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Sony Pictures CEO Thinks the Net Wasn't Worth It
rossturk writes "Michael Lynton, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, said, 'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period.' Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.' It's become customary to expect a somewhat limited perspective on things from old-world entertainment companies, but his inability to acknowledge that the Internet has changed everything makes me think he's a very confused man. Is this when we all give up hope that companies like Sony Pictures can adapt? Will we look back on this as one of the defining moments when the industrialized entertainment industry lost touch for good?"
'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period.'
Well then I trust you personally don't use it at all.
It's become customary to expect a somewhat limited perspective on things from old-world entertainment companies.
Relax, he's just one voice of a thousand at Sony.
Is this when we all give up hope that companies like Sony Pictures can adapt?
Frankly, I've got enough problems of my own to be concerned with their problems. It is and has been for quite sometime an adapt-or-die scenario for these guys. If they haven't figured it out, you won't see me shaking my fist up at the sky screaming "WHY!? Why couldn't you take me instead of Sony Pictures!?"
This guy should talk to his own people more often--Sony's CEO and chairman Howard Stringer said in a recent interview:
Customers will refuse to accept it unless the technology is open. Youth in particular really dislikes closed technologies, closed systems and the like. I think the failure of AOL LLC of the US is good evidence of this. When the Internet was just beginning to spread, AOL boosted its subscriber base by providing special services only to its customers. After a while, though, customers began rebelling, complaining that they weren't children. Because AOL wanted to keep them locked up in a narrow portion of the immense Internet cosmos, open technology was created. Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads. This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn't download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US.
Instead of that kind of level headed talk we get to hear from Mr. All-My-Customers-Are-Criminals.
Ride that ship to the bottom of the sea, Michael Lynton.
My work here is dung.
This, presumably, from a free market wonk who thinks the law of supply and demand are best for everyone. Go ahead and meet the demands of your consumers, damn it!
,'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period.'
I say we spam him with goatse until he repents.
I know how he feels about entitlements, really.
Some people have unbelievable ideas about what they're entitled to. When I find an artist who actually believes he's deserves to be paid until death + 70 years, then I get that same feeling, like nothing worthwhile ever came out of that artist. At least nothing without a rancid aftertaste.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Given that Sony recently posted its first loss in 14 years, I think perhaps it is time for them to get with the new modes of media distribution instead of keeping its head in the sand and decrying them.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
I find it quite ironic that this was said by a CEO in Sony, a company that came to its riches and fortunes by facilitating copying. Sonitape was the sneakernet of the 50s.
This is more of the protectivist thought that has lead and is leading to the decline of these old school companies and allowing the growth of new companies to challenge and pick them apart.
These companies have the resources, man power, and product to dominate large portions of the media if they would only embrace it and adapt to it. Change is a scary thing for large organizations to take on, especially voluntarily.
The best part is the first thing they taught me when I started getting my MBA was that change was good and needed to be managed, not prevented. You would think these business types would eventually catch on.
Of course this is Sony, the Captain of the DHFB(Dead Horse Flogging Bandwagon).
-Lifyre
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
No large entrenched business likes to change their money making scheme, especially the media industry. For most of the 20th century the media industry has remained pretty much static in the way they did business. Sure technology and quality gradually changed and got better but distribution and marketing stayed the same. Now you have the Internet, a way for people to interact with media without going through the usual channels and the media companies are freaked. Digital formats make sharing music easier than before and trust me, sharing music has always gone on, just not as easy or on the same magnitude. What the media companies need to do, and eventually will do kicking and screaming, is actually adapt. They cannot keep distribution artificially low because files can be copies infinitely all over the place. When a majority of people don't see a problem with ripping CDs, downloading music, and using portable music players, instead of trying to criminalize everyone, it is time for the companies to change. They are a bunch of smart guys, I am sure they will figure it out (unless their proposal comes down to "bailout?").
Why do things have to change?
Someone should really update this for the internet. And immortalize this idiot's name as the dunce who asked the question...
Go somewhere random
And the biggest example of that is WAR CRIMINAL.
I hope this helps the planned deportation to The Hague.
Yours In Socialism,
Kilgore Trout
They used to make quality products, not so much anymore. My latest experience is the last straw. Last year, I purchased a Sony navigation unit. I soon found that the maps were outdated, and missing major landmarks, and even an Interstate highway that had opened the year before. Support assured me that the next update would solve these problems. Well, after many months, an update has finally been released for the mere price of $99. So, in other words, Sony wants me to pay another $99 to fix what was broken from the time they built the unit. I consider it a lesson learned, and will not longer purchase Sony products.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This entire story is pure flamebait. What else would you expect a head of a media company to say? There business models are getting whacked by rampant illegal piracy that is getting more and more widespread.
This is not really news.
at least, the Internet permits to spread free software and work collaboratively (even if in different countries or even without ever meeting IRL), on free software of course ;-)
that's quite an achievement AFAIC
Criminalize Customer: Their really does seem to have been a massive switch to this. The customer should really be the boss the only one a company should have to please. But it appears more and more like the big companies view customers as the enemy to be accused, lied to, and forced to pay them.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You're only supposed to use the ??? when the next step isn't obvious. Since 'Buy off legislatures to support your failing business model' has been their tactic for years, it's not a very secret step.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I looked around to see what Sony products I products I have purchased - none. And no, I don't download or shoplift or get my media for free. If I like it, I'll buy it. Apparently, Sony doesn't make anything that I like.
But hey, I'm a guy who turned off cable and isn't converting my TVs to digital because here's really nothing on worth the price of a converter (Yes, a real weirdo!); let alone the price of a new TV. Yes, that includes PBS. I won't miss the endless Suzy Orrman and Wayne Dyer pledge drives. And what once was my all time favorite, This Old House, has turned into house porn - nothing but show casing high end stuff that I could never afford.
Losing money on it, eh?
As we all know, nothing may ever legally be distributed for free on the Internet, or in fact, anywhere. If it's not distributed by a record label, film company, or major software company, it is inherently pirated and of no value to any person and should be destroyed immediately for all our own good. Only by buying good, wholesome entertainment and software products will we be preserving the jobs which every industry worker deserves by divine right of kings. Or something.
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
Obviously the idea that nothing good has come from the internet is total nonsense. But I have a hard time disagreeing with this:
because that's exactly the attitude I hear. Maybe that's just the way things are going to be from now on, but it does bother me that so many people consider not getting a product to be an unacceptable response to terms they don't like. I guess *I* must be getting old...
Visit the
It's really about entertainment in digital form. Record companies and movie studios have made tremendous profits from the transition from analog to digital.
In particular, music companies were able to sell CDs that cost less to manufacture than vinyl disks and charge significantly more for them. They were also able to release CDs of older music that otherwise would not be repurchased.
In recent years they've suffered from the other consequences of digital media (e.g. the ease of copying). Yet on balance, digitization has been a net positive for their bottom line.
That's right, the net has increased competition.. the customers feel "entitled" to companies catering to them by providing product to them in the form and price they want, and will find what they want through black marets should we refuse to provide it.
"the customers feel "entitled" to the product they want at the price they want, and now have a way to get it when we don't want to provide it, and we don't like that" - Sony Pictures.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Capitalism can't produce common goods. Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government. It was created in an academic environment, by passionate people that cared about the advance of technolog (indirectly: of mankind). Internet advanced quickly, different protocols appeared, once replacing the other (Gopher, SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, etc.).
Then the companies came. Those set of protocols froze, some began to fade. Companies didn't care about "what's right". They didn't care about advance the network. The HTTP/1.0 -> 1.1 transition took years, and still hasn't finished (e.g. http pipelining). IMAP mail stalled, and got replaced by webmail. Multicast was never deployed at large. Newsgroups got replaced by phpbb.
These companies hate Internet. If they praise it, it's only when they realize they can't afford to ignore it (or destroy it).
Criminals... like hiding rootkits on CDs with no notice kind of criminals? I guess All-My-Corporations-Are-Criminals too.
I agree with this statement but my conclusion is the exact oposite...it is for this reason that I feel the internet is amazing
"I work in an industry where the way we make money is to rigidly and tightly control the flow of information. You didn't get to see the movie unless you paid for it. You didn't get to listen to the music unless you paid for it. Sure, people could dub VHS tapes or buy a bootleg or record things on cassettes, and we fought these things, but they were the exceptions. Now, thanks to the Internet and the free flow of information we don't make as much money as we used to because now it's easy to share information. Rather than adapt or maybe realize that our earnings are going to go down, I'm just going to wish the Internet didn't happen so I can go back to the glory days. Or maybe I'll send off for that time machine I see advertised in that magazine."
Schnapple
' Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.'
I do think there's an entitlement problem. I just think it's the other way around. You have these old dinosaurs of the industry who've been the gate keepers of media production for so long, they don't know how to react to a little competition. Think about it; some guys are probably out there running a torrent site at a loss, while using ad revenue to stay afloat. Meanwhile, these guys are sitting on the actual copies to the media don't even bother because 1) it will compete with their existing revenue model and 2) it's probably harder to justify 20-30$ to resell movie when your marginal costs are ~0$. Thing is, these guys will either have to take control of the distribution and make a profit of it, or someone else will.
Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.'
*A panting Michael Lynton enters his boardroom with Sony's Chairmembers* ... is that a Blu-Ray copy of Spiderman? ... it had it in its hand as it was leaving the store. ... ... ... you're all cu ... customers! How could I have been so blind? No wonder we are losing this war! SECURITY!
Michael Lynton: *gasping for breath* I'm sorry I'm late. But I was just down in the store and I had to confiscate this.
Chairman One: Is that
Michael Lynton: Yes, I had to confiscate it from a "customer"
Chairman One: The customer stole it? We have the finest security in place
Michael Lynton: No, far worse than that. The customer held up the product and said to me, 'Hey, Mr. Lynton, it's bullshit I have to pay $30 for this after paying $15 to see it in the theater.' At which point I realized that it intended to give this away through the internet to all of his friends.
*pauses for seriousness*
Michael Lynton: Then I tackled him and I just saved us one trillion dollars in lost profits.
Chairman Two: Mr. Lynton, we might have a problem if that person paid for this copy of Spiderman.
Michael Lynton: No, you don't understand, he had a shirt indicating he used the internet. If that isn't a red flag, I don't know what is. All of them are criminals just looking at us with their beady little eyes trying to figure out how to steal from us.
Chairman Three: Sir, are you feeling alright?
Michael Lynton: I'm feeling great, I just saved us money. You know, I saw someone on the street the other day and they were fat and pasty white and I knew then that they used the internet. So I drove them down with my car.
Chairman Four: That was you on Channel Nine News last night
Michael Lynton: Oh please, grow up, this is business and business means war. Now, I think that if we act quickly we can hit the customer with viruses in the rootkit no one's found on our Blu-Ray media. The time is upon us to put an end to the customer once and for all, people. Think of your children! Wait a second, why do you all look confuse? Oh my god, you're all them
My work here is dung.
Instead of that kind of level headed talk we get to hear from Mr. All-My-Customers-Are-Criminals.
Ride that ship to the bottom of the sea, Michael Lynton.
Media distribution is essentially an oligopoly/cartel and 'shrinkage' used to be small and manageable.
It used to be that theft = theft. Now theft = infringement.
He's really just unhappy that the old distribution model is fucked because:
1. the internet lowers the threshold for infringement and
2. their distribution model (even with all the internet stuff they do) only partially meets consumer demands
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
"I'm A Guy Who Doesn't See Anything Good Having Come From The Internet. Period." Sounds like a guy who's wife won't let him look at porn.
"I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period." Huh? Well you have failed your shareholders miserable Mr. SONY CEO. Most of the economy is based on businesses doing business using The Internet. I think it's time for the Mr. Sony to sack Mr. CEO for total failure and having such a profound view of what good business really is. No wonder the recording industry is left behind in the net economy. *sigh*.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
Ted Stevens? Is that you? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f99PcP0aFNE)
people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it
Damn skippy! That's just human nature. I'm sure it started from the caveman years. Not everyone is as rich as you Mr Perfect CEO.
You have morons like this guy running the show and then wonder why you had a billion dollar loss last quarter?
"Oooh, I don't understand how this newfangled Internets works, so let's just say it's eeeeeevil!"
When will they stop these dinosaurs from running the industry?
HAND.
No, theft has always been theft, and infringement has always been infringement. Legally they are, and for practical purposes always have been, two very different things. The fact that you did not understand copyright law does not mean anything has changed.
Your point 2 is what everybody else has been saying: If they can't adapt, they can't adapt. Other companies have. But if they are unwilling to supply what the customers want, they have no special exemption from going out of business, just like everybody else who does not keep up with the times.
He's CEO of Sony Pictures, he can afford to buy all the pr0n he needs.
Probably gets 10% off music & movies too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Well, I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good coming from the movie industry, period. Why? Because they 'feel entitled' to control people's private communications when they want to, and when that doesn't happen 'for free', they'll bribe Congress do force it on us.
Link to the original article guys, the story you linked to even has the courtesy of doing it.
http://www.wwd.com/media-news/fashion-memopad/memo-pad-uniqlo-nabs-deyn-bad-internet-classic-martha-2136751
It contains more quotes than just the sony guy.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Does anyone fail to see why I have refused to buy any Sony IP that I can possibly avoid for the past 20 years? (Remember boys and girls, the mother board of your computer may have Sony IP on it in a chip or BIOS.) This kind of mind set isn't new to Sony, it's been around in a noticable form for the past two decades.
I will even nix the purchase of computing equipment if I can find the same or better equipment that doesn't have Sony IP in it and the price isn't more than 5% higher. Since my employer buys several thousand systems a year, I hope that has a small but measurable effict on Sony's profits, though it likely doesn't. The times I have had to OK equipment with Sony IP in it, it made my teeth hurt, I felt less manly, I gained weight, lost more hair, and needed stronger glasses.
Just kidding, I only felt mild disgust.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Everybody else like big banks & car companies?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's like the five stages of grief:
1. Denial -- New formats! They will protect everything!
2. Anger -- RIAA! Arrest all the students!
3. Bargaining -- Hulu? Please?
4. Depression -- You are here.
5. Acceptance.
Me thinks he's at stage 4, right now.
BUT just because his entire business is evaporating out from under him because everyone wants his products yet does not want to pay for them doesn't necessarily make him "out of touch."
It's challenging. And at the end of the day someone has to foot the bill. Or, the products need to go away. Unlike an album, movies cost millions and millions to make. As such, the costs just don't lend themselves to being covered with "internet" strategies like micro-payments and such. It's a crazy state of affairs.
And don't get me wrong: I hate all of this RIAA shit too. It's kinda like the stages of grieving.
Companies would want to charge at every step which is one reason many other networks and hypertext systems were hard to use and didn't scale well. By only worrying about making it work and not how to make money from it it was a successful project.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"I don't see anything good having come from the fridge, period", said the man who used to deliver ice blocks door to door with his horse carriage.
Michael Lynton, you're such a lame joke...
The only Sony product I could find in my house is my stereo amplifier. And that's almost twenty years old - it still works wonderfully,though. I wonder how many of the products their making today will last that long...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
His point on the one hand you have honest customers on the other you have large groups of crackers who do steal their stuff.
For example all of those playstation 1,2,3 and PSP roms floating around torrent sites,usenet and such yeah I know fair use allows the user to make a backup for personal use.
But far to often this is used by cracking and pirate groups to say "I am allowed a back up man !" all the while they are uploading Terabytes of stolen data to the web in the form of torrents and some of them have torrent sites you that you have to pay to become a member of.
this is complete and total theft of IP and you can argue it anyway you want to it is still stealing.
Now on the other Hand becuase of these Jack asses you have people getting more insane amounts of hoops to jump through just to play a CD or Movie that they paid money for !. Lets not forget the persons responsible for this.
yes, I am talking about the Pirates and crackers as well as any group that actively engages in blatent theft they are why these insane laws exist although far too often I hear people say "they are taking away our freedom of making a backup !"
I agree with that but at the same time they have investors,share holders, artists, musicians and the list goes on and all of those people have a family to feed and care for just like you.
also I agree with the fact that they and other companies should respect the uses right to transfer legally purchased software to another user with all rights intact for the person who paid you for it.
But this is not going to happen at all anymore because of the as mentioned before huge groups of pirates and crackers cashing in on their hard work yeah I know what your going to say "but they charge more than it is worth man" well when you figure a company hires professional artists and musicians as well as programmers they have to pay for that ya know and these people do not come cheap ! if you want the best you pay for it !.
and in so doing Sony has to charge enough money that they can make a profit for themselves as well pay their employees it is as simple as that.
well I am going to stop here before I am flamed in to oblivion for trying to see both sides of the coin.
R.Morton
modded quote "what's that he's talking about? Windows , Never had a problem with Windows till I tried to use it."
The banks weren't supplying what customers wanted (low interest rates, solid financial foundations, sound business management). The car companies were not supplying what customers wanted (affordable, quality cars with good gas mileage and without planned obsolescence). So... what?
You're only supposed to use the ??? when the next step isn't obvious. Since 'Buy off legislatures to support your failing business model' has been their tactic for years, it's not a very secret step.
Actually, step three was going to be "Sacrifice Month-Old Baby Bunnies on an Altar to Baal" but there seems to be a limit on the length of the subjects for these comments ...
My work here is dung.
Actually, I think he's saying that it's the companies that are saying "theft = infringement." Even if he isn't, I'm saying it now. You'll notice pretty much none of the *AA cases are focusing on "they stole" but "they're breaking copyright, thus infringing on our property." (or at least that's how they're presented in the media, which is as good as presenting the case that way, in the public's mind) Piracy's still theft. It's not "copyright infringement." Copyright was supposed to be about preventing others from using your work to their financial gain, thus reducing your profit. That's why derivative and fair use are in there as acceptable. Most pirates aren't out there selling the copies, they're acting more like a library, making the materials available for others to take. If you wanna liken it to criminal activity, it'd be someone shoplifting a DVD and then passing it around to all their friends to have a look. Most pirates are just simply missing the personal gain factor that would make it a true copyright infringement case.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
He's mostly right, except for the bit about free.
Honestly, I'd pay somewhere between $1.00 and $2.50 for a movie, if it were HQ-5.1 and instant play, like youtube.
Because it's more convenient to download a movie, and play it on my media player than aquire and load a DVD, so I choose that medium.
The movie producers leave me little option than to download illegally.
Yes, I've seen the stores, their selection sucks.
No wonder he hates the internet, he was the former president of AOL International.
Howard Stringer's quote, not yours, but...
And yet, Facebook.
Get off my lawn!!
Here is a technology that absolutely redistributed wealth away from the lazy. Persons that can innovate today love it. People who are living off innovations two and three generations old will hate it. The hard working want to let it progress to revitalize the world. The entitled want to regulate it and make it benefit only those selected by the elite.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I don't agree that nothing good has come from the Internet.
However, I haven't yet decided if there is an overall net benefit. I suspect that the cons outweigh the pros. I'm referring to the entirety of the impact of the Internet
Of course, it's purely an academic speculation, since it's not going away.
Advice: on VPS providers
I thought CEO's of major companies had 'vision'. Isn't that what they used to say to justify their salaries?
Obviously, Mr. Lynton is a man of 'vision'. We just can't understand his ideas with our puny vision-impaired brains.
People generally don't change or adapt. Progress happens when old farts (like me) die off and are replaced by younger people with different ideas.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
like these companies feel towards their profits? if people dont want to pay for the product then the profits aren't deserved, the companies fold and we find other things to buy.
that's a GOOD thing, something new will come around.
the situation of scarcity that allowed this market is gone, let it fall and let a new market rise.
let all market participants succeed and fail only on their own merits, no legislation, no false scarcity.
next time you say we don't have the right to share copyrighted media go read the 9th amendment, yes we do have that right.
and if you debate this on the side of the companies don't forget that they already are getting government support in the form of corporate protection, add onto that the DMCA and all the rest the current situation is undeniably unfair to the point of being unjust.
data cannot be owned and the legal game of twister that's happened in order to try and allow it is sickening. it needs to go away.
Lets face it, this is the common attitude of large scale corporate capitalism. They think they have a "right" to make as much profit as they want, and their customers/clients have a legal obligation to pay whatever the corporate masters demand. They don't have to satisfy any customer needs, they don't have to make a worthwhile product, all they need to do is buy legislation and hire lawyers to make huge profits.
Just look at the current credit card system. They have terms of use that are crafted to trick people into paying more fees. They retroactively raise interest rates on balances. They have 30 page service policies that none of their users understand.
Don't call it capitalism. It's organized theft.
Here's a short list of things he doesn't think are important:
Yeah, I guess he's right. The internet is useless.
-- Will program for bandwidth
He's Right that:
I do feel entitled to download everything I've already paid for. I will not pay for the e-version of a book I own or that is out of print. I will not pay again for a record/tape/CD I already own. And I will not pay full hardcover price for an ebook, full price for a CD with only one or two desired songs, nor hesitate to view/obtain a movie for free to avoid escalating cinema costs.
He's Wrong about the Internet:
The Internet galvanized the public, academia, and industry into pushing the bounds of technology. It has precipitated a technological growth from which the entertainment industry has benefited handsomely. Production quality has increased while its costs have decreased. Dissemination of entertainment has, thanks to the internet (and peripheral technologies), been able to greatly expand markets, enhance product marketing, tune the delivery of content, and all for a lower cost. And I still buy DVD's and CD's and go to cinemas when I think they are worth the price.
He Doesn't get that:
The audience aren't inherently criminals, they simply want a fair price for a product. And until the entertainment industry accepts that, then the audience will seek fairness by any means possible.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
He can go fuck himself.
I mean, really. Does the fact the internet broke their shitty business model really make it worthless?
What an asshole to even say such I thing. I'd rather be without anything Sony ever made than be without the internet.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
So they weren't left to suffer the consequences of their poor business decisions, they were propped up with public money instead.
Get this internet users? You have been all called thieves by this guy.
Sony is a bunch of asshats. Stop buying their stuff and maybe they will go away.
There are many almost totally unrelated companies under the Sony umbrella. Sony Pictures is the former Columbia Pictures. It has absolutely nothing to do with Sony the technology company, except both are owned by the same holding.
It appears Sony has failed in the management of their customers' expectations. Sony has pretty much failed at execution for a long time now. Even my lowly Dream Machine alarm radio is a travesty to adjust.
About the stealing, however, I agree. My country (America) has become a low minded, coarse, self-indulgent nation of dicks. But there's every indication that in any country that achieves our level of wealth and abundance the population de-evolves in exactly the same fashion. It's probably the nature of the human animal. It leaves hope for future (re-)improvement and it beats hell out of living in a world of donkey carts and voodoo spirits calling for the stoning of your sister for saying "Hi" on the street (if you have streets.)
It's short for "I emphasize the finality of the preceding sentence by drawing attention to the period", and it's a complete sentence. The long form is too much effort to read and type so normal people use the abbreviation.
...Only because FB doesn't seem closed. The moment that FB starts actively enforcing some sort of closed policy, is the day that you see a mass migration to a new networking site.
FB has an avalanche that can happen to them, once a few friends start leaving, the person needs to create a new account to keep in touch with them, that person who ends up liking the other site more (for whatever reason), leads to more people going over to the new site until FB becomes like MySpace (or Friendster) and dies.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Period isn't a sentence? Curses.
Buggy whip manufacturers see nothing good coming from the interstate highway system.
Masaru Ibuka, The first "Purposes of Incorporation " of Sony: To establish a place of work where engineers can feel the joy of technological innovation, be aware of their mission to society, and work to their heart's content.
'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything ... period.'
It means about the same thing as what he said, and isn't as likely to annoy people.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> Ride that ship to the bottom of the sea, Michael Lynton.
He is CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. He will never even catch a glimpse of the bottom. Neither will several generations of his offspring.
Of course the cases are focusing on "breaking copyright infringment" because if they filed a suit saying "they stole this" the **AAs would be laughed out of court even by the most plaintiff sympathetic judge on the planet.
However, if you've ever seen one of those "You wouldn't steal a car..." ads, they ARE trying to make a mental parallel between downloading media and stealing a tangible object even though the two are entirely different legally.
So, let's repeat the mantra: No one is deprived of physical property when copyright is infringed. Again: no one is deprived of physical property when copyright is infringed.
In one ear and out the other, though, I bet.
Goodness! Language!
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
Why Internet? Let's go into the era when things started really wrong.
Sony should have scrapped in first place its support for PC - the CD drivers and MOSTLY the monitors.
Why Sony sold CD drives? They were cheap, they were powerful, they gave HUNDREDS of megabytes to the nefarious, poor scum of PC users. Sony should have pushed for a complete, all-scale proprietary architecture. NO customer fingers inside the box, like the Mac.
AND THE MONITORS! In the very beginning of the PC revolution, Sony monitors were in high demand for cheap graphics, including 3D. Who gave thousands the first taste that one can do something pretty on a dumb, awkward, slummy open architecture PC? The great 3D cards came later btw. Sony should have shot the guy who thought Trinitron was good for the PC.
But Sony didn't do it. And worse, you went into the wave. Sony supported the base that scrapped X25, Frame Relay and Microsoft's proprietary network (does anyone remember it?) More, Sony started to give Internet a chance!
Why Sony introduced a Ethernet port into PS2? Why? Sony pushed over the edge even those who didn't know what a PC was. No Ethernets! Some TwistedNet with a direct port into some hardcore encryption chip. Better, NO networks at all! Just console boxes and millions would never had jump into Internet. Ten years ago, a huge mass of people still thought that PCs were thinking machines, Internet a parallel Universe and console games what the world shall be.
But Sony could not stop itself. It closed eyes to the Pirate Harbour of Linux. It even supported it. It started to use codecs to distribute clips of its ever loving blockbusters... There were lots of things Sony could have done and Internet would never be a headache.
It could have just kept us on the cassetes anyway.
That's right. All those fake files floating around are sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids.
$META_SIG_JOKE
The cost of distributing media has dropped to nearly zero. The era of centralised media is over, they just haven't figured it out yet.
They became complacent, got used to telling people what to consume, when to consume, and how to consume information. They can't do that any more and are having a tantrum about it.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
it appears it is time to find a new CEO for Sony.
Look at the bright side, everybody: If he doesn't acknowledge the internet, he can't sue people for downloading his movies! Yarr harr me harties. Quantum of Solace, anyone?
As soon as they stop laughing, I would certainly like to hear what Apple and Amazon have to say about this.
...remember when we could, without delay, without an account, a
background check, or an extra 20 dollars or so every month for service...
listen to popular music of the day...
...view a program in video with sound, without a network logo
and ticker feed blocking "certain" portions of it...
Computers are not very good radios, and
they are even crappier televisions.
Internet technology hasn't been much help, either; It
looks to me like a pack of youngbloods have their horse pushing the cart.
There is nothing to FEAR but NOTHING itself; and I fear there is a whole lot of nothing going on. --scorpivs
It happens that the Net thinks Sony Pictures wasn't worth it too.
So the feeling is mutual.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I find a funny twinge of discomfort in reading this, because it almost seems like you are implying that "infringement" is worse than "theft"! I think almost everyone here would say theft is worse than infringement. It's really the entire point of our distaste for the current "intellectual property" regime, which is cartels trying to apply finite goods and capital protections to information (not a finite good).
You seem to really be trying to distinguish infringement for economic gain from infringement without. I'd have likened it to grand larceny versus petty theft, but it really isn't about the magnitude of the infringement, since someone could sell one copy for profit or give away thousands for free in the digital copying case.
Customers have done a fine job of criminalizing themselves by thinking that stealing is ok and normal.
Criminalize Customer: Their really does seem to have been a massive switch to this. The customer should really be the boss the only one a company should have to please. But it appears more and more like the big companies view customers as the enemy to be accused, lied to, and forced to pay them.
You sound really naive. You think things used to be different? The same thing happened with the tape recorder, with the VCR, with the printing press. Capitalist companies have always been a small group of conspirators who view the population as sheep to be fleeced for their own benefit. That is the entirety of their motive. If they had a different motive, they would have chosen a different organizational structure. If they claim to have a different motive, but they didn't choose a structure that is more suited to a different motive, then they are lying.
The Internet is doing something quite useful. It's slowly and painfully eroding our cultural of naivety, and that's a good thing. Unless you've got your hand in the cookie jar.
Would you like a free rootkit with that CD? No? Tough shit.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
After all the crap they've pulled with root kits, proprietary media, etc. this just adds one more reason not to support them. I haven't bought anything from Sony in many years and won't in the future.
I think you misspelled commas.
Ah, wasn't trying to imply that one's worse than the other, just that they're not equivalent. Like most legal issues, what's worse mostly depends on the circumstances of the case. Mea culpa.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
And we think we're entitled to it because we are. Humans are inherently creative and all art and science is derivative. It is our human right to improve on what has gone before. It cannot be prevented regardless of what the law says.
So if they won't offer us what we want we'll take it anyway. It's not that people aren't willing to pay - it's that they're not willing to sell. But we'll have our progress whether they'll sell it or not.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Good point.
Fortunately companies don't do anything (since they are just imaginary concepts), people do things on behalf of companies, and people go old, retire/die and are replaced, so they can change, sometimes surprisingly quickly even (though some take entirely too long for my tastes). Of course, sometimes the change is bad, but that's life I guess.
Some of their online music departments have embraced Drupal in a big way for artists sites. Some people do "get it", just not those who see their profit / control bottleneck being burst wide open. Granted they have a long history of doing crazy proprietary shit instead of embracing standards but who knows, perhaps over the years the Drupal people can be influential to other departments to embrace the internet rather than fear it. How many technologies can one company create their own failed versions of before the ROI is seen as an epic fail? I'm guessing that ROI has a higher standard to meet in the current climate too.
Just a point of clarification: AOL *did* adapt to the internet.... way back in 1996 (before my time there, anyway). Stringer is an idiot, too.
You think internet is bad? Just put out your entire company out of the internet, no website, web store, mail, not even internal network with things like mail or web servers.
You are right, internet is bad... follow your own word, take those measures, you will be coherent with yourself and everybody* happy.
* Message sponsored by Sony competing companies
Seriously, if you had a device that could duplicate any device you used it on, without affecting the original in any way, would people be trying to say, "You wouldn't duplicate a car, would you?" It would sound completely absurd. And this time is going to be here sooner than many people realize, I think. With 3D printers being at the point laser printers were when I was a kid, before long we could easily have one in nearly every house. Just think about what that will do to the manufacturing industry? Sure, they don't do everything actual manufacturing does right now (durability for example) but they likely will eventually. People are already working on making them able to embed circuitry into the designs.
I think this could make the copyright disputes we are having right now look downright enjoyable, because this will affect a whole lot more people than copyright.
This is typical generation gap stuff. Old people being replaced by young people resent it and old millionaires relying on old business models built on old barriers to entry for creatives resent it when those barriers for entry go away, their inflated friction filled distribution channel goes away, and their position as a risk management entity becomes unnecessary for the creatives. For him personally, I'm sure it is better if the net had never existed. However for the numerous people who now don't need a monolithic studio to get their content made and distributed so that the public and not a few risk averse suits can decide what is good, I'm sure the net is primarily a positive thing. And this argument confines the benefits only to the field he's whining about rather than mentioning all the field more relevant to the human condition than what watered down escapist crap will produce the next summer blockbuster.
In the end, he's not properly equipped to deal this new environment. I'm sure if I were dropped off in the middle of the Amazon rain forest without any supplies i probably wouldn't see much good come from it despite the ecological and pharmaceutical benefits derived from it. Fortunately for him he's already extremely wealthy and doesn't have to compete in the new world. Unfortunately for Sony they have a leader who without a vision for the future is effectively stuck 30 years in the past complaining about the good old days. If it were my company I'd want someone prepared to move forward not desperately clinging to the old.
Oh, yeah! Some of them even circumvent the DRM on Sony DVD's so they can transcode them and view them on their PSPs, therefore stealing the extra PSP-enabled copy that Sony will never sell them! What criminals!
Your comment makes various assumptions which you have not shown to be true:
People aren't "stealing" their stuff for the sake of stealing it. They're doing it because they want more control and use out of their media than Sony and others provide. Hulu is an excellent example of a proper solution. People used to download tv shows much more frequently before it's advent. It allows the rights holder to still make money through commercials, but at the same time gives the user control over when they watch the media, how they watch it, as well as pause, rewind, and fast forward, with a great UI which far surpasses YouTube in my opinion. The quality is pretty much as good as the tvrips (in 480p mode at least) and it even allows for discussion and ratings, making it a very social site as well. It simply provides for a much better user experience than the alternative, and the content usually goes up within a day or so of the air date.
"But there's DVR!" you say. DVR doesn't help you when you're stuck in JFK because your flight was delayed for 3 hours, and all you have is your notebook. DVR doesn't help you when you want to watch a show that's no longer in syndication, and hasn't been released on DVD (of which there are many), etc etc. Add to this that they're working on an iphone app and will likely have an Android app in the works as well and Hulu is a perfect example of how to properly take advantage of the internet's abilities. Is it perfect? Not yet. I personally would still like to see the ability to download the episodes so you can view them offline, but what it is now is certainly a great start.
So with all of this, why would people bother downloading rips? Hulu is more ubiquitous, requires no hard drive space, no messing with codec converters, no dealing with potentially virus laden downloads, etc etc etc. Do people still download? Yes, but mostly because you can get a tvrip quicker than Hulu will put it up (often within 30 minutes rather than a few hours), and Hulu doesn't have everything yet, doesn't retain everything yet, and isn't available outside of the US due to legal reasons. The important thing, though, is that it's moving in the right direction.
Sony Pictures, however, is so stuck in its "1. Release in theaters, 2. Release on DVD several months later, 3. Release on TV several years later" that they think nothing else will work, while Paramount, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Universal, and others have already begun adding some of their titles to Hulu. Is it an exhaustive collection? No, not yet at least, but again, it's a start.
I wish you luck Sony, given your recently posted losses this year, you're gonna fucking need it if you keep acting this way.
everything looks like a nail . . .
??? == your fired!
I have given this story the yourfired tag.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
to call humanity's second greatest invention since Mathematics(*) itself useless. We're talking about a technology that allows Joe Average in the US to send a message to Juan Promedio in Spain in less time it took you to read this paragraph for a total cost of less than a cent. Think about that for a minute, and realize all the possibilities this opens up for humanity as a whole.
It may have some problems, yes, but anyone who says that nothing good has ever come out of it is either a complete idiot, someone with an agenda or as is probably the case here, both.
(*)If you're wondering what's on first place, you're reading this post on one.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
This guy should talk to his own people more often--Sony's CEO and chairman Howard Stringer said in a recent interview:
Customers will refuse to accept it unless the technology is open. Youth in particular really dislikes closed technologies, closed systems and the like. I think the failure of AOL LLC of the US is good evidence of this. When the Internet was just beginning to spread, AOL boosted its subscriber base by providing special services only to its customers. After a while, though, customers began rebelling, complaining that they weren't children. Because AOL wanted to keep them locked up in a narrow portion of the immense Internet cosmos
Instead of that kind of level headed talk we get to hear from Mr. All-My-Customers-Are-Criminals.
Ride that ship to the bottom of the sea, Michael Lynton.
Previously, Lynton had worked extensively on internet related matters. He was President, AOL International, and CEO, AOL Europe starting in 2000, where he was responsible for AOL Europe as well as for AOL operations in Asia and Latin America.
Can't decide if this is hilarious or depressing :)
You can't take the sky from me...
I don't care if movies disappear from the earth. They are a waste of time and money. I spend my time reading whatever I want on the web. I can learn and research whatever I want. It's the most wonderful thing. That and email have taken over my life. I love communicating with old friends, and not having to use the phone, which I hate.
I hear the Internet runs on the souls of babies and every blog is written with the blood of a thousand puppies.
Wow, what an idiot!
That's like a banker thinking that nothing good came of dynamite, simply because bank robbers have used it to blow open bank vaults!
This is the absolute perfect example of the mess that SONY has become. "If we aren't using the technology to screw our customers, then nothing good has come of it. Period."
"I'm a humble person really,
I'm actually much greater than I think I am"
The U.S. government was heavily involved in the early development of the internet. I've often wondered how much different (better) it would be if the thing had been private, with various vendors having different nets competing for market share, from the beginning. For one thing, I bet viruses would be practically non-existent as the vendors would have worked very hard to prevent them from spreading on their internet. I think a lot of other things would have been and would be better too.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I hate that kind of thinking. It can be used to justify anything. It doesn't matter if I happen to agree with you on some aspects of the IP debate. It's the same reasoning as "9/11 changed everything." It didn't change anything, it just brought certain things that were always true into the public debate. It was always true that we were subject to terrorist attack. It was always true that copyright was not a true property right, but a clever and technology specific arrangement in the public interest: to enable creative people to support themselves without resort to patronage. In a way it's ironic that huge intellectual property companies and cartels are dominating the debate, since the whole point of copyright was to enable the development of a kind of independent, creative yeomanry.
In any case, the quote in question ("Iâ(TM)m a guy who doesnâ(TM)t see anything good having come from the Internet") pretty much says this guy is not qualified for his job. As CEO of a large entertainment company, his job is to find "something good" (i.e., profitable), in particular something good his competitors have overlooked. Instead, he's effectively confessing his leadership incompetence. The world is changing and he doesn't know how to make money in the new world. I doubt he's even on top of half his business. Last time I checked his company made a game console with Internet connectivity that his customers use to play multiplayer games.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government.
Yeah, I'm gonna have to ask you to back that up. The fact that the government was involved with the creation of the internet does not imply that it could not have existed otherwise.
The rest of your argument is basically one big "correlation implies causation" fallacy.
http://www.worldofends.com/
'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period.'
Well, just having him feel that way would already have been worth it.
Seriously: media companies need to get used to the fact that if distribution of content costs next to nothing, they end up making only a few percent of next to nothing, and that doesn't support the lavish lifestyles they are used to. Other industries had to discover the same thing. It's what a free market and innovation are all about.
I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from advertising, period.' Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they don't need, and they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.'
And, typically, we have a link to an article that plagiarized the entire story from the original in Women's Wear Daily. (Of course, being WWD, they go on to mention what the women on the panel were wearing.)
The real revolution hasn't been driven by the Internet. It's been driven by cheap disk space. Now everybody can store multiple copies of incredible amounts of dreck. If disk space cost like it did ten years ago, but we had today's bandwidth, there'd be far less junk around.
The movie industry has been losing the on-line battle for decades. When videotape first got cheap enough to rent, the movie industry thought a fair rental price should be equal to four theater tickets. Plus popcorn. Really.
Unlike the RIAA, the movie industry has failed at retail price maintenance. Music CDs are still selling around $17, while movie CDs tend to run less, and gradually move to the $4.99 bargain bin. And that's without the Internet.
Hulu is an excellent example of a proper solution
Wrong. Go on a holiday to Canada or France and try to use Hulu - Then let me know how "excellent" you think this "proper" solution is...
> But if it is valued, then why can't those that value it give something back in return?
It is rather unfortunate that the copyright holders dictate the terms to society with no questions asked here. Frankly I get the impression that they'd earn more (in many cases) from lowering their prices and finding ways to offer alternative use models, like pay-per-play with micropayments, or even the street-performer protocol.
For example, I personally would be happy to pay something like $0.15 / track for the privilege of upgrading the audio on my aging LPs to compressed digital quality --- but there is no way for me to actually do that, legally. (Yes, yes, my brain knows that compression artifacts and bandwidth limit filtration could be considered a downgrade, but my aging non-musician ears don't know that...)
Hulu doesn't work out of the USA, and content on HULu randomly disappears. You never know exactly when then shows you want to watch will become unavailable. It differs by lots of factors.
Hulu's interface is functionally no different than youtube. it just looks a little prettier. Also you have to have a net connection for HULU. If your out of wifi range of 300' your not going to be watching hulu.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Copyright was never about preventing anybody from using another person's work for their own profit. There are in fact plenty of provisions for doing just that in Copyright law.
Copyright is about preventing people from copying another person's work and distributing it for their own gain. It's a specific method of profiting from a work that is restricted. It's no accident that it happens to be the most direct and (usually) most profitable method of using a work, and it makes a lot of sense.
It's built into the name, for one thing, but also it is very well established that copyright law grants the creator a (theoretically) limited monopoly on the distribution of their work. That's it. Once it has been legally distributed, copyright grants no control over the copy which was distributed. The person who recieved the copy can cross out parts, re-write parts, even make dozens of copies for themselves and then poop on them if they want. It's up to them as far as copyright law is concerned.*
What they can't do is distribute their copies of the work without either having the copyright holder's express permission or making sufficient changes in the content to warrant an exception under the copyright code.
Not one bit of that has to do with any kind of Piracy**, and the only way it should be called such is if the original copy was, in fact, stolen. If it was purchased legally, then you are dealing with copyright infringement, which is a crime (note that it is become more well established that recieving the illegal copy is not a crime, only the distribution of the copy is a crime). It is not, however, theft. The property was more than likely legally purchased originally, and then copied and distributed illegaly. Copyright infringement, not theft.
You're off on your criminal analogy as well. There is nothing illegal about sharing a DVD with all your buddies. It's illegal to shoplift the initial DVD, but that isn't normally how things spread. Usually the DVD rips you find are from legally purchased copies, they are simply illegally distributed**. That's not theft, and it's a far cry from piracy.
A real, honest to goodness analogy of what happens in the digital world with DVD rips and their distribution, would be sheet music. Often times sheet music is purchased legally, and then copied (via a copy machine) and distributed dozens of times. This happens a lot in school music programs, and most music teachers who do this don't realize that when they give little Johnny a photo-copy of Little Drummer Boy to take home and practice, they are committing a crime.
It's -still- not theft. You don't go to jail for stealing the photocopied music, because you didn't steal anything. You copied it. You get sued for copyright infringement and have to pay shittons of money. And probably lose your job. But guess what? Such cases, where the works are illegaly distributed but not for direct profit, are hard to track down and usually aren't worth it. Sound at all familiar?
We don't call clueless music teachers thieves or pirates, why the hell should we call DVD rippers thieves or pirates? They do break one more law than infringing music teachers, but it's still not theft in any way, shape, or form, and it sure as hell isn't any kind of piracy.
I'm starting to get really sick of people calling copyright infringement, which has nothing to do with theft or piracy, theft and piracy. It's like calling a money launderer an arsonist. It doesn't make sense (unless that specific money launderer is in fact an arsonist as well, but that's different). The whole idea of it is buying into big media corporation bull shit to make their case sound more legitimate and scary. It's legit enough already, they just don't like how limited their rights are, and want more rights to control the content they distribute.
Damn this rant went long.
*There are other laws, like the DMCA, which DO dictate the use of a copy after it has been distributed, but that is not copyright,
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
From the summary:
"It's become customary to expect a somewhat limited perspective on things from old-world entertainment companies, but his inability to acknowledge that the Internet has changed everything makes me think he's a very confused man."
What did he say that was incorrect? What he said--that people have gotten accustomed to wanting shit for free without paying the artist--is 100% true. Slashdotters in particular have become almost militantly pro-piracy and use every opportunity to defend piracy and violating artist rights by distracting the argument with invented bad guys such as the RIAA and MPAA.
I Suspect the Internet is about to "route around" Sony.
Yes, but then again, Hollywood isn't on the verge of going bankrupt, no matter how many imaginary billions of dollars they claim are "stolen" by filthy pirates. ;)
The Internet ad said I was supposed to get a free PS3. I gave them my shipping address, credit card number, and the e-mail addresses of ten of my friends. What more do they want from me?! I've had enough. I'm visiting the local Best Buy and come inventory day they'll be short one PS3.
The internet is useless. [and then the signature:] Will program for bandwidth
Heh, that's pretty funny. Here, let me try one:
Will program for new irony detector.
Well, I guess that's my goal. looking back, I don't think I've bought* anything from Sony this century and I can now see why.
*or stolen you stupid ass.
What I say is it wasn't created for profit, it was created very far from the market. There were no MBAs involved, no managers. It was a community puting out software and RFCs. The corporate world, at that moment was busy creating zillions of incompatible little LANs, onthe low end, or a monstruosity (the ISO/OSI model... X.25) on the high end.
It's funny because Sony Online Entertainment seems to do pretty well.
Sony reminds me a lot of Apple. Though Apple clearly has a different view on the internet and has done a great job making money from online services, their corporate ideology seems to be very similar.
Both Sony and Apple love proprietary technology and trapping this customers into using their products and services. Like making it a massive challenge for a layman to use anything other than iTunes with their iPod, or making it very difficult to sync my iPod from one machine to the next. Or not allowing me to run Apple OS on whatever computer I wish, etc. As for Sony, everything from ATRAC to Sony Memory Sticks to the Cleo's just try to lock you into Sony. Not only that, but when I bought a brand new Sony MP3 phone last year, I realized that I can't play an MP3 without DRM on it! Over the years I've ripped a lot of my old CD's and now I had to use third party software to trick my MP3 phone into playing my MP3's because the phone was designed not to play something without DRM. That is unacceptable. I won't even get into the whole rootkit bs from a few years ago. There is a very large difference between creating a full range of services to try to capitalize on all your customers needs and from giving them limited functionality on products they purchase. I bought the fucking phone, I will play whatever the fuck I want to play on it, end of story.
To me, what this shows is a very scary Daddy Knows Best philosophy on the part of these companies and others like them. They believe that as a consumer, I am not to be trusted and that the products they sell me must be crippled, because I'm a deviant individual and will steal from them. The irony here is, those people who really want to use their products to their full potential simply just have to do a google search and see how it's done, all Sony is doing is making it a bigger pain in the ass for those people who are less tech savvy or who do not use pirated music or software.
Regardless, this is why I have stopped buying Sony or Apple products. We live in an age where 100 people walking around with anti Sony billboards won't do anything but if the same group stop buying Sony products, and educate their friends and family to do the same, it may eventually start showing in the bottom line.
I'm very optimistic about it all however because for every Sony or Apple out there, there are many other great technology companies that don't gimp their products. Eventually, enough people will catch on and these companies will understand that they must stop trying to fight the internet and start trying to find new ways to be competitive.
It's ironic that Mr. Lynton complains about consumers feeling entitled to getting free entertainment, because he seems to believe he is entitled to keep the same aging business model and not make any new or innovative changes to the services his company provides, and still make the same amount of money. Hardware electronic companies will eventually learn that the internet is here to stay and that there is no real way to fight it. What they must do is stay ahead of the technology and offer new and unique products and services to their consumers. Apple did and is doing a great job with iTunes, and if they didn't lock me into the software they way they do I would still be buying from them. Sony needs to wake up, hire a CEO who actually get's it, and completely reposition itself.
When he was quoted "when they can't get it for free they steal it" there is some lie to this. We all pay for our DSL or Cable modems. The bandwidth is not free and so while someone thinks that something is stolen, it is paid for by ISP charges. It's not so much about the product anymore but more about "the message". If a church offered their bible online and everyone downloaded it, they'd be happy no doubt, so why can't movies be more like the bible then?
For example, I personally would be happy to pay something like $0.15 / track for the privilege of upgrading the audio on my aging LPs to compressed digital quality --- but there is no way for me to actually do that, legally.
What the hell are you talking about? That has already been established as legal. Unless of course they managed to sneak some copy protection on to your LP's when you weren't looking.
If you look at all the recent copyright cases, you'll see that they consistantly decide that copyright infringement only happens when you choose to distribute your copy of the work. The copy you make for yourself is legal*, the copy you give to someone else is illegal.
Get it?
IANAL of course, but just look at all the recent court cases and it seems pretty well established what specifically is and is not legal, at least in regards to personal use. Even the person downloading an illegaly distributed copy seems to be in the clear, though that's not as well established as personal use copies. It's the DMCA and copy protection that get you, and such things don't exist on old LPs, only DVDs, newer CDs, and other newer media distribution methods like downloaded music with DRM.
*The exception, of course, is if there is some form of copy protection. Since the DMCA made circumvention of copy protection illegal, it comes in to play whenever copy protection is present.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.' It's become customary to expect a somewhat limited perspective on things from old-world entertainment companies
While I don't necessarily agree with his conclusion that nothing good has come from the internet, I agree with this statement 100%. A lot of people do feel entitled to take whatever they want when it comes to digital content on the internet. Of course there is good on the Internet, but the selfishness and lack of ethics in society that manifests itself on the Internet is a very real and undeniable evil. It is that which sometimes gives the Internet a bad reputation among some industries.
Pathetic Sony CEO, I bet if a cure for cancer is ever found he'll be lamenting the downfall of companies that specialize in chemotherapy treatments.
... you can no longer see value in the present, and wish it would just change back to the past. It must be a truly terrifying existence to want the present to go away. Best to give up now, it only get's more weird from here.
He is CEO of Sony Pictures, not Sony.
And by the looks of it doesn't really care about distributing things right either. Sony Connect was a mess, and then there is that annoying issue with Farscape season 1. What problem? They bought the rights, but haven't don't squat with making the season available - at least no where I can find it.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
He's titled to his opinion, as naive and self-serving as it may be (and incredibly poor P.R.). I don't think anything good has come out of Sony, period.
Period is not a sentence. It lacks a verb, unless we are talking about your sister.
Dude, I'd have to kick my own ass, if I spent my time trying to watch TV over the internet.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I completely agree, that movie sucked.
He doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, because it hasn't lined his pockets with extra millions. Worldwide communication, everything a publisher, that's all nonsense. All that matters to him is that he hasn't seen an entry in his account that says "+ X Millions, Internet".
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The trouble with this "What's Yours is Mine" philosophy is that it always means Other People's Stuff.
How many Slashdotter's would be OK with me walkng into their home and walking out with their tech toys?
People are people. They'll steal whenever they can rationalize it away.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Will we look back on this as one of the defining moments when the industrialized entertainment industry lost touch for good?"
No, either he will die or his company will. Neither one will be a great loss. Then things will change. This isn't the first case of someone shouting in the face of the obvious refusing to believe in reality. It won't be the last and it won't make his fantasy realm any more real.
That said, he is half right about one thing. Americans have a powerful sense of entitlement. Doesn't have anything to do with the Internet, though.
"Criminalize Customer: There really does seem to have been a massive switch to this. The customer should really be the boss, the only one a company should have to please, but it appears more and more like the big companies view customers as the enemy: to be accused, lied to, and forced to pay them."
I fixed that as well as I could without changing your words. It really needs to be restructured, though.
It also lacks a subject, However a complete English sentence does not require a subject, nor a verb.
No one wants to admit it, but he's right. Even if it isn't us /.ers, the internet has fostered an environment where 'free' is the rule of thumb. The other day, I was in a seminar about budgeting your money (I was getting paid to go). The guy hosting it gave a list of things that you can get from the internet for free, rather than paying for it otherwise, including magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
What isn't mentioned is that the vast majority of a lot of revenue for media sources comes from the real-world end of things. And it's either a matter of starting to charge money for online access, or go under, as the user base shifts to the internet. If everyone stopped their subscriptions to newspapers and started reading it all online, that paper would close down, and there wouldn't be that source online anymore.
And to anyone who thinks that standard web ad revenue is enough to stay afloat on, you're truly mistaken. The cost of web adverts is decreasingly rapidly as the web becomes saturated with them, and ways of blocking them become more sophisticated. The only way to break even is to increase the number of ads, and their obtrusiveness.
" Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.' It's become customary to expect a somewhat limited perspective on things from old-world entertainment companies, but his inability to acknowledge that the Internet has changed everything makes me think he's a very confused man. "
Is he? Are you saying that he's incorrect? He's confused and you have blinders on. Last time I checked piracy was actually happening. It's not like the Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot were it's alleged that some have seen it. Yes the internet has changed a lot of things. What's not so clear is that every change has been for the better. The only confusion here is the belief that technology can't have a dark side.
1. the Net Wasn't Worth It
2. Men on the moon was a fraud
3. the earth IS flat
4. The earth is almost exaclty 5000 years old
5. The illuminati run everything
6. The Jews run everything (NOTE: please disregard the fact that #6 is mutually contrary with #5)
7. The neocons run everything (NOTE: see above note)
8. If man learns to split the atom, the world will be destroyed
9. sail to far out on the ocean, you'll fall off the edge of the earth!
10. here there be DRAGONS!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You can watch some full episodes on cbs.com. It varies by show. For example, you can get Numb3rs, but not The Mentalist.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Obviously an artist cannot enjoy the proceeds after death...
Perhaps authors want to skip paying life insurance premiums by leaving royalty-generating copyrights to their heirs instead.
people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.'
companies 'feel entitled" to have profit with what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it, 'they'll sue poor grandmas and whine like babies'
Being in the entertainment industry the largest disconnect is that people creating entertainment products are visionaries, such as Walt Disney. Obviously he was much more visionary than many of the CEO's of today, but the concept is the same.
Things aren't always about "the money", it's more about "the experience". But to create a complete experience it requires a lot of time and resources of talented individuals which requires money from investors (also known as entertainment companies). Investors want a return on their investment (well, duh). So it requires people paying for that experience to make the effort balanced. A complete experience also requires going into a controlled environment which means leaving your house. The internet junkies of today want to experience the "complete experience" without leaving their house. So there's a HUGE disconnect.
There could probably be a system created for micro-billing of watching entertainment but there probably wouldn't be the recoup necessary to offset the investment in creating quality entertainment, but more importantly this would create lesser quality of entertainment in the end. As things would be created with the uncontrolled environment and computer screen as the target audience, the number of senses that are able to be stimulated from the experience are lessened. This format would attract people who want to capitalize on making money in that genre, but be restrictive of serious creative types to realize a whole and complete experience.
If you want to be entertained and want to continue having great art created, get off your duff and go see a movie. Throw your vote of what arts you want to see more of with your hard earned dollars. Buy the stuff you enjoy, pay to see the stuff you enjoy.
I think what the parent intended to say is their shrinkage used to be eaten by the retails, where it was due the theft, and the distributors did not care. If they experienced shrinkage it was because they had unsold and less marketable product and the occasional forklift accident prior to shipping.
Now they have to face "pirate" distributors on a grand scale yet each such distributor small and hard to find. The need infringement to be set equal to theft or would like it to be, for the preservation of their existing model.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
actually MGM is about to be bankrupt, unless they pull off a major blockbuster with their next release they probably can't finance the production of another. They don't even have an entry in this summers movie season.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Tell that to the legislatures rushing to prop them up with unconstitutional expansions of copyright law.
Capitalism can't produce common goods. Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government. It was created in an academic environment, by passionate people that cared about the advance of technolog (indirectly: of mankind).
No. The internet was a result from a military project that aimed to create a computer network safe enough to withstand a nuclear attack. Therefore, the internet was the by product of the cold war. Google "arpanet" if you are in doubt.
No the customer should not be the boss.
The boss should be the boss, the customer should be the customer, and the staff should be the staff. Each working towards their own ends and their own reasons but each with a reasonable accommodation for the others' goals and place in the organization.
Parent is AC and intentionally inflammatory. Don't feed the trolls.
(spouts off some truth, but intentionally ignores reality to try to get a rise out of the rest of us.)
Capitalism made it what it is today, if they had kept at it it would be like a Soviet car today.
What about the CD and DVD, or the thousands of other standardized products?
Generally companies supply what is demanded by customers, not by elitists. What average customer gives a flying hoot about IMAP if they are happy with webmail, or whether one protocol is a bit better than another? Companies have to make a profit, otherwise they go out of business so why the hell should they spend lots of money changing all their systems just because some academics thinks a new protocol is 30% faster. They actually need need a return on the money spent, unlike government which can waste all the money it wants and never go out of business (it doesn't need to cater to real people either.)
Anyway, I suspect IMAP and newsgroups haven't got replaced, its just that new users find webmail and phpbb easier to use.
Really?
Ya, damn those customers for wanting what they want now instead of having to wait.
Oh wait, this is Sony, who has a history of screwing their customers for generations now. *yawn*
This is a non story from yet another company who just doesn't "get it" and thinks its still 1950 ( at least in their business practices, they do have some cool tech of course ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I noticed that "Multiplayer computer games" made your list of things that require the Internet. Why is this? Now that the market share of HDTVs such as those made by Sony has increased, why can't people connect four gamepads and a TV to a Sony VAIO PC and play that way?
There is still download and threat of viruses with Hulu. You are connected to the internet and content which runs on your computer is downloaded; so a virus could come through.
*snip*
Relax, he's just one voice of a thousand at Sony.
*snip*
True, but one voice that is driving the boat. Plus they have a history as a corporation that pretty much matches his non customer-centric philosophy. He's forgot who he ultimately works working for. Without customers, you don't exist.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Yes, I believe a period is considered a sentence (at least by half the women I know).
I speak England very best
I see not response beyond the title of this post as appropriate. Shashdot should immediately delete all other posts & advertisements in this threat, replacing them with one giant LOL.
I could write a more witty response, quoting Jefferson even, but why bother? I won't convince his layers that their pay checks are "hurting america, japan, etc." But all normal people agree with me. So I will win, period. Just like the blacks & women won, just like the gays & atheists are winning, just like the pot users will one day win, etc.
You must create a market to sell stuff. Even government has a market. You do not. Bye bye.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Did you just immediately hit reply when you hit that line in the parent? I assume so, otherwise you would have seen the parent mentioned that fact as one of the current drawbacks of Hulu.
Not really, as with the advent of DRM the level of control has gone down.
DRM often takes away options for reasonable Fair Use such as backing up the data so bought. This while the prices for the data remain unchanged, and high relative to the costs of production.
Printing press?
Capitalism is a very recent development and was not really around in the days of Guttenberg.
The customer does not have a place in the organization. S/he need not have any 'reasonable accomodation' for the boss and staff. You pays yer dollar and gets yer goods. Or you go to the next vendor.
Try reading my full comment instead of just hitting reply half way through. I mentioned those drawbacks, among others. And Hulu's interface IS functionally better because of things like being able to dim the rest of the page, change resolutions with a button that actually works (as opposed to youtube which sometimes will and sometimes won't depending on the video), being able to see the exact time your mouse is hovering over the seek bar, as well as some other things.
Yes, Hulu blocks IPs outside US. (Using a Well Known Search Engine, you'll find plenty of workarounds - pls try them only for Academic/Research purposes.)
The reason of the block, is not Hulu's inherent evil. It's rather the outdated structure of TV shows international rights.
If you sell The Simpsons in France, the French TV station which buys it, has an exclusive contract - i.e., nobody else can broadcast the Simpsons in France. Hulu may therefore risk legal trouble if they hulucast The Simpsons in France.
Needless to say, this is a big piece of BS: if you follow this logic, you'd make Satellite dishes illegal, because you can use them to watch The Simpsons anywhere in the world you are.
Such contracts/laws were made for a different world. Today, enforcing such rights on a territorial basis is close to ridiculous -and a sure encouragement for French users to torrent The Simpsons.
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong." (Oscar Wilde)
The banks were not supplying those things because that was not the profit model for those making the decisions in the banks, at least the major decisions that ultimately mattered.
Those people did extremely well, those CEOs gained huge payments, and already are rebounding after this stumble, even if that rebound means their companies going under.
These bankers are triumphs of our system. They made millions, billions of profits for very little work. They did things far smarter, on their own, and are reaping the profits.
...why don't you put your money where your mouth is? Take your site down (in case you didn't know it's at http://www.sonypictures.com/), then I'll pay attention to what you have to say.
Until then, you would do well by keeping your mouth shut whenever there's a microphone or a reporter in the room.
Did you seriously just equate the risk of getting a virus just by having an internet connection, to the risk of having a virus while having an internet connection WHILE browsing warez sites which often have viruses posing as cracks for applications, or videos, etc? Are you really that thick that you think having any open internet connection is as dangerous as engaging in risky activity online?
I am sorry are you advocating a system where corporate entities have access to police powers and can reliable count on jailing their customers when they violate copyright or some other TOS?
I would rather live in a world without movies, tv, and recorded music. Live music and visual arts predate the idea of LAW itself are intrinsic to humanity we could give up those three specific forms and lose little as culture, at least in comparison to the total lack of freedom you seem to advocate.
The big problem here is an economic one at the root. Our society over produces and over consumes this type of art. There are finite good s and labor that go into these productions. Those have a cost and must be recouped. The producers have a price point that is to high, as evidenced by the vast black market distribution of these materials. The consumers are using to much because the price many of them pay is often little or nothing. The correct answer is to charge a little less and produce much less. People won't want to consume as much if they actually have to pay, they will be "satisfied", few will illegally distribute or go looking for and deal with illegal distribution because their simply won't be enough material out there to make the efforts of doing all that worth while.
Computer geeks aside you think joe public would bother learning about torrents and if there were only five movies or so a year he cared to see anyway? You think the geeks would take the trouble to make it easy to do something we would be doing much more infrequently. I don't think so.
Society is dumping to many resources into this particular kind of art. Because reproduction is so cheap and easy the economics around it are being tossed out of whack. The market is doing what it always does and correcting. The black market exists because there are artificial legal barriers to reproduction even if there were non the "free" reproduction would just happen sooner. Studios like MGM are on the verge of bankruptcy and will likely fail. Its a good thing thing actually. Eventually equilibrium will be reached and when it is there will be less waste.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
It's not an entitlement problem.
It's a distribution problem. The old model is obsolete, and these idiots have lived like kings on it for too long.
It's like fighting an economic wave. They can hang on to their leaky boat, they can try to bail it out, or they can go swimming. One way or another, it's going down. The sad thing is how much will be lost in the mists of copyright law if the corporate ship of Sony sinks.
Anyone who hunts down old Jazz recordings for the purpose of republication will know exactly what I'm talking about.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
If the organization is a business then the customer certainly has a place, if the business wants to stay open.
Paying your dollar, is the reasonable accommodation.
The CEO of the studio that released "The Pink Panther 2" is in no position to lecture anyone about a sense of entitlement. The Onion's commentary on this is barely even satire at this point:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/vindictive_movie_studio_threatens
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
But if we give them our social security numbers, then they *know* we're proper US citizens, right?!
I disagree.
When the Doctor Who Easter special came on, I didn't feel like waiting for SciFi ... SyFy channel or BBC America to get it's act together. I didn't want to be the last whovian to see it.
So I opted for bittorrent. I'm pretty sure Lost, 24 and fans of American media outside of this country feel the same way.
I do think that as consumers, we really shouldn't be turning straight for piracy feeling like we -deserve- it or that there's any real sense of entitlement, but I didn't feel like waiting for the American distribution network to get with it and chose my options. If the BBC or SyFy want my business that bad, they'll do within 24hour broadcasts of big properties. Some properties are getting proper treatment, I mean, now, Funimation is doing Full Metal Alchemist subs in days of Japanese airing.
(The same's true for Top Gear. plus I don't think it's appropriate for the BBC to censor it for export purposes either.)
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
That's more to do with the fact that they made some horrible decisions on producing some films. They outsourced to other studios for a number of films last year, and acted shocked when they got back nothing but crap. A quick count shows they produced less than half of their own films by themselves, last year (6 of 14 that I counted). It's got nothing to do with piracy, or whatever. They've just suffered a string of flops.
You racist!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The internet was developed in order to ensure American communications after a Communist Soviet nuclear strike.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Ahhhh those Entertainment Industry CEO's are kooky kooky guys!!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
How exactly does their internet stuff fall short? DRM Free music for $0.89 per song? Satisfies my cravings.
.... I haven't purchased any music from the major labels, because the music I want isn't on them and its just as easy for them to put it on the same stores.
Hmm I think I might know why their still upset
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
>Capitalism can't produce common goods.
Yes it can. Capitalism is the most efficient producer of common and uncommon goods mankind has ever devised. It is also the system most compatible with free choice and democracy. Do you want to move to Cuba? Go ahead...
>Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government.
As surely as the airplane would've never had existed if it weren't for the wright brothers.
>It was created in an academic environment, by passionate people that cared about the advance of technolog (indirectly: of mankind).
It was, in fact, created in a military-sponsored environment, by passionate people who cared about the advance of the soviets and the threat of nuclear weapons (indirectly: nationalists).
>Internet advanced quickly, different protocols appeared, once replacing the other (Gopher, SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, etc.). Then the companies came. Those set of protocols froze, some began to fade.
Gopher was text-only and superseded by the Web. All of the other protocols you mentioned (SMTP, HTTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP) are still aroud, still relevant, still ported to new systems and kept current. But, even if they werent, are you trying to say that between POP and IMAP we must have both forever?
>Companies didn't care about "what's right".
What is "What's right"? What you think is right? What I think is right? What they think is right?
>They didn't care about advance the network.
Unless it would make them money. Or differentiate their products. Or make them look good to prospective customers. Thinking about it, they did care.
>The HTTP/1.0 -> 1.1 transition took years, and still hasn't finished (e.g. http pipelining). IMAP mail stalled, and got replaced by webmail. Multicast was never deployed at large. Newsgroups got replaced by phpbb.
Water-fueled cars were kept away from the market by big oil companies. HIV virus was created to sell vaccines. Amiga OS was sabotaged by IBM. OS/2 was replaced by Windows. Sinclair computers went out of business. But not all is lost! Blue Mountain Arts is still around!
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
Period is indeed a sentence. Period.
I have the same opinion of Sony Pictures...
It's slowly and painfully eroding our culture of naivety,...
Funny, that's exactly what Michael Lynton thinks about the internet.
The kids tripping on acid during the Summer of Love mostly turned into fear-freaks who relentlessly elected NeoCon Evangeliban to office.
This is a generational cliché. The 'Summer of Love' was 1967 and at that time there were no kids tripping. LSD didn't hit the American high schools throughout the country in a big way until the early 1970s. There is still a lot of debate about just how this managed to happen, but it did.
The number of people involved in the hippy counter-culture in the 1960s was actually very small, maybe 2-3% of the 18-25 year olds at the time 1967. They got a lot of press for being colorful and very noticeable, but there weren't a whole lot of them. The vast majority of American teens in 1967 were not much different from the teens of 1957 or 1997, they were just all normal people.
Much of what people think of as 60's behavior and mentality actually took place in the mid to late 1970s. This actually was a weird time with a lot of weed smoking and a lot of tripping. But most of the teenage tripping on LSD happened in the years 1971-1974 and then rapidly faded. Again no one is exactly sure why this social phenonemon happened at this time.
Here on the west coast we have a lot of the people still around who actually were the tripping hippies in the '67 Summer of Love. They, the ones that survived and didn't go mad (about 85% of them), are generally quietly prosperous, middle-class and politically liberal.
There are a few radical hippies that turned conservative, such as the respected David Horowitz. But they were mostly radical new-left people from Berkeley and not San Francisco hippies.
I realize that all this now 'doesn't mean shit to a tree' (an expression of that time), and, with time, political enemies get grouped together by subsequent generations as artifacts of a past and irrelevant era. But still it is best to avoid the trap of generational clichés in public forums.
Thank you.
Well if that's how the CEO feels perhaps Sony can get itself off of the internet. Sony doesn't like it? Sony doesn't have to use it. Sony has 92 thousand Ip's, we have a IP shortage and 92 thousand ip's could be used by those that actually a respect for the internet and what it's done for the world. What's a matter Mr CEO, don't like things that don't buy you another gulfstream?
My sentiments exactly. TV poisons the mind with advertising coercion, news channel brainwashing and programs that stupify. Internet is the antidote.
Right, what's ridiculously stupid is not his primary opinion (that 'piracy' facilitated by the internet is 'bad', an opinion even shared by non-Mega Media Corporation Execs), though I would contest that myself, but his inference that NO POSITIVE BENEFITS EXIST in addition to this 'negative' aspect. I mean, people die from free-way accidents, but it also facilitates longer-distance travel. Millions have been saved by Penicillin and derivatives, but I had an allergic reaction once, so I guess there must be NO benefit, huh? I just think these people just don't have a real life outside of counting their money...
He is correct. I think piracy has become so convenient that it literally takes self-control not to do it when you hit any hiccups getting media. It's sometimes easier to torrent than rent a movie.
He has not considered the minor possibility of serving the end-users with his products. I guess sale by litigation is the new capitalism.
Hulu has probably done more to combat media piracy than any number of massive and vicious lawsuits. So has netflix with their new content delivery system. I will always hit up Hulu and youtube's new shows tab and such before hitting up the torrents. I can't imagine I am the only person who does this.
Maybe they should attempt delivering their content in a way that people want.
You'll notice pretty much none of the *AA cases are focusing on "they stole" but "they're breaking copyright, thus infringing on our property." (or at least that's how they're presented in the media, which is as good as presenting the case that way, in the public's mind)
They're going to court arguing for "copyright infringement" because that's how the law works. There is legally no such thing as "theft" of intellectual property. Colloquially there may be, as in "He stole my trade secret," but legally that translates to "He misappropriated my trade secret."
On the other hand, in the media, they are very much trying to create a connection between infringement and theft. My take is that this is part of a larger push to equate intellectual property and property in the public's mind, and to marginalize the utilitarian reasoning that used to justify intellectual property in this country. When that is gone, time limits no longer make sense, and the push will be for stronger and stronger intellectual property rights - because property is good!
Copyright was supposed to be about preventing others from using your work to their financial gain, thus reducing your profit.
In the U.S., copyright exists first and foremost to provide an incentive to create. That justification is explicitly specified in many of the major copyright cases. That is the reason exclusive rights are granted, and what you fail to specify. It is a reason that used to, and should continue to, circumscribe copyright policy.
Your approach confuses the issue. Intellectual property should provide only what incentive is necessary. Providing excessive protection is economically inefficient. But by claiming that copyright is about "preventing others from using your work" and preventing someone from "reducing your profit", you walk down a road toward justifying absolute, infinite protection of intellectual property. Fair use reduces your profit. Term limits reduce your profit. So no, that's not what copyright is about (or at least, not what it used to be about).
That's why derivative and fair use are in there as acceptable.
This reveals that you don't know what you're talking about. "Derivative" use? I've never heard that term. "Derivative works", yes. And actually, the copyright in derivative works belongs to the original copyright holder, so no, derivative works are not "acceptable" in the same way that fair use is.
Most pirates are just simply missing the personal gain factor that would make it a true copyright infringement case.
Again, this is factually incorrect. "Personal gain" is not necessary to make something copyright infringement. In fact, after the NET Act, even criminal copyright infringement doesn't require monetary gain.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Lets go back a number of decades, to a better time when actors worked on the stage. Great minds writing wonderful entertainment, unfathomably wonderful performances by the best that the field of acting could offer. All on the stage.
And then one day these "moving pictures" pop into existence. Moving pictures? The players said. Load of tripe, trashy stuff so we shall ignore it. Shortly thereafter, people seem to actually be going to see these moving pictures, and in greater numbers too! Soon the players audience is shrinking, more and more, theatres shut down or changed into 'movie theatres'.
And what does the player say? the playwright? the stage hands and producers?
"Nothing good has come of this 'moving picture' business, people just expect to be able to walk into a room and watch a pre-recorded performance! Unbelievable! These films are stealing our income! Why one small group of actors can make one single performance and duplicate such a thing until we are out of work!! Nothing good at all has come of it and nothing good will come of it!"
Ironic, to be the head of a firm that deals exclusively in what one would have once called an extremely disruptive new technology, and to make these comments... How the wheel turns.
Sigh...
I don't pirate video or audio, but I don't buy them either. The issue here isn't that everyone is becoming a criminal, its that the entertainment products produced by the studios aren't worth the price they want us to pay.
It surprises me that there are people out there who are willing to shell out $12 a head for Pineapple Express.
Lets also not forget the rootkit fiasco unleashed by Sony. Their actions were verging on criminal and from what I can tell about criminal behavior, it still takes one to know one.
"I do think there's an entitlement problem. I just think it's the other way around. You have these old dinosaurs of the industry who've been the gate keepers of media production for so long, they don't know how to react to a little competition."
You're joking..right?
Competition would be small independent artists selling their music online through myspace/social networking sites outside the norm of a recording label.
Torrent sites that leech off of the actual artists are just thieves.
"these guys will either have to take control of the distribution and make a profit of it, or someone else will."
Eventually, this will just hurt the consumer. We will just get less quality art, movies, software, and music because there will be no profit in it.
"It's a distribution problem. The old model is obsolete, and these idiots have lived like kings on it for too long."
It's not a distribution problem. It's a thief problem. Even if you offered a movie in all the proper formats for download (only if you paid for it). Piracy would not be reduced. In fact, it would probably increase.
see: Itunes. Did this stop people from illegally copying music?
No, theft has always been theft, and infringement has always been infringement. Legally they are, and for practical purposes always have been, two very different things. The fact that you did not understand copyright law does not mean anything has changed.
Your irony detector is in serious need of re-calibration. In fact, it's so fucked that you should just ditch it and buy a new one.
"I find a funny twinge of discomfort in reading this, because it almost seems like you are implying that "infringement" is worse than "theft"
Infringement is worse than theft. With theft, you lose one physical object. With mass infringement, you may lose your entire business (more and more people know they can get it for free and as a result, don't pay, torrent/free sites may also get higher keywords than the original site..and lose potential customers).
I think it's more the underlying arrogance to think that an industry that has existed in a meaningful sense for just over a century is more important than a series of advancements in communications technologies which has revolutionized most aspects of modern industrialized society.
What it does paint is a picture of large corporate entertainment giants being run by short-sighted Luddites who will ultimately fail.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The distinction needs to be made between production and distribution. I would agree with you if lawsuits were being filed against websites because they enabled other producers to better compete, however that is not the case. Internet technologies have become more successful distributing the old media, rather than enabling competing independently produced material. Old media isn't being rendered obsolete, just old media's model of using distribution profits to cover the costs of production.
What's sad is that we are seeing old media becoming more entrenched. Instead of searching for free independent music or movies, people have just switched to downloading the known highly marketed material. While they kick and scream about losing money due to piracy, they are secretly grinning because they are securing their mindshare for other avenues of profitablity like merchandising. The internet was an ideal system for diversity, however we are instead getting cultural homoginization around these old media companies with the big marketing dollars.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
You have these old dinosaurs of the industry who've been the gate keepers of media production for so long, they don't know how to react to a little competition.
Close, but no cigar. The net is not about Production, it is about distribution. There will always be a market and need for production, and some limited physical distribution.
It is the mass distribution model they have not grasped - a method for getting their product to an extremely large customer base, for a good price, which combined with the marginal cost of distribution returns them an substantial profit.
Have you seen the kind of absolute shit being put on your TV or being sold in record stores? The big media giants are collapsing because they're becoming increasingly less capable of producing things that aren't, at best, mediocre, or at worst, just plain bad.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Fuck you.
photosMy Photostream
"Have you seen the kind of absolute shit being put on your TV or being sold in record stores? The big media giants are collapsing because they're becoming increasingly less capable of producing things that aren't, at best, mediocre, or at worst, just plain bad."
Star trek just made $72.5 million this weekend. Also, the other flaw in you argument is that shitty music, movies, and software will not be pirated.
Has illegal software increased or decreased in the past couple of years?
I think his confusion all stems from what the Internet really is. We can all agree that the Internet is a network of computers. Having said that, he probably doesn't even realize how Sony is dependent on a network.
Maybe he uses Email, maybe he doesn't. But I'm sure some employee there can't do any substantial work without Email. Need to come up with a quick marketing cover? Have one of your arts guys come up with something. And how will he submit his project? A network no doubt.
Or what about needing to render something? Better get a giant super computer to meet your deadline.
And payroll?
The list goes on and on...
So sure, he can't see anything good coming out of the Internet.
Hulu works ok in Australia.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Internet : 1
Sony Pictures : 0
Your move, short-sighted fool.
E
P.S. The score is binary. The Internet has won.
Why can't they start distributing media in a different way than they are now?
I'm guessing the content that is mostly being pirated is US TV shows, games and movies that aren't launched world-wide at the exact same time. Steam (www.steampowered.org) launched e.g. GTA IV and other titles worldwide with this approach, and could announce that this did in fact decline pirating of those products.
A lot of services already add VAT to products bought online, so this should be out of the question.
People are tired of waiting for information and culture, if it is accessible in another part of the world. I know it's not a human's right to watch "The Office" in Germany at the same time people are watching it in the US, but when people are willing to pay, what is the problem?
his inability to acknowledge that the Internet has changed everything makes me think he's a very confused man
He's not confused, just plain mistaken.
Troll? And here I was think that should have been modded redundant...
My sig can beat up your sig.
phpbb is FOSS.
19th century textile workers probably didn't have a lot of nice things to say about the power loom, either.
That means Slashdot has a threat of viruses too! You should leave just in case. Seriously. Just leave.
It's just a series of tubes anyway.
Well, this is what I use: One-Dollar rentals from the DVD rental vending machine at the local grocery store. They even have a couple of Blu-Rays in that machine for the same price.
Only downside: The selection isn't so great, and you actually have to physically go to the store twice for each movie (rent and return). But overall, this is a price that I find totally acceptable.
Really. Exclamation Mark.
^^ +1
It boggles my mind why every apple-cheeked teenager on the planet zOMG-NEEDS a digital copy of some of the shit they buy/torrent/share. Album covers were cool in my day (disclaimer: Eddie. 'nuff said), now, most times, you don't even get that with a DL. You get the song, which is overplayed on the radio, and wears itself out in 3 weeks.
ZOMG. I'm old.
Unless the illuminati is full of neocon jews.
What.....Capitalism as a concept maybe but in practice its been around a long long time
If the recipient of the infringing copy would have bought it, had they been unable to get a pirated copy: the tangible object lost are the green dollar bills they would have gotten from the sale.
You know what's really good that came from the Internet? The term "wah-mbulance". Sure, it's a bit overused, but I think it applies.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
... it is that the term CEO is taking a well-deserved knock-down. These CEOs are simply greedy pricks too smart for politics and too stupid for law school. Michael Lynton is this week's poster boy.
If your out of wifi range of 300' your not going to be watching hulu.
Ok so you can't watch it on Mars... I suppose that's a fair point.
I cannot believe you got troll. The customers while they should be what the company is aimed at pleasing, do not always know what they want and cannot be treated as a literal boss.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
He's not completely right, but he sort of is; while there are some great services on the internet (such as news aggregators, video broadcasts sites like Hulu and many others) and other very useful sites, there's also a lot of useless shit on the internet. Twitter is blogging for lobotomized chimpanzees, such as Ashton Kutcher (and no I don't give a damn if I spelled it right); 90% of videos are worthless, in terms of artistry and entertainment; and there are tons of boring, useless sites and attack sites.
All of that said, he's still an idiot; but the Sony CEO "gets it" more than this asshat and we really shouldn't listen to the guy. Just because one guy at an organization says something, doesn't mean everyone agrees; a lot of people forget that corporations are just a group of human beings, and each human being within the organization may have a different opinion on the topic. Just because he has the employee badge, doesn't mean everyone at Sony thinks that.
Their problem is, they think the Internet is about something they call'content'. They really do not get it. What the Internet did was to abolish the relevance of the concept of content. Ask yourself, is Twitter 'content'? Or ask Sony, more like.
Something similar is happening with open source software. As in the famous cases of school teachers confiscating copies of Linux. Its hard during revolutions.
Why do they have a web site? If someone wanted information about Sony Pictures, surely they could make a phone call or, indeed, write a polite letter of inquiry?
There's a whole big world outside the US, and none of us have heard of or use Hulu.
hell, if was the ceo of a big multi-national media company, i would buy all my songs from itunes and fill up my 120gb ipod. but since i'm just a student and don't have much money i'll stick to piratebay.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Would you like a free rootkit with that CD? No? Tough shit.
But see.. it's not "Tough Shit". If I don't want it, I don't buy it. For the record, I don't steal it, either. In situations like that, I get a great deal of satisfaction by not spending my money. For example, when you go to buy a car, the salesman tries to maintain control by playing a game. Assert yourself! He wants to trade you sheet metal for money, and you're going to let him call the shots? You can find a fucking car any day of the week.
Money talks, but so does 'no money'.
Perfect description of the problem, since the internet is a competing distribution network. Trouble is, the existing distribution network (ie theatres) costs too much. The intelligent approach would be to switch networks. Why don't shareholders reward intelligence?
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
No it doesn't
- Australian waiting for Hulu
That's a bit unfair, not everyone has access to the internet, it's not ubiquitous as everyone likes to think, grand parent was also using an international context and this is even more of a problem outside of the US. I can barely get proper cellphone coverage where I am let alone any sort of wireless internet.
And his remarks are reminiscent of Clemens' on the subject, who was channelling Dobbs, who later admitted he stole the work, but traced it back to Pliny the Elder before the trail was lost.
What's your point?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
To summarize the summary, this stems from the fact Sony (and others) as so high and mighty, that they feel they have the right to not participate in online purchasing. Then to top it off, charge customers an outrageous price to purchase via a means they may find inconvienient.
When does the company URL free up?
Our IP range seems a bit strange. I have, for example, a host at x.x.32.1 which shows up as China in three different geo-location databases, but the IP at x.x.32.2 shows up as Australian. The IP range is leased from one of the states major providers - all of which show up as Australia when you check them. Just something to note I guess.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
This got modded insightful? Look, I've got no beef with asserting that many corporations treat their customers like idiots, but "Capitalist" is a theoretical orientation, not an organizational structure. And if the word your looking for is "corporation", then you've confused correlation with causation: A corporation is just a model of funding your business. Large companies require more complex funding operations so they tend to be corporations. Generally, only very large companies can get away with screwing their customers. There is nothing about screwing people that is inherent to corporations, unless you're a Marxist.
A panel with print and film whining about how their respective technologies are being phased out. I'm sure it was a little pity party. It's never good to whine and cry about that. Get up and invent something that works in the new situation. That's what younger "comic strip" artists did when they couldn't make a break into getting their strips into newspapers. They're now web comics creators and they network with each other on the best business models that are working out for them. I follow a few that are struggling with the methods of payment for their works and even they wrestle with the concept of getting their viewers to pay for their work, but at least they embraced the change in technology their art instructors scoffed at just a few years ago.
"I got it all together but I forgot where I put it."
THANK YOU!
One of my pet peeves is the extreme excess of media produced today. TV is perhaps the perfect example of what I mean. We have cable from Comcast. For X dollars per month, we could get the basic package (60 channels or so). For X+10 dollars per month, we get the next package up (hundreds of channels). We have the X+10 dollar package because of two channels we did want (yeah, out of hundreds of channels, there are only about 4 that are worth watching). But what possible use is there for buying 400 channels? I mean, really. I cannot watch 400 channels, and most of them I don't want to watch. This is a heavy excess of material that isn't necessary to enjoy the TV that is worthwhile.
We don't need massive quantities of TV. We need TV that is engaging enough to give us our fill very quickly and leave time for something else (and time seems to be the one thing our society can't find enough of any more). I enjoy The Universe (a history channel documentary series about astronomy) because it is both interesting and generally well made. I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings series of movies, for a similar reason (extremely well made, and a captivating plot. Although the books are still better). I wish things of this caliber were frequently shown. But instead, when I turn on the TV (which is often an exercise in futility), I see very few shows that are worth my time. I stopped turning to channels other than discovery, history, science, and national geographic. I often turn on the TV, look at even *those* channels, see nothing interesting and turn the TV off.
Perhaps my demands are too high, but it seems to me that interesting fiction is getting ever harder to come by. It's as though the imaginations of the producers are disappearing, although I'm pretty sure the ratings system is just as responsible for this (and the sheep-like consumerism model of our present society certainly doesn't help).
Summary: TV is dumbing down. Buying 400 channels is useless since you can't watch them all. We need more interesting shows/movies.
Being a financial / market analyst working in the buy side and having done some work on the supply side of the investment industry, I am so glad I'm not heavily invested in this company.
What the fuck does he think he's doing?
That's terrible publicity and does not show that he has any concept of how to be competitive in this "new market".
That board needs to fire him!
@anyaristow,
I disagree, I personally simply wouldn't bother with that companies content.
If I have PURCHASED for instance, all of Stargate, (Ya all 10 seasons and Atlantis too) and I want to watch them on my iPod while I'm in the airport and your world view as the publisher says I can't, guess who's world view is going to win?
My other argument to your point is ease of availability, While I do own all those dvd's I downloaded already ripped & formatted for the iPod versions because for me, the bandwidth is cheaper than the time.
I really wish that there was a study of exactly how much the stuff that's instantly available on iTunes is pirated VS like programs that they do not have.
No, it's a basic economic problem. In the absence of a legally binding monopoly such as patents or copyright, if the cost of a commodity is set too high relative to the cost of production, someone else will find a way to undercut you. New technology often makes this possible, and the Internet is an example of such a disruptive technology. Look what digital cameras have done to companies like Kodak, and this concept should become immediately obvious.
Right now, we have a situation where a commodity---they have deliberately commoditized music and movies by flooding the market with throwaway music that all sounds alike, throwaway movies that are just bad rehashes of existing movies, etc.---is sold at a price that made sense when the cost of producing and distributing content was high. Now that the cost of production and distribution is much, much lower, they can look for ways to keep final sale prices high all they want, but the basic laws of economics say that it ain't gonna happen without collusion, and that even collusion will have limited success. Here's why:
That last one is the ultimate kick in the nuts for the industry. It means that the descent of the music and movie industries into peddlers of commodity crap is directly to blame for their products having no value. Translation: if you don't like the money you're making off music and movies, try making better music and movies.
In the long term, though, this is about losing control of distribution. The media giants want to maintain control over distribution. The Internet is basically making that impossible. There's no reason for somebody to release music through a big label except for the ability to reach their listeners. This advantage to label distribution is fading rather rapidly. In the long run, they will have no good reason to exist.
Although movie studios aren't in much danger of that yet, I'd imagine within fifty years, they'll be where the music in
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
@Gerzel
I used to have a customer who was absolutely convinced that viruses could come through the AC plug.
You stand about as much of a chance of getting a virus from hulu as he did of getting one that way, That is to say NONE. At least through that channel. If you've left open another pathway into your machine it's not going to be hulu's fault.
> That has already been established as legal.
Digitizing your own LPs ("space shifting") is almost certainly legal in the US but probably not in the UK or other foreign countries more closely following UK copyright law.
OTOH that's not what I meant, what I meant was "obtaining a compressed version of the CD quality music".
Don't bother, it's a crap movie. not even worth the time and bandwidth we used to download it. Oh, and it's also the first time we got one of those lovely "you've been caught pirating stuff. please stop. or else" letters.
It seems unlikely he hadn't previously discussed his views with his colleagues at Sony and in the entertainment industry. Since he expressed those views on a panel, it seems unlikely many of those colleagues told him he was being a clueless idiot.
So it's not just individuals who are being clueless, but an industry echo chamber which is enabling a large number of rich and influential people to float away from reality.
Sounds like he'd get along well with Ken "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." Olsen.
'Common Good' as the OP is using it is a good that isn't owned by an individual or company. Usually those are things that the government is involved in the creation of because it's either not going to be profitable, or making it profitable would make it far more difficult to use.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Betamax
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Hulu doesn't help you when you are not in the US. A dvr does.
I must say the Sony CEO has been living in a bottle and someone just uncorked it. He has arrived in a society which has technologically advanced to the point that he cannot fathom how or what to do with technology. And his ignorance and unwillingness to learn will sink his ship..
Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US government. It was created in an academic environment...
The internet was created by the US government but in a military environment. The web was created in an academic environment but by CERN, the European particle physics lab so that particle physicists like myself could use it to share information with colleagues around the world.
Capitalism can't produce common goods.
and when sony knowingly sold rear projection tv's with bad optical blocks that died usually 6 months after warranty ran out and cost about $800 USD for just the part never mind the labor, FUCK YA !!! I download every movie and music recording sony ever produced just cause bitch!!! HAVE A NICE DAY . . . . . .
It sounds like you are claiming that the money the US government spent on starting the Internet was a bad and unwise investment. But the reality is that it was a fantastically good investment.
The problem is that US companies need to make a profit in the very short-term. They are only allowed to look ahead at most a year or two on the outside. Often the are most concerned about quarterly results. IMO it is utter insanity for the US to be using a system that demands short-sightedness in its decision makers.
Your right that the government does not have to worry as much about short-term profit as companies do. But this is a good thing(TM), not a waste, unless you agree with Michael Lynton and think that nothing good came from the Internet in which case, your analysis would be spot on.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Twitter is blogging for lobotomized chimpanzees, such as Ashton Kutcher
I represent Lobotomized Chimpanzees of America, and will conduct their defamation suit against you.
Just make an SSH tunnel to your server in the U.S. Problem solved.
Thank you. I was going to say the same thing - Hulu doesn't work in Canada.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
He replied, no, the customer is an idiot. If they did the math they would never buy one of these furnaces because the cost cannot be repaid over the life of the furnace. The customer would be better off with a mid efficiency furnace, but we don't tell them that, we're not the salesmen.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
...Only because FB doesn't seem closed. The moment that FB starts actively enforcing some sort of closed policy, is the day that you see a mass migration to a new networking site.
Facebook was significantly better when it was closed.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Until 15th century, until an invention of printing press, books were extremely expensive. One book cost more than several cows. A book was written by hand then, pictures in a book were drawn also by hand.
Printing press made books dirt cheap. But not all was good about it. The first bestselling author was Martin Luther.
Printing press appeared in 1440, the Martin Luther's first bestseller appeared in 1517, 77 years after.
The result was reformation and religious wars. Internet is only about 15 years old. What will happen 77 years after its invention?
But something will happen for sure, as the change in the base does cause changes in the social and economical relations. Sony and the likes' problems are the smallest part of it. The whole thing will change, as the invention is so fundamental. Hopefully there will be no analogs of reformation wars though, which, as I wrote already, were also caused by an invention and its widespread adoption.
No. It does.
Compare with the article where some chernobyl plants adapted to radioactive soil.
Well, if Sony cannot adapt, it will die.
There will be newer, more flexible media companies which will survive and thrive on the net.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Brilliant. From now on, every time I hear about an entitlement problem with today's youth, I will have to consider whether the situation actually describes an entitlement problem with today's elders.
If you're used to writing telegrams, "period" probably is.
This also brings us neatly back to how old-fashioned Sony really are underneath the slick, proprietary, lock-in, "you customers are all criminals" world they and many others inhabit.
A corporations only job is to maximize the return of investment for its stockholders...
Thing is, to a degree he is right, anyone that does a job need to be payed for it. The question is how, and how much...
I suspect the problem right now is that the Leadership is used to being payed by the copy, just like any dealer of physical goods. Sadly, this have also lead to the creation of one hit wonders, thanks to the constant lobbying of copyright extensions.
I keep wondering how the world would look, if anyone could stuff base material in one end of a machine, and have a complete car come out the other.
Because that's the thing right now. Machines used for printing, recording and similar have become so small and cheap that anyone can own them. I cant help but think that rather then dealing in bulk, they should start dealing in actual scarcity. Put the basic content online for free, but then put a limited run of collectors items up for sale related to the same content. Only problem for the corps is that this cant really sustain a "industry" (oh what a word to use for creation of art, i keep having the vision of writers, musicians and others sitting in some warehouse building doing their thing while a supervisor is walking up and down the lanes). or at least, not the content distribution "industry" that's been in existence in one for or other since Gutenberg...
That's really what they have been doing btw, distribution content. And that's a job one can do using computers these days, sending the whole content of a 10 volume encyclopedia around the globe in matter of seconds, when it would have taken months to do the same back in the 1700. And even so, the copyright back then was for 30 year, while now its what? 130?...
Artificial scarcity, that's the name of the game they are trying to play. And at the same time trying to make us think that their "product" is as vital to us as air itself...
Kinda reminds me of the water sellers of dune...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Sony is not a US company, and they are not integral to the functioning of thousands of other 'innocent' companies, and by extension, hundreds of thousands of innocent workers.
Completely different situation. The world is not black and white. Please adapt.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
So I was thinking the other day how any of the big music labels could actually make a site that I would be happy to use to buy music with. The options I looked for are:
1. Availability of music - out of print stuff, hard to find things that I can only maybe find on ebay at ridiculous prices, complete discographies, b-sides, etc.
2. Format choices - FLAC, mp3 at varying bittrates (LAME V0 is my preferred), and maybe a few others although those are the two most popular formats by a huge degree.
3. Price - So this one is the biggest problem. The record companies want a lot more than I'm willing to pay usually. I propose a price per byte model where I pay X amount for the data I download. This would make it so if I get FLAC it would be more expensive than some crappy 128 kbps mp3.
The system I came up with is basically a record company run "private bittorrent tracker." Something akin to a tracker run on Gazelle (if you've seen it you know what I'm talking about). Instead of dealing with ratios you're dealing with currency and the record companies can even offload most of the bandwidth onto their users although they would need to have at least some dedicated bandwidth for each album in the catalog so that they were all always available.
I think it could work, but I really don't have any hope that I'll ever actually see it happen. If there was a charge of $.01-.02/megabyte then mp3 albums would be around $1-2 and FLAC anywhere from $4-8. Very reasonable for the consumer for the most part. It also becomes a convenience factor because if I know I can get any album from an artist with correct tagging and high quality rips I'd shun spending a ton of time trying to look for it elsewhere for free.
Of course I collect full albums and not just individual tracks so considering that it might change things, but I still think there should be more choices of formats/bittrates for the consumer.
Do mercantilism sound familiar?
Only diff is that they now use international law rather then individual national law to protect themselves...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Possibly it would be more correct to say "its the proper solution given the constraints hulu et al. have to work with". There is such a thing as licensing and regional restrictions.
4. Force customer to watch your crap.
We aren't that far away from the dystopian world pictured in Max Headroom.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
They want to impress on the public that infringement = theft, because (they think so, at least) the general public doesn't, can't, and won't understand what it really is.
So, to satisfy the general public, you have to associate it with something they know and understand. Even the stupidest person understands that being stolen from sucks.
I'm not saying it's right. But it's probably better than an ignorant public doing it because they think it doesn't hurt at all.
That said, I think the whole thing is a farse... but I do think the 'you wouldn't steal a car' ads should be considered literal. If you know better, they seem wrong... that's fine, you wern't the target viewer. If you don't know better, you'll understand what the ad says more than the law book says. ...
Now that I've said the same thing at least three different ways, let's see if anyone manages to misunderstand me anyways.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Economy of scale issues?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Great article. I found this article in http://www.boilingpage.com, the real-time search engine, that shows the hottest pages on the web based on how popular they are among people. No wonder this article shows up in http://www.boilingpage.com homepage.
This is a forum. You hit "Reply", and your response was indented. Given that the parent comment wasn't at the root level, you had to have noticed this.
Write 100 times on the blackboard:
.... Also you have to have a net connection for HULU. If your out of wifi range of 300' your not going to be watching hulu.
Well yes, nimrod - you have to have a connection via the toobs to access hulu.com Now grab something to steady yourself or sit down for this next part is truly very shocking: It works over 3G connections. At 480p even.
Sony pictures is going anywhere.
Universal isn't either, or 20th Century Fox.
They all need to be aware of the danger of pushing too much harder in the current economic climate.
The reason their profits are down currently is because the whole economy is down. Instead of lobbying for their own interests, they should be putting pressure on Congress to prosecute the bankers, Prime, Sub-Prime, CDO's etc. Forcing Mark to Market, or Cram downs. Perhaps if Sony Pictures CEO can convince Congress to stop allowing the banksters to steal from the Taxpayer via the bailouts, Sony (all branches from their games, music label, to NLE software) would be more profitable. I actually like some of Sony's products--Sony Vegas, DVD Architect, and Sound Forge. At the same time, I do not like their root kits on audio CD's, or this CEO's fucking attitude. If he really thinks the net isn't worth it, he should have construction crews, yank out all the computers, networks and phones in all his offices, buildings, render farms, and studios.
Or he could just have a nice cup of shut the fuck up, and be glad he makes a couple grand from idiots like me.
Capitalist companies have always been a small group of conspirators who view the population as sheep to be fleeced for their own benefit.
Capitalism is about voluntary trade in a society where individuals are protected from force and fraud, but are otherwise free to deal with others however they wish.
tape recorder, with the VCR, with the printing press.
These are valuable inventions that have brought counltess benefits to people. Why disparage them?
Mine is Good
Wow this guy is really out there. I mean the internet equals nearly free distribution. And people come to expect free distribution because we know it's free. Now if you are a distributor I understand that will suck for you. But you could have known that 10 years ago.
If large banks were allowed to fail, the economy would go into melt-down, many other companies would fail as their debts to those banks were called in to pay creditors. The government would be left providing huge payouts for guaranteed deposits, propping up huge firms which would otherwise go to the wall (as they do already in many industries in the US, aerospace, farming, steel, etc), and generally funding a lot more than they do now, indefinitely.
Supporting large banks for a short time is actually the cheaper option, though I do think it should be coupled with far more draconian oversight in future and a proper separation of speculation from savings. Problems which the current administration has completely avoided addressing.
Taming the human appetite for risk by regulating it is essential for avoiding conflicts like this, not punishing foolishness after the fact with bankruptcy. After all, moral hazard was not the cause of the current crisis, widespread greed and credulity was.
When you look past the mirage of the perfect free market to what we actually have, you see that protectionism, corruption and cartels are rife, and would be far, far worse with less regulation and government intervention.
First, that guy thinks that people are stealing Sony Picture films. This is wrong. They are copying them. And therefore they are not paying him money.
Second, we live in the information age. Well, that guy at Sony picture doesn't, but we do. So this new age brings several changes. They are not allways compatible with old school Kapitalism and it is not compatible with closed things. Because closed means lack of information.
There have been areas in the past age economy where "closed" didn't work. This was for instance the sciences. Sciences work best when open, which mean if things get published other people can use it. But even here is total openess coming and publishers are screaming, because scientists think of Open Access.
So I think this guy from Sony Pictures should think about a way how movies could produced in an open way instead of complaining, that the old style is gone.
SciFi apparently bastardizes the show anyhow, cutting out scenes and such. Screw that. I'll take the BBC version.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Planck is famously paraphrased as saying "science advances one funeral at a time."
In many respects, so does society in general.
So he knows for a fact that the Internet is no good: he's been working hard for years on achieving this state of events.
checked at dictionary.com, and period has 18 definitions as a noun, 1 as an adjective, and 1 as an interjection.
I see no verb definitions, related to sisters or otherwise.
Has period become a verb on the streets or something?
Oh, yeah, note that interjection.
the guy has never seen slashdot Cant be that much of a problem, ten to twenty years from now, people like that will be almost extinct. Anyone opposed to the net as is, is obviously a dictatorial megalomaniac who has every interest in keeping the mass of humanity stupid and ignorant. And more ... the godmother of mmo's was a bloody Sony product. I don't know if anyone remembers it but there was a life before WoW, and it was called Everquest, by SOE
this guy must be very confused indeed
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Not true. Sony bought Grouper for $65M and turned into Crackle.com. They have all their catalog movies like Spiderman, Big Fish, Few Good Men, Ghostbusters,Rudy, and even Starman. The ads are non-existent, unlike Hulu, and can be viewed in 720p HD
The site has not gotten any exposure, as it has not been mentioned in any of the comments!
For Mr Michael Lynton We all owe Mr Lynton a sincere debt of gratitude for his feelings on the internet, perhaps that explains the following facts of which Sony was found guilty and fined. After all, Sony technology is responsible for the development of "Root Kit" and "Drop Loader" technology as part of their original copy protect scheme. This Sony technology is the preferred delivery technique of almost all current malware, spy ware, Trojans, remote hijacking, spy bot, rogue and now BIOS persistent virus and remote system admin exploits. Thank You MR. Lynton for investing Sony's infinite resources and expertise to develop new ways of depriving computer owners the ability to control their systems, monitor hijacked ports and API invisible applications. Perpetuating the current epidemic of malicious rogue applications. Considering the billions you have cost business and consumers world wide in lost revenues, downtime, remediation costs, compromised national security of many nations, I think Sony Pictures needs to go back to 16MM film, be deprived of the internet and digital production resource. You should get an all expense paid extended holiday at Quantico to discover the delights of water boarding first hand and perhaps a cattle prod enema might also be in order.
"In Every Life The Time Comes To Grab The Bull By The Tail And Face The Situation" W.C.Fields
"I did not get filthy rich, because instead of you people paying me money for every shitty movie I have made, you download it from the internet; therefore, the internet is useless".
Seriously, if you had a device that could duplicate any device you used it on, without affecting the original in any way, would people be trying to say, "You wouldn't duplicate a car, would you?" It would sound completely absurd.
I've discussed this a few times on /., and I'm convinced that if the copies are of any quality at all, the first person to invent such a machine will wake up dead in the morning.
So will the second.
Reason: Our entire society is based around the movement of goods from A to B - and you can think of money as a special form of goods which is easier to carry around than "enough grain to buy a horse".
Governments can't do anything without money coming in.
Businesses can't do anything without money coming in.
But if you can duplicate anything with enough accuracy to be able to use the duplicates in place of the original - the whole system collapses. Who's going to want to give you money for something when they can just point their duplicator at one for free? For that matter, what use is money when anyone who's got £1 can turn it into £1000 with their duplicator?
A few people have suggested this could actually produce a utopian society because all of a sudden nobody would need to work. Myself, I don't think society can cope with the massive change this would introduce.
These people need to learn that the world doesn't revolve around their companies or preferred money making schemes.
I as a customer, don't just exist to fill their pockets. I as a human being among billions have certain needs and if someone wants my money, it's his job to find out, what they can do for me so that I am willing to pay for it. The customer is king.
I think these moaning people need to learn their place and that the goal of a society is to improve quality of life for its people and not to protect the interests of the few, who prefer that everything stays like it is, because they profit from it.
it isn't stealing, is it.
And the number of CEO's who say that unpaid overtime is required because they need to stay competitive, is that not "stealing" from their workers "for free" because they can get it for free?
These are valuable inventions that have brought counltess benefits to people. Why disparage them?
They are indeed, and he was not disparage them. He was talking about how the media organizations tried to stop them being used in some way.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCR#The_court_battle
So it is free. Try again.
' Why? Because people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.'
Says the Don who represents the small group of "business man" that institutionalized the systematic exploitation of artists. Often literally stealing their works under the protection of "legal" contracts, which is written by the same lawyers who instructed the lobbyists to push legislation through, aided by "sponsored" politicians.
..would people be trying to say, "You wouldn't duplicate a car, would you?"
Yes they would. Yes they will. Yes they do.
Star Trek replicators sound nice. But who designs the first copy and why?
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
I'd ask where '4. Profit' is, but you know...
Why is trade now called "fleecing"? Aren't we "fleecing" the companies in return when we use the goods or services that we pay for? Perhaps you "fleece" your employer, because, at the end of the day, you get a portion of his money (and let's quietly forget to mention how much you worked for it).
Your "erosion" of "cultural naivety" seems like little more than certain lone nuts replacing common words for established principles with more inflammatory ones.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
My girlfriend's response when I read the quote to her:
"I'm a girl who doesn't think I've seen anything good having come from Sony in a while."
Zing!
Just make an SSH tunnel to your server in the U.S. Problem solved.
I have a server in the USA? Who knew?!?! Cool. (I live in Vancouver, Canada, and I can't use Hulu.)
In the seventies they had an idea called the Peter principle which is that in an organization, everyone rises to their level of incompetence. Sony is obviously lead by such a person. I worked for an ISP for hotels that wanted to add first run movies to their options. We spoke to the media companies, and I was surprised that their view was that their content was what everyone wanted. The hotels told us the purchase rates for the Internet were almost ten times the purchase rate for movies. Sony couldn't be more misinformed on tastes and wants of their customers. How many more hours do you spend on the internet than watching movies? If you have to pay for the movies at a theater? I would estimate that my ratio is easily higher than 10 times for internet to movies on TV and if I go to the theater, well I sometimes go more than a year without getting my feet stuck to the floor.
Price of natural gas. Then it wasn't worth it. Today, oh ya.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Remember, he's losing money because of pirating, so his remark is 100% biased.
I bet he torrents porn, and loves it.
If nothing good has come of the Internet, then I'd say even less good has come of Sony. In fact, Sony has been in the forefront of criminalizing customers the world over instead of embracing them. I have even less regard for Sony as an entertainment company.
My view on the movies, at least, is that as long as you can implement adequate security before release, there's nothing out there to beat the experience of watching a film in the theater. Everyone was moaning about the Wolverine leak, and yet that isn't a problem with online piracy, that's a problem with inadequate security and dishonest employees. Other industries have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. Some torrent didn't steal Wolverine, a dishonest employee did.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And that's almost twenty years old - it still works wonderfully,though.
It still works well because it was made 20 years, not despite it. That was before they added the warranty countdown clock to products.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
"Look what digital cameras have done to companies like Kodak, and this concept should become immediately obvious."
This is a terrible example. Kodak may have lost money because people are no longer buying film. But, Their content isn't being shared for free and downloaded. This is the difference. There is still a demand (and a market) for all of the music and movies being shared on the Internet. Proof can be found on torrent sites.
People won't share or download something that isn't worth anything. The more it appears on those sites, the more value it has (and..a market).
"Now that the cost of production and distribution is much, much lower"
Do you have proof of this? The cost of production has gone up, because people's expectations of a "good movie" has also gone up (because technology is better). How much do you think the latest star trek movie cost to produce? Distribution costs may have been reduced, but were they ever that high? The content (because it costs so much to produce) is always worth more than the blank media used to distribute it.
"Music and movies are commodities now"
Not true. A commodity would be something like corn, where anyone could *produce* it. The backstreet boys still sound different than N'sync, no matter how much you say otherwise. Also, copying is not the same as producing.
"If people are unable to get music by a particular artist, they'll just move on to somebody else"
it's called competition. This has been the case for many years.
"The law of diminishing marginal returns. The more content people have access to, the less the value of access to additional content. Therefore, even if people were not pirating content, the big media giants' content would eventually become nearly worthless anyway merely because of the availability of such vast quantities of legal free content online."
This may be true to some extent, but studio music that is professionally created will always be more popular than some piece of shit song written using a PC in some guys basement.
"Paying millions of dollars for a big name star made some sense when making a movie required millions of dollars in equipment and cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in film and development costs alone; these days, such a business model is an anachronism"
you keep talking about how cheap it is to make a film...with no proof. Have you heard of something called the screen actors guild? They require companies to pay actors a certain amount of money for each scene...which isn't cheap.
Hell, Almost all of Kevin Smith's movies cost at least $20,000 to produce (and this is considered cheap).
Clerks: $27,575 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerks)
mallrats: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallrats)
I couldn't get a production cost, however it made $2,122,561 and it was considered a flop, so I am assuming it cost more than this to produce it.
"There's no reason for somebody to release music through a big label except for the ability to reach their listeners"
Actually, this will force artists to go with big labels. Most independent artists make a living selling music (because they are not as well known, gigs pay out very little and merchandise doesn't sell as much). If they can't sell them anymore due to sharing, the only way to make a living is to sign with a big label.
"Given a choice between two commodities that provide similar gain, people naturally choose the cheaper commodity. Given two commodities with the same cost, people naturally choose the commodity that provides a bigger gain. This means that they will always tend towards the cheaper online content over more expensive content through other means unless the more expensive content is dramatically better to provide differentiation (making it no longer a commodity)."
We aren't talking about paid content with a different, free alternative. We are talking about paid content that you can get for free on the Internet. Most people, given the choice, will choose the free one. This says more about human nature than about the value of the content or the business model.
Fixed that for you.
People aren't "stealing" their stuff for the sake of stealing it. They're doing it because they want more control and use out of their media than Sony and others provide.
That's what they tell themselves. A handful may even walk the walk. But for most, frankly it's stealing to steal: they just want to watch without paying.
The best thing that the champions of fair use -which is a legitimate and important balancing factor to the power of copyright- can do right now is to stop kidding themselves about this. The overwhelming majority of "copyfighters" are just kiddies with a warped sense of entitlement looking to get something for nothing. Fair use must be preserved, but something has to be done about the thieves.
You've figured out what entertainment consumers in 2009 want.
"....people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it..."
People want to easily and quickly download or stream entertainment without a bunch of licensing and proprietary format hassles.
Now get your lazy ass out of the $3,500.00 leather executive chair and go figure out some products that people want to buy.
Just because Hulu isn't perfect doesn't mean it isn't the right direction. They also offer at most 6 episodes of most shows. People still can't catch up on many tv shows that are still airing - with the result being people don't watch the show at all.
But Hulu as it is still beats the previous options of "pirate it or don't watch it".
The media companies are still being dragged kicking and screaming into these great opportunities they've absolutely refused to monotize on their own. It's sad, really.
Evidently most people are baffled by just how greedy monopolists are - how can these guys believe that they deserve it?
Firstly, corporations exist to maximise shareholder wealth. This is their side of the bargain and they generally stick to pursuing that goal. What else would you have them do? What would motivate them to do it? Greed is not a corporate problem, it is what they are for, and the very thing society manipulates to our own advantage. It is OUR job to ensure monopolies do not occur - competition is our tool that ensures we are whom benefits from corporate greed.
Secondly, the greed isn't as outragous as it seems. Exploiting monopoly profit turns into a ball and chain.
Simplifying massively for illustration, say a company has issued shares worth $100m, and the market has a 5% required rate of return (the amount you need to pay out just to convince people to part with their cash). At this point, between the share price and dividends, shareholders need to get $5m. Then the company somehow gets monopoly power, turns a $10m profit and all signs are that this will continue. Existing shareholders make a fortune that year, but this becomes reflected in the share price because the market can now pay twice as much for a share and still make it's required 5% - the share price doubles so the total is now at $200m.
Lo and behold, next year the company now MUST make $10m profit just to make the 5% return to shareholder. The company itself appears to be making a ton of money, customers are being royally shafted but actually everybody taking home the profits are only making the 5% everybody else is getting. Sure, old shareholders made a massive gain but that was last year, this year they can make 5% elsewhere, and likely many of the current shareholders bought in at the higher price.
The company is actually in a dangerous position because if anything happens to that monopoly they will dramatically fail to make the shareholders' required rate of return. The gravy train doesn't have brakes.
Tough shit for them, you rightfully say. But don't act all surprised and appalled when they put up a fight - we didn't like it when they screwed us over and they wont when we do it right back, especially when most of their losers won't even be the same guys who won out back in the day.
No, there's no difference at all. Kodak lost money because people picked a commodity with a cheaper cost/benefit ratio (digital cameras) over a more expensive one (film cameras). The music and movie industries are by and large losing money because of a glut of cheap and free content online. I'm not saying that piracy isn't causing money loss right now, but even if they could stop 100% of piracy, their paid content would still converge towards being nearly worthless. One of the biggest causes for the drop in TV viewing has been increasing use of things like YouTube, and I don't mean for watching TV shows. It's a case of one source of entertainment replacing another. Simple as that.
You may not consider entertainment to be a commodity, but the reality is that it behaves far more like a commodity than a properly differentiated set of products---not just music and movies, but all entertainment. Increases in one area of entertainment inevitably cause reductions in another. Therefore, people are trading off one source of entertainment for another. As far as the consumer is concerned, it is a commodity, and they are all equal, regardless of how much you'd like to believe that they are not.
Regarding the cost of movie production, SAG wages, etc., that's my whole point. They expect huge actor/actress wages, but the reality is that a fair number of the better movies lately have been done by largely unknown talent. The cost of producing a movie (comes from four main sources:
With film, my calculations are that it costs more than $11,000 for one hour of 35mm film stock. If you can develop it yourself, it only goes up to about $15,000 to include development costs. If you ship it out, it goes up to more than a quarter million. This basically means that 35mm film is not viable for low budget production, even ignoring the equipment costs. Even 16mm is pretty expensive. With the advent of digital photography, the equation changed.
I made a feature length movie a few years ago, and including paying the talent for their time, all equipment costs (purchasing), rights, location costs, etc. was in the single digit thousands. There are plenty of aspiring actors and actresses out there who will work for next to nothing for the opportunity to get their names and faces out there. There are plenty of people willing to help out in all sorts of ways, assuming you don't do production in a place where everybody is too worried about liability (like Califonria).
So basically, the cost of low-budget movie production can easily be a fraction of what even Kevin Smith's cheapest movies cost, though his movies are a good example of what can be done on a bigger small budget. There's really nothing preventing the studios from being in real trouble except lack of organization among the YouTubers. Give it time.
Regarding your assertion that people expect higher quality movies, that is true if you only look at what sells in theaters. That's mostly because of the cost, though. Theaters won't play a movie unless it is pretty much guaranteed to make a huge income because of the high cost associated
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's fair, I mean everyone on the Internet doesn't think Sony was worth it either.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Eventually, this will just hurt the consumer. We will just get less quality art, movies, software, and music because there will be no profit in it.
Your conclusion makes no sense without supporting evidence.
Particularly:
--evidence that a lack of profit motive will reduce the quality of art, movies, software or music.
Yeah, that guy has clearly never played civilization
Webmail replaced IMAP and phpbb replaced USENET because you don't need an rfc to implement them.
I agree with you somewhat. However, supplying what customers want is only part of the formula for a successful business. You also have to be able to turn a profit by providing what your customers want.
The internet has changed significantly how businesses can and can't make money. Some of the services that used to be provided by for-profit companies no longer can turn a profit. This is fine; not everything we consume and enjoy must be provided by a for-profit company. But to imply that the company only has to provide what the customer wants is a bit naive. They can't provide what the customer wants with the product they create, or they would make no money. They will have to get in a different business, or create a product that costs a lot less to produce.
It's more of a sentence to the men who have to deal with them.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
My sentiments exactly. TV poisons the mind with advertising coercion, news channel brainwashing and programs that stupify. Internet is the antidote.
Ok. Second sentence was insightful, but the third is +5 funny. The internet being the antidote for advertising, news brainwashing, and stupidity?!
I think the mod just got whooshed...
The fact it doesn't work outside of the US is moot for this discussion- the GP claims that it is a solution to a problem, not that it's the best thing to be using for 100% of everyone at this exact moment. Antibiotics are the best technical way to treat an infection, even if you're unlucky enough not to have any available when you need it.
It's GUI isn't really the point either. Any site showing embedded video is going to look, to a greater or lesser extent, like YouTube. The "solution" in question is in finding a way of distributing content that is acceptable to both consumers and the content owners.
In Hulu's advertising-driven embedded video we may have that solution. It makes money for the content owner while keeping the content relatively locked down, and that makes them happy. And it gives consumers an opportunity to watch their content for free, on demand, which makes them happy too.
Awwwwww, but it started with an uppercase, and had a period at the end. Surely that counts for *something*?
Maybe the customer wasn't such an idiot after all.....he could have even been right ;)
nein
Matter duplication is a tricky problem. Assembling the integral units is already an issue. 3D printers carve matter out of chalk, cardboard, or wax, not a chunk of metal necessary for transmitting energy from the front to the back of a car.
We have the ability to fabricate a plan into a gear or another hunk of metal. Push the AutoCAD specs into a fab. We, as in humanity, also have used robots to assemble those fabricated hunks into a piece of working unit, car, machinery for something else, whatever. This is within a factory, though.
The dynamics, the logistics, of trying to get each unit of material within it's proper place, while being fabricated, have yet to be figured out. It invokes levitation, or, a factory.
It's not going to happen in the basement any time soon, as much as I'd like it.
The government is looking out for it's own interests at all times, just like any organism would. They're not going to "prevent" it, they'll adapt. There will always be government, there will always be churches, there will always be a higher power regardless of how happy each human feels. Humans were built in a structured society. Each person needs a higher power to model themselves after.
tl;dr fuck you
As my father lik@(munch munch)...
The furnace would have been worn out by the time the prices rose to make it viable. Customer is still an idiot.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Yes, you are correct, I was typing a bit fast and got the two a little mixed up. Thing is, consider an musician's dilemma. In order to make a sustainable living they either had to play live and hopefully make enough money to offset costs or team up with a label and distribute their product. Now they can write something up, hop on the internet, and send it out to the world. My whole issue with this is that people who are already at the top have the monetary resources to develop an online distribution service which their customers and clients alike would enjoy. Unfortunately, because this requires an upfront investment in research and may not have as wide profit margins that justify their already ludicrous salary, they whine about it. They're so used to being the gatekeepers of *distribution that they expect customers to come to them instead of trying to reach the customers. So with this, asshats like the aforementioned ceo bother me. : /
We currently exchange our labour for goods and services (mediated by money). Replicators make goods abundant, not services. Therefore you will still exchange labour for services.
Designing items is a service.
People will be paid to design items.
They will be paid by:
The graphic design industry wasn't killed by the invention of printers, it was *created* by it.
Sony has been in financial trouble ever since the RIAA takeover that landed this guy in the drivers seat. He won't quit the war on customers until Sony is ruined.
If I was a major shareholder, I would be asking a lot of questions about this. Sony Electronics is going down the tubes, while the music and movie arms run the show, and dictate to those who paid for building the company. Meanwhile, the company hemorrhages money.
He is only parroting the RIAA mantra that sales are being 'stolen' by people who don't buy enough of the copyrighted material. The biggest problem is that the majority of these 'thieves' appear to be people who are buying the product. The rest of us don't buy or download, because we don't see anything there we want. He has no plan to remedy the real problems his company has suffered under his leadership.
It's too bad that Sony has been hijacked by this thug. The company used to have a lot going for it. to recover, they need to give it back to the engineers.
I have the same advice for HP. Too bad I have no say in either company.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
I don't buy Sony stuff anymore because it breaks just after warranty expiration and repairs cost too much.
A real, honest to goodness analogy of what happens in the digital world with DVD rips and their distribution, would be sheet music. Often times sheet music is purchased legally, and then copied (via a copy machine) and distributed dozens of times. This happens a lot in school music programs, and most music teachers who do this don't realize that when they give little Johnny a photo-copy of Little Drummer Boy to take home and practice, they are committing a crime.
Except that 'Little Drummer Boy' was based off a Czech christmas carol. It was also made in the 1941, part of the problem with copyright is the terms that allow for 68 year old works to be treated as protected. Funny how the time point for 'public domain' was made to be 1923 when media organizations rape the Public Domain for ideas and copyright their crap based off them.
Also the Teachers use would more likely be considered fair use or educational use which usually is an exception.
Easy way to fix Copyright would be to limit its term to say oh I dunno 7 years like it was originally hell even 20 years like patents currently are wouldnt be bad (even though they are trying to extend that to 50 years, technical stagnation that would result from that would be as horrendous as the cultural stagnation that copyright has caused)
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
No, they aren't "triumphs", or even good at their jobs. The problem is that they did not play by the system (free trade). Instead, they manipulated and corrupted it. There is a very big difference.
You do make a profit if you give your customers what they want, for a fair price. That is, in the context of the automobile industry. It happens every day. And don't try to tell me that the Internet has significantly affected the automobile industry in that way. I don't buy it.
The auto makers (I am generalizing here: GM and others) failed to adjust to market demands. In particular, people want affordable cars and trucks that get decent gas mileage (depending of the use of the truck) and that last more than a few years. Again in general, the auto makers were not supplying what people wanted. I defy anyone to show otherwise. People were still buying cars and trucks! The market did not die out. They just bought from those who were more affordable or who met their needs better. I believe this is pretty damned self-evident.
ALL of the companies that are complaining now, are in industries that dug their own holes, with their own full knowledge, and now want bailed out (banks, mortgage and finance companies), or failed to compete in the modern market (Detroit), or can't stand an open, free market (Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA). Every goddamned one. I might note that the members of the RIAA and MPAA are members of both the latter categories.
The graphic design industry wasn't killed by the invention of printers, it was *created* by it.
And with a business model that is currently protected by copyright laws.
but still, lucky I'm a designer then.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
"Period." is not a sentence.
You've never lived with a woman, have you?
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
but I also have to say that your presentation of "The Myth of the Public Domain" as evidence of anything is laughable. That is like saying that "Mein Kampf" is evidence that Fascism is a Good Thing. I think I will pass on that, thank you very much.
+1 Insight@!#$%^$#$ NO CARRIER
notcapsnotcapsnotcapsnotcapsnotcapsnotcapsnotcapsnotcapsnotcaps
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
CmndrTaco? Are you listening? We need a +6 moderation for posts like this.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
>Internet would've never had existed if it weren't for the US governmet
Agreed except US part. Something like internet was build for example in Poland before(but some communist thaught that it was bad idea and dropped project funding). My point is that if not US, than other country(Japan/German/UK/put your country here) would invent it(probably in slightly diffrent form)
Uhmm... you're asking this on Slashdot? Seriously?
To be fair... if I had presided at AOL for years, I'd probably feel the same way about the Internet.
Pray tell, which national laws were used to suppress the printing press?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
not so much suppress, as sensor what was printed, thanks to the first copyright laws...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
'I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet, period.'
Well then I trust you personally don't use it at all.
I think he probably just doesn't like the Sony Online brand.. someone there probably ran over his dog and showed him up on a promotion or something.
Although.. it -IS- Sony Online.. so they really _haven't_ done anything good have they?
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Yes, but if you dropped to say 20 channels of TV without having a-la-cart then you will have 19 channels of reality TV. And even with a-la-cart they will have to charge you more for the Universe channel to make it worthwhile to carry because you are in a small, small minority that actually wants to see educational programming.
For example, when you go to buy a car, the salesman tries to maintain control by playing a game. Assert yourself! He wants to trade you sheet metal for money, and you're going to let him call the shots? You can find a fucking car any day of the week.
And how! I can't tell you how good this advice is- so many people probably fall victim to car-salespeople's predatory tactics. But when I'm there, the minute they try to pull BS, I'm like, oops- you made a mistake. I don't accept this BS from wait staff, when I spend $40 at dinner, and I certainly won't be taking that when I spend 30 grand on a car. Bye now!
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
We don't need massive quantities of TV. We need TV that is engaging enough to give us our fill very quickly and leave time for something else (and time seems to be the one thing our society can't find enough of any more). I enjoy The Universe (a history channel documentary series about astronomy) because it is both interesting and generally well made. I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings series of movies, for a similar reason (extremely well made, and a captivating plot. Although the books are still better). I wish things of this caliber were frequently shown. But instead, when I turn on the TV (which is often an exercise in futility), I see very few shows that are worth my time. I stopped turning to channels other than discovery, history, science, and national geographic. I often turn on the TV, look at even *those* channels, see nothing interesting and turn the TV off.
Then you should support getting the FCC to force cable companies to offer individual subscriber plans where you only get the channels you want.
Star Trek replicators sound nice. But who designs the first copy and why?
The first matter replicators are limited. Those limits are slowly being overcome. There will be no *one* inventor that make a perfect replicator.
Imaging a device that could crank out legos in any color, given raw bricks of plastic. I'd buy one, and so would a lot of people, but it's not enough of a leap to disrupt the entire economy.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
"The music and movie industries are by and large losing money because of a glut of cheap and free content online."
The only cheap and free content I see online is the same content produced by the movie and music industry but shared for free. Everything else is not that popular and not worth much to consumers.
"I'm not saying that piracy isn't causing money loss right now, but even if they could stop 100% of piracy, their paid content would still converge towards being nearly worthless."
No it wouldn't. Show me free alternatives to poplar movies/music that people are downloading.
Piracy is what causes paid content to approach $0.
here is a simple example: http://www.torrentomega.com/Popular-torrents-complete-list
do you see the top search terms? 99% are all paid, copyrighted, content. Go to any torrent site and it's the same.
"One of the biggest causes for the drop in TV viewing has been increasing use of things like YouTube, and I don't mean for watching TV shows. It's a case of one source of entertainment replacing another. Simple as that."
Some guy showing a picture of his cat has not replaced professionally produced television shows.
"I made a feature length movie a few years ago, and including paying the talent for their time, all equipment costs (purchasing), rights, location costs, etc. was in the single digit thousands. There are plenty of aspiring actors and actresses out there who will work for next to nothing for the opportunity to get their names and faces out there. There are plenty of people willing to help out in all sorts of ways, assuming you don't do production in a place where everybody is too worried about liability (like Califonria)."
Technology has gotten better over the years and people now expect more. This is why costs have increased to create a movie. The video game industry is another example of this. Would a game like space invaders or adventure sell on the xbox 360? Probably not. People want something more like halo.
"in an environment where distribution costs are near zero like the Internet---the millions of people who watched "Leave Britney Alone" tells us that people get a lot of entertainment out of cheap sources, too."
it's free (and nearly worthless), so it's like apples and oranges. Try charging people $5 to see it and tell me if it is still popular.
"Some torrent didn't steal Wolverine, a dishonest employee did."
True, but the torrent sites still made the torrent available to the masses. They are just as responsible.
"Have you seen the kind of absolute shit being put on your TV or being sold in record stores? The big media giants are collapsing because they're becoming increasingly less capable of producing things that aren't, at best, mediocre, or at worst, just plain bad."
All industries are suffering because the US is in a recession.
The only people I see hurt are small, independent record stores.
I'm a guy who thinks you're a douche, period.
3/7
Rather ironic given that Sony has been caught engaging in illegal activity of their own, including price fixing and hacking their customer's computers, not to mention just delivering poor quality products and coasting along on the strength of what used to be a good brand name. The fact is when you steal from your customers you should hardly be surprised when they react in kind. I don't condone people taking what they want rather than paying for it, personally, I just stopped buying their products altogether and don't download them either. If Sony wants to deliver their music and video products with a reasonable profit margin rather than price gouging and attempting to get laws passed which give them money from my pocket even if I don't want their products, then I may consider buying again.
To counter your fundamental assertion, retro games are actually quite popular these days, so yes, they would. One of the most popular games on iPhone right now (#6 in the paid games category) is Myst (1993). Tetris comes in at #16. Pac-Man Lite is #32 in the free apps area (though the full paid version didn't make the top 100).
You're absolutely right that most people would not pay money for the crap that is on YouTube. That doesn't in any way counter my assertion that it is supplanting paid content. I've seen at least a half dozen studies thus far that have all come to the conclusion that people spending time surfing the Internet has significantly cut into things like TV and movie viewing. That was pretty much considered established fact, last I checked.
That's specious reasoning. It proves absolutely nothing about whether piracy affects movie sales. It only proves that piracy is occurring (or at least that people are attempting to pirate stuff). Stating that piracy must be hurting movie sales because movies are being pirated is the very definition of begging the question, not to mention mistaking correlation for causation---my rock protects me against tigers; I haven't been attacked by tigers this week, so it must work.
To completely cut your argument off at the knees, just this week, KCBS ran a story that said exactly the opposite of what you're saying---that studies show music sharing online has actually led to an increase in music sales. This is really obvious to anybody who really studies the dynamics of this system carefully. We're not talking about underground, anarchist blogs saying this. We're not talking about the pirate party saying it or Bittorrent developers saying it or even people on Slashdot saying it. We're talking about news coverage of a study that aired on a freaking Infinity Radio station saying it. This means that it is obvious to almost everybody except for the people who make their living by demonizing piracy at this point.
So no, your vigorous argument does not prove that piracy is hurting movie sales. If anything it illustrates just why we have to keep shouting to anyone who will listen that the logic behind that argument is fallacious. Far too many people have been brainwashed into believing that nonsense....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The only way I see these companies stopping so called illegal downloads is offering better quality downloads.. Using sites like TPB and other torrent related sites in a way that benefits them. Before the âoesceneâ can release their tv rips.. The companies who aired it need to encode it in high quality and get it down to manageable sizes. 175MB for 30min shows.. 350MB for 60min shows. 700MB for movies. And various sizes for HD content. I think the standard now is around 1100MB.. How will they make money you ask.. Well.. They insert ads like hulu and other sites.. Just encode the ads within the show. So you ask why would some one choose to download a release with commercials in it you ask.. Well, if the companies release superior quality along with them helping to seed it. I am sure a few servers of theirs seeding this content will allow for extremely quick downloads. Much faster delivery than scene releases. That should easily take care of new media.. The older media they would have to go back and re-release those. To combat the other releases and I am hoping they will also release things that you cannot yet find on the net at all... I don't see anything like this happening any time soon. But this is the only business model I see working at all period. The sue your customers avenue is not working.. The proposed 3 strikes your disconnected won't work.. Well.. Unless the companies that send the notices to the isp's to disconnect pay the isp's any lost revenue.. Which seeing the net being a service and most people keep their same internet provider for many years... The loss in revenue can be a substantial hit. Even still. So-called pirates are almost always one step ahead.. So there should be a way around even the 3 strikes rule such as encryption and other ways to mask what you download...
The ads I am speaking about should not be overwhelming in the release.. 1 to maybe 2 minutes tops of ads per 60min episode. I want to re-iterate what they will have to do.. They will have to release content with ads before or near the same time the Scene does which is usually 30 minutes to a few hours after it is aired. The release will have to be the same to superior in quality. The files will have to be at or near Scene file sizes. The company that releases it will have to seed it allowing for superior download speeds.. Right now depending on the release it can take any where from 30 mins to 12 hours to fully download.. If these companies seeded the releases it would allow for quicker consumption of the media.. The so called end user/pirate would look at the 2 options. Scene release that will download in 30 mins to 12 hours. Or a release from the company who has the rights to do so, and it downloads in 20 mins to 1 hour each and every time. Looking at those variables.. Which are you more likely to choose? If they follow the model the scene has established and improve upon it in those exact ways the scene for the most part at least in the new releases will have no need to be there and just vanish into the background.. If however these companies make you download programs that will allow you to do this and that and burden the user with drm laden things then it will not catch on and eventually die out. Also I forgot to mention Scene standards dictate the files be .avi any file types that allow for drm control and or malicious programs to be run or found should be shunned, mocked, hacked, and eventually die out. I think .avi right now and eventually move to .flv or .mkv...
I agree with almost and probably all of what you just said.. However, I think you left out one point. Most people today equate downloading or sharing with actual pirates. People who download or copy material for the sole intended purpose of re-selling. Whether it be music movies software and any other number of things. Still not sure the proper label for these people that I think are the actual pirates but correct me if I am wrong.
Someone who shares a tv show or movie should be treated far differently from a person who obtains a copy and makes many more copies for the sole purpose of selling said copies. If they were to make many copies and give them out.. I think they should be in the same category as file sharing should be.
A similar point should be made for sites. If a site is distributing files even for free but are making a decent profit from the site via ad revenues said site should be taken down or restructured in a way that would allow for no to little profit.
That's like saying "socialism" or "communism" has been around as long as the practice of sharing.
The use of monetary trade is not the same as Capitalism.
Yes it does as a similar but distinctly different economic system to capitalism.
There is also the sort of capitalism where capital and those with it are thought to be more right or more intelligent/influential/good than those without. That could be called almost a worship of capital.
Yes but I was refering to the practice of "small group of conspirators who view the population as sheep to be fleeced for their own benefit" that is something that has been around a lot longer than there has been a definition for it!
Monarcy of the stock portfolio?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
It's short for "I emphasize the finality of the preceding sentence by drawing attention to the period",
The funny thing is, it is exclusively used when the preceding sentence isn't actually final. The present example clearly illustrates this point - even Michael Lynton obviously recognizes some benefits of the Internet. The actual meaning being "I am aware that the preceding statement was too sweeping and isn't actually true, but I am trying to make a point here".
That's right, they aren't even saddled with huge loans, extensive and intrusive government regulation (gov't being their largest shareholder now), and extremely negative public opinion? And a lot of the "bad" bankers didn't lose their jobs?
What the hell, you folks pretend the government just gave em a shiatsu back massage and called it a day.