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RIAA Wins In Court Against UW Madison
Billosaur writes "A judge has ordered the University of Wisconsin-Madison to turn over the names and contact information for the 53 UW-M students accused of file sharing over the university's networks by the RIAA. 'U.S. District Judge John Shabaz signed an order requiring UW-Madison to relinquish the names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and Media Access Control addresses for each of the 53 individuals.' The ruling came as no surprise to the university, which had previously rejected the request of the RIAA to hand out their settlement letters to alleged copyright violators on their campus. The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."
...how i hope that the ip-adresses can be matched to the biggest computer pools available at UW. and that all the login-data was lost in a miraculous backup-failure.
did i say anything? why is it ringing at the door at that late time of day? what the f...AAAAAAAARGH...
connection reset by peer.
What do they actually hope to achieve by filing these lawsuits? Is it profit? I just don't understand.
They didn't "win in court". They filed suit, which UW Madison said they'd have to do before they'd give up the records.
They hope to indicate to the consumers that they are fully in control. The idea is for everyone to understand that they WILL buy RIAAs music or else. In the meantime, they'd like to recoup their legal fees and maybe even make some extra money by taking the kids' lunch money.
Scare tactics. FUD. Call it what you will, but they hope to accomplish punishing/cowering a generation of kids so that they can continue their outdated business model.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."
The moral of the story is if you download illegal music; do it from a university and with a forged MAC. Of course, who's mac is it anyway? Are they going to get a subpoena for every single person that uses the university's network to supply their network cards so the mac address can be examined? That should be fun...
It's all about intimidation. They're hoping the next person who wants to illegally download via P2P will wonder if they will get sued and think twice about doing it.
Cheers.
Mark
For years, we have been struggling with performance of SSL, difficulty of choosing good passwords, vulnerabilities in encryption algorithms. No more! As evidenced by RIAA lawsuits, a new 100% reliable way to identify yourself online has been discovered - an IP address! After all, it's found to be a proof of identity in legal proceedings! Starting immediately, banking websites no longer have to ask for those pesky usernames and password. They can just use an IP address provided by ISP to give you an unrestricted access to your bank account. After all, US courts did much the same thing for RIAA.
The lawsuit path *has to be* a short-lived strategy while the RIAA attempts to get some othe revenue generating system in place.
With DRM implementation plans facing so many hurdles has there been any talk of other avenues this organization might go down.
I refuse to believe that the RIAA believes their current strategy of making examples of isolated individuals will work in the long-term.
Are they fresh out of ideas or have I just missed some news on this front?
Regards.
Can we please for all future articles involving the **AA, instead of saying "**AA does something stupid again," we say "Sony and friend do stupid things again?" Slashdot can do its part in ruining the big labels/studios by revealing the true culprits.
Another Federal level politician (judge) who has been miseducated as to the importance (scope) of his appointment. A proper interpretation of the Constitution would easily show that this is well outside the realm of federal legal jurisdiction.
Two hundred years of constant, relentless, plodding expansion of the authority of the federal government has skewed everyone's perception of what their proper jurisdiction is, though.
Can anyone answer why slavery wasn't covered by "interstate commerce"? Even after fighting a war Congress still went through the motions of passing a Constitutional Amendment to give themselves the power to regulate that. If a Constitutional Amendment was necessary for something as obvious as slavery--a business which trafficked in human life--then how is "interstate commerce" purported to be enough to micromanage nearly everything else which happens in our economy?
Chalk one more up for the communist (ie. a government which controls everything by using a choke hold on the economic financing) politicobankers.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
If it's not an undue burdern on the University, I hope this goes really slowly and eats up tons of RIAA time and money.
Ratfucking bastards. (and my CAPTCHA is vulgar)
It was an ex parte proceeding. It was not a "win". There was no one else in court. No one to oppose it.
It was not against University of Wisconsin. It's against the "John Does".
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
How does monitoring which IP addresses were on these networks necessarily imply that they were trading copyrighted material? The same goes for the 24,977 shared audio files, who can say that those weren't audio recordings of lectures given by professors, or poetry, or local bands trying to get promotion, etc? Hell, for that matter, who's to say they were music/movies at all? Couldn't they have been ISO's of Linux Distro's, JPG's of the topless drunk prom queen, PowerPoint presentations that study groups were collaborating on via the internet?
I realize that probably not everyone is innocent here, but in terms of PROOF, I just don't know about "facts" like these.
"The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."
;-)
Oh, that won't stop them. I'm sure they'll be happy to offer an enterprise licensing settlement for every student at UW-Madison with auto-renewal on a yearly basis.
Remember, if one infringes, they're ALL liable.
"The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway."
I didn't think they needed to? I thought that when the RIAA comes calling, what happens is that you get a notice saying you've already lost a court case some out-of-state court, because the judge rubberstamped their claim that this IP address is you, and now it's up to you to either a) pay a lawyer, go to court, and try to prove your innocence, or b) pay the nice RIAA their reasonable thirty-five-hundred dollars and get on with your life.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Against, Wisconsin! Against, Wisconsin!
They sue you all the time!
Download songs and they will fry you
Lawsuits sure this time. (those bas-tards)
Against, Wisconsin! Against, Wisconsin!
How the judge did find:
Against! Students! - fight, fight, fight!
You'll lose this game.
(Good luck - from a Spartan)
It's directed more at Universities and parents. They know full well kids wont take the moral high ground and stop pirating. They are aiming these suits at the kids to show parents who the boss is. I know several parents who've taken action against there kids for fear of the RIAA knocking on their doors. My father, when this all began, even took time out to come talk to me about whether or not I was pirating songs on his cable modem (I was 25 at the time and staying with them while in college still).
Lawsuits are rarely profitable on a corporate scale. They are more or less used to scare a certain segment of the population, in this case, parents and gaurdians. This in turn puts pressure on the actual offenders. They aren't looking for compensation for the theft which is what lawsuits were supposed to be for to begin with. Instead it's being used as a message which, to me, is an abuse of the system and the judges and lawyers involved should be taking action to stop it as it significantly reduces the credibility of their own system.
It would actually be interesting to see what the RIAA would do with IP's mapped to University Common Area machines. Should they then sue the University since they are the owners of the machines that are linked to the IP, like they do with ordinary people?
Lucky for the RIAA that you can't change a MAC address. Oh, wait...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
How is that going to help them find anyone?
Hey RIAA - read this first.
And everyone else too. Never hurts to know stuff like this, y'know. Just in case. Yeah. That's it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
More than likely, when the next generation gets into power, they'll remember this and pass legislation that will move the pendulum the other way to the detriment of the copyright holders. Corporate America being corporate America, they'll make sure they don't lose and those and the talent/creators will be the ones who take it in the pocket book.
As far as outdated business models are concerned, there are legal ways to get this material, so the "outdated business model" argument is no longer valid.
"Scare tactics. FUD. Call it what you will, but they hope to accomplish punishing/cowering a generation of kids so that they can continue their outdated business model."
By your reasoning, money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth. After all, if I counterfeit money, I'm not hurting anyone, right? People still want music and are willing to pay for it. Copying it because it's easy is no more ethical than counterfeiting money.
TODO: 4/26/2007
1) invent Time machine
2) travel back to College
3) change Mac Address
4) Proceed to share music files as planned
5) Also, Invent Google
6) Profit!!
Dear Mr and Mrs Joe Average
We, the RIAA, represent copyright holders of digital content, and as such, it has come to our attention that you own a computer which is also connected to the Internet via Globalcom ISP.
We have acquired web surfing logs from Globalcom, and have determined that several people in the Northern Hemisphere have been downloading music files illegally. Since you connect to the Internet via Globalcom we are prepared to offer you a discounted amnesty program. You may choose this option, sending us the requisite $5,000 payment via check or major credit card, or you may choose to wait till we take you to court, confiscate your computers, all the computers you have had access to, and the computing and entertainment devices of yourselves, all your family members, and anyone who has been within 50 feet of your wireless router.
We cheerfully await your reply and are certain you will do the right thing.
Sincerely,
The RIAA
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Most of the legal methods also depend upon the idea of artificial scarcity though- in this case scarece bandwidth. I'm surprised there hasn't been a group of artists yet to band together to form a new music licensing website and group that licenses digital recordings at $.25/track- double what ASCAP/BMI offers artists while still underselling ITunes.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The RIAA thanks you for your support in its fight against piracy and theft.
They have radio (free music) and empty-v (more free music) that you can sample at a far higher quality than any lossily compressed file. But they can't control P2P or MySpace. Those two things are the only ways indies can be heard.
They don't want to stop you from downloading Aerosmith's song "Changes", or Black Sabbath's song "Changes", they're trying like hell to keep you from hearing the (fictional, this is just an example) Blue Vaginas' "Changes".
Do you have any idea how many songs there are named "scatterbrain?"
Watch for the RIAA to work on getting MySpace shut down next. This isn't about losses from "piracy", it's about losses from competetion. And the indie bands ARE their competetion.
THAT'S what it's REALLY about.
-mcgrew
At the very least, why does everyone use **AA ? This is Slashdot. Everyone should know **AA is the same as *AA. Why not use ??AA ?
For reference:
"UW-M" = University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
"UW" = University of Wisconsin - Madison
Whoever submitted the article mistakenly used the wrong abbreviation.
Or, you know, check their logs to see who was logged in at the time of the alleged downloads. They DO make you log in, right? My school did...but who knows.
Because the major labels' marketing power, which iTunes relies on too, lets artists sell more than twice the amount of recordings some website would. Basically.
Truth arises more readily from error than from confusion. -Francis Bacon
This often comes up in stories about UW-Madison. The University of Wisconsin is a big system with many campuses. UW-M refers to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. UW alone (pronounced "u double-u") refers to UW-Madison. By contrast, UW (pronounced "u dub", as I understand it) refers to the University of Washington.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
By your reasoning, money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth.
It is. Has been for some time now- ever since the US government decided to try to create one world currency only loosely linked to a commodity instead of strongly linked (the fiat petrodollar). Of course, the final thing that killed it is the number of banks that keep extra dollars around that only exist in cyberspace- there are far more "dollars" out there than can be accounted for by the government printing offices.
After all, if I counterfeit money, I'm not hurting anyone, right?
Given that the government has been counterfieting money since the 1930s, how could you?
People still want music and are willing to pay for it.
Now that is a separate issue. The broken business model is the one of artifical scarcity- the music isn't scarce anymore. NEW recordings are what is scarce. Therefore, I'd propose a whole new business model for the music industry- low bandwidth (8 bit, 22khz, mono) recordings for free, higher quality tracks (16 bit 44khz stereo) for $.25 (double what the bands get now from ASCAP/BMI), and all of the money going to the band. Forget the record labels- and if you want a CD, buy the tracks you want off the band's website and burn it yourself. No DRM or copyrights. This encourages the bands to continue to put out new stuff- as high quality bitrate recordings will get out into the wild on the filesharing networks, the sales will drop off for older tracks,so to keep making money bands will have to put out new stuff.
Copying it because it's easy is no more ethical than counterfeiting money.
Wrong end of the stick. Copying it because it's easy means that the copying itself has very low real ecconomic value- it's the creation that should have high ecconomic value. The RIAA is in an obsolete business model, because their business model depends upon getting money from COPYING other people's work. They need badly to become extinct as the buggy whip makers. The artists are who deserve the money, not the RIAA.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
oh, please. for decades now, you can soft-set mac addrs.
;)
worst case, kids, is you have to ditch your $5 ethernet card and buy another one
(that doesn't help with onboard ethernets though. for that, you'd have to ditch the whole mobo.)
if I was a student and someone was going to finger me on my MAC addr, dumping my ethernet card would be one of the first defensive things I'd do.
"hey, it just broke. not my fault. but I bought a new one just yesterday..."
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"Outdated business model?" The one where they go after people who are violating their rights and ripping them off?
What exactly would you consider a modern business model, online sales? They've been doing that for years through iTunes. You just want to scapegoat the RIAA to make yourself feel better about pirating other people's work. Admit it already.
Protecting your rights isn't "scare tactics." If you guys don't like copyrights, then you'd better abandon the GPL since it relies on them. You also can't bitch whenever someone takes GPL code without attribution.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Ok, so let's say that I loan my car to my friend on Saturday, who then runs a red light. Using the intersection photo, the police mail me a ticket. But of course, I wasn't the one driving.
The **AA claim that they IP address 1) points to such-and-such computer, and 2) the owner of that computer must pay.
Except in my analogy, the license plate doesn't change each time I turn on the car.
Is that the same type of logic going on here? Can it be that simple to explain to someone like, say, a judge?
-Valiss
You bring up an interesting point. If I have a 2GB U3-enabled USB pen drive, with Azureus and Limewire, I can plug into any Java-enabled Windows box and do my thing, even at a public terminal. If I do that, how is liability possibly going to be assigned to me? The computer doesn't know; it's a public box with a single, anonymous login. The IP addresses can only tell them which physical box in the public pool it was, and that's assuming that the residential Internet is tied to MAC addresses.
So, in this hypothetical, who takes the liability? What if I do this at a public library? Is the library responsible?
~ C.
I don't think it's profit, I think it's "???" ...
so when are we going to start seeing spoofs; maybe something like:
hi, I'm a MAC address.
and I'm the RIAA.
just got to get hodgeman to do the voice-over and we're all set.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The "outdated business model" response is just as tired and irrelevant as the perennial favorite, "free advertising." Neither has anything to do with the actual topic--the RIAA suing people who are infringing on its members' rights by distributing artistic works so that people don't get paid for them. The group has every right in the world to do this, and the outcry over it is quite bizarre. People always cheer the EFF on when it sues people, but for some reason the RIAA isn't allowed to.
In truth, what's really going on in your post and others is that you're purposely drawing on anti-capitalist stereotypes by portraying the RIAA as some faceless corporate badguy so that you can feel better when you fire up Bittorrent and make sure System of a Down doesn't get paid today. Pirates never, ever mention the artists in their posts. It's always RIAA, RIAA, RIAA. The reason for this is that the idea of there being hard-working artists in this equation has to be swept under the rug or feelings of guilt might surface over ripping them off, and that goes against the true cause of piracy-- an unwarranted sense of entitlement and no desire to contribute back to the artistic community.
Expect to see this post modded down.
Money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth? Then why is it still in use? Did you pay for the computer you're typing on, and do you receive paychecks or student loan money? If money is obsolete, the answer to both questions would be no. But it's not, is it?
What a load of goofy, leftist crap. Money isn't obsolete and never will be. The capitalist free market is how nature works. Your "outdated business model" argument is really a red herring to justify piracy so that you feel better about the ethical nature of your activities. "I'm not ripping off artists. My actions are just a result of an outdated business model! Whew, now that I'm off the hook, time to download the latest Bad Plus album so I don't have to pay them for their work."
"Sufferin' succotash."
Of course, no password was ever shared or stolen at that university....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
'More than likely, when the next generation gets into power, they'll remember this and pass legislation that will move the pendulum the other way to the detriment of the copyright holders.'
I doubt it, this generation has learned the same lesson the Vietnam baby boomers learned. They've learned that you can't beat the man. They will grow up to do the same thing the baby boomers did, sell out and sell out hard.
'As far as outdated business models are concerned, there are legal ways to get this material, so the "outdated business model" argument is no longer valid.'
Are they still charging based upon artificial scarcity and the number of 'copies'? Supply and demand dictates that productions and distribution bottlenecks define costs. The music industry is based around old bottlenecks that no longer apply. Bittorrent and Digital copying means that 1 song is no more valuable than 10,000 songs. You can set up a studio in which to record and cut albums for less than 5k now. There are and always have been plenty of talented artists, they are a dime a dozen (sorry artists, but its true). Music is cheap to produce and in virtually unlimited supply.
Once upon a time when market dynamics changed this drastically companies went out of business, even huge companies, and new ones sprang up that worked differently. Now D.C. has sold out to the point that those companies effectively buy legislation to keep them relevant.
Music was never a good way for an artist to make a living. Most bands sound great when coupled with great recording. Its time for professional music to be about concerts and recorded music to be free promotional material. The recording industry should effectively be artist unions that do just that, offer high quality recordings as REASONABLE prices perhaps even free recording and hosting with union dues.
My local library makes patrons scan their library card to log into the public computers. Instituting this means the person at the reference desk no longer has to keep track of how long people have been on (since there are not enough computers to meet demand generally). But I think the real reason they did it was so they could track who was looking at what online in case the FBI and the PATRIOT Act came calling.
some labs may have drop in hard disk with a common login for some classes.
Ok, so up it to $.50- more than 4x what the RIAA pays the artist. Good for society still because it encourages the artist to release more new tracks- in other words, actually do their ART instead of living off of copies of their art.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
What exactly would you consider a modern business model, online sales?
Separating out from the rest of your rant- a modern business model separates the low economic value stuff out (like making copies of CDs) from the high ecconomic value stuff (writing new songs, live performances) and finds a way to make money on the high ecconomic value stuff while giving away the low ecconomic value stuff for free.
As for your rant about the GPL- well, yes. Agreed. Not a problem for me. I don't care to get paid by the copy or by the license- I want to be paid for my time being creative. Once I've finished writing the software, what do I care what happens to it?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
money is a very efficient way for 2 people to exchange services. For example, I am a carpenter, and you are a programmer. Do we barter, our skills or are you going to give me chickens when I finish your deck?
Or do you mean that physical money is outdated, and we need something like Federation Credits for intergalactic trade?
Money is an obsolete way of keeping track of wealth? Then why is it still in use? Did you pay for the computer you're typing on, and do you receive paychecks or student loan money? If money is obsolete, the answer to both questions would be no. But it's not, is it?
Just because something is obsolete doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore. My parents still have a hand pump in their garden well- but it's rarely used. Likewise, my paychecks are direct deposited, and I spend with a debit card. I rarely even have any coin at all in my wallet anymore- my computer was paid for with bits and bytes, not dollar bills.
Worse yet though is that even those bits and bytes are too large to effectively cover low-ecconomic value activities like copying CDs and DVDs- the actual cost to produce is too small to be counted, which is what we're talking about. The only way the RIAA's business can be supported is with artificial scarcity.
What a load of goofy, leftist crap. Money isn't obsolete and never will be. The capitalist free market is how nature works.
Really? When was the last time you saw a baboon using money? When was the last time you saw a stock market in a beehive? So much for the free market being "the way nature works" LIE, just another "I want to use guns to oppress my neighbors and take their property" argument.
Your "outdated business model" argument is really a red herring to justify piracy so that you feel better about the ethical nature of your activities.
No, sorry- I'm FOR paying the artist and creating a better model to do so. It's really against the unethical nature of the RIAA's business model- charging money for something that can be done for free, that is, the copying and distribution of music.
The rest of your rant fails to take this into account, so I'm not even going to dignify it with an answer. But someday soon you're going to have to face it when a petabyte hard drive, a fast processor, a desktop fabricator, and a bunch of grass clippings will allow you to copy a steak dinner as easily as we copy a spreadsheet today. After all, it's just the ARRANGEMENT of the carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen that makes it a steak and not grass clippings. If you can scan the steak, and rearrange the atoms, you can make as many steaks as you have grass clippings.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
money is a very efficient way for 2 people to exchange services. For example, I am a carpenter, and you are a programmer. Do we barter, our skills or are you going to give me chickens when I finish your deck?
Or I just download the deck plans off of the internet, use my desktop fabricator to make legos out of grass clippings and epoxy, and make the deck myself. Isn't that far more efficient than paying somebody else to do it?
The point is that it is becoming less and less economic to exchange services AT ALL as time goes on- and some services are going to drop off the bottom end. The RIAA is finding themselves at that point today- a hundred years from now it will be even the software engineers.
Or do you mean that physical money is outdated, and we need something like Federation Credits for intergalactic trade?
Physical money is outdated right now- and many people HAVE replaced it with something very much like Federation Credits- autodeposits and debit cards have pretty much replaced physical money for me. That is what I meant to begin with. But in the long term, even the bits and bytes I paid for my computer with will be outdated- eventually everything will be software, and hardware will be just what your desktop fabricator creates after you download whatever the heck you want off of the Internet. It's music and movies now- but I've already seen experiments where you can download a bicycle off the internet and have an epoxy-resin fabricator build the parts for assembly. Someday those fabricators will be able to rearrange atoms themselves- then where will your "exchange of services for money" be when nobody needs to exchange services anymore?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Worse yet though is that even those bits and bytes are too large to effectively cover low-ecconomic value activities like copying CDs and DVDs- the actual cost to produce is too small to be counted, which is what we're talking about. The only way the RIAA's business can be supported is with artificial scarcity."
You missed my whole point. Money is also "artificially scarce". It's easy to print something that looks like a dollar. When you do this successfully, you steal from everyone who has real dollars by causing inflation. Same thing with music. When you circulate pirated music, it devalues the original music because you are giving it away for free. As a marxist, you don't understand the value of private property, there's no point in arguing with you that creating music takes work, and the product may or may not have monetary value based on the number of people that like it, and the amount of money they are willing to pay for it (i.e. trade their own productive labor for it).
The rest of your arguments about money are a red herring. Money isn't obsolete. It's a way to represent productive work and simplify trade, as it has been for thousands of years. Whwther it's in the form of paper or bits in a computer, it's still the same thing. Everyone uses money every day, unlike a hand pump.
"Bittorrent and Digital copying means that 1 song is no more valuable than 10,000 songs. "
No. That's like saying 1 dollar is no less valuable than 10,000 dollars. Just print more money. What are the consequences? Inflation. This means that everyone who has money pays when you print and use conterfeit dollars. Ultimately, the more people distribute music for free, the less the song is worth, because a cheaper source exists for free, so you need to charge less to entice people to buy the legal copy. The value of something is defined by it's demand, not by it's cost to reproduce.
"When was the last time you saw a baboon using money? " Wrong example, perhaps. Richard Dawkins, in The Ancestors Tale, discusses primates having a kind of proto-trade (my words not his). Individual primates who share excess food build up goodwill and/or trust with other members of their troop so that when they are in need the others share their excess food with them. Conversely, stingy fuckers get as much as they give, nowt. What is money other than a form of itemised goodwill and trust? However, this still kicks the arse of the nature-is-naturally-selfish-so-it-is-ok-to-be-a-vi rtual-sociopath-Jeffrey-Skilling-misunderstanding- The-Selfish-Gene school of capitalism as the indiviuals who share/cooperate are more likely to survive.
You missed my whole point. Money is also "artificially scarce". It's easy to print something that looks like a dollar.
No, I got that quite effectively- the problem with money is that it IS artificially scarce, and our government has been printing it like there is an infinite supply of it.
When you do this successfully, you steal from everyone who has real dollars by causing inflation.
Ah, but only if you think real dollars had any value to begin with- which they haven't since 1935 or so (when did the gold standard become illegal again)?
Same thing with music. When you circulate pirated music, it devalues the original music because you are giving it away for free.
That's because MUSIC has no real value either- the only real value is in the art of creating NEW works of art. Copies don't take any real labor to produce- thus in the Marxist Labor Value of pricing, they can't have a price.
As a marxist, you don't understand the value of private property, there's no point in arguing with you that creating music takes work,
Creating music the FIRST time takes work. Creating the same piece of music for the millionth time is done by robots and has virtually NO ecconomic value, because there was no labor that went into it. The Artist deserves to be paid. The RIAA is just a bunch of con artists who are ripping off the real artists and doing NO usefull work.
and the product may or may not have monetary value based on the number of people that like it, and the amount of money they are willing to pay for it (i.e. trade their own productive labor for it).
The only moral value of a product is the labor that goes into making it; that is, the original artist who wrote or interpreted the song. The rest has no ecconomic value- charging money for it is immoral.
The rest of your arguments about money are a red herring. Money isn't obsolete. It's a way to represent productive work and simplify trade, as it has been for thousands of years.
So what happens when there is NO productive work going into a service, and NO need for trade in a certain industry? That's what has happened in the music industry- the value of recording and copying music has become zero.
Whwther it's in the form of paper or bits in a computer, it's still the same thing. Everyone uses money every day, unlike a hand pump.
I don't use the paper form anymore- and I'm not stupid enough to buy into an immoral con artist's insistance on making information artificially scarce. I'm sorry that you are that stupid to believe in myths and legends such as MONEY instead of freeing your mind and soul from the material world. You must be awfully tied to all sorts of other superstitious rituals as well- I bet you even invest in the stock market, where you pay people to shuffle worthless paper all day.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Therefore, I'd propose a whole new business model for the music industry- low bandwidth (8 bit, 22khz, mono) recordings for free, higher quality tracks (16 bit 44khz stereo) for $.25 (double what the bands get now from ASCAP/BMI), and all of the money going to the band. Forget the record labels- and if you want a CD, buy the tracks you want off the band's website and burn it yourself. No DRM or copyrights. This encourages the bands to continue to put out new stuff- as high quality bitrate recordings will get out into the wild on the filesharing networks, the sales will drop off for older tracks,so to keep making money bands will have to put out new stuff."
People who write stuff like this don't understand the value of marketing in a company, and don't understand business in general. If a programmer writes the most kick-ass game in the world, and nobody's heard of it, he's not going to sell any copies. A successful business requires a lot of cooperation between a lot of people. This argument that only the musicians deserve to get paid is nonsense. The internet may streamline this process, but in the end, people aren't going to search through thousands of band's websites to find music they like. That's what record labels do for them, for better or worse.
True enough. I think trade and money is a stage, not a natural part of all species and all societies. We're approaching the end of that stage now; the only real question left will be what comes first, polluting ourselves to death in search of profit, or using and rearranging that pollution to eliminate any possibility of making a profit on anything. The first way leads to extinction- what the RIAA is experiencing right now is just a virtual form of what we're doing to our own living space. The second way will make money and trade worthless- the only thing left with any value will be information and intellectual property, and even that won't be worth very much in a world where anybody can get anything they want if they can distill the correct atoms out of sewage or the smog in the air and assemble them in the proper way.
Of course, we'll evolve to fit the new way- we always do....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
People who write stuff like this don't understand the value of marketing in a company,
Or rather, we consider marketing to be an ecconomically negative activity that destroys efficiency and allows inferior products to outmarket superior products.
and don't understand business in general.
That statement I'll agree with. Why should I trade for something I can do myself?
If a programmer writes the most kick-ass game in the world, and nobody's heard of it, he's not going to sell any copies.
True- but that's where you hand out a lower quality version to friends and then charge for the high quality version. Why should I pay for marketing I can do myself?
A successful business requires a lot of cooperation between a lot of people.
A faith-based idea if I ever saw one. Why does a successfull business need to be any more than a single individual, if technology replaces everybody else?
This argument that only the musicians deserve to get paid is nonsense.
Then prove it's nonsense, instead of making faith-based assertions.
The internet may streamline this process, but in the end, people aren't going to search through thousands of band's websites to find music they like.
True- instead they're going to get it from the broadcasters, just like they always have. No need for a recording company there if you've got a friend who is a DJ with a listening audience, or better yet, ARE a podcaster with a listening audience.
That's what record labels do for them, for better or worse.
If that's all record labels do, then they need to get a new gig- perhaps actually CREATING something of VALUE instead of just faking it?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Spoken like a man who hasn't worked a day of manual labor in his life.
I'm not sure what "less economic" means, but I get the strong impression you don't believe in the concept of "skilled labor" and seem to think you can teach yourself to perform services (at equal quality) for less than you can buy them.
This again is the attitude of one who is playing with concepts such as value and skill and finance, not someone who is living them.
Someday isn't today. Raw materials do not equal finished products, just as compressed grass clippings and epoxy do not equal a deck.
On a long enough time scale all you predict might come true, until then money isn't outdated. (Paper or electronic doesn't change a thing.) Dollars are dollars. Yen are yen. Just because the transactions are done in computers instead of at a cash register / teller window doesn't change anything. The accounting is exactly the same.
UW Madison should reply using the immortal words of our esteemed Attorney General, "'I have no recollection' of the passphrase to that encrypted file."
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
'No. That's like saying 1 dollar is no less valuable than 10,000 dollars. Just print more money. What are the consequences? Inflation. This means that everyone who has money pays when you print and use conterfeit dollars.'
Dollars aren't worth any more than counterfeit in and of themselves. They are supposed to represent value. Music doesn't represent anything, it has only its innate value. You are right, technology has made it cost nothing to copy something as much as you like and the people have spoken, they don't see anything wrong with using that technology. This has ALREADY devalued songs to the point where they don't have a value worth measuring.
'Ultimately, the more people distribute music for free, the less the song is worth, because a cheaper source exists for free, so you need to charge less to entice people to buy the legal copy.'
Did you even read the post you are responding to. I maintain that free sources of all the music are already plentiful enough that the value is nothing. At least that is the value to the ones receiving the music. The artists can realize greater value from the recorded music by using as promotional material. Those same artists can make a living by PERFORMING music, privately and publically. Those artists can form unions that provide bittorrent trackers and P2P networks to distribute their music. Those same unions can provide recording time at cost, union dues might be enough to cover cost and if not a small surcharge (no greater than cost) would be charged. Either way, cheap equipment and software packages have made professional grade recording affordable for garage bands.
'The value of something is defined by it's demand, not by it's cost to reproduce.'
No, demand is only one side of the coin. The other side is supply. Despite your last statement that demand is the only factor everything else you have said admits that the existing ready supply of free music that is large enough to fill the demand has effectively reduced the value of recorded songs to nothing. The answer is to let the multi-billion dollar industry that revolves around song recording to collapse and let new markets that accept this reality spring up. Not to pass laws to attempt to artificially inflate the value of the recorded songs to something rather than nothing.
In fact, to everyone reading this thread. I know a few local bands. Would anyone be willing to donate bandwidth to host the torrents and trackers so that I can help get a union like this started?
You're not really debating fairly here.
You clearly understand what you're talking about very well, and as such you should know that when people have been going on about money being real, they're talking about currency as a moderator of trade, not as in the coin of the realm. Its apples and oranges, and replying to apples with oranges is disingenuous debate.
Money as the moderator of exchange is very real, and in that sense you are living proof, just by using it to live... unless you're accruing the means of survival through some other channels than buying them with your debit card.
Capitalism is, in fact, the dominant economic mode of the earth, and as such, communist notions of value assignment are somewhat meaningless. I.E. it really doesnt matter that the Dollar is no longer on the Gold standard, because capitalism decided that the market no longer needed fixed monetary values. You and i may think that such a shared hallucination is retarded, but that doesnt make it any less Things As They Are.
The Marxist conception of Value is actually his weakspot, imho. It basically ignores the reality of market processes in favor of the way things "should be." Which is fine for philosophy and Macro-processes, but not for monetary issues.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
this RIAA shit.
This has gone WAY too far. This is PLAIN OUT INTIMIDATION AND HARASSMENT. There is nothing legal to this.
These bastards are doing a witch hunt, not unlike in Spanish Inquisition style, defining "names" from COMMONLY USED computer ips. (how does that happen, beats the hell out of me despite having been working in I.T. since 6 years).
Just tell me if is there ANYthing about this different from what Spanish Inquisition did in 15th century ; compile a list of names from your so-called suspects (without any evidence) and then burn them in the stakes.
Read radical news here
Any organization that doesn't want to play this game should use NAT to map their public addresses to their internal network no matter how big their address range.
Think about it. If you have a class C address range, and you psudo-dynamically (e.g. randomly) map each private (internal) address to a public address then there is no possibility of correlation.
So the fixed servers are given fixed addresses, and the client machines get issued a public address when they go public. Do it in a first requested, next issued basis. The mapping would be pretty straight forward and consistent on a session by session basis.
Make the rotations happen arbitrarily at DHCP cliam/renew and leave it at that.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
You're not really debating fairly here.
It's hard to debate fairly against those who are not intellectually equal.
You clearly understand what you're talking about very well, and as such you should know that when people have been going on about money being real, they're talking about currency as a moderator of trade, not as in the coin of the realm. Its apples and oranges, and replying to apples with oranges is disingenuous debate.
Currency as a moderator of trade ceased to have any value the day the government started to counterfiet it; it just takes time for the myth to fall under it's own lies. Inflation and the effectively infinite supply of bits means that one day money's value will fall to zero- the law of supply and demand at work. Likewise, the value of art has fallen to zero for the same reason- it's effectively now in infinite supply. As time goes on and automation takes over, skilled labor is due for the same fate.
Money as the moderator of exchange is very real, and in that sense you are living proof, just by using it to live... unless you're accruing the means of survival through some other channels than buying them with your debit card.
Well, I can, it's not strictly neccessary. My ancestors got very fat living in this valley before white man came- they may not have had clothes or personal property, but they considered themselves VERY wealthy, as the land provided all that they needed. Fish, venison, birds, eggs, vegetables, fruit- they had it all back then, before the malaria.
Capitalism is, in fact, the dominant economic mode of the earth, and as such, communist notions of value assignment are somewhat meaningless.
Except, of course, in the music industry, where capitalism must be protected by lawsuits to still exist...
I.E. it really doesnt matter that the Dollar is no longer on the Gold standard, because capitalism decided that the market no longer needed fixed monetary values.
And one day soon capitalism will decide that the market no longer needs money. Unless you figure out what to do before then- you'll be as outdated as an RIAA executive.
You and i may think that such a shared hallucination is retarded, but that doesnt make it any less Things As They Are.
But it isn't how "things as they are"- inflation shows that, as the value of the dollar continues to errode towards zero. It is in fact just one big fraudulent con game- and those at the "top" deserve nothing more than jail and execution for the lie.
The Marxist conception of Value is actually his weakspot, imho. It basically ignores the reality of market processes in favor of the way things "should be." Which is fine for philosophy and Macro-processes, but not for monetary issues.
Doesn't matter- because the law of supply and demand makes *both* obsolete in a surplus economy. Marx's "value of labor" means NOTHING when everything can be done better by machine than man. (Guess you, like so many others, have been fooled by my handle- I hack marx, I hack economic systems- I'm not a slavish follower of anybody's axiom beyond that which I need to fit into the myth of the people around me- and even then, I found a niche where my "money" supply is guaranteed by law rather than dependant upon the ever-decreasing value of the dollar.) Eventually, we'll need no labor to live; at that point, money will be obsolete for far more than just cyberspace programs and patterns of bits.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Or rather, we consider marketing to be an ecconomically negative activity that destroys efficiency and allows inferior products to outmarket superior products.
"
LOL. Now I know you don't understand business. What a joke. Take an economics course and stop embarrassing yourself. Try designing a chip without marketing it to your clients to see what features they want, sometime. Let me know too so I can short your company.
I can't even read through the rest of your post because I fell out of my chair laughing a 1/3 of the way down.
Why would they get more then 1 sale? After all, everyone can just fileshare the latest song like they do for RIAA music.
Eventually, it will get to that point; the inefficiency of current file sharing networks (for instance, grokster is not compatible with bittorrent) will keep this away for a while. But I strongly suspect, long after the RIAA is gone and stops controling the prices, that the price will once again rise- after all, the band still has to eat. It will balance out someplace between selling the song ONCE paying back some of the R&D- and the rest getting paid back by live show appearances and ticket prices.
Having said that- here's the good part: This puts pressure back on the artist to either earn money another way (do the music as a hobby) or continually put out new tracks and remixes; in either case society is better off than a one-hit wonder living off of the sales of a single for a hundred and fifty years.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"It's hard to debate fairly against those who are not intellectually equal."
Yes. And? Since when was the path supposed to be easy?
"Currency as a moderator of trade ceased to have any value the day the government started to counterfiet it; it just takes time for the myth to fall under it's own lies."
Wrong, currency as a moderator of trade continues to have value as long as those who participate in the game continue to accept it. We assign value through our actions. We use money as a moderator of trade, simple as that. You may feel free, obviously to believe whatever you want, but that doesnt change the fact that you participate in a system you hold to be meaningless. All the rest is empty Demagoguery.
"Well, I can, it's not strictly neccessary. My ancestors got very fat living in this valley before white man came- they may not have had clothes or personal property, but they considered themselves VERY wealthy, as the land provided all that they needed. Fish, venison, birds, eggs, vegetables, fruit- they had it all back then, before the malaria."
Far out. And my ancestors did the same in Ireland before the potato famine. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the apparent fact that you subsist through means negotiated by currency, yet claim that moderation by currency is meaningless. If that is the case, then why buy into the lie? and yes, holding that its a lie but participating in the system is buying into the lie. So you're a malcontent. So what?
"Except, of course, in the music industry, where capitalism must be protected by lawsuits to still exist..."
Not entirely sure what you're trying to say. Legislating a business-model is different than litigating capitalism.
"But it isn't how "things as they are"- inflation shows that, as the value of the dollar continues to errode towards zero. It is in fact just one big fraudulent con game- and those at the "top" deserve nothing more than jail and execution for the lie."
You'll get no argument from me if you choose to phrase this in terms of 'the expansionist nature of capitalism as viewed through the constant inflation of world currencies, is an inherently unsustainable practice, and should be stopped.' However, again, you come with meaningless rhetoric instead of argument. It *is* the way things are. PRESENT TENSE. Last I checked use of the present tense in no way spoke to how things would be at ANY POINT IN THE FUTURE. If its a con game, its one we play on ourselves, yourself included, no matter how much you flail around deriding it, and as such labeling it fraudulent is just vapid.
" (Guess you, like so many others, have been fooled by my handle- I hack marx, I hack economic systems- I'm not a slavish follower of anybody's axiom beyond that which I need to fit into the myth of the people around me- and even then, I found a niche where my "money" supply is guaranteed by law rather than dependant upon the ever-decreasing value of the dollar.)"
No. does it make you feel good to think that you've 'tricked' me somehow? putting quote marks around money doesnt alter the fact that you have chosen a lifestyle dependent on something you claim to be fradulent and meaningless. If you want to talk about the negative social impacts of a monetary society, I'm right there with you, but i fail to see how you've said anything of meaning.
"Eventually, we'll need no labor to live; at that point, money will be obsolete for far more than just cyberspace programs and patterns of bits."
yeah, good luck with that. I'd not say that you hack anything so much as that you yourself are a hack.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
The school feels the RIAA will have a hard time tracking down who did the file-sharing anyway, as the IP addresses the RIAA has for the violations may be mapped to computers in common areas, making it difficult to determine just which people may have made the downloads."
.edu connection. It's also very enjoyable when there's no assigned seating and no way to trace it back to you.
Ah yes. I fondly recall sitting in class as the professor professed.
How wonderful it was to take notes with my laptop plugged into the classroom table.
You know, Bittorrent is REALLY fast over a direct
LOL. Now I know you don't understand business. What a joke. Take an economics course and stop embarrassing yourself. Try designing a chip without marketing it to your clients to see what features they want, sometime. Let me know too so I can short your company.
Exactly my point- marketing allows inferior products to beat superior products in the marketplace. The most marketing you should EVER have to do is give me a spec sheet- if you can't sell me your product based on a spec sheet alone, then you've got more work to do refining your product or I don't need your product at all. In NEITHER case should I buy your current product. That's the reason I stopped buying music several years ago- everything that has come out since 1990 has been pure crap, marketed heavily.
I can't even read through the rest of your post because I fell out of my chair laughing a 1/3 of the way down.
Idiots often laugh at wisdom because they don't understand it.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The difference is quite simple, the RIAA just wants to take all your money and have you locked up. They have no interest in tying you to a bon-fire and igniting you by pouring molten-lead in your mouth.
I know it's a subtle difference, but it's still there.
What could be better than a jet powered motorcycle? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8l6GTHLSWE
Yes. And? Since when was the path supposed to be easy?
"My path is easy and my yoke is light". Seems to me that when we put our faith in truth instead of lies, the path is a lot easier.
Wrong, currency as a moderator of trade continues to have value as long as those who participate in the game continue to accept it. We assign value through our actions. We use money as a moderator of trade, simple as that. You may feel free, obviously to believe whatever you want, but that doesnt change the fact that you participate in a system you hold to be meaningless. All the rest is empty Demagoguery.
I fully agree I participate in a system I hold to be meaningless- that doesn't mean I shouldn't work, as well as I am able, to abolish the meaningless system. As it is, that work isn't very hard- by the process of inflation, the system is quickly abolishing itself, that's why piracy exists.
Far out. And my ancestors did the same in Ireland before the potato famine. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the apparent fact that you subsist through means negotiated by currency, yet claim that moderation by currency is meaningless. If that is the case, then why buy into the lie? and yes, holding that its a lie but participating in the system is buying into the lie. So you're a malcontent. So what?
So I'm working to bring down the system from the inside, in little ways.
Not entirely sure what you're trying to say. Legislating a business-model is different than litigating capitalism.
Not much- it is in fact legislating capitalism instead of allowing it to fall to the forces of the market. The piracy is the REAL market- the other is a fake propped up by violence and fraud. The reason piracy exists is because the value of copying and marketing has fallen to zero.
You'll get no argument from me if you choose to phrase this in terms of 'the expansionist nature of capitalism as viewed through the constant inflation of world currencies, is an inherently unsustainable practice, and should be stopped.' However, again, you come with meaningless rhetoric instead of argument. It *is* the way things are. PRESENT TENSE. Last I checked use of the present tense in no way spoke to how things would be at ANY POINT IN THE FUTURE. If its a con game, its one we play on ourselves, yourself included, no matter how much you flail around deriding it, and as such labeling it fraudulent is just vapid.
Time means nothing to me- what, after all, is a few centuries or even my own life in comparison to eternity? To end the unsustainable practice will take time- so we should work on it in ANY WAY WE CAN. Labeling it as a fraudulent con game is the start of breaking out of the superstition- unless you can label the problem, you'll never begin to fight the problem.
No. does it make you feel good to think that you've 'tricked' me somehow? putting quote marks around money doesnt alter the fact that you have chosen a lifestyle dependent on something you claim to be fradulent and meaningless. If you want to talk about the negative social impacts of a monetary society, I'm right there with you, but i fail to see how you've said anything of meaning.
Actually, as a unionized civil servant, I've found a partial way out- a niche in the capitalist economy where my income is entirely protected by law, unaffected by the con game. It auto-adjusts with inflation and those who pay me are forced to rather than choose to. But that's beside the point- my lifestyle isn't actually dependant upon either- that's why I also formed The Oregon Project- a club to "buy" a commune for those of us who will eventually be made useless.
yeah, good luck with that. I'd not say that you hack anything so much as that you yourself are a hack.
High praise indeed, for my set of personal values.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Great, let me know how that grass-clipping and epoxy house works out for you. Also, be sure to tell me how long it took you to assemble all those deck parts and how you plan to do that with a desktop-sized 3d printer.
SRSLY.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
So maybe the thing to do, if you're potentially in the **AA's sights is to set your P2P app to save all your swag to a USB HD and stash it in an undisclosed location if you think they're going to come calling. They could look for it, but I'm pretty sure they couldn't force you to reveal its actual whereabouts.
You're using her as bait, Master!
now, that difference you speak of, is actually NO difference.
You missed out contexts in this issue.
Taking someone's money and locking them up is today's burning at the bonfire.
Read radical news here
If a slave stepped on a moth, conceivably that moth could have had descendants, over a period of several decades, build up to sufficient numbers that they ate holes in your shirt, causing you to patch it; this would bring the slavery thing under "interstate commerce" because you patched it yourself rather than buying a new shirt form someone in hawaii or whatever.
I honestly bet that would get the a-ok form the current supreme court. What do I win?
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
"Hey, why are there 1,700 different IPs all registered to 00-DE-AD-BE-EF-00?"
"Just because something is obsolete doesn't mean it doesn't exist anymore. My parents still have a hand pump in their garden well- but it's rarely used. Likewise, my paychecks are direct deposited, and I spend with a debit card. I rarely even have any coin at all in my wallet anymore- my computer was paid for with bits and bytes, not dollar bills."
Irrelevant - if money is physical or electronic matters little in practice - electronic money is merely a more efficient form of fiat money. It is used as a store of value, a means of transaction and a unit of accounting nonetheless, with no current alternatives in use. (Commodity-based bartering is terribly rare these days)
"Really? When was the last time you saw a baboon using money? When was the last time you saw a stock market in a beehive? So much for the free market being "the way nature works" LIE."
Correct - money is a civilizational advance. Reciprocal bartering (and reciprocity in general) however, has a very long history within our species.
"just another "I want to use guns to oppress my neighbors and take their property" argument."
Using force to take other people's stuff sounds much more like Marx than market economics.
"No, sorry- I'm FOR paying the artist and creating a better model to do so."
Yea, the fact that you benefit personally from your "ethical stance" is merely a happy coincidence. Whoopdido.
I mean, with the thoughtful, intelligent way they approach their evidence gathering I think that'll be their only option. Call it the SCO approach: we want to see all your trade secrets without real evidence you need it on charges that are so hard to prove it's a bit of a challenge finding where to start.
And there too, the intention is not find the guilty at all - it's intimidation for money.
I can see this is a tactic of executives that know their income is safe: I have yet to see any business that survives suing its customers. And in this case they're targeting their future customers, so well done for bright ideas. Almost as bright as putting rootkits into disks.
Insert
DE AD BE EF BA BE works for me sorry, lameass filter encountered
No it hasn't, there has been some very good music released in the last 17 years which has not been heavily marketed crap.
Of course since you don't buy any music all you will have heard is what you may have heard on the radio which obviously is for the most part heavily marketed crap.
Sometimes that may be the case but in the vast majority of cases people, idiots included, laugh at things because they're funny, or ridiculous which is what statements like your sweeping generalisation about music is.
I don't imagine you would be very happy if every company in the world sent you a spec sheet for every product which they sell. I expect you'd moan about that quite a lot.
Instead companies often put shortened versions of their spec sheets in highly visible locations, these are called advertisements, and if you see something which you think may be useful then you can request the spec sheet directly from the company. This whole process is called marketing and is how you find about new products which you may find useful.
That's UW-Milwaukee. UW-Madison is either called UW, or Madison, but it's not UWM. You damn out-of-towners.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
No it hasn't, there has been some very good music released in the last 17 years which has not been heavily marketed crap.
Of course since you don't buy any music all you will have heard is what you may have heard on the radio which obviously is for the most part heavily marketed crap.
Thus proving my point- marketing is about taking inferior products and lying about them to sell better than superior products.
I don't imagine you would be very happy if every company in the world sent you a spec sheet for every product which they sell. I expect you'd moan about that quite a lot.
Well, actually, I wouldn't. I'd love such a database. I'd prefer it online and searchable rather than paper, but that is EXACTLY how I want to shop- comparing the specifications of similar products and choosing the one that best fits my NEEDS.
Instead companies often put shortened versions of their spec sheets in highly visible locations, these are called advertisements, and if you see something which you think may be useful then you can request the spec sheet directly from the company. This whole process is called marketing and is how you find about new products which you may find useful.
The problem is, the advertisements rarely include the specs I need, or worse yet, they lie about the true specs. If you have to advertise, you don't have a good enough product to be worthy of survival in the market.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The day your big brain can control how much food you shove into your big fat stomach - we'll talk. Until then you are an intellectual featherweight, though clearly a physical heavyweight.