. If it doesn't, I think we end up with copyright anarchy, after all the blood has been shed and the dust has settled. I'd love to see copyright go away and artists live on small donations from whoever likes them enough. That way you get artists who are in it for the music, not the money, something sorely lacking today.
Since technology is today's driving force for the economy, I think it wins be default. For once the headless monster might inadvertantly work in favor of the average guy.
It's new: Pay-Per-Thought; :)
Each time you think about it,
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Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
There would be no Linux users and nobody would build their own machines. Nobody would drive Saturn, they would all drive big ol' Fords.
Kate
_________________________ Visit me at http://pornforcomputers.com
The question I have is: Is it OK to tape a song played on the radio and then distribute it? It seems to be public domain. It seems, however, that once I distribute that recording in my own way (ie, Napster, etc), I become a Law-Breaking Grab-ass and Dr. Dre cuts off my Napster login.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
the biggest argument audiophiles have is digital vs. analog.
as somewhat of an audiophile, i can argue that i do hear the difference between vinyl and say, a CD, or an mp3.
believe me - NOTHING sounds as good as a fresh record just pulled out of the sleeve. No hissing, no nothing. And you can hear everything...the only argument is that most shit is being recorded digitally anyway so the digital to analog conversion makes the argument moot. However, originally recorded works, especially jazz and blues, are best when heard on a turntable. Anyone who says different either A)Is a technophile (the slashdot choice) - or B)Doesn't know good music anyway.
As for copper or gold connectors...i really don't care enough - that's a VERY discreet difference.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I think it is scary that the motives of most (if not at all) big media distribution companies is to eliminate the ability to own a copy of anything. I don't want a pay-per-view life. Microsoft also wants to do this with it's .NET OS... Pay-per-use computing. It leaves consumers powerless. I hope they all go the way of the DivX (the Circuit City one, not the video compression method)
As it is now, we have free reign. the internet is a virtual playground. no one has any idea how to control it. great. this proposed change to music distribution won't make a difference until the internet is policed/stifled/censored/etc.
Exactly. The Internet is, and will remain a medium of free speech. This is why we must remain vigilent and resist all attempts at corporations to destroy the censorship-free nature of the net. Why did SDMI fail? Because the users (ie, us) refused to accept it. Score one for the good guys.
how should they handle the fact that a digital medium in this day and age can become obsolete within a matter of months?
Unlike physical media, you can just run a program to convert files to different formats. I'm sure there will be away around it.
-- Floyd
-- Floyd
It doesn't make sense after all isn't the original intent to protect the creator? I think now we are just trying to protect the rights of those companies that often for example give musicians crappy music contracts. Why?
I hope to god people aren't listening to today's music in 125 years so much that it needs a copyright.
Kate
_________________________ Visit me at http://pornforcomputers.com
When I think foward, trying to understand why big corporations want legislature such as the DMCA, UCITA other recently passed legislation, I do not think that obsolete technology is what they have in mind. Quite the opposite.
Big corporations are already accustomed to paying annual licensing fees. I think the manufactures that are supportive of the current movement in copyright law is trying to tone that model down to the end user.
Rather than selling office suites or software, they now maintain ownership even if you happen to get the media. I think in the long run, the plan on the table is that there will be no media. I think it will start with distribution across the wire, and eventually be replaced with no distibution whatsoever. What better way to control their 'rights' to their copyright than to control the access altogether.
I think we will see big corporation supportive of next generation Internet access to bring large bandwidth to the masses. I think that is all part of the big picture for the future.
Instead of going to your local store to 'rent' software, of course, by dropping your $50-$1,000to buy the pretty box with the CD's inside, you would access this through one of the readily available ASP's that are available in the new corporate world. Instead of installing the software, you will run it on their servers. You will pay a annual or monthly fee to 'rent' time to use the software.
To big business, this model will be ideal. No longer will they need armies of IT professionals to maintain their software. The cost of their software AND their overhead in their IT department can be reduced to one annual contract with one or two ASP's, and every computer on their network will be covered. Big business will gladly trade people on payroll for a larger annual contract with outside sources. Why? It costs a *lot* of money to employ people, a lot more than their salaries. When approached with this model, big business will be inclined to pay larger fees for outsourcing their products to ASP's than they are currently willing to spend of software alone. Their cutbacks in their IT departments will more than make up for the additional overhead of software, the bottom lines will be better, shareholders make more money and everyone is happy. Especially the software manufacurers that are now recieving more money than they ever have per year, and that income will come year after year, forever.
The average consumer does not understand terms like 'cost of ownership' as intimately as the majority of the readers here do. They will not understand that paying $30 a month forever is more expensive than putting out $300 for software they can take home and 'own' (in their own minds, at least, they have a tangible product, so they own it).
The manufacturer's, however, understand this problem all to well. They realize that instead of offering a $300 package, they would prefer the residual long term payout. Kinda like a loan, but the consumer is not buying anything. They will have the best of both worlds. No one uses their product or infringes on their copyright without their knowledge, and they have a promised income.
Once this distribution method becomes a reality, and I firmly believe it is growing to that point as we speak, we will see more and more software moving to this business model.
The PR departments for these companies will love the entire process. They will be all to eager to explain to the average consumer that their software will never be obsolete. They will always have the most recent copy of the software. They will never have to suffer through an upgrade again. And they can access their software from every PC, PDA and toaster oven on the planet. As explained above, I think that selling this model to big business will be a no brainer. Once a couple of large corps are hooked, the rest will fall in line in order to remain competitive.
And, if all this pans out as I think some manufacture's hope it will, do not fool yourself into believing for a second that it will not propogate to other industries. Movies and music industries would be thrilled to have a method to turn a $100 per year customer into a $19.95 per month customer that owns nothing.
Your favorite movie or song track will always be available regardless of what changes technology take in the future. Your collection will never be threatened by fire, the elements, or theft. That will all be promised by the manufacturer.
And it will simply be an added bonus to these manufactures to cut out every distribution step between them and the end consumer. Will prices fall? Sure, but not nearly enough to cover the change in price between insert your favorite movie production house and the video store on your street where you bought your last movie. The average consumer will see they can save $5 on this movie buying into this system over paying the guy down the street for 'yesterdays' technology that degrades in time and may be lost forever if their house burns to the ground...
So of course we now have "the artists"... And how it hurts them. I want to know why we need rock stars who are millionaires. Digital media won't kill live concerts and - stop me if I'm wrong - but I've heard of people making an honest living by performers. Modern music might actually be worthwhile if musicians were more entertaining...
So why do we have to perpetuate the music-industry-inspired childhood fantasy of the Rock Star who "loves to drive in his Jaguar" and "always ate at the steak bar"... "Welcome my son! Welcome to the machine!"...
Wasn't it (haha - idealistically) supposed to be that "the artists" were musicians because they loved their music above all else?
It is OK for you to record off the radio and play for your self until the tape wears out. It is not OK for you to copy that tape and give it out in any format whatsoever. At least to the best of my understanding.
The polarisation of views from the share everything (FSF) to everyone is a selfish individual...
Everyone seems to assume that we have only those two possibilities with regard to misic or other similar IP. However would it be legal if someone talks to all her neighbors, and each neighbor contributes one cent. Let's say there are 2500 neighbors, and total proceeds are $25.00. This money is then used to buy one CD or DVD. Would it be legal for all 2500 neighbors to share that CD or DVD? IANAL, but it seems that indeed they are co-owners, and nobody got more right on that IP than anyone else.
Obviously, the seller still loses, assuming that seller wants all the money it can get - but how fair this would be?
If you want society, in the form of the government, to spend time and money on creating and maintaining a system of property rights, along with the enforcement mechanisms, there are going to be strings attached. The system is going to have to be in the public interest, providing tangible benefits to society, not just to the "owners" of property.
Not at all. If the owners of property are the ones paying for the upkeep of the system, then they should be the ones who get to decide how it works. If you bought 51% of the stock in a corporation, you'd be pretty damn pissed if you didn't get to call the shots, right?
All of the "natural rights" in the world are worthless if there is no remedy for their violation.
In my experience, "natural rights" are a concept paraded around by the lazy and apathetic when they want someone to hand their rights to them on a silver platter. The very concept of "natural rights" is misguided -- at the most primal level, you do not have any rights. None. You have as many rights as you can make sure you can get.
Assume static demand, perfect information, and atomic transactions; if 1024 people are willing to pay $1 for the new Britney Spears single, then the first 512 are willing to pay $2 (because on average, they'll each sell one copy and wind up paying $1 net), the first 256 are willing to pay $4 (because they'll sell a copy at $2 to one of the second 256, and another one at $1)... until the first guy to buy it ponies up $1024 to Britney. If Britney's smart, she sells at $768 and lets the surplus cash go to the first people to buy -- a fan's not going to pay $768 for a single no matter what the math says, but a record executive would if he knew there was a buck in it. In this case, there's room for everyone to make a 33% return on whatever their investment is (minus the $1), essentially instantly. My faith in human greed compels me to believe that VCs would be banging down the figurative doors to invest at the high levels, bridging the gap between the $768 Britney got and the $8 that a fan might be willing to pay, if he knew he'd get most of it back.
So if everyone does their homework, the artist gets the lion's share of the profits, the VCs do the VC thing (getting paid for risking money), the consumer gets data dirt-cheap, and we don't need any of this copyright bullshit.
Of course, some smirking anarchist can buy the single at $512 and instantly start offering it at $1, in which case the price plummets and the VCs take a bath. Wait, what was the problem again?
Obviously, it's not this simple... but in the thirty seconds I've been thinking about it, I haven't been able to think of a really bad way it's not that simple. You'd need some tricky work with MD5/signatures to prevent cheaters, maybe restrict selling prices to powers of 2 to keep people from selling at $1023.99... huh. Your negative feedback is appreciated as always.
By reading this post, you have already agreed that this idea is originated, owned, and controlled by me. You are expressly forbidden from implementing, writing down, talking about, saving to disk, reverse-engineering, or criticizing this idea. You may not think about this idea for more than five minutes at a time. By accepting this license, you agree to be bound by all its terms, whether legal or illegal. This license may change at any time, in which case you are bound by both the old and new licenses. Where terms of this license conflict with reality, reality shall be deemed at fault. Please bend over and prepare for the installation of the Customer Service Module.
If you want to talk shit about Don McLean you better know what the fuck you're doing. Off the top of my head I can name quite a few hit songs he wrote (in either U.S. or U.K.) aside from American Pie.
They include: Vincent (Starry Starry Night), And I Love You So, Everyday (Cover of Buddy Holly's song), Castles In The Air, Can't Blame The Train, and others.
Not to mention the general influence his music has had on modern music. American Pie was one of the first big pop songs to have such a length, and definitely has lasting influence. Madonna covered it recently and made a little hit of out it as well. By the way I also find it prudent to mention that Don McLean was able to retain copyrights to his original works through good negotiation, so he can still live pretty comfortably off his old hits. True, he hasn't has a huge hit in the last decade, but he worked his ass off and made lots of good, popular music in his time. He deserves to be able to live well from his work if he wants. Needless to say, he does tour still, and in fact appeared recently at a big July 4 festival with the Boston Pops on A&E.
But maybe I'm overreacting. Perhaps you were talking about the mediocre NBA player Don MacLean instead, at least judging by your spelling.
Yeah, Saturn is only a part of the BIGGEST CAR MANUFACTURER IN THE WORLD.
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GetSystemMetrics(SM_SECURE) == FALSE
1. In general I think it is difficult for a common media format used by the general public to become obsolete and un-supported (Betamax doesn't count due to the video cassette wars). Something as common as audio cassettes for example were superceded (by CDs or DATs) many, many years ago but remain incredibly common. As for art being inherently analog, that certainly leads to philosophical question of whether art exists on it's own or does it exist through the perception of one. If the latter, have I introduced you to my friend Nyquist?
2. Vinyl to cassette was a very major step from physical recording to magnetic recording. This step led to one of the most dramatic changes in information storage. While audio cassettes are analog, their computer counterparts were digital which introduced magnetic recordings as a very versatile media especially due to the capability of being rewritable in both the analog and digital forms. CD's are just another form of digital recording. So I guess we agree, the switch from analog to digital was the point when everything changed (for the better!).
3. Any ideas where I can get a good 8 track player? I still have a some tapes that I used to listen to in my first car.
The whole idea of democracy is predicated on the notion that "the people" are capable of governing themselves. In order to ensure that "the people" can do this well, the freedom of speech was guaranteed (in the US Constitution), as a means of fostering an "intellectual commons".
Just to add a little extra incentive (to encourage "the people") to contribute to this commons, they also added a limited notion of copyright, so that people could reap a fair profit from innovative ideas -- for a limited time -- before those ideas pass into the public domain (to the benefit of all).
The key to all this, of course, is that time limit (14 years, originally, wasn't it?). Without that time limit, you essentially allow individuals to stake a claim on an idea. It's as if we've all become gold-rush prospectors, grabbing up choice real-estate in idea-space...
Think about it. You can't come anywhere close to mimicking a Disney cartoon character without risking a nasty lawyer-letter. The castle in the theme-park may be just a mock-up, but the one in idea-space is a very real barrier to the would-be trespasser on Disney's "intellectual" property.
Simply put: this has got to stop!
Allowing extra-long copyrights and patents smothers the free exchange of ideas, which turns that all-important "intellectual commons" into a no-trespassing zone.
-- TaiwanJohn
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This is probably what will happen: humans will continue to evolve, and start to use post-human technologies to augment their sensory systems.
Because of this, 44Khz CD's and MP3s will sound different, and people will be claiming that at the start of the digital revolution, we lost a lot of heritage due to the digital conversation.
(I don't know whether it will happen - I'm just a big cynic!)
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
We can only realy percieve into the 22Khz range, and falling as we get older.
The reason why we need the higer frequencies that that they constructively interfere to produce virutal tones, or beats, at a lower part of the spectrum.
Most of the new 'flat' speakers use this principle along the way ASFAIK. (Granted I only know what I have read in T3 magazine)
So sampling upto 96kHz as I think SCD does will produce a better reproduction of the sound, at least when you take into account the acoustice of hte room.
But then I could well be talking rubbish.
Good point. MP3 removes the "lock" from music CDs, and consumers have shown that many cannot be "trusted" with this freedom.
However, the djini is out of the bottle already. There simply is no way to go back to the good ol' days when it was hard to copy/share music with digital perfection.
The original poster mentions DIVX, in this regard. The only way for the record companies to prevent Napster-type "theft" would be to stop releasing music in CD format. Sure, they can force manufacturers to make CD players with the latest boneheaded copy-protection scheme, but there are millions of "unsafe" players in the world, which aren't going to disappear anytime soon.
Owners of those players are going to demand new releases in CD format for years to come. The quality of CD music is already so good that the record companies don't really even have the option of enticing us to "upgrade" to a "protected" format because the quality is so much better.
CDs (and legacy players) will be with us for a long time. Ergo, MP3s will be with us for a long time. The record companies will simply have to learn to live with these cold hard facts.
Hell, why not just charge 10 cents per Napster download... and send the money directly to the artists (or to the record company, if the artist's contract requires it).
Go, micro-payments! (Check out PayPal.)
-- TaiwanJohn
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The difference between reselling that Metallica CD and sharing it with a few thousand of your closest net-friends is that in the former case there still is only the one CD, while in the latter case thousands of copies have been made and distributed. These are two very different situations from the perspective of those who assert rights to the recording (and profit from those rights). That's not to say that there is anything "natural" about a one-medium, one-copy rule. But that is pretty much the condition under which the current system of music distribution has evolved, for good or for ill.
The problem with a purely free-for-the-downloading approach to music is that there is no money in it for those who make the recordings. Recording music would be pretty much a hobby activity, or at best one subsidized by musical performances. And making good recordings isn't cheap, with $1500 microphones, $40,000 mixing consoles, and so on. True, digital technology is going to reduce some of these costs a bit, through hard-disk recording and the like, and some forms of music (computer- based electronica, for instance) are especially cheap to produce this way. But recording live performances is always going to be labor- and gear-intensive, with at least a certain amount of expensive equipment and personnel required to produce a quality result. All-free, all-the-time isn't good for music or musicians, or ultimately, music-listeners. (And those luddites who feel that such a situation will benefit live music enough so as to be a positive trade-off -- save your arguments for later.)
So the question boils down to this: how can music recording make enough money to be self-sustaining when anyone can make copies at will, for free? The fact is, it can't. And unlike free software, where services to, with, and about a free product provide ample economic opportunities, a recording musician can't make much money with a free recording.
The RIAA members may grossly overcharge for their services, but at least sometimes musicians get recorded and paid. The 'net provides an alternative to what the RIAA does in manufacturing and distributing recorded media, and at much less cost; they want to be able to continue to make fat profits on a system that is rapidly becoming antiquated until they find a way to fill their money pipeline via electronic distribution. You and I don't expect, or want, that to happen. But the fact remains that free distribution won't pay for artists and it won't pay for recordings to be made. What will replace the RIAA members, and how will it make its money? Answer the latter question, and the former will take care of itself.
I personally don't think that having individuals rent music is a particularly viable solution to financing recordings -- I just don't see any enabling technology on the horizon that the average music listener would accept. And that's what this discussion boils down to. But I could be wrong: this could be a very fruitful discussion. It's not going to go anywhere if we keep focused on RIAA vs. Napster, however -- I don't see either of them as representing viable solutions.
I don't think anything in the physical world is permanent, even digital data in its pure form, independent of storage medium. But with a few good copies of a "work" even if some copies deteriorate good copies can be reproduced almost indefinitely - at least for a human lifetime.
If people desiring permanence use only open data formats, then a means of playback or translation into a more modern, open format is always possible.
However, I have noticed a trend here at slashdot which is the "when linux supports all my Windows games I"ll stop using Windows" syndrome. This applies to continued use of all kinds of closed, proprietary storage and playback sysems when free, open ones which may not be exactly the same but are roughly equivalent are available. An operating system can also be considered a general purpose "playback" program for all kinds of data, so the same principle applies.
Maybe it is a generational thing (I'm middle aged) but I fail to see why so many people just must have the latest game or music recording. Most of these games have little or no long term appeal and most of the music is crap. I like all kinds of music but an excessive diet of boring, repetetive, mechanical rap and heavy metal is more a form of anesthesia than entertainment.
There is so much really great music available which is free, and there are enough good games for Linux to keep one busy for a while. As has been pointed out in another post, one can only get so many frames per second which are meaningful to a human's perception, and only so much clarity in sound which makes a difference. (Most of us are tone deaf anyway and so long as the piece carries the rythm and melody it really provides the needed musical content).
So long as a large majority of people simply must have the latest piece of commercial crap culture or techno-gimmick, then they will fall prey to the planned obsolesence syndrome. This include MOST Slashdot visitors who continue to use Windows on the excuse that their favorite game (correction, the one they are playing this week) isn't available on Linux, or that the boss requires homework in MS Word format. Come on, if using Windows is a condition of employment then the employer can and does supply office laptops for such homework assignments (and for out of town trips).
While in one sense technological change creates an opportunity for even more lockin and planned obsolescence, it opens possibilities for an escape from that. I really don't think wearables have much of a future because consumers will reject the concept of being cut off from the physical world. Nobody likes to have blinders on. But, something like small and extremely powerful systems which consist of nothing but a small cube you can put in your pocket and a flexible or rollup display pad and keyboard will probably replaced desktops as we know them (and serve the same function) in 10-15 years. These will also allow full hollographic projection with walk-in worlds like the Star-Trek hollosuites. So, you will be able to create your own games. Also, music synthesis will be much advanced allowing easy creation of *great* music by a non-talented geek. Nobody will have a need for commercial recordings or commercial games. I think these will be available for the masses at a reasonble price, too.
In many ways, Slashdot represents the same problem with planned obsolescence in the short lifetime of its stories. That is an intentional commercial gimmick to keep the suckers coming. It's almost impossible to craft a thoughtful post here because by the time you put it up the story is gone.
Unless your prefs are set to -1, nested, you are missing the best posts at Slashdot.
The link to "vocative phrase" is incorrect, it should go here, which is contained in Darling's Guide to Grammar and Writing.
is copyright law, which gives the author exclusive rights for a period of time, after which the work is open to the public.
At least that is the way it was written to work, but now the entertainment industry wants different rules.
Micropayments may be reasonable and fair some day. Pay a few pennies each time I listen to a song; don't pay more than a few pennies for a song I didn't like. However, I have two major problems with this kind of distribution mechanism:
1. continued access to old material
2. content integrity
[1] CDs have been available for almost 20 years and I still can't get reissues of a lot of my old LPs. As a consequence, a lot of excellent music has simply disappeared. The same is true of out-of-print books. Despite the technological ease of making digital material available for ever, I don't trust the publishing and recording industries to bother: they are much more concerned with pumping new releases and publications.
[2] The second issue, revisionism, is a little creapier: what if, say, Marianne Faithfull someday got embarrassed about the lyrics to "Why'd Ya Do It?" and decided to have them digitally redacted?
We are already being subjected to Orwellian news that gets revised between newscasts and altered according to the target "market".
"Bye, bye.... Miss... American Pie..."
"drove my Chevy... to the... levy..."
"but now I don't have to because of Priceline daht cahm"
"great for... airline tickets, hotel rooms, coats borrowed from James Dean... anything..."
"this'll be the day...... that I die... but I'll die happy, because of Priceline daht cahm... yeah"
[hired audience claps]
You know that Shatner actually has an album out of this talking songs crap...
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
Ignore him. He's trying to make everyone think he knows what he's talking about. Rather, someone else has told him what to say and now he's just regurgitating their words.
Why is this marked as a troll? This is a perfect example of what a JOKE the slashdot moderation system has become. ANY comment that doesn't follow the " Everything should be free, Linux is great and Microsoft sucks" line is marked down and lableled as a troll or flamebait. If you moderate at +1 or +2 you NEVER see an opinion that doesn't follow the line. Even the brainless folks who can't come up with anything better than fp, sp or tp get marked the same as this well thought intellegent comment. Give me a break.
Again, why is this a troll. This person actually can think for himself and formed an intellegent opinion that doesn't follow the party line so his comment gets marked down as a troll. What a joke. The people who mark these type of posts down are the ones who just don't "get it". The pro napster folks are obviously in the minority on this issue. Get over it and stop censoring any opinion you don't agree with.
I already pay in many cases more then 10 times what it costs to manufacture a CD, if I want it while it's new and before people are sick enough of it to dump it in the used bins (or more often I pay even more for things that are hard to get due to being import only releases, etc).
What I'm paying now is already the most I would be willing to pay for most of the product, for full rights to do what I want with it. As long as I'm not reselling it, I should be within my rights.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Okay, look. Either you want to live in a capitalist society, or you don't. Are you actually hoping for a truly socialist republic?
Right now, what we live in is a sort of mix between socialism and capitalism. Certain things are guaranteed you (supposedly) which does not include health care, so obviously it's incomplete. On the other hand, we have the right to do as we please (more or less) with at least sixty percent of our money even if we're in the uber tax bracket.
What's "fair" in a capitalist society is that we vote with our dollars. If you don't like the way a company does buisness, don't use their products. That's why we have laws against monopolies (which are not often enforced, I'll grant you) in this country; So that you do have that kind of freedom. Now if we could get DeBeers smacked down... ha ha. Never mind, that's my own little agenda.
The sad, true state of affairs is that people don't buy things unless they're aggressively marketed. One of the most talented blues musicians I know of (Who actually has several CDs out, they're not a total unknown) is virtually unknown compared to awful acts like the back door boys, and not carried in any local store. Marketing means more than content because people resemble sheep more than humans. It's your "fellow" humans who perpetuate the ridiculous anti-artist practices of the record companies. Try affecting them.
Oh, and as much as I approve of Orrin Hatch saying that the record companies are misusing and abusing the DMCA, I don't think he has a right to threaten to force them to make works available. However, I do think that a complete rework of copyright and patent law is necessary, but will not happen because of "special interest" (READ: Big Buisness) lobbying.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was thinking about the original intent of copyright and patent law: to allow the creator to enjoy for a limited time the fruits of their creative work, in order to encourage them to continue to do so.
Contrast this to the current state of affairs: most IP is owned by corporations; inventors are required to sign over rights to their employer as a matter of course; musicians and authors have to give up all rights to their original work just to get them published, etc, etc.
One way out of this mess to to say that IP is evil and should be abolished. But I really do think that a creator should have some say in the fate of his/her creation.
So I propose an alternate solution (not that this will ever be implemented, mind you). It's simple: change the law such that IP can only be owned by the inventor/creator/artist. The guy who registers the copyright/patent/whatever owns the IP. Period. He can license it, but he can't transfer, sell, or otherwise get rid of it. He retains final authority and control over its use. And unlike other forms of property, it cannot be bequeathed upon death: when the creator dies, his IP rights expire.
Now it is true that the current power-players in the IP world (like the record companies) can still use their position to force a creator to sign a totally unreasonable IP licensing agreement. However, as everyone here is well aware, there is a big difference (at least in principle) between a license to use/reproduce/etc and outright ownership. If nothing else, it would make it much easier for the creator to sue to nullify an unreasonable agreement.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Hi. Read this: http://www.kuro5h in.org/?op=displaystory&sid=2000/7/18/122257/231. Please don't b-slap me; this is important!
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.