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RIAA Forgets to Make Royalty Payments
theodp writes "NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer agreed with the RIAA on one point - artists WERE being deprived of money that was rightfully theirs. But Spitzer managed to find $50 million for performers without shaking down grandmothers. Spitzer's culprits? A Who's Who of the nation's top recording companies - members of the RIAA - who failed to maintain contact with artists and stopped making required royalty payments."
Is it good or is it whack?
Don't you people realize tonight is the last episode of FRIENDS! Get your priorities straight!
* If you expect companies to follow the copyright of the GPL, you should support the RIAA going after infringers of its copyright. If not, you're a hypocrite.
* There is absolutely nothing wrong with a company being upset that its product is being pirated freely over online networks. A recent Slashdot poll showed that the majority of Slashotters are unemployed or are students ("academics"), which explains a lot. Try getting a real job sometime and see what it feels like when your work is everywhere, and you start worrying that your days are numbered. Does John Carmack want you to "sample" his new game via the "free advertising" happening on eMule?
* At the 2004 WinHEC, Allchin demonstrated an alpha version of Longhorn that played six high-resolution videos at the same time while playing Quake III in the background. An equivalent XP machine couldn't play more than four videos. Meanwhile, I can't even get xmms to play without skipping, and windows to drag without visual tearing! That's because KDE and GNOME are hacks to emulate a desktop on top of the crufty XFree86 architecture that people won't let die (Linux users absolutely fear change).
* VA Linux-owned Slashdot thinks its niche opinion represents the majority of the world. This is a result of people visiting every day and buying into the groupthink. Nobody outside of Slashdot knows or cares about "Linux," "RIAA", "M$," or anything else Slashdotters think is such a huge issue in today's society. Go to a mall or coffee shop sometime and see what people actually talk
about.
* Speaking of VA Linux--it's a Linux company...that owns a "tech news" site...that posts news stories negative toward competitors like Microsoft. If a Windows company or even Microsoft itself owned a "tech news" site and posted anti-Linux articles all the time, everyone would be up in arms. But with VA Linux, it's a-okay.
* Slashbots think people don't like the music coming out these days, which is the cause of the piracy. Never mind that if people didn't like the music they wouldn't be pirating it, most Slashbots--again, this goes back to the niche opinion thing--don't realize that most people these days love the music coming out and want to hear all of it. Probing around, you discover that Slashdot is made up of nerds and fogies who listen to things like The Who and Blind Guardian and techno--not what mainstream society enjoys.
* Any company ending in "AA" is evil. Especially if it doesn't want you distributing its works without paying for it. Somehow, this mindset is supposed to make sense.
* The inevitable result of all this is a world in which nothing can be profitable because people simply pirate free copies. Is that really what Slashbots want? OSS and free-ness in general reminds me of the hippie era of the 60s--idealistic socialism that only exists because of the surrounding capitalism around it that provides the environment for it to exist. We all know what happened to that idea.
* Linux rules the desktop, when in reality [google.com]: Windows = 91%; Mac = 4%; Linux = 1%
* Slashdot editors are abusive. We all remember The Post. It's amusing the editors never mention the issue. The worst editor is michael, who will mod you down, insult you for your post count, and post unprofessional color commentary along with the article. This is the same bizarre person who cybersquatted Censorware for years--even as Slashdot posted articles negative toward cybersquatting! Michael played it off like he was some sort of stalking victim, which made it all the more bizarre.
* The moderation system is broken. If you mod someone as "Overrated," you can't be metamodded. People abuse this all the time to gang up and knock you down into oblivion.
* If "Linux" just refers to the kernel and not the operating system, how can "FreeBSD" refer to the operating system (userland tools, standard libraries, etc.) and not just the kernel? Face it, "GNU/Linux" looks and sounds ridiculous.
* Slashdot is all about spinning truth fo
True. I just wanted to know I liked watching better when you were going in than when you pulled out. Keep doing a bang up job.
I've read it over a few times, and I'm still not seeing where he says that.
I didn't say that he said this, but we may as well jump to the core issue, right? So, I'll ask you again: is unrestricted unregulated file-sharing just ok?
Again, I invite you to quote a false claim he is making.
And I invite you to quote me claiming that he was making a false claim.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Bush calls on RIAA to wack Osama Bin Laden at SlashNOT.com
I'm sure we're all grateful for your efforts to police what we discuss.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda