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Tim O'Reilly Says Piracy is Progressive Taxation
Idmat writes "In Tim's latest opus, he reflects on the lessons of his experience as a publisher: (1) Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy, (2) Piracy is progressive taxation; (3) Customers want to do the right thing, if they can; (4)Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy; (5) File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers; (6)"Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service; and finally, courtesy of Larry Wall, (7)There's more than one way to do it. "
I think many people, like me, download music and then buy it. Artists like Moby are very positive about MP3's. Think about it, the artists themselves just want their music to be played and loved.. the money is just a bonus.
Ciryon
While Piracy does take away from some business it also generates others. It may not help the businesses that it "steals" from, but it doesn't truley damage them. A company such as Microsoft that makes billions of dollars really feels no pain. A ebook that has already been sold in stores for years does not miss a beat. I mean yeah it's nice to get something for free on the internet, but it is also really nice to get a brand new box of software, or a book still in it's plastic, or any number of other new bought from the store items
those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. -isaac asimov
Of course piracy doesn't hurt book publishers. How many writers work in the sea? Pirates only rob ships, you know.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
It's a resource allocation technique that's turned into a religion. Dogs, cats and bugs are all our fellow parishners; pissing on trees or whatever. But they're gland-driven robots- what's our excuse?
Really. We need to get over it.
This property-game is making the world worse.
But I agree with your comment.
Here's a quote from David Bowie
Trolling using another account since 2005.
You can find several O'Reilly books in PDF and HTML on Kazaa. Is it not a similar "loss in possible sell" for them just like software?
kedi
Someone who actually understands that other causes, like shoplifting, cost the MPAA/RIAA more money than pirating.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
You may not want to print these by yourself, especially if, unless you are a DTP professional) you don't have the required machines to have such a nice printout...
For me the quickest way is to order it for my Company.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Although, I might not agree with the point that most everybody who likes an mp3 will go buy the album, I do believe it helps more than it hurts.
If you like a particular band, not only would you be in the market for the album, you might also want their t-shirt, stickers for your box or what not. The only parties that would suffer from piracy, would be the recording industry. It's their business model that is flawed, thanks to the internet. Most of the $ spent on a CD doesn't go to the artist anyway.
Would an artist rather have 1 million listeners, where 5% buy the cd, and maybe something else, or 10,000 loyal listeners, and no further audience.
The biggest benefit of filesharing, as I see it, is it promotes better works. If someone turns out to be a one hit wonder, do they deserve the same compensation, as a band that consistently turns out good work??
Although the percentage of the audience that purchases the album, might drop, if the listener base increases at a greater rate, isn't this better?
This space intentionally left blank.
**WOOSH**... That was the sound of the parent post going STRAIGHT over your head :P
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Why do you need to print those books? Read them on your monitor and they are old already in a few months time anyway.
I used to believe that piracy at the personal level did no harm at all - spread the word, people still spent just as much money etc
But I met up with a friend I hadn't seen for a while the other weekend and he told me he now *only* get his music off the net and doesn't pay for any of it.
And this is someone who would previously have been a heavy spender in this area.
I think that this attitude - which seems prevalent particularly amongst my work colleagues is a Bad Thing - I don't care if we change the method of distribution or if the record companies go bust but it is important that the artists receive payment for their work.
Heh, as much as I hate replying to AC's, bravo, cause that shit was funny.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
I read computing books while travelling.
I don't want to buy 20 batteries to be able to read them on a screen.
I also don't appreciate to read on a screen.
Paper just does it... and I don't have to uprade it whenever the software editor's CEO wants to buy a new house/ferrari...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
The National Insurance Crime Bureau reports that insurance fraud costs the insurance industry an estimated $30 billion each year. Insurance fraud and accident staging costs the average American household approximately $300 each year in extra insurance premiums.
Now I don't KNOW if the same thing may happen in the software industry, but it occurred to me that there has to be SOME reason why these companies still make a huge profit despite rampant piracy. It only makes sense that the difference is being made up by the honest folks who actually pay for the software.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
I'd say that this is completely true. I myself and many (if not most) of my friends "pirate" software, movies and music frequently. In fact, we've got several terabytes worth of pirated material between us just among me and my closest friends. Does that mean we never buy software, movies or music?
Definitely NOT, in fact I've never bought as much software, movies and music as I do now. I've got a couple of shelves filled with game boxes, many of those from producers that would normally be far too obscure for me to purchase otherwise, had I not tried out their software in advance. Our DVD collection is starting to rival our VHS collection, and we shouldn't mention how much I've been to the movies recently. As for music... well, I never listen much to music anyway but thanks to the net I've had the opportunity to find performers I'd never think of buying normally.
If I find something I like, feel I have a use for or just plain want to support, I do the right thing and buy a copy of my own. My friends do too, and I think so do most people.
Maybe the ideas he develop aren't earthshaking in themselves (rather more like trying to burst through an opened door ^_-), but at least it's nice to see those arguments in an ordered & clearly presented way !
As many here i sometimes grab stuff from the net, but when i really enjoy i usually buy...
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
Pretty much right on the money. To sumerize for those who do not want to click and read (it is fairly long).
People for the most part are honest and will pay a resonable price for a product. When he says that P2P is a progressive taxation, he means that more music books and movies get exposure, which means that people will spend their money on more different things than just the Top 40 stuff they have access to. (Same thing most people have been saying since Napster).
On the other hand, actual selling of bootlegs is harmful because it dilutes the market for legitimate sales. However existing laws are enough to cover this. Finally, it ends in some options where possibly the media giants could come to some sort of agreement with ISPs to offer sort of like premium cable. Pay 60 a month for broadband and all the movies or music or whatever you can use off a local server.
Not a bad idea.
1.3 The Core of Unix
In recent times, more attention has been paid on the newer and more lightweight varieties of Unix: FreeBSD, Linux, and now Darwin -- the version of BSD Unix that Apple used as the platform for the new Mac OS X. If you've worked with the larger Unix versions, you might be curious to see how it differs within these new environments.
For the most part, basic Unix functionality differs very little between implementations. For instance, I've not worked with a Unix box that doesn't have vi (Section 21.7) installed. Additionally, I've also not found any Unix system that doesn't have basic functionality, such as traversing directories with cd (Section 1.16) or getting additional help with man (Section 2.1).
However, what can differ between flavors of Unix is the behavior of some of the utilities and built-in commands, as well as the options. Even within a specific Unix flavor, such as FreeBSD, installations can differ because one installation uses the built-in version of a utility such as make (Section 40.3) and another installation has a GNU version of the same application.
An attempt was made to create some form of standardization with the POSIX effort. POSIX, which stands for Portable Operating System Interface, is an IEEE standard to work towards application interoperability. With this, C programs written on one flavor of Unix should work, with minimum modification, on another flavor of Unix.
Unfortunately, though the POSIX effort has had some impact on interoperability, there still are significant differences between Unix versions. In particular, something such as System V Unix can differ considerably from something such as Darwin.
However, there is stability in this seeming chaos: for the most part, the basic Unix utilities and commands behave the same in all Unix flavors, and aside from some optional differences, how a command works within one environment is exactly the same as in another environment. And if there are differences, using the facilities described in Chapter 2 should help you resolve these quickly.
-- SP
See subject.
Am I the only one feeling that moral is a thing of the past? Piracy is wrong, period! While everyone agrees, that you don't steal from poor people, people are starting to go like:
"Company A has XXX Millions dollars, so they won't mind/feel the impact, bla bla".
Wrong! Morally you're not allowed to steal from rich people either. If you have some problems with a CD containing one good song and the rest is utterly bad, boycot the music company for producing crap. If you think movie XYZ is to expensive in the cinema, boycot the movie industry. If you've got something against a corporation, boycot them. Do not turn yourself into a pirate. It's just entertainment for Gods sake, you can easily live without.
Thomas S. Iversen
we've progressed where everyone regardless of race, color and creed are equal in the eyes of the law.
If you look through history you'll find this same retarded right-winger argument at every milestone. For one thing, homosexuals are NOT equal in the eyes of the law and even those who are "equal" are subject to the law's interpretation and enforcement, which is often less than ideal.
If people are poor (at least in America) it's their own damn fault. They should work harder and get educations, not look for government handouts.
So poor people should just go out and get a job? Are you hiring? wake up, our economy is far from perfect. Every time a manufacturing plant moves to Mexico, a city is destroyed. Thank god for NAFTA and unregulated trade, eh? You propose we don't need any progressive reforms? Tell that to the people writing software for FREE because there's no other way to compete with Microsoft.
Socialism just doesn't work, look at history.
Uh... you mean communism? Yeah, that didn't go so well, but communism isn't the ultimate goal of social reforms. If you look at history, you'll find that a simplistic black and white approach never works, whether it's to the left or the right.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Whatever this guy calls piracy, its still stealing and its still illegal. The 'fat cat bastards' are already being taxed progressively by the IRS.
It is simply not ethical to explain away one's criminal activity by claiming its fair because it hurts the rich and helps the poor.
I tend to disagree with this. I think it is safe to assume that a majority of the people in the US will always take the 'free' alternative if they can get away with it with ease. People says that "If the music industry let me pay $.50 per song to download in a unrestricted format, I would pay instead of steal" and while some would, most would still get their music from kazaa. The reason why we hear people on slashdot say this so much is that they know a system like this will never happen with the current RIAA. Instead they decide to use it as a poor moral justification to their illegal music swapping habit.
In conclusion: (1) People like stealing if it is anonymous, easy, and leaves no possibility of getting caught and (2) People need to stop trying to justify their actions as if it were some kind of morally justified duty bound civil disobedience
On a side note, I have gigs of downloaded mp3's but will not pretend that I have a good reason for breaking the law.
*hides from all the -1 flamebait mod points*
Tim who?
Someone infringes the GNU licence for something that's been around for years... That really does not hurt the original writer does it. Just wondering how the reactions would be then... IMHO it's the same thing
It reminded me of what Dickens used to do...
First he'd sell the book 3 chapters at a time, a set of three every month
Then he'd buy back all the chapters, Rebind them
Sell the books back to the people that he just bought the chapters from
Then he'd sell a "special edition" copy With a different coloured binder.
Made millions which was a wonderful way to "present the same information and the same product"
Why can't people just learn that people will be... Enthustiac enough do do the same thing with music and videos.
I still remember that about 10 years ago (before the majority of programs where released on CD-ROM, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it), nobody I knew bought their software. Everybody copied.
;)).
Nowadays, there is still a lot of copying going on (I have to agree on that), but almost everyone I know has tons of software they actually bought. So I guess that is going in the right direction.
About books, I know some people who downloaded some O'Reilly books from Kazaa but still most people buy their books (me too, because having a book in your hands is a way better feeling than reading it of your computer screen).
About movies, I think some gets lost there, but not a lot. If you have a good broadband connection downloading movies doesn't take a lot of time. After that you can create a VCD and use your DVD player to watch it (or you can watch it on your monitor, which I find not very comfortable, even if you have a 22"). The quality can be very, very good. So you might think a lot of money gets lost there, right? Wrong (I guess
People still want to see movies in a theatre. Nothing beats that atmosphere. And if you look at the amounts of money LOTR or Harry Potter raised (which is still way up there with blockbusters from the past), there can not be much loss there.
Maybe smaller (cult) movies suffer, but I guess not, because there is (and always has been) a select audience for them who still wants to see them in theatres.
Also, more people buy movies nowadays and we have DVD to thank for that.
About music, yes I think money gets lost there. It is really easy to download some MP3's of the Internet and burn them on CD. People will still buy albums, but only the once they really want to have (yes I know there are a lot of people who still buy tons and tons of CDs, but I'm talking about the majority here).
So money gets lost. And what does the music industry do? They try to sue people. Wrong, wrong, wrong. They *can't* stop this by trying to scare people. They have to find other ways for people to stop copying and buy their music again (or maybe they have to live with piracy but still find ways to convince people to buy their music). They have to find something that will do for music that DVD does for film. Don't ask me for a solution, but I think legal action is the wrong path.
So, in summary, the only market where money really gets lost is in music (or at least that is what I think).
A number of times I have attempted to subscribe to book publishers email list to get early warning of the release of books I may want to buy. If we eliminate all those publishers whose web sites plain didn't work, we are left all the rest that never sent out anything to their list. That's correct, not one of the publishers have ever announced anything on the lists I signed up for (and my email does work.)
I can't help but notice that more and more companies are losing the ability to sell to anything but a captive audience. Amazon sends me emails about Pratcett and Tolkein but nothing about the 10,000 other SciFi/Fantasy writers I may wish to read.
I'm here, I've got some cash, for Ghod's sake someone please try and sell me something new!!
Suck mah ballz sucka mc
The importance of this point cannot be overstated. Honestly, how many of us would burn far fewer CDs if they cost only $3 or $4? It's not even a matter having the CD cover or avoiding the trouble of downloading. I think most people feel more comfortable using the proper means. However, at $17 a CD and $25 a DVD many of us cannot afford the level of entertainment being thrown at us. So we pirate.
Publishers have the ability to reduce, perhaps eliminate, piracy by lowing the price to the point the majority of consumers are willing to pay. If Photoshop were $25 or could be used on a charge per time basis how many people would sit for hours trying to download it?
The prices are kept high for the obvious reason that publishers make more money with an expensive product and some pirating than they would with an affordable product and no pirating. Thus, since the publishers themselves choose to encourage piracy with overpriced products I have little sympathy for their whining.
It's not black or white, it's RIGHT OR WRONG! As in, communism, socialism, homosexuality, etc. are all just wrong.
screw those music companies if they are going to rip someone off for another cd with only one good song on it. simularly another cd with just a different cover or maybe a 'bonus' song on it. how many $15 disks did i buy that i didnt want once i listened to the damn thing? are there tracks i never finished? sure. nothing i can do about it either
... a nice box or animation on tv isnt enough to make me happy if the game is lame or behind by five years. especially in this world where nobody takes back returned games.
same thing with games as well
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
I've been working with computer book publishing in one capacity or another over the past 9 years: as a technical editor, author, and computer tech.
It used to be that you could go into your local chain bookstore such as Barnes & Noble and find at least 1 full back-to-back aisle of computer books of all kinds: self-help, programming, graphic arts, certification. Today, the whole book industry is depressed, but the computer book publishers have been hit hardest in my opinion.
No need for self-help books--the advances of both Windows and Mac OS, as well as their ubiquity among the public, means that fewer users need them. Geeks like us are never a large community and sometimes would rather slit our wrists than buy a book, so programming and administration books have dipped sharply in sales (I personally know--I co-wrote one of them).
So today, you'll find a few certification books along with a slightly larger group of programming books, and a very tiny amount of self-help books. If it weren't for Amazon, my book wouldn't be around.
In my opinion, part of the problem comes from the lack of true creativity or innovation in the industry. The Microsoft juggernaut and its "embrace and extend" philosophy (read: assimilate, compromise, or condemn) is partly to blame for this. The lack for computer industry members to consider something new or different is another part.
Not to toot Apple's horn (I do primarily work with Apple products and comment on them a lot here, so I might sound like a shrill), but they are among a handful of companies that are resisting the fears and dropping out new ideas--not anything necessarily innovative, but perhaps core application ideas that spur new ideas that sell products. Examples: "The digital hub," "multimedia," "desktop publishing," movie making, the use of USB, etc.
As I said, Apple and said companies didn't invent or design these ideas, but should be credited with its popularization in the industry, which forms the basis for a spurt of PC sales.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Socialist?????
Compared to Blair, Bush is a raving communist.
I'm slightly puzzled by why O'Reilly thinks a family piano is a "nostalgic affectation". I think it's good to play your own nice, FREE music!
Huh? Wha? Piracy = Progressive Tax?
As in, denile is a great thing. And some people (slightly less than 50%) think Progressive taxation is a great thing.
So, mix a little denile with something else (Progressive Taxation) and try and pin it on breaking the law.
"Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury.... It all comes down to this... Am I making any sense? Does this make any sense?
If Chubaka lives on Endor, then it's okay to Pirate."
--- On a side note, to say Progressive - Good, Regressive - Bad??????
Here are a couple good Regressives:
1. Gas Tax. A regressive tax. Helps encourage fuel economy, discourages frivolous travel.
2. Cigareete Tax. A regressive tax. Helps discourage smoking, less lung cancer and second hand smoke. Smoking is really for the rich actors and actresses so they can appear debonair on the silver screen.
has some interesting stuff to say, but he says it from the Publisher's point of view. I wonder, to what depth, has OReilly actually explored digital media , that he can make such authoritative comments. As of now, I'm very sure that record/movie houses are losing much more money than our man Tim. Anyhow, it's much easier to read a book printed on media, rather than an e-book. That's another reason why tablet pcs haven't become too popular.
Probably, movie/music houses make more money than publishers. And no amount of money can EVER, EVER be enough. Recently, one of these young pop guys was interviewed regarding the P2P situation. He was happy abt it.. when asked about money, he replied - he has enough. That made me think - Imagine, if you have made $10million of your album, why not put it up for free d/l, one year down the lane ?? It can be additional publicity for that artist's newer albums.......
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
So in the end who is the one to suffer from all boycots? Yes, the Artist...
Anyway in the current copyright laws copying is defined like stealing. In my opinion it is these laws that should change. An example:
If a say 'Moo!' and ten people listen to me, does that differ from when I say 'Moo!' and a billion people happen to listen? Yes, a lot more people are listening. No, the effort involved for me is the same. Are the words arriving in their ears copies of what I said? I guess they are not. So?
However if we were not talking about words but about songs recorded digitally the whole scenario changes because of copyright laws. Well in my thoughts it's in the nature of digital data and the way computers process it that its being copied.
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
Yeah, but you know, it only works to illustrate Tim's points. I mean, who would get his books from a /. AC, anyway...?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Don't let the term 'New Labour' fool you - with a few exceptions (Brown at the treasury is the most significant, and unfortunately is showing signs both of reverting to the traditional 'throw tax revenues at state-provided services' mindset of earlier Labour governments, and of preparing a bid to supercede Blair) few of the current bunch would recognise socialism even if it came up to them and bit them on the knee.
In "The Hacker Crackdown" he said (or may have been quoting a police detective) "10% of the population will steal anything not nailed down, 10% will never steal anything, the battle is for the hearts and minds of the rest."
Best Slashdot Co
Not Everyone Thinks Thinks Each Law Is Just
Nothing left-wing about the UK government. The Conservatives are nowhere coz Blair stole all their voters.
Well.. Only the very desperate and p2p illiterate, but the subject line just says it all.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Some commands that you type are internal, which means they are built into the shell, and it's the shell that performs the action. For example, the cd command is built-in. The ls command, on the other hand, is an external program stored in the file
The shell doesn't start a separate process to run internal commands. External commands require the shell to fork and exec (Section 27.2) a new subprocess (Section 24.3); this takes some time, especially on a busy system.
When you type the name of a command, the shell first checks to see if it is a built-in command and, if so, executes it. If the command name is an absolute pathname (Section 1.16) beginning with
The search path is exactly what its name implies: a list of directories that the shell should look through for a command whose name matches what is typed.
The search path isn't built into the shell; it's something you specify in your shell setup files.
By tradition, Unix system programs are kept in directories called
The search path is stored in an environment variable (Section 35.3) called PATH (Section 35.6). A typical PATH setting might look something like this:The path is searched in order, so if there are two commands with the same name, the one that is found first in the path will be executed. For example, your system certainly has the ls command we mentioned earlier -- and it's probably in
You can add new directories to your search path on the fly, but the path is usually set in shell setup files.
-- TOR
Agreed. Dead tree archives are very useful. I can open them next to anyone's computer, there's no chance it'll ever run out of batteries, and I can annotate (well, furiously scribble and sometimes flat out cross out sections). Sure, you can get O'Reilly bookshelves on CD, but trust me, after working in front of a monitor X hours a day, you really want to focus your eyes on something else besides a computer screen.
I have watched my 19 year-old daughter and her friends sample countless bands on Napster and Kazaa and, enthusiastic for their music, go out to purchase CDs.
What about MP3 players? Surely piracy ensures one never has to spend a dime on their favorite music. Just because they haven't caught on as much doesn't mean eventually they won't. When was the last time you bought a record or an 8 track cassette?
To truly supplant the existing music distribution system, any replacement must develop its own mechanisms for marketing and recommendation of new music. ... File sharing services rely heavily on that most effective of marketing techniques: word of mouth.
Last I checked, pirates can hear what songs they like on the radio, and the TV, via MTV and VH1, then download them for free. Despite what this article claims, pirates really can get away with music for free and it's only through advertising to those ignorant of how to pirate music, and to honest people, that the industry is, for now, not be seriously hurt.
The current experience of online file sharing services is mediocre at best. Students and others with time on their hands may find them adequate. But they leave much to be desired, with redundant copies of uneven quality, intermittent availability of some works, incorrect identification of artist or song, and many other quality problems.
As the industry improves, so will the solutions of the underground. I remember when you would have to connect every day for a month to a 2400 BBS to download a 4 meg file via Zmodem. Now you're able to go to Kazaa and type in a keyword or two for your favorite song and artist, and even select the bit rate you want, almost every time able to get a high quality copy of every song on a CD. Might have to let the thing download for a bit, but all the MP3's are piled onto your hard drive in an easy, automated process. Especially with broadband. It's going to get even easier in time. Soon we'll have high enough speed connections where instead of a song by song distribution, you just download the entire collection of songs from an artist off Kazaa in one ZIP file.
I'm not proposing solutions. I'm just trying to be more realistic.
Reading books on screen is typically much less pleasent than reading in dead tree form.
I have tonnes of eBooks, including many from O'Reilly -- I haven't bothered reading them, because it's simply not a nice way to read large quantities of text.
Piracy is progressive taxation
Might be time to change my political affiliation.
Yeh, the price of videos dropped to something reasonanble, thanks to DVD's i have a large video collection.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
What bothers me is that the main complaint is that companies are 'loosing money'...
:P
This cant be possible in most cases, since I hadnt planned on buying it in the first place! Most of the time I just download the tunes, find stuff I like, then if its worth buying I do, but I think most people are sick of the big businesses hyping the crud out of 1 good song to sell a CD, and you get 12 cruddy songs.
No I didnt spell check this post...
What if you cannot buy a disk?
I don't mean "You cannot afford to buy a disk", or "You are unwilling to budget the money to buy a disk", I mean "I have money, but no-one is selling the disk I want"?
Consider this: I got into The KLF some years after they were hot. While you can fairly easily purchase The White Room, Doctoring The Tardis, and Chill Out, you cannot find any of the older KLF albums new. Period. The KLF burned all their older albums as a result of some copyright problems.
OK, so how can I buy that which no longer exists? Now, while I would happily purchase the albums if I could, now I would pretty much be reduced to getting them via a file sharing service (the true irony here would be if The KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front) objected to being traded over a file sharing network.).
Or consider "Song of the South" - You will NEVER see that movie again, because The Mouse is so Politically Correct that they would never air that movie (and I don't see why not - Uncle Remus's tales were NOT racist!) Since there is no profit in keeping the movie preserved, it will in all probability rot away in a vault next to Walt.
Sorry, but I begin to think that copyright should have a clause forcing it to expire if the material is not distributed in a reasonable and non-discriminatory fashion.
Just a little thought-grenade I thought I'd lob into the conversation.
www.eFax.com are spammers
- "..."Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service..."
Yup, they're called CDs.It's possible to purchase MP3s these days, at prices comparable to the per-track cost of a CD. But why? Most people can't discern the difference, but with bloody expensive equipment it is noticable.
Take my recent experience:
- My home theater receiver died recently, and I just got around to shopping for a new one -- the contenders started out with a Sony ES unit, a couple Denon THX-Ultra certified models, and a Pioneer Elite THX receiver.
It was a very profound reminder of why I shouldn't put money straight into MP3s without getting the source material on CD... you're not getting the whole sound. (Heck, even with CDs you aren't... but it's better than MP3.) It's even making me think about SACD (Super Audio CD) and DVD-Audio... and I don't have perfect hearing.Then I made a mistake.
I listened to a mid-level, non-THX McIntosh. (The MHT-100, if you must know. "A/V Receiver" on the drop-down menu.)
Oh. My. God.
I heard things on a CD I didn't know were there -- and yes, the only part of the equation that changed was the receiver. Same speakers, same source, same volume level and EQ (none), same room.
It's a $5000 (US), 92-pound behemoth that looks like it was designed by the same guy who designed the McIntosh 1700 back in the 60s. It's twice the size of anything else, looks ugly... and sounds incredible. I could buy 5 Sonys at that price, yet I'm still having a really hard time justifying the Sony after hearing it.
In my perfect world, the recording industry encourages trading of mid-quality MP3s because they realize it's free advertising, and people will go out and buy CDs knowing they get a higher-quality product and better sound.
But it's not a perfect world, things don't work that way, and we're busy making the lawyers rich.
Lovely.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I think Tim makes some great points and is a step in the right direction of the publishing mindset but it is not the complete picture, especially when it comes to subscriptions. I currently use p2p because my musical appetite is so much larger than my financial capability to sustain it by buying the all the CD's I listen to, especially when it comes to exploring. An all you can eat subscription services will fix this one particular segment of my consumer habit, however, there are only so many subscriptions that I can afford. ISP, Cable TV, assume a music service will exist, dvd/video store, book club, subscription websites, online games, virus scanning updates, other software, upgrades, etc etc etc etc. And that is excluding all the normal bills we all pay. There are only so many subscriptions we can financially contribute to. So it will end up in the same situation, saturation of possibilities to explore, to many subscriptions to afford. I will seek other ways of sustaining my exploration whilst still enjoying the sheer pleasure of owning something I treasure. In my case that may mean I will treasure my "all I can eat" music subscription (if it ever happens) more than something else, but I will still make the same decisions I do now, just focused on something else. Left intentionally blank
Understands?
I am sory, but agrees would be the better term.
Nothing is proven, and it all depends on where you stand.
Have you ever seen someone making xerox copies of a newspaper and reselling them?
Answer to this question and you'll find why piracy does exist and how to fight it.
Every time a product price is overcharged because its producer wants to get the highest possible profit from it, someone, somewhere, will start to think on ways to copy that product or to sell fakes.
Things sold at fair prices will never get pirated, period.
I'm currently stuck in a very low-budget (no money, not bad movie) situation, and I have a difficult time paying for music regularly. Given the opporotunity, I do feel that I would pay, but when you are, quote, a 'poor-ass bastard,' there's not much to be done except hope a better-paying job pops up.
"The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
Definitely agree - we do the exact same thing here.
My fiancee and I are *huge* RPG junkies. Is there a new game out that we're not sure we'll enjoy, with no demo? Chances are it can be snagged off Kazaa. We try it out, and if we like it, we buy a copy. If not, it gets deleted.
A great example of this was Morrowind. There's no demo available, and the game is hell on system resources. Some setups have *huge* problems with crashing, while others are fine. It's also not the kind of RPG that all RPG fans will enjoy. Rather slow and plodding, especially at the beginning, with a heavy emphasis on dialogue as opposed to combat. So, we downloaded it. Absolutely gorgeous in the eyecandy department. Openended quests. Lots of fun. Very few crashes on our setup. So, we bought a copy. Bethesda impressed us, so they got our money. In return, we got a great game, the construction set, and update patches (that seem to have fixed the few crashes we did have). Good deal. They've also had at least 2 more purchases from friends we recommended the game to, and most likely at least 2 more in the future.
So, one user "pirating" the game turned into 3 sales for them (possibly 5 over the next few weeks). In addition, we'll most likely be picking up the expansion as well - which is more money in Bethesda's pocket.
Had we hated the game, they wouldn't have got any money. But, had we purchased the game initially, instead of "pirating" it, then the store would have had a return. AFAIK a return is considered worse than no sale at all (at least it was a few years ago when I worked retail - things may have changed).
But pirates have been known to plunder towns, as well. That's what the *AA organizations are fighting about - should they be forced to pay the tab to move authors, actors and musicians to inland cities?
I, for one, support the 'big bad' organizations. I think it would be totally unfair to ask them to compensate creators of content for moving inland.
If we, as consumers, want to enjoy the works of people who live in costal towns, then we should be prepared for the fact that they may one day be raped and pillaged, ending all future works from them.
Would an artist rather have 1 million listeners, where 5% buy the cd, and maybe something else, or 10,000 loyal listeners, and no further audience.
While I see this having merit in a theoretical idealist world, if you look in any other discussion regarding online music distribution (the legal kind), there are countless highly moderated posts saying something basically like this: "I would buy music if I could pick and choose songs from various artists so I can have the good songs rather than all of the filler". What they're really saying, of course, is "I want to be able to only buy songs on the Top 40 being force fed to me which I am more than happy to slurp...oh, btw, P2P is great for small indy groups! [Just so long as someone else finds them first, promotes them to the point that they become cool and hip, and popular enough that I can pick out one of their `non-filler' songs to put on my compilation CD]". That is the sort of mentality that ensures that nothing but what Big Music is pushing as the next big thing will be eaten up by these people.
As a sidenote I'm not a goatee toting better-than-though listening to indy music: Most of the music I listen to is the same old stuff - Matchbox 20, Eminem, U2, etc. Yet I have long realized that just because the other 11 tracks on the CD aren't in the Top 40, they most certainly aren't filler (indeed, the unknown songs often are the most artistic and inventive).
You are absolutely right in all the four points. Plus not using screen is safer for eyesight.
However many, including myuself, read computer books mostly on screen, because the *find* function works perfectly when you need an answer fast.
I read fiction, poetry and philosophy in dead tree format.
kedi
A publisher publishes something that P2P advocates like, and the comments are filles with "see we're right" comments.
To me it's still a matter of not liking some copyright owner's way of selling the rights and bluntly ignoring it.
I wonder how people here would feel if this amount of people started to ignore GPL/BSD licence (insert your own favourite).
I agree. Just look at all the text on slashdot...very unpleasant reading.
Could I interest you in a copy of Slashdot in dead tree form? $19.95 + 4.95 S&H.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If I was a music publisher I would employ a group of people to upload large quantities of variable quality versions of my music onto the file sharing networks.
That way if you wanted to download a copy of a song you could get a low quality version quickly and easily - good advertising, but if you wanted to get a decent quality version you would have to take an hour or so searching or you could go to my website pay a dollar and get it easily.
This way I get a really cheap form of advertising, poor people with lots of time can get the music for free and rich people will pay me for it, the best of all worlds.
Taking something that doesn't belong to you is theft, regardless of the wealth of your target.
Your post is just a rationalization for your own moral weakness.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
The Grateful Dead let fans copy and swap recordings as much as they like. In terms of both popularity and money, they were quite successful. Being heard is the essence of music performace and builds your fan base. The larger the better/profitable.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
As an author I know the problems with distribution. I wrote a few chapters for a book on .Net software development that has made little in the way of revenue. The issue is not with the quality of the book but with the glut in the market of other books out there that have similar, if not the same, target audience. Brick and mortar stores like B&N and Borders can't afford to put more than one copy on the shelf of many of these books and as a result sales are down.
Online subscription services like Safari keep such publications alive, as developers can browse the selection and see if the book that they want is of any use to them, and keep looking for the help they need until they find the right resource.
I am fully in support of subscription services like safari as a better distribution medium, especially in the tech industry, as a means providing the content and help needed to the development community.
(p.s. the book is Inside ASP.Net, if you're curious)
I'm sorry, I accidently inserted that last sentence before the italics... didn't mean to misquote you
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
The article was absolutely brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that it made me wonder why the music industry is being so reactionary about all of this when many print publishers are doing their best to embrace the new technology.
The difference, I think, lies in O'Reilly's description of the mathematical necessity for go-betweens to facilitate interaction between millions of buyers and sellers. If that really was the basis of the recording industry, then everything else he said would immediately apply and we could justly accuse the recording companies of a deplorable lack of vision. However, in the case of the music industry, I don't think that is the whole story.
When I buy a book, I either go to Amazon and look at the customer reviews (for technical books) or wander into a shop and look around until I see something interesting (for novels). My decision is therefore based either on my own, (relatively un-manipulated) opinions, or those of other consumers. Despite the existence of poster and tv adverts for books, the role of a book seller is therefore primarily to present me with a wide selection of books and let me make my own decision.
The music industry is in a very different position. Through radio and TV, people are continually hearing music which is currently available. Liking a piece of music is an odd psychological phenomenon which depends heavily on repetition of the tune and perceptions of what your peer-group likes. Since the music industry has a lot of control over what you and your friends hear day in, day out, they have a remarkable amount of control over what you like, and therefore what you will buy.
The truth of this can easily be seen by the fact that it is possible for the music industry to make vast wads of cash out of such utter crap as Will Young covering Light My Fire (and, oh, I still tremble with rage at thought of that sacrilege) and the Cheeky Girls rambling on about their bums.
That level of control over the minds of customers far outstrips anything the print publishers can exert. It's a license to print money, and I believe the recording industry is scared of losing it. A well implemented peer-to-peer service in which it is possible not only to download music you know you want, but to be exposed to new music in a way the music industry cannot control could be their worst nightmare.
I don't want the music industry to disappear and, as the article pointed out, it never will. I just want it to be reduced from its current role as the definer of popular culture to to its proper place as a facilitator of popular culture. If that can happen, one way or another, we will all be better off
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
...progressive taxation is piracy. Now who are you going to believe -- highfalutin' smartypants Tim O'Reilly, or me?
Pirating music deprives the artist of revenue. Just look at all of the Tupac Shakur songs that can be downloaded. How can he get paid if no one buys his albums?
No data, no cry
Out of curiosity, does anyone have a copy of one of the "polite" cease and desist letters that he sends to websites that pirate his material? I bet it goes something like this:
-a
In my opinion record companies sat on their arses for far to long and didn't actually take the time to embrace the new technologies that were presented to them. If back in the day, when MP3 first started to become popular, they had thought "wow, this looks like an excellent way to distribute our music without incuring a lot of manufactoring costs" we probably wouldn't be in the same situation now. Just my $0.02
I always buy CD's after downloading and listening to mp3's.
Blank CD's.
Add in paper:
Movie ABC XYZ
$18 DVD
$10 VHS Tape
Album ABC XYZ
$15 CD
$9 Tape
Yes it is cheaper for them to product the CD and DVD. And don't throw me a line about start-up costs and crap like that. They have been charging more for CD than tape since they came out with no justification. IF anything tapes should be more expensive than CD's.
We're all distracted by the side issue, here. It's not piracy vs shoplifting, or anything like that.
The simple fact is that the Internet has made the current business model of music publishing and distribution obsolete.
That's not to say that we don't need music stores, or that we don't need the RIAA. (Snicker if you like, but they do have a role to play, and it may well be more then the pre/de-emphasis curve for vinyl recording.) It's the business model, plain and simple. They have three prime roles: studio work (recording/mixing, etc), promotion, and distribution.
Studio work is diminishing, because the declining cost of technology brings it to an ever-increasing number of people. Basement and garage studios abound, and it goes uphill from there. Sure there's a lot of drek, but there's some good stuff, too. But this isn't the big issue.
Promotion is one big issue. The big labels really work on the STAR. For the most part, they are able to pick a random artist, shove them into airtime with music and videos, and make them a STAR. Then they sit back and harvest cash. The rest of those people who want to make music are a 'cost of doing business' to be minimized, albeit a potential source for the next STAR.
This role is under jeapordy from the Internet and file sharing, because they allow us to make up our own minds. The real effect here would be the diminution of the STAR. Not that we won't have them, but they'll be less significant, and under less control, AND probably more talented.
The other big issue is distribution. Once upon a time, their role was to get music out there. Now their role appears to be preventing music from getting out there. They manufacture scarcity. But that's also not to say that CD stores are obsolete, because they're not. But we/they need to understand the difference between mp3 and CD, and quit pricing the things like platinum.
In a technology-adjusted business model, the RIAA and the major labels still exist. Ironically, they may still make the same profit levels. But they shed most of their control over STARs and airtime, and they have to work harder for a larger range of artists.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The effect of P2P has on a record company is:
#1 Revenue gained from CD sales from consumers who bought CD after sampling and wouldn't have bought it previously
minus
#2 Revenue lost from consumers who would have bought CD not buying it after sampling it.
minus
#3 Revenue lost from consumers who would have bought the CD and after sampling it decided not to.
If this was a positive value then the record company would be happy, if negative then they will oppose P2P.
Usually the RIAA pushes #2 as their argument and then it's countered with #1 by P2P representatives. I'm pretty sure it's actually #3 that's scaring the industry.
The relationship between their protest therefore directly relates to the number of people disliking their music - louder you hear the artist or label whining the worse their music.
I am very much in favor of progressive taxation. How many houses can one make use of? How many cars can one drive? How much food can one eat?
Progessive taxation is allegedly written in law here in the U.S., but it doesn't actually work.
The loopholes in tax law allow the wealthy to avoid any actual progressive effect of taxation. Dollar for dollar, individuals making millions per year pay less than middle class families as they are able to manipulate the rules for their benefit. The gap between rich and poor has only grown in the last 30 years.
And how have the wealthy been able to do this? They bought the legislators and therby the necessary loopholes in the law.
Some fundamental rules still apply:
"He who has the gold makes the rules."
"They that gots, gets more."
"Greed is a powerful thing."
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
So I can freely copy the Perl library-on-CD that O'Reilly publishes? And the Unix Powertools CD? This is great news. The money I save on technical references will enable me to "upgrade" my music collection to actual CD's!
My God, did Tim O'Reilly just call me a wookiee? At least he could have gotten the quote right...
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Trolling is purposely trying to incite someone, and is typically done AC so as not to bear repercussions (cough, cough). I responded with more respect for the opposing position than the original poster asumed.
These days progressives are absurd
There's some objective thought for you. Questioning things involves asking questions, not just stating that something is "wrong".
How did I not consider his argument? I broke it up and adressed nearly every sentence! What, are we so fucking PC that we're not allowed to disagree anymore? I have every right to propose a counter argument, and I don't have to congratulate anyone beforehand.
Now I believe I'm done responding to AC flamebait for the day.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
I got Napster pretty late... I more or less stopped listening to music when I left for school 6 years ago. I had listened to manufactured pop on my commute to high school, and left it at that.
:)
A few friends tossed me MP3s that were interesting, and I downloaded Napster and grabbed other MP3s of those bands and/or similar bands. Someone would mention someone that I would like, and I'd grab a few MP3s.
I'd then go to Amazon.com (at 3 AM) and order a bunch of CDs from those artists that interested me to have in the car.
Now I have a home stereo w/ a CD Jukebox, and I just got an iPod for my Tibook, and got XM Radio for my car 6 months ago. When I hear a band I like on Internet radio or XM Radio, I order the CD. Unfortunately, I hear a lot less new music because easy access to MP3s is gone.
Oh well, saves me a few bucks.
Extra fun, copying all my old CDs to CD-R to add CD-Text so the on screen display works nicely.
Sure I've copied a few CDs from friends that have interested me, but that's a request to expose me to new music. A friend is a BIG fan of Saliva, tossed me a CD. Now I have a copy and MP3s of it. Will I buy that CD? No... will I buy everything that they put out in the future? Yes... Had he not given me the CD to copy, I'd have never listened them at all... it's all relative.
Alex
I was having a party and wanted to get some new
.25 to .50 per song. I wanted them right away, I wanted a big selection, I didn't want to have CD's to change and purchase and discard the packaging.
music for it the day before. I used Kazaa to
search and download some christmas songs by
Louis Armstrong, other older Jazz and Barrelhouse artists, and some contemporary ones.
I would have been happy to pay around
I would love to put money in the hands of the artists directly. I contribute to web sites such as dyndns.org , eff, granitecanyon, etc, that provide services, even though it is not required.
I think the music publishing industry are a bunch of thugs and parasites, by and large, and they have been crushing the smaller and independent
studios and artists, while calling the public thieves and pirates. They are now petitioning congress to install monitoring in all of our computing equipment.
People, this HAS TO STOP. Right now we fight back
through the EFF, and other public interest groups. Give them money and take the time to write to your congress people, before you are thrown in jail by the record companies.
- "Until you can hear the difference on cheap gear, your argument doesn't apply to 99% of the music-listening market."
You are absolutely correct. Not everyone can afford -- or even cares -- about high end gear. I have no argument there.However...
There is a market for perceived quality. These are the people who buy "microcircuit cellphone boosters" (or whatever they're called today), "cellphone radiation shields," and are swayed by late-night infomercials. THIS is your market.
So, allow all MP3s of, say, 96 (64?) Kbit or less to be freely traded; in fact, flood the P2P networks with 'em! People will more readily redistribute them because they aren't a trick (like the repeating loops), and then (instead of spending all the money on lawyers), you advertise how much better the CDs sound.
Alternatively, without the willingness to embrace free distribution, it would behoove the music cartels to emphasize the quality point; perhaps from the angle of "make sure you get the best sound -- rip your own MP3s!" Make people not trust one another (they set a damn good (bad?)example), and make people want to have a 'trusted chain' -- know the source (CD), know the encoder, and then believe your MP3s sound (warmer | sweeter | more... whatever) than bootleg ones.
It's the Microsoft approach -- Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. It preys on basic and well established human nature... it has worked before, why not bend it to a new use?
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I wonder how much of the observed decline in sales of CDs and DVDs and other such media is not due to piracy, but simply the fact that it is now quite simple to exchange old records via eBay and similar places? I know also of DVD swapping circles, where you essentially buy one DVD with another DVD, you both go and watch them, and trade on. Those sales and "sales" are never recorded by recording companies. And they're almost certainly more common now than what they were a few years ago...
I'd love to see the figure for sales of ALL CD's broken down by year, artist, and volume. I suspect that since the introduction of P2P the sales of a lot of older CD's has actually gone up.
Of course, getting the information is probably next to impossible because of all the various channels, accounting differences, etc...
Yay, more lame justifications for illegal piracy/theft* of goods.
*To all you morally challenged individuals who will try to espouse on the differences between piracy and theft, save it. Theft is theft is theft. Downloading music you did not buy is theft period.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
The article simply provides no evidence to prove this, or how it effects the actual situation. When making an argument against someone, it's important to define your target and not confuse their interests and views with others'. Everyone actively opposing peer to peer technologies has already overcome obscurity as an obsticle. Sure, my buddy loves it when people download his song -- he's more excited by the fact that people are hearing it than selling it. And, as such, his music isn't being pirated, it's being distributed the only way he can get it out. The mp3s and movies on my hard drive are, quite simply, pirated. I lost my desire to own legitimate copies when 170 of my cds were stolen, so I've had the unique "opportunity" to be on both sides of the fence -- sympathizing with artists I'd like to support, and not caring. Nearly all artists fit in to one of two categories in my mind: rich enough that they don't need my dollar, and happy enough that I'm listening to their music that they don't care about my dollar.
Lesson 2: Piracy is progressive taxation
"...may shave a few percentage points off the sales of well-known artists (and I say "may" because even that point is not proven)..." I'd call this statement horribly conservative, at best. While a pirated copy of a cd or book doesn't translate directly to a lost sale (I've got around 500 cds worth of mp3s, but I can guarentee I wouldnt have had that many cds), people simply aren't going to buy things they can get for free without leaving the house. I used to go to record stores hunting for rare vinyl with my friends, but it's just no longer worth it. CDs, in my opinion, really are on their way out and a standard for massive storage on whatever media ends up working out, where we'd buy the rights and probably no media, is probably inevitable. The simple fact is that CD sales are down, and I think you're lying to yourself if you don't believe mp3s have a large part in it.
Lesson 3: Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Some. How many? I think O'Reilly is on to something when he implies it's more than you'd think. But a quick glance at me shows it's not everyone (at least, not his definition of "right").
Lesson 4: Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
First, there is absolutely no evidence provided to back this up. Second, even if it were true, it would be highly subjective. Comparing shoplifting to piracy is like comparing apples and oranges. A pirated copy doesn't rob from anyone's inventory, but possibly steals a potential sale. Likewise, a shoplifted copy doesn't affect the copyright holder, but the retailer selling it.
Lesson 5: File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers. Again, who are you trying to convince? It seems the purpose of this article would only be to pursuade people that piracy isn't all that bad, and there aren't a lot of people other than these "existing publishers" and their puppet politicians who are against it, at least on a peer to peer level. The guys with the clout and money.
While O'Reilly's artile did hit on some key points, it suffered from the same thing as every other peer to peer proponnent: inability to provide proof. The large publishers aren't going to budge because they stand to (continue to) lose the most money.
Whale
If Microsoft took the code for Linux and used it to develop a closed source OS, the Slashdot community would be outraged. Why? Because Microsoft would be breaking the contract that they agreed to when they downloaded the source. How is this different than the agreement (and there is an agreement, one that exists because you are a citizen of this country and subject to its laws) that one implicitly makes when one purchases a CD? The belief that the recording industry is evil has as much validity as Microsoft's opinion of the open-source community. Neither are valid criterion for breaking the law. No matter how you rationalize it, piracy is wrong. You're breaking a contract you made, and it always strikes me as odd how many intelligent people are not bothered by this at all.
Furthermore, the record companies don't care about you at all. They care about your baby brother. Most ten year olds I know don't have that much pocket money, and if they spend the next six years getting their music for free, I'm skeptical that they'll feel a need to buy CDs once they have money. Everyone I know who buys CDs grew up buying CDs, while most people I know under the age of fifteen download almost all of their music. To put it another way, my generation grew up buying cassettes and CDs. The generation after mine bought only CDs. The generation after them buys only CD-Rs.
If we are already paying for it, why more anti-piracy legislation?
Get the people who are SELLING copies!
I think the RIAA owes ME money for the CD-Rs that turned into coasters, backups, and frisbees.
Ironically, the RIAA assumes they have the copyright on everything. So if I buy CD-Rs to burn my own music on, I'm still paying them for the *privilege*.
I'm going to scan in and OCR all of the OReilly books and put them online so that people don't have to go through all the hassle of going to a bookstore and paying the exhorbitant cost of the books. And they can swap books with their friends.
Let's see how Tim feels about that.
alot of songs i like are on. this is because i have alot of cd's by the same artist. i keep all of my music in mp3 format because of convenience. as a result most i have alot of mp3's of the same artist in the same directory. i also tend to load up the entire directory at a time and listen to it on random. if you were to ask me what cd the current song i'm listening to came from, i probably couldnt answer you.
keep in mind that i own the cd's it's just that the title of the cd is not that important to me. i typically find a new artist, either through the net or from friends, and i'll purchase 2 or 3 cd's by that artist. i normally dump the songs straight to mp3 and put the original cd's in a case. so i never think too hard about the different albums.
-- john
I seem to remember that 10 years ago or so these groups where trying to fight piracy on the web in general to the point where they could have made the web cease to exist. Can anyone find any references to companies that have tried the same? It would be good ammo to support allowing new technologies to emerge even if they appear to threaten publishing companies (otherwise we'd never have TV, radio, or just about any other technology).
Why is it that with all of their resources, the RIAA is unable to figure out a way to make the amazingly technology that is decentralized filesharing work for them (at least in a way that they acknowledge)? I tend to think the fact that they can't is evidence of their stifled creativity.
The assumption that an up and coming artist can attain wide popularity by putting his music up for download on the net might be flawed..The reason - well, most people search for music on the net by artist name or band name.. and choose to download music only from artists that they already know.. it is not often that someone will risk wasting their bandwidth and time downloading songs from a band or artist who they haven't even heard off.
Having said that, if there is an independent group of music lovers and critics, comprising perhaps of well known musicians, who will possible review the songs of unknown artists and make a mention of the better ones on the site, it is possible that the more adventurous among us might actually download and distribute the music around thereby increasing the artist's popularity.
I think we need an open forum where music contributed by unknown artists can be reviewed and criticed. Would go a long way towards promoting real talent.
You're going to pay me enough.
Please revise your bid accordingly.
My girlfriend is a good writer, but is unknown. I have tried for 10 years to get her to put her stuff on the web, even some of them, but she is afraid of having it "stolen". She believes that in the future, if she can get it published the traditional route, the books will be worth a great deal. I keep trying the argument that you give a little to simply get your name known. What a waste.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Eh? How is asking a question "overrated"? Especially when it hadn't been moderated previously.
Oh well, typical moderation abuse, I suppose. I guess I'll count it as a benefit to society that whoever did that inane moderation has one less point now. ;)
First the music/movie industry is using the internet freely to spread their products and make everything they have pop-ular and then they are complaining about bad people who make a few copies.
If You are dealing with internet, You should expect internet-like feedback. That's a simple principle. Everything on internet is FREE: websites, commercials, TV, music, software and movies. Why is that so hard to accept?
Internet is helping the industry more than it hurts it. I think it's a understandable thing that You have to pay these kinds of "taxes" for being more successful with Your products.
Prove it. You're wrong. My parents happen to be well into the top 1% (OK, flame away) and many other people that I know are as well. They pay more proportionally--I know this from seeing it with my own eyes. The idea that the rich, as a group, manage to avoid taxes en masse is simply false. Yes, there are some exemptions and some people take advantage of them, but for every exception there's an often unavoidable way to get absolutely soaked because of our ridiculously complex tax code (and the "rich" tend to recieve more of this due to the complexities of their sources of wealth). Yes, there are a handful of people that manage to successfully escape their fair share of federal income taxes, but they're very few in number and they cannot keep it up. It should also be mentioned that they cannot avoid the numerous other taxes imposed on the wealthy, such as property taxes, luxary taxes, estate taxes, state taxes, etc. Take a look at the alternative minimum tax some day--there are many victims here too that are supposedly "rich".
You act as if our sole objective should be to minimize that gap instead of focusing on making the middle class and the poor wealthier. I'd far rather have huge disparities in wealth if it means that people at the lower end get wealthier. This, despite your misinformed opinion, is what has happened by and large. The reason that the rich get richer is because they're investing (taking risk) and, in turn, that creates wealth, jobs, demand for goods and services, etc. The fact of the matter is that the middle class have, as a matter of fact, grown wealthier, consistently, after inflation. Please see http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/4person.html Furthermore, despite our disparities, we have one of the wealthiest middle class on ANY time in ANY place in the history of the world. Do you really believe that it's just the top, say, 10% that is buying all those new SUVs, TVs, computers...? How many old cars do you see on the road today? Do you think the rich are the only people that drive? Oh yeah, also you might want to note that the numbers of the "wealthy" in the past few years has shrunk with the decline of the stock market. I say this because the gap has SHRUNK recently and because it demonstrates that this wealth disparity is a function of utility, for the risking of capital/time/effort, and that's it's not merely an act of abitrage.
Shoutz out to mah babiezmama
did you even bother to read the article? if you had you would realize that tim o'reilly, you know the head of o'reilly, doesnt consider them to be lost sales.
-- john
huh?
I bet Microsoft wishes that they lived in this magical, fantastic world that O'Reilly finds himself him. Then life would be easier for them. Fortunately, "free" usually becomes much better then paid for, marketing driven products.
I nominate this for the Obfuscated Headline Contest.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Sure, the RIAA business model is crap, but that doesn't mean that we should "enlighten" them by stealing their music. I think that a pay-per-use or per-song model is much better. To make this an example, remember shareware? You as a shareware author have the right to set terms on your programs. I wrote a few (back in the CompuServe days) and had no idea whether they received a lot of use, no use or what - because no one felt like coughing up the money. A copyright gives me the right to decide how I share my work with others. It also gives the public the right to have the work after a certain period of time. Just because digital data is easy to transmit doesn't mean it should be free.
To say that this is just stealing and that it isn't ethical, just doesn't hold up with me.
:)
Think about it. We are not letting the large corporations control us anymore, we are showing alternatives, we are "revolutionizing" our way of life!! Good thing we (Americans) went ahead and revolted against England and fought for our independence, or maybe we shouldn't have because it was illegal
Back when I first ventured into font design, I was a poor, starving college student and couldn't afford Fontographer. (Then, the only real choice for doing good font design work.) Hell, I wasn't even sure I wanted to do font design fulltime, but I didn't want to shell out $300+ for the program. So I downloaded a copy, found that yes, indeed, I did enjoy font design.
:-)
So I scraped, scrounged, begged, and borrowed, and bought a legitimate copy of the program. It would have been just as easy to keep the hacked copy, but why bother? When I purchased the package, I got the manuals, the knowledge that I'd get a decent price on upgrades (there have been no major upgrades since before I bought the software -- Macromedia seems to have let the software die on the vine).
In the end, though...I did the right thing because...well, it was the right thing to do. Macromedia provided me with a tool that I could use to make some money, and it was only fair that I repaid them for that.
This article is one of the most insightful that I've read on the subject. It's definitely made me think quite a bit...I have a B.A. in creative writing and I know that the stuff that I write is quality material. Like any other writer, I'm having a hard time breaking in... I think I'll take a few of my better works that don't seem to be going anywhere and publish them in PDF and e-Book formats for all to enjoy. And hopefully this will build a little bit of recognition for my work so I can actually start selling to the real publishers out there and then someone else will come along and do the right thing by me as an artist and buy my works off a bookshelf somewhere.
Maybe it's better to have a network of faith than a network of enforced trust.
blog |
This is the most staggeringly ridiculous thing I've ever seen on Slashdot.
Firstly why don't you tell us what line of business that you're in blancolioni: I would like to tell you illicit ways that I can ruin your "business plan". You see that's why we have these little things called "laws", and if you believe that you can single handedly wave them away as just false protections of bad business plans then please tell me where you live and where you work: Maybe we could teach you about your own personal "business plan" and how it's just a bad plan.
The fact that this got moderated up just screams out how unbelievably unrealistic and absurd moderation on Slashdot is: A bunch of kids in their basement spouting how the world could be free because to justify whatever it is they do.
Enough is enough! How many times will we have to read this kind of self-reassuring crap? We have all the ingredients of dishonest rhetorics in this article :
:File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers. Who are you Tim, who are WE to decide for other people what's best for them?
The Robin Hood syndrom : The poor are good, the rich are bad. So any behaviour is morally justified as long as it hurts the rich. It often comes with the implicit idea that if it hurts the rich, it benefits the poor. RIAA are rich, RIAA fights file sharing so file sharing is good for the poor and is a Good Thing (TM).
The "he did it first" syndrom : We're just responding to a prior agression from the recording industry. They charge $17 per CD! This is offensive and they deserve retaliation.
The "let's decide for them" syndrom : This one is amazing. Tim is so clever that he knows what is good for record companies better than them. My daughter now owns more CDs than I have collected in a lifetime of less exploratory listening. or (...)even if the RIAA fails to see the opportunity. The funny thing is that Tim contradicts himself the next page
Inaccurate analogies : electronic distribution works for IT books so it should work for music. Yet he mentions specifics in book publishing that render the analogy useless But the entire package--not to mention the convenience of a paper copy, and the aesthetic pleasure of the strongly branded packaging--is only available in print. Reading a 500-pages book on my laptop is VERY inconvenient, but I just have to plug my PC to my stereo to enjoy the full experience. Another example of this trick is in the analogy with cable TV. Did it ever occur to you, Tim, that the ONLY reason why I'm paying 20 bucks a month for cable is that I CANNOT get the same thing for free?
Gross generalization : also called proof by example or drawing long-term trends from 2 (or even one) data points. My 19 year-old daughter dls gigs of mp3 and still buys CD. Thus (implied) everybody does the same. My daughter discovers some unknown artists thanks to Kazaa. Thus (implied) the main impact of file sharing on the industry is to unearth excellent artists from obscurity. First, notice that everything is implied. Second, even if Tim's daughter doesn't dl Britney Spear, I would bet that most of the shared mp3's are stuff that you could find in mainstream stores. Anyone has data on this?
Outright lie : Online file sharing is the work of enthusiasts who are trading their music because there is no legitimate alternative. Because buying a CD is not a legitimate alternative?
Plain ol' mistakes : Tim reduces the role of the music industry to mere publishing. He's completely missing (or hiding?) the fact that they're also producers. The publisher selects and markets content as Tim describes. The producer funds and actually contributes to the content by guiding the artists. Listen to most artists' very first albums; those which are reëdited after they get famous. I've got Bowie's and Genesis' first songs. They're crap. Well, not complete crap; when you know their later work you can hear some of their talent. But it's more or less some watered-down Beatles. What happened is that these guys were discovered by talented producers who saw their uniqueness and helped them to develop it. How can file sharing replace these people?
Most arguments I read in favor of file sharing can more or less be reduced to "I do what I can, not what I should". We often see the conjunction of bad resoning based on wrong assumptions. The most commonly accepted assumption is "the music industry overprices CDs". It's just plain wrong. Comparing the $17 price of a CD in stores to the $1 cost of burning it doesn't make more sense than comparing the $17 price of a T-bone in a restaurant to the $1 cost of the meat and potatoes to the farmer. Check record companies' income statements. You'll realize that their operating profit is between 5% and 10% of sales. Some even lose money. They don't make 10 bucks on each CD but less than 1. Where does the money go? To store owners; to advertising; to fund bands which never sell a CD; to pay employees who search for young talents, sign them, help them; to pay for recording equipment; to pay taxes, rents etc... I don't know this industry specifics enough to give more details but you get the point. I'm not trying to make you cry on record companies. I'm not saying they are angels. I think any artist on the verge of signing with a major should be very cautious and get a good lawyer if (s)he doesn't want to get screwed. But the bare fact remains: CDs are NOT overpriced.
Now back to file-sharing. I believe that this technology can greatly improve the efficiency of music distribution, i.e. all the part priorly addressed by retailers and publishers. I would not be surprised if a form of electronic distribution took a large chunk of the market in the not so distant future. I've got no problem with that. It's innovation, progress, ordinary course of business, whatever you chose to call it. The problem IMHO is that the current form of electronic distribution violates copyright. And copyright is the only protection known to permit the ones in the production part (artists, producers,...) to get a (fair) chunk of revenue. And the bullshit about increasing music sales through better diffusion is just that : bullshit. It may be true, but nobody knows for sure. The funny thing (and the thing that many people chose to ignore) is that nothing in the law currently prevents artists and/or producers to forfeit their copyright, release their work freely over the web and expect that they recoup that through increased sales!!! Despite the common "conspiration theory" view of a market in the hands of a few majors, there are truckloads of independant producers/publishers around. Some are going the "free as is speech" way but most aren't. If the wishful thinkers are right, then the producers who go the file sharing way will flourish and the market will shift this way.
But I fail to see the moral justification in a bunch of spoiled kids just taking what they can against the wishes of all those who contributed to bring it to them and calling it justice. I have already downloaded mp3s and I'm not very proud of it. There are reasons why I did this (availability, convenience, price...) but they are just explanations, not excuses. Call me hypocrit if you wish, for doing things I so strongly advocate against. Yet, I'd rather acknowledge my wrongdoings than fall into self-complacency.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
Honestly, how many of us would burn far fewer CDs if they cost only $3 or $4?
CDs at $3.99 new... That won't happen. A typical CD contains 12 songs, and federal law mandates a royalty to the songwriter of eight cents per song.
However, at $17 a CD and $25 a DVD many of us cannot afford the level of entertainment being thrown at us.
Even without considering the bandwidth issue, movie piracy isn't as big as music piracy because unlike music CDs, movies can be rented inexpensively through Blockbuster or Netflix.
If Photoshop were $25 or could be used on a charge per time basis how many people would sit for hours trying to download it?
I'd guess that most of the people who pirate Photoshop plan to use it for web graphics. But I can get you a legitimate copy of most of the retail version of Photoshop for $99.95. It's called Photoshop Elements, and it has everything its big $600 brother has except support for some high-end operations used only in print publishing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
When was the last time you bought a record
Remember that quite a few electronic dance music DJs read Slashdot. Those DJs still typically use vinyl by tradition. Only a few DJs have begun to move to Compact Disc based systems.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Uh, copyright does expire. Albeit after something like 75 years.
The basic copyright term in the United States for works made for hire and works published before 1978 was extended to 95 years four years ago. And Congress reserves the right to add twenty more years every twenty years. Sick.
Will I retire or break 10K?
$18 DVD vs. $10 VHS Tape
It costs money to produce the "making of" extra, the "deleted scenes" extra, and all the other extras that typically come on a CD. It costs money to license the MPEG and Dolby patents involved in DVD Video technology (many of the VHS patents have expired by now).
Will I retire or break 10K?
What I don't get is why mp3s have suddenly become the focus of anti-piracy groups. People have been going to their local libraries for years and checking out CDs and recording them on cassette or burning copies for themselves and friends. Where were the anti-pirates then? Why didn't they shutdown libraries for giving out copyrighted material?
Granted getting mp3s is more convenient than going down to your neighborhood library but it's no different than what was going on before. And unlike mp3s which are most accessible to those having the luxury of a pc + broadband, CDs at the library are available to EVERYONE.
Even though he got the quote a bit wrong (even the attribution!) the Wookie quote at the end was the best part of the article and a perfect summary of the situation.
All of the companies striving now to lock down content are going to find in the end that all they get out of the effort is business limbs torn off by angry wookies.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of course I would probably be flattered if a critic gave me 2 stars, with my self esteem problem, hehe.
Speaking of problems, did anyone else experience a weird phase yesterday where they were suddenly logged out and couldn't log in? It was really freaky, I kept on getting this 303 error POST messages, and my friend who is another /. fan had the same problem. Anybody know why?
Ok, i collect. As probably many of you do out there. I buy cd cases that hold 200+ cd's whenever i find them at a reasonable price and i have more than a few completely filled. Ok, i know, a lot. I get the point. But here is another.
Most of the divx movies i enjoyed i purchased on DVD
I NEVER bought music when i was young, i'd listen to the radio, or tape it from a cd. Now that i download MP3s i have a small collection of music i love, cd's where i enjoy the whole cd. As the point has been made many times i have found music i'd never heard of nor listened to that i buy.
Also i am an anime fan. I'm not an extremist of any sort, i watch certain animes when i feel like it. I usually download them first (in divx format on a filesharing network) and then watch them. As many anime viewers know (as i'm sure many of you are) it's quite difficult to find a variety of anime at your local blockbuster. I dont live in a huge city or even know anyone that likes anime where i live. I can't borrow what someone else has to view it. Once i have previewed the anime i often (in most cases) will buy it. I've spent more moeny buying DVD's because i was able to watch them than i have or ever thought i would spend.
It's understandable that people think p2p is only used to pirate music and videos and such. It is, but then it does lead to more sales. Now, i may purchase a lot but i do have much more that i dont own personally. I also burn compilation cd's for my brother and some of his friends, mostly just singles of stuff that they have, but also mp3s i've downloaded on the net. Songs they can't get as singles.
It's a double edged sword, and though more people make money because their band is heard at the same time more popular groups loose some of their profits. Personally i wouldnt have bought any of the things i have purchased without pre-viewing it somewhere.
I would be willing to pay for a good file sharing service, nothing that just 'rivals' KazaA, i need something that's worth paying for. Napster was the begining, and quite good and if it was still working would be my favorite for music.
The question is, if it was out there, a good filesharing service, something completely legit that offered service for a reasonable fee would you use it. Would you? I would.
Confucius Say "The superior man understands what is right; the inferior man understands what will sell."
~eQuasarus~
Started, predictably enough, at slashdot. Found the article Tim O'Reilly Says Piracy is Progressive Taxation. Well, I had to check that out.
After Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. he goes on to Lesson 2: Tim O'Reilly is a great example of a guy who doesn't go on the record until he's got it right. Maybe he's always right, or maybe he doesn't open his mouth if he's wrong. I respect that a lot.
So I tried to find more of his pieces online. First, went to his oreillynet author page. The next piece I hadn't read was the Switcher Stories Follow-Up, but as I had not yet read the original, I thought I'd do that first. At this point, it became obvious that I was going to have to dig up to get anywhere. So, I read that one. It's about a comment attributed to Kevin Browne, along the lines of "Apple - Work harder to accelerate Mac OS X sales or Microsoft will exit the Mac market forever." Tim's take: So when Tim was in Seattle, he was invited to sit down with Tim McDonough, the Director of Marketing for the MBU. He was able to clarify Kevin's comments a bit. Tim: "And he was intrigued by my report that my customers (Unix power users, Java developers, perl hackers, wireless community activists, and other "alpha geeks" of all stripes) are adopting OS X in droves."
I've heard rumors about OS X on x86, and if I find it, I'll definitely give it a whirl. Hearing about it a lot on slashdot, and having a real purty layer on top of BSD could be slightly more useful than cygwin, a slightly-useful Linux layer on top of XP. So let's see what Tim says about these alpha geeks. Well, duh. But the rest of it is slightly more informative. Ok that's too cool to pass up. Definitely rigging this up on my system, and finally I'll be able to have my technical documentation read to me in a Sean Connery accent. So, finally, on to Switcher Stories Follow Up. Aha! More evidence of this Mac-on-x86 conspiracy. That link is "What Hollywood can learn from Microsoft", by Paul Boutin I assure you, the rest of the piece is just as insightful.
Of course Homosexuals are equals in the eyes of the law.
They have the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex as the rest of us.
They have the same right to express physical love to a member of the opposite sex as the rest of us.
The conservative philosophical sticking point is, these horrible gays *choose* to exhibit illegal, deviant behavior, and giving them the rights to do such behavior is tantamount to giving them rights above and beyond ordinary people.
I'm not supporting or justifying this philosophy, just explaining it for those who haven't heard an explanation of it yet. Try listening to Rush, he'll set you straight. Though I often wonder where his anal cysts came from. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's not, "Give the wookie what he wants" but "Let the wookie win". Somebody should rip a corner off his geek card.
The article is other wise quite interesting though. Sell access by category. That is a obvious but brilliant way for the publishers to increase their revenue.
Robin Hood maybe legend, but the American Revolution isn't. Americans took arms against the British and their legal policies in the colonies that the British financed and owned because to the Americans those policies were intolerable and morally wrong.
No matter how the established government and corporations of that time wanted the American colonies to go on paying extra taxes and not having representation present for the process of lawmaking. No matter that it was right and legal for those British to impose additional taxes against American Companies and not British, it was still repugnant to the colonists. They fought and died to resist it. To me that seems pretty heroic.
Today the corporations and government are working to protect their profits, not their livelihoods, these people profit off the works of others. It is easy to go from patron to exploiter in such a situation.
The corporations are profiting from an older technology to distribute works of artists that do not share in those profits. There is no profit sharing plan here. The artists are paid fundamentally differently from the corporation with whom they have a contract. The newer technology does not threaten the profits of the artists so much as the profitability of the corporations that have the artists under contract. The artists can use any means of distribution as they are the creators. The corporations only profit if the distribution is through the mediums they own and manipulate to their corporate advantage. It is because the corporation owns the means of distribution that the artist signs a contract with a corporation in the first place. The government sees that the people with the most money (corporations) are feeling threatened (all that money buys a lot of lawyers to bring this to the government's attention) the government then acts to 'protect their richest supporters' by passing laws unfair to the users of the newer technology. The people are upset by it even though it is the law of the land. People then break the law. Is the law right, or are the people right?
Americans once decided that the people were righter than the law, and fought and died for people's rights. That is why the second amendment to The Constitution of the United States of America is there. And that is why so many new laws are eroding the fourth amendment too. Since when did the people that own a distribution medium have more rights than the people that actually create the thoughts being distributed?
Robin Hood may be legend, but Americans fought and died against unjust tyranny for real, just like in the legends, and for much the same reasons.
Who's side are you really on?
We also wrote an article that basically says, "put out good quality music and fans will more likely buy it." It's not just the responsibility of the music industry execs but also the artists themselves.
http://www.poochkiss.com/blog.asp?Link=126
I would agree that DVD's many times add stuff on that would be worth the extra cost.
In the early days of Compact Disc Digital Audio, CDs had extras that one could almost call "deleted songs" by analogy with DVD Video's "deleted scenes". For instance, Bad by Michael Jackson contained an extra track called "Leave Me Alone" that wasn't available on the vinyl, cassette, or 8-track version of the album. (Yes, Bad was one of the last albums on 8-track.) They could put extras on a CD because a 74-minute CD could hold as much as 3 24-minute sides of an LP. However, with CD becoming the dominant format, the typical album went from being 48 minutes long to being 60 to 72 minutes long, and they had to be pressed on four 18-minute sides of an LP. Cassettes, on the other hand, could be expanded to 40 minutes a side to hold the whole CD. The increased capacity of the medium could have quite a bit to do with why new albums have more filler than old albums.
But looking at my experience with CD's I don't think that is that case.
It isn't that the price of CDs hasn't dropped; it has. $15 in 2002 dollars is much cheaper than $15 in 1983 dollars. It's that the price of cassettes has dropped even further, due to reduced demand.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There's no side here to be on, and you're engaging in a bit of histrionics to compare the American Revolution with the corporations selling music. The former was important, the latter is of no consequence.
To respond to one of your assertions, when musicians sign contracts with corporations, they give away some of their rights to that music. That's what contracts are all about: I give you something and you agree to give me something else in return. If musicians want to keep those rights, they shouldn't sign the contracts.
In the end, though, it's all about throw-away pop entertainment with a half-life of about 5 minutes that appeals to a narrow minority of the population. Not worth all the fuss.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I think if you want to be able to pay your bills, perhaps you should think about doing something that is actually *useful*.
There is a reason that artists have traditionally needed *patrons*. The true paying artistic works (e.g. Sistene Chapel) are few and far between.
So if you want to make money, choose something in which you can make money. If I thought it was really *neat* to draw chalk circles on the sidewalk, what right would I have to *demand* that I be paid for doing it?
Earning money for doing your art is a side benefit, not a god-given right. If your current "job" isn't paying enough to meet our bills, then get a better paying "job".
Piracy still is wrong. O'Reilley, in his essay, makes a clear distiction between piracy ( making an illegal copy of content for profit ) and sharing ( giving someone a copy for free ). Making copys of a CD and selling them in eBay is piracy, and already able to be prosecuted. Sharing files over kazaa is more like copying a tape for your friend, not illegal and not immoral. Piracy = bad, Sharing = good. Got it? He also states that there are real business opportunities for music publishers to participate in online sharing and make money from it. Wherever there is gobs of supply and gobs of demand someone has to bring the two together, regulate quality, etc. Sharing means free publicity and free distribution, which are costs usually incurred to reach the consumer. Plus people have consistently paid extra for the newer, prettier, hyped-up version of anything. Listen, we are consumers in a capitalist economy. We are not supposed to consume 'nicely' or 'morally' ( although that can be strong form of protest when enough people act together ) we are supposed to consume 'rationally' and coorporations are supposed to take advantage of that by offering us good products at a fair price at a convenient location. Consumers are using new channels to obtain music because the music industry is not offering them those things. Just because the music publishers are not acting quickly enough to gain my business online does not mean I should forsake my music listening. I spend a lot of time online and enjoy listening to new bands ive heard about. I dont feel morally obligated to buy the CD, but I often do because its still easier than spending time hunting down songs and ripping one myself. 'Morality' and 'major labels' do not even belong in the same sentence.
The most intersting aspect of this, IMO, is how easy it is for the MPAA and RIAA to get their way. They're organized and well funded, while all the people bitching here don't do dick to change the laws. For the MPAA and RIAA it's embarassingly easy, and that won't change until groups like the /. crowd get off their butts and fight for what they want, instead of bitching to each other. Honestly, reading /. can be like watching an endless loop of Friends, with a geek twist, and without the cute chicks.
If I can get it for free I AIN'T buying it too! It's obvious that if there's free pussy and milk I won't be marrying the bitch and I won't be buying the software and I won't be buying the CDs. Are you daft or why do you spend money on what is virtually free for all?
They have the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex as the rest of us.
They have the same right to express physical love to a member of the opposite sex as the rest of us.
nope, you missed one very very important point. Heterosexuals are free to choose their prefered sexual partner. Homosexuals are not free to choose their prefered sexual partner. By definition, a homosexual prefers a sexual partner of the same sex, so by definition homosexuals are denied rights that heterosexuals have. You failed to look at the relative issue. A law against homosexual marrages is discriminatory against homosexuals. I can't believe I even have to make that argument...
I've listened to rush, he commits errors like this all the time.
The conservative philosophical sticking point is, these horrible gays *choose* to exhibit illegal, deviant behavior, and giving them the rights to do such behavior is tantamount to giving them rights above and beyond ordinary people
Like those horrible blacks who *chose* to exhibit illegal, deviant behavoir on buses in the 60's? Yup, believe it or not, thats how conservatives used to view that. Time's are a'changin.
I used to believe baseless arguments like this in... oh... 6th grade, when I still looked to other people for opinions. Luckily I've matured since then.
No, giving them the right would be giving EVERYONE the right, we're not limiting rights to homosexuals only. We shouldn't be limiting rights to ANY group of people. If you make gay marrages legal, you won't have to show an "official gay person" licsense at the altar. If the laws were repealed, anyone would be allowed to perform this, as you say, "deviant" behavoir.
Horrible, deviant? These are relavent terms, my friend. I think it's pretty horrible and deviant that people feel they can have control over other peoples love lives, or that they even care to invade the lives of people who have nothing to do with them. Why are they so threatened? Would it hurt to leave the issue alone? No, and that's why they call it "homophobia".
So why is it deviant? Oh, let me guess... the bible said so, right? One thing that amazes me about bible thumping homophobes is that they haven't even read the bible. Or at least, they don't know how to organize their priorities. For every "homosexuality is a sin" reference there is in the bible, there's about 500 "don't be a hypocrite" (you know, the whole thing about the splinter in your brother's eye and the plank in yours?) or "love thy neighbor as thyself" references. You think jesus was just kidding about that stuff? No, he wants you to love sinners, and that includes homosexuals, and everyone else for that matter. There's also about a million references to having faith in crhist, so as long as we're writing the bible into law, should we make a law against being Jewish? Atheist? Let me remind you of something:
doh.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a god." - Thomas Jefferson
Hey, at least I'm honest. But here's my responses to the points made in the summary:
(1) Obscurity is a far greater threat to
authors and creative artists than piracy,
Agreed.
(2) Piracy is progressive taxation;
I don't understand what this is supposed to mean.
(3) Customers want to do the right thing, if they can;
Disagree. Customers only want to do the right thing if they face potential repercussions for doing the thing that benefits them the most instead.
(4)Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy;
Probably true. In the case of media that can exist without a physical form, such as music and software, both are relatively inconsequential.
(5) File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing
publishers;
Until a workable new paradigm for publishing exists, this statement is self-contradictory. How do you publish if you're not a publisher?
(6)"Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service;
Absolutely disagree. This is the principle that the entire Dot-com New Economy was based on, and we all saw how well that worked out.
Consumers do grudgingly agree to price hikes, but if you've given them something for free and then take that away, they'd rather find someone else that still offers it for free than pony up any dough.
(7)There's more than one way to do it. "
Agreed. It's yet to be proven whether any of them will be to everyone's satisfaction though.
While Tim is spot-on about most of what he says, part of it is based on an aging paradigm, where all books are printed in bulk and mostly sit in a warehouse until remaindered.
A huge number of publishers are now using print-on-demand technologies. With these, books are printed one at a time, when someone orders one. There's no warehousing or storage involved -- it's close to the Star Trek food dispensers, but for books. These are close to indistinguishable from conventionally printed books (and I say this having published books both ways, and having subjected print-on-demand books to some serious torture tests to be sure that the print, binding, etc, would hold up well under harsh conditions).
I have more on the process in my article "Creating Surprise Me with Beauty:
How to publish books easily, inexpensively, and beautifully".
Heh - good description. I'm sure that most homosexuals would be quite happy to give heterosexuals the right to marry & express physical love to members of the same sex, thereby ensuring equal rights for all concerned :-)
I was pestering my brother-in-law to read Cryptonomicon for years, and left a hardcover at his home. He started reading, got hooked, but the hardcover was too inconvenient for him to lug around on the bus, etc.
;)
So he hops on Kazaa and finds an eBook copy that will install on his Palm. Now, no legitimate electronic copy of Crypto exists (to the best of my knowledge), so this is probably a copy that some dedicated hackers scanned and OCR'ed page-by-page.
Now he AND my sister have become heavy readers again, but there's a catch -- they only want to read books they can download to their Palm. So they're basically stuck reading dedicated-geek crap like AD&D Dragonspear shit that fanboys go through the trouble of making their own digital copies of.
Let's hold a fund raiser to buy out Random House or Ballantine and hand it over to O'Reilly. Whaddayasay?
sigh
// I will show you fear in a handful of jellybeans.
Basically, like a lot of people, I am extremely lazy. I used to have all my CDs on the shelf and would listen to one, but then no bother to get up and change it.
Now, with 2000 plus songs on the computer, I work, wander round the house, whatever, with my entire collection playing. I have playlists for different artists, moods, etc and never need to get off my arse and change the CD.
The result is that I am more 'into' music than ever before, as listening to it is easy and makes me want to buy other albums from the artists I enjoy.
I can afford to buy CDs. As a student I couldn't afford to - so I pirated friends CDs onto tape. The result was that I listened to music I otherwise wouldn't have bought anyway. Now I can afford the CD, it's easier just to buy it than go through the hassle of taping/copying.
Hmmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I have a couple gigs of MP3s. It's stealing. If I deleted all of them and wiped my hard drive, I still stole. I understand that he isn't arguing any point, but clearly an implicit thesis to the argument is "piracy is okay because we're not harming anyone." So, here I present my mini-rant.
...what does threatening anything have to do with what's right or not? Oh, right, it's not harming anyone, so it's okay. Sure. Burglarizing a bank is a victimless crime, too, right? I mean, you can't even justify it like, say, stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving family -- you didn't need the music. That doesn't matter if it's offset by the fact that your original medium is never lost.
Progressive taxing my ass. All of his lessons are simply the justifications that all the anonymous theives of the Internet give.
Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
Piracy is still a threat. Piracy is still wrong. Obscurity has nothing to do with piracy. How can I get it through these people's skulls?
Piracy is progressive taxation
Justification for pirating music. Obscurity doesn't matter. You're still stealing. And I have a Kindergarten diploma because, among other things, I learned that stealing is wrong. Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
Piracy is a loaded word, which we used to reserve for wholesale copying and resale of illegitimate product. The music and film industry usage, applying it to peer-to-peer file sharing, is a disservice to honest discussion.
Alright, we'll just call it "stealing." The rest of the article talks about how publishers, and again they're justifying stealing. They say it's alright to steal their stuff. Fine. But others don't think so.
The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price.
Read: We can get music for free, so let's not bother paying for it. It'd be a crime NOT to steal, what with the Internet and all. In the meantime, we'll blame the RIAA for our stealing (notice I'm not saying "pirating" anymore -- we want a fair argument, right?)
Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
See #1. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.
File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
"Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service
However true that may be, it doesn't stop the fact that people are stealing right now. I will agree with the part that enthusiasts liking to own something -- DVDs and CDs don't seem to be owned when they're purchased for $20+, do they? It seems that stealing MP3 filess and DivX let you own the medium more than if you had legitimately "purchased" it! That, however, doesn't make it legal to steal. I agree with most of the stuff about how to make music sharing profitable, though, especially if they get rid of the "per song per use per user" policy. I'd value getting any song I want any time I want to be used any way I want with no per-use fee at about $10/mo. That may or may not be practical, but I'm sure some people would be willing to pay more.
In conclusion, many of his claims about the future could be valid, but it seems to me that he is simply justifying stealing music at the present. And for that, I give his persuasive essay a C.
If morality is set by the community, then I suppose you have no problem with people getting their hands cut off for stealing, or women getting stoned to death because they were *accused* of adultery (whether or not they're actually guilty of the act) because in some community - THOSE are the standards.
And in those communities, they ARE acceptable and the right and MORAL thing to do. It sounds as if those morals conflict with yours.
The poster was trying to get this point across: some people have morals that conflict with others. Not everyone will agree with whats right and wrong.
The RIAA companies won't do it since they can't put decent enough encryption around it, but it's a great opportunity for independants who could use it to make something that would lose quality when ripped.
Having been above the top tax bracket many years running, i must inform you that taxes for the very wealthy are different from the norm in that all loopholes are closed. You dont even get the same deductions others get.
No my friend, the rich pay more than their fair of taxes. Is it just to hard to accept?
Unmanipulated book buying is a myth.
As much as we'd all like to not judge a book by its cover, it's virtually the only recommendation that people have to go by when buying something. This isn't necessarily true of all cases, but for most fiction and hobby style books, is all that matters.
I worked in a bookstore for years before my current life, and spent some of that time interacting with publishers and reps. Any-time you run across an author you don't know, you trust 2 things, the rep (who has a vested interest in making you purchase the books) and the cover.
Why not judge books by their covers? It's way easier than reading the entire thing!
Ha ha ha ho ho ho!
You have got to be joking. There is no way that you seriously think those two aren't tools of the recording industry/MTV empire.
-Mark
Stealing: you have a thing, and I take it away.
Copying: I have this one thing, and I make anothing thing just like it.
These are totally unrelated acts. Copyright forbids certain kinds of copying in hopes of encouraging the act of original creation, and copying may violate the law as a result, but there isn't even a hint of stealing involved. Get a grip.
I've got the hardcover of that book. Interesting to re-read it and see how much, and how little, has changed.
Best Slashdot Co
But heterosexuals don't have sex with a "preferred" partner. They have sex to procreate. Are you crazy? Sex is yucky, and sinful. You're not supposed to prefer anything about it.
Your points about admonishments in scripture regarding hypocrisy are not lost on me, they're just lost on about 99% of other Christians out there. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
heh - I wouldn't kick Mick Jagger out of bed for eating crackers. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed
from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.
-- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month"
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