Actually, my friends and I always thought the proper bastardization of the title "Master of Puppets" was "Pasture of Muppets." Unfortunately, I don't have the artistic skills neccessary to depict Kermit & co. in a field with the Metallica logo atop.
Alternatively, "Pastor of Muppets" makes for a slightly less morbid image. I could have sworn I ran across a band once with an album called "Pastor of Muppets". Anywho, I did a search and came up with this which is equally amusing.
There's no way they can make money off this. Why would somebody go to the store and buy a can of openCola when they could just download a can?
Corporations aren't going to use openCola because there is no technical support for it. There is nobody to hold liable if the tab comes off of the can or if the contents explode when shaken.
If you choose to go with openCola you are putting your compatibility in jeopardy. Your current cups, straws, pitchers, and other serving devices have not been certified by the manufacturer to be openCola compatible and using them with openCola may void their warranties.
Ironically, individual TVT artists have been putting their own stuff on MP3.com (apparently idependent of their label considering the lawsuit). The best techno band ever put some of their older stuff on MP3.com recently and all of their CDs have been released under the TVT label. I think it's only a matter of time until more talented artists realize they can make more money on their own through MP3.com than through standard record labels where they have to subsidize the other 90% of artists - it's already paying off handsomely for a lot of artists.
I've been extremely impressed with the leap in quality of music on MP3.com. I tried it out a year or two ago and was unimpressed. Then a few weeks ago when "major label" recordings were disabled from my.mp3.com I started going through withdrawal and decided to give it another shot. In a matter of a few short days I had quickly gathered up over 3 hours of music that I really liked. By traditional means, this would have taken me several weeks and several hundred dollars in buying CDs that I only know a few songs off of (which I've been doing for years). Now if I find a CD I like on MP3.com it's usually much cheaper than normal and I can listen to it instantly rather than waiting for it to come in the mail. If the RIAA and TVT were smart they would be paying MP3.com to provide their useful my.mp3.com service because it added value to buying traditional CDs (e.g., instant listening and listening from anywhere) and would help delay the inevitable shift to a world where the current music distribution paradigm is obsolete.
There's a free (as in beer) X server for windows called MI/X (or was it M/IX?). I used to use it when I used to use Windows and it worked well enough to get work done. A search on Google will probably turn it it.
This Java X server looks like the development on it is a bit more active, though.
My experience with BellAtlantic has been a bit different - it has been far worse. They have done very little right so far.
When I signed up for their Infospeed service they sent me the wrong DSL modem and they charged me for it _6_ separate times. They did send me a replacement modem without much of a problem, but it took me over half a year of constant calling to get them to take back the original modem and get a refund for the 5 erroneous charges.
Then, on the day that my DSL line was installed and my service enabled, it worked fine while the technician was there but it stopped working about 15 minutes after he left. For the next two months it would work for maybe 5 or 10 minutes and then cut out for 15 minutes or more. It would either cut out completely or drop so many packets that it was unusable. I reported the problem immediately and despite their assurance that they would handle it within "72 hours" it took them 2 months before it was fixed, and I had to constantly hound them on the phone before they actually did anything - I got no response at all from them otherwise.
And the way they fixed my problem just shocked me. I was having the same problem that other people were reporting on the same "tree" as me, a tree being a group of a couple hundred phone lines connected at their central office. What they did was physically switch my line to a different tree. So they left a couple hundred other customers with defective connections and switched off those who figured out something was wrong rather than fixing the root of the problem.
The physical line switching also screwed up my long distance service. They didn't properly switch over my long distance phone service when they switched the line so AT&T had two accounts they were billing me for and the "newer" account that was actually being billed for my newer calls was billed at twice the rate it should have been because the appropriate calling plan wasn't in place.
Then, earlier this year my DSL went down again. This time it wasn't just phasing in and out - it was completely down. I called it in immediately and then waited 72 hours (which is how long they always say it will take), and called back only to be told that they didn't have a trouble ticket in for me. Well, I wasn't about to go through a two month ordeal again so I started calling them on a daily basis even though they would tell me each time to check back in 72 hours. It took them 10 days to fix it this time which is still waaaaaaaaay too long. I suspect the problem was something trivial like somebody had accidentally kicked the cord out of my card at the office (they said this happens a lot) - it's pathetic that it took them so long to fix it if that was the case.
To top it all off, their whole customer service process is an absolute nightmare. I was on hold for literally hours most days and when I did eventually get to speak with someone they would make me run through the same stupid ping test that I had already done a million times before and then tell me to wait 72 hours. To make matters worse, a lot of their tech support team didn't know what they were doing. I remember one tech support guy who had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I said a large number of packets were being dropped.
Well, I don't have time to expand on this any further, but believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I wish Cablevision would get their act together and offer cable modem service so I don't have to deal with BellAtlantic again in September when I move, but I fear that my only alternative is going to be to use a regular dial up account. I have been dreading moving for the sole fact that I will need to deal with BellAtlantic again.
People who maintain that Napster will somehow free the unsigned artist fail to realize that there already is a service that does this and as at yet it has not created any house hold names nor spawned any artists who have quit their day jobs to pursue music fulltime with the revenue from MP3 sales. It is abundantly clear now that besides good music, an artist needs good promotion, music videos, radio airplay, etc. or else the artist will wallow in obscurity despite being extremely talented and having their song on the internet either via Napster or MP3.com.
Whoa there... I don't think just because MP3.com hasn't generated a mega-platinum supergroup in their less than a year of (public) existence their business model deserves to be written off as a failure. Several of the artists on MP3.com are actually already making enough to live off of through their MP3.com earnings and most are garnering far more exposure than they would be otherwise. It is very important to realize that this is just the beginning, though. You need to give the service and community a few years to mature before you can begin comparing it to traditional promotional channels. If MP3.com sustains their tremendous growth for the next couple of years I'm pretty certain it will be a far more powerful ally for artists than record companies in their current incarnation.
I was all set to agree that this one case presents a counter-example and then I rethought: What about decreasing prices, inflation, interest and the time value of money? Let's say it was 1985 when you copied CD C. You saved, let's say, $20. 1990 rolls around and you have money to buy the CD, so you do...for $15.
That is all irrelevant because there is no way I could have bought the CDs in 1985. Forget that I said that I eventually bought the CDs several years down the line - I had the copies during the period that I could not afford to pay for the music. Whether I had the copies or not made no difference to the record companies' bottom lines as there was no way I could have paid for the CDs/tapes. The point at which I had enough of an income to buy the original music and would have paid the asking price if copying weren't available would be the point at which I would have been witholding revenue from the record companies. Some people never reach that point for various reasons.
Here's another concrete example of copyright infringement that doesn't lead to a loss of revenue: somebody who writes a computer program in their spare time and posts it on the web under the GPL has a copyright on the program. If some company were to take said program and incorporate it into one of their products without licensing their product under the GPL they have committed copyright infringement but they have caused the original author a loss of revenue as the original author was not generating revenue off of their program. Yes, the author's rights have been violated, but no revenue has been stolen.
In any case, while I agree that maybe "theft" isn't the clearest word for this, I don't think it's the howling error the original poster made it seem.
The original poster is probably sick of organizations like the RIAA as I am, over statements such as copying a CD that you own to MP3s on your computer solely for your personal use is illegal and theft (yes, they actually state this on their web page). They try to romanticize their cause and villify those that they oppose by referring to them as theives. I am very offended at being called a theif for using something like my.mp3.com where all parties involved have legally paid for the CDs that are being used.
Sorry I confused you - I think I tried to cram far too many arguements into my last post, so I'll try to focus a bit more this time.
As for you distinction between copyright infringement and deprivation of revenue, I understand the difference but I don't understand your claim that one "doesn't factor at all" into the other. Are you saying that I could infringe the copyright WITHOUT depriving of future revenue?
Absolutely. People who copy music, for instance, wouldn't have necessarily bought the music had they not been able to copy it. As a real-life example, when I was a kid I would copy music tapes for my own personal enjoyment. I was poor and my parents were poor and there was no way I could have afforded to actually buy the music, even though I would have liked to. In this case the record companies lost no revenue because I wouldn't have been able to buy the music anyway. There are plenty of other examples I could give of people who have copied music that they wouldn't have paid for had they not been able to copy it (whether because of financial contraints or because they felt the price of a CD is too high). Incidentally, as soon as I turned 14 I got a minimum wage job and poured most of my earnings into CDs, a lot of which I had copied previously and gotten hooked on, so my copyright infringement actually increased the record companies' revenue rather than decreasing it.
My point before was that you are stating that the revenue is what is being "taken" but it is not a felony to deprive an entity of future revenue. The deprivation of revenue is merely a potential side effect of a felenous act and not a part of the act itself. The deprivation needs to be part of the act itself to be considered theft under your original definition as the side effects are not certain (i.e., loss of revenue is not guaranteed).
Do you think that "copyright infringement" is a less appropriate term to use for unauthorized copying than "theft"? I think it fits the bill far better as there is no guaranteed loss with unauthorized copying.
No, I don't think you read my post. You are applying the two halves of your definition to two different things. The "felonous act" is copyright infringement. The "taking of something" is the deprivation of future revenue, which doesn't factor at all into the "felenous act". You can't apply different portions of your definitions to separate things and then claim that one of those things fits your definition.
And since when is future revenue intellectual property? Future revenue is not protected as property under the law, at least not in the US. By your reasoning competition is theft because it takes future revenue from your competitors.
Excellent definition. In fact, it goes to prove the original poster's point. You chose to ignore the second half of your definition in your post and this is where calling copyright infringement "theft" breaks down. I quote:
with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same
Note the emphasis I placed on "the same". What you are taking when you commit copyright infringement is intellectual property, but you are not depriving the ownder of the same. Sure you may be indirectly depriving the owner of revenue which the property could generate, but this is a secondary effect - the owner still has full use of the original property so he is not being deprived of the same. The definition does not say that the intent is to deprive the owner of something else, it states that the intent is to derive the owner of the property itself. And a revenue stream is not intellectual property (unless you're priceline.com).
This is not to say that I think M is totally in the right and that the theives are totally in the wrong. But let us call a spade a spade and label the thieves "modern day Robin Hoods" rather than trying to re-define them out of existence.
So why not just call it copyright infringement (which it is) rather than calling it theft (which it isn't)? I would hardly call terming it "copyright infringement" defining it out of existence - we have plenty of words in the english language to more accurately define it than "theft".
Clarification:What Yahoo have you been looking at?
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Irrational Exuberance
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To clarify, when I say that Yahoo will continue to experience tremendous growth I am referring to their revenues, not their stock price. A P/E ratio of is really frickin high even for a copmany in hyper-growth and I'm not going to venture a guess as to what the actual value should be (perhaps 100 is reasonable - I don't know).
Oh, because it's on a web page it's something new and great with huge growth? Not really, it's the other way around, anybody can do what yahoo does. There are tons of other search engines just like yahoo out now that have shown this.
Oh brother... I can't believe I have to explain this in Slashdot of all places. Are you aware of the tremendous growth in number of users that the web and internet have been experiencing over the past several years? It's practically following its own version of Moore's law doubling every few months (I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head). When your target audience grows at an exponential rate so does your business, at least when you're on top like Yahoo is. The target audience for books, magazines, and other traditional media is not growing anywhere near as fast as the number of internet users - you have to have been under a rock for nearly the past decade to think otherwise. Even if Yahoo's percentage of marketshare remains constant among search engines they will experience tremendous growth by shear virtue of the fact that the market pool of users is growing rapidly. (I would argue that Yahoo's percentage market share will increase over time due to their highly successful branding efforts, but that is a totally separate issue and not necessary to see why they will continue to experience high growth).
On a happier note, Mp3.com has struck a deal with BMI to license it's music. While this isn't directly connected with the RIAA's lawsuit against MP3.com it will hopefully encourage the RIAA's member companies to strike their own deals with MP3.com as well thus allowing their BeamIt/my.mp3.com service to continue in full force.
Ask yourself: if a heavy-equipment manufacturer had revenue, earnings, and growth identical to Yahoo!, would you pay $150 a share for it?
Of course you wouldn't, but that doesn't mean Yahoo is overvalued. The big difference between Yahoo and a heavy-equipment manufacturer is the rate of growth. Heavy-equipment manufacturers have been around for quite a long time and as such the market for their products is pretty well saturated and growing at a linear (I'm guessing here) rate if at all. Yahoo, on the other hand, has an exponentially growing market and their earnings have seen commensurate growth. The market factors this into the price of their stock by giving them a higher price to earnings ratio than companies with less dramatic growth. Now, whether or not a P/E ratio of 100 is too high is another question which I am not going to attempt to answer, my point is that Yahoo's P/E ratio should definitely be higher than traditional companies with the same level of earnings because their growth rate is much greater.
You were quoted before as saying that Napster commoditizes your music. How exactly is music art when it is sold by a giant record label, and a commodity when shared among fans? It seems that you got that backwards. Don't get me wrong - I think you have every right to protect your intellectual property - but your earlier statement seems to indicate that you are more interested in commodotizing music than making something which people enjoy.
Sure it does normally, but I think most people can quickly comprehend this specific situation if they are given the appropriate context. The guy was joking with his friend about using a product which competes with his friend's company. It be like me telling a friend who works for Pepsi "I was really thirsty so I grabbed myself a Coke (I know, my soul is sold now)." The reference to Microsoft as evil was part of an easily understood joke and not the typical reference that requires a background in technology to fully understand.
The special master's bias was anything but clear. The whole argument about him being "biased" sprung from an email he sent a long time beforehand to a friend at Netscape. In the course of their email conversation it came up that he had installed IE on his computer recently and he joked about how he had sold his soul (or something to that effect). If you actually take this in context, his comments most likely sprung from the fact that his friend worked at Netscape rather than any anti-Microsoft bias on his own part.
Has anyone noticed that Microsoft seems to be deliberately trying to piss of the DOJ and state's attorneys general? I'm no fan of MS, but I've always been pretty impressed with their strategy, especially in legal matters. So are they trying to get the worst possible punishment on purpose? Are they betting on reversing the findings of law on appeal by claiming the DOJ was too harsh? I don't get it.
This is exactly what they did in 96(?) when they were being sued for attempting to kill Netscape via predatory practices. They acted like total asses during the original trial to the point where they had ired the judge so much so that he refused to consider Microsoft's request to disqualify an outside consultant who had been brought in by the judge and who supposedly had an anti-Microsoft bias Their arguement concerning his bias was very weak, but the appeals court decided that the original judge shouldn't have been so hasty in dismissing their request that he be removed, so they over-turned the original decision. Now Microsoft continually points to this earlier overturn on appeal and "spins" it to make it look like the government gave them a seal of approval to do what they did with IE.
I wondered the same thing back when this trial was going on - why on earth would Microsoft being acting like such enormous asses? I saw no way that they could possibly gain from being so hostile, but amazingly enough it turned out to be a brilliant plan. Not only did they get the original decision overturned because the appeals court saw them as being treated unfairly (even though they were really, really asking for it), they now go on and on about how this previous case gave them the green light for their bundling and aggressive "marketing".
due to the relative nature of time, a message that travels faster than a beam of light could inform an observer of an event before it happens
How so? This seems counter-intuitive, but then again so do a lot of things in relativity, so if you could point me to a URL with a more detailed explanation I'd appreciate it. Here's what my intuition says: say I were on the moon and I was observing events down on earth. If I were watching them through a telescope there would be a delay of about a second or two between the events occuring and me seing them due to the time it takes light to travel that far. Now if there were some way for me to observe the events half a second sooner the information would be travelling to me faster than the speed of light, but it's still well after the events happened. I don't understand how I could have a chance to change the original event.
Well, a nice side effect for Sony of having a hard drive in the Playstation is that hard drives generally have a lifespan of a few years which means that people will be back in a few years for seconds (or to buy Playstation III's). That's the one thing which has been bothering me about everything turning into a dedicated PC - the lifespan is being shortened on these things because failures are much more likely when you having moving parts (i.e., the hard drive). Then again, five years from now when the hard drives fail in my PSX, TiVo, and whatever else, the state of the art will probably have advanced so much that I'll be excited to upgrade.
...it's going to have to battle in court with the major labels over something that I really don't anybody needs or wants.
I take it you meant to say "over something that I really don't think anybody needs or wants". Well, I for one love their BeamIt service, so you can't say that nobody wants it. I supposed I don't need it, but I feel that I have a right to it as I'm using it to listen to music that I have paid for. Anyway, you should give BeamIt a try. I use it at work all the time, and I find it so incredibly useful that I even use it at home sometimes even though I have my entire CD collection sitting right in front of me (because it is a very convenient way to make playlists, among other reasons). And it works great on Linux.
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Alternatively, "Pastor of Muppets" makes for a slightly less morbid image. I could have sworn I ran across a band once with an album called "Pastor of Muppets". Anywho, I did a search and came up with this which is equally amusing.
There's no way they can make money off this. Why would somebody go to the store and buy a can of openCola when they could just download a can?
Corporations aren't going to use openCola because there is no technical support for it. There is nobody to hold liable if the tab comes off of the can or if the contents explode when shaken.
If you choose to go with openCola you are putting your compatibility in jeopardy. Your current cups, straws, pitchers, and other serving devices have not been certified by the manufacturer to be openCola compatible and using them with openCola may void their warranties.
I've been extremely impressed with the leap in quality of music on MP3.com. I tried it out a year or two ago and was unimpressed. Then a few weeks ago when "major label" recordings were disabled from my.mp3.com I started going through withdrawal and decided to give it another shot. In a matter of a few short days I had quickly gathered up over 3 hours of music that I really liked. By traditional means, this would have taken me several weeks and several hundred dollars in buying CDs that I only know a few songs off of (which I've been doing for years). Now if I find a CD I like on MP3.com it's usually much cheaper than normal and I can listen to it instantly rather than waiting for it to come in the mail. If the RIAA and TVT were smart they would be paying MP3.com to provide their useful my.mp3.com service because it added value to buying traditional CDs (e.g., instant listening and listening from anywhere) and would help delay the inevitable shift to a world where the current music distribution paradigm is obsolete.
There's a free (as in beer) X server for windows called MI/X (or was it M/IX?). I used to use it when I used to use Windows and it worked well enough to get work done. A search on Google will probably turn it it.
This Java X server looks like the development on it is a bit more active, though.
My experience with BellAtlantic has been a bit different - it has been far worse. They have done very little right so far.
When I signed up for their Infospeed service they sent me the wrong DSL modem and they charged me for it _6_ separate times. They did send me a replacement modem without much of a problem, but it took me over half a year of constant calling to get them to take back the original modem and get a refund for the 5 erroneous charges.
Then, on the day that my DSL line was installed and my service enabled, it worked fine while the technician was there but it stopped working about 15 minutes after he left. For the next two months it would work for maybe 5 or 10 minutes and then cut out for 15 minutes or more. It would either cut out completely or drop so many packets that it was unusable. I reported the problem immediately and despite their assurance that they would handle it within "72 hours" it took them 2 months before it was fixed, and I had to constantly hound them on the phone before they actually did anything - I got no response at all from them otherwise.
And the way they fixed my problem just shocked me. I was having the same problem that other people were reporting on the same "tree" as me, a tree being a group of a couple hundred phone lines connected at their central office. What they did was physically switch my line to a different tree. So they left a couple hundred other customers with defective connections and switched off those who figured out something was wrong rather than fixing the root of the problem.
The physical line switching also screwed up my long distance service. They didn't properly switch over my long distance phone service when they switched the line so AT&T had two accounts they were billing me for and the "newer" account that was actually being billed for my newer calls was billed at twice the rate it should have been because the appropriate calling plan wasn't in place.
Then, earlier this year my DSL went down again. This time it wasn't just phasing in and out - it was completely down. I called it in immediately and then waited 72 hours (which is how long they always say it will take), and called back only to be told that they didn't have a trouble ticket in for me. Well, I wasn't about to go through a two month ordeal again so I started calling them on a daily basis even though they would tell me each time to check back in 72 hours. It took them 10 days to fix it this time which is still waaaaaaaaay too long. I suspect the problem was something trivial like somebody had accidentally kicked the cord out of my card at the office (they said this happens a lot) - it's pathetic that it took them so long to fix it if that was the case.
To top it all off, their whole customer service process is an absolute nightmare. I was on hold for literally hours most days and when I did eventually get to speak with someone they would make me run through the same stupid ping test that I had already done a million times before and then tell me to wait 72 hours. To make matters worse, a lot of their tech support team didn't know what they were doing. I remember one tech support guy who had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I said a large number of packets were being dropped.
Well, I don't have time to expand on this any further, but believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I wish Cablevision would get their act together and offer cable modem service so I don't have to deal with BellAtlantic again in September when I move, but I fear that my only alternative is going to be to use a regular dial up account. I have been dreading moving for the sole fact that I will need to deal with BellAtlantic again.
Whoa there... I don't think just because MP3.com hasn't generated a mega-platinum supergroup in their less than a year of (public) existence their business model deserves to be written off as a failure. Several of the artists on MP3.com are actually already making enough to live off of through their MP3.com earnings and most are garnering far more exposure than they would be otherwise. It is very important to realize that this is just the beginning, though. You need to give the service and community a few years to mature before you can begin comparing it to traditional promotional channels. If MP3.com sustains their tremendous growth for the next couple of years I'm pretty certain it will be a far more powerful ally for artists than record companies in their current incarnation.
That is all irrelevant because there is no way I could have bought the CDs in 1985. Forget that I said that I eventually bought the CDs several years down the line - I had the copies during the period that I could not afford to pay for the music. Whether I had the copies or not made no difference to the record companies' bottom lines as there was no way I could have paid for the CDs/tapes. The point at which I had enough of an income to buy the original music and would have paid the asking price if copying weren't available would be the point at which I would have been witholding revenue from the record companies. Some people never reach that point for various reasons.
Here's another concrete example of copyright infringement that doesn't lead to a loss of revenue: somebody who writes a computer program in their spare time and posts it on the web under the GPL has a copyright on the program. If some company were to take said program and incorporate it into one of their products without licensing their product under the GPL they have committed copyright infringement but they have caused the original author a loss of revenue as the original author was not generating revenue off of their program. Yes, the author's rights have been violated, but no revenue has been stolen.
In any case, while I agree that maybe "theft" isn't the clearest word for this, I don't think it's the howling error the original poster made it seem.
The original poster is probably sick of organizations like the RIAA as I am, over statements such as copying a CD that you own to MP3s on your computer solely for your personal use is illegal and theft (yes, they actually state this on their web page). They try to romanticize their cause and villify those that they oppose by referring to them as theives. I am very offended at being called a theif for using something like my.mp3.com where all parties involved have legally paid for the CDs that are being used.
Sorry I confused you - I think I tried to cram far too many arguements into my last post, so I'll try to focus a bit more this time.
As for you distinction between copyright infringement and deprivation of revenue, I understand the difference but I don't understand your claim that one "doesn't factor at all" into the other. Are you saying that I could infringe the copyright WITHOUT depriving of future revenue?
Absolutely. People who copy music, for instance, wouldn't have necessarily bought the music had they not been able to copy it. As a real-life example, when I was a kid I would copy music tapes for my own personal enjoyment. I was poor and my parents were poor and there was no way I could have afforded to actually buy the music, even though I would have liked to. In this case the record companies lost no revenue because I wouldn't have been able to buy the music anyway. There are plenty of other examples I could give of people who have copied music that they wouldn't have paid for had they not been able to copy it (whether because of financial contraints or because they felt the price of a CD is too high). Incidentally, as soon as I turned 14 I got a minimum wage job and poured most of my earnings into CDs, a lot of which I had copied previously and gotten hooked on, so my copyright infringement actually increased the record companies' revenue rather than decreasing it.
My point before was that you are stating that the revenue is what is being "taken" but it is not a felony to deprive an entity of future revenue. The deprivation of revenue is merely a potential side effect of a felenous act and not a part of the act itself. The deprivation needs to be part of the act itself to be considered theft under your original definition as the side effects are not certain (i.e., loss of revenue is not guaranteed).
Do you think that "copyright infringement" is a less appropriate term to use for unauthorized copying than "theft"? I think it fits the bill far better as there is no guaranteed loss with unauthorized copying.
No, I don't think you read my post. You are applying the two halves of your definition to two different things. The "felonous act" is copyright infringement. The "taking of something" is the deprivation of future revenue, which doesn't factor at all into the "felenous act". You can't apply different portions of your definitions to separate things and then claim that one of those things fits your definition.
And since when is future revenue intellectual property? Future revenue is not protected as property under the law, at least not in the US. By your reasoning competition is theft because it takes future revenue from your competitors.
with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same
Note the emphasis I placed on "the same". What you are taking when you commit copyright infringement is intellectual property, but you are not depriving the ownder of the same. Sure you may be indirectly depriving the owner of revenue which the property could generate, but this is a secondary effect - the owner still has full use of the original property so he is not being deprived of the same. The definition does not say that the intent is to deprive the owner of something else, it states that the intent is to derive the owner of the property itself. And a revenue stream is not intellectual property (unless you're priceline.com).
This is not to say that I think M is totally in the right and that the theives are totally in the wrong. But let us call a spade a spade and label the thieves "modern day Robin Hoods" rather than trying to re-define them out of existence.
So why not just call it copyright infringement (which it is) rather than calling it theft (which it isn't)? I would hardly call terming it "copyright infringement" defining it out of existence - we have plenty of words in the english language to more accurately define it than "theft".
To clarify, when I say that Yahoo will continue to experience tremendous growth I am referring to their revenues, not their stock price. A P/E ratio of is really frickin high even for a copmany in hyper-growth and I'm not going to venture a guess as to what the actual value should be (perhaps 100 is reasonable - I don't know).
Oh brother... I can't believe I have to explain this in Slashdot of all places. Are you aware of the tremendous growth in number of users that the web and internet have been experiencing over the past several years? It's practically following its own version of Moore's law doubling every few months (I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head). When your target audience grows at an exponential rate so does your business, at least when you're on top like Yahoo is. The target audience for books, magazines, and other traditional media is not growing anywhere near as fast as the number of internet users - you have to have been under a rock for nearly the past decade to think otherwise. Even if Yahoo's percentage of marketshare remains constant among search engines they will experience tremendous growth by shear virtue of the fact that the market pool of users is growing rapidly. (I would argue that Yahoo's percentage market share will increase over time due to their highly successful branding efforts, but that is a totally separate issue and not necessary to see why they will continue to experience high growth).
On a happier note, Mp3.com has struck a deal with BMI to license it's music. While this isn't directly connected with the RIAA's lawsuit against MP3.com it will hopefully encourage the RIAA's member companies to strike their own deals with MP3.com as well thus allowing their BeamIt/my.mp3.com service to continue in full force.
Of course you wouldn't, but that doesn't mean Yahoo is overvalued. The big difference between Yahoo and a heavy-equipment manufacturer is the rate of growth. Heavy-equipment manufacturers have been around for quite a long time and as such the market for their products is pretty well saturated and growing at a linear (I'm guessing here) rate if at all. Yahoo, on the other hand, has an exponentially growing market and their earnings have seen commensurate growth. The market factors this into the price of their stock by giving them a higher price to earnings ratio than companies with less dramatic growth. Now, whether or not a P/E ratio of 100 is too high is another question which I am not going to attempt to answer, my point is that Yahoo's P/E ratio should definitely be higher than traditional companies with the same level of earnings because their growth rate is much greater.
You were quoted before as saying that Napster commoditizes your music. How exactly is music art when it is sold by a giant record label, and a commodity when shared among fans? It seems that you got that backwards. Don't get me wrong - I think you have every right to protect your intellectual property - but your earlier statement seems to indicate that you are more interested in commodotizing music than making something which people enjoy.
Sure it does normally, but I think most people can quickly comprehend this specific situation if they are given the appropriate context. The guy was joking with his friend about using a product which competes with his friend's company. It be like me telling a friend who works for Pepsi "I was really thirsty so I grabbed myself a Coke (I know, my soul is sold now)." The reference to Microsoft as evil was part of an easily understood joke and not the typical reference that requires a background in technology to fully understand.
The special master's bias was anything but clear. The whole argument about him being "biased" sprung from an email he sent a long time beforehand to a friend at Netscape. In the course of their email conversation it came up that he had installed IE on his computer recently and he joked about how he had sold his soul (or something to that effect). If you actually take this in context, his comments most likely sprung from the fact that his friend worked at Netscape rather than any anti-Microsoft bias on his own part.
This is exactly what they did in 96(?) when they were being sued for attempting to kill Netscape via predatory practices. They acted like total asses during the original trial to the point where they had ired the judge so much so that he refused to consider Microsoft's request to disqualify an outside consultant who had been brought in by the judge and who supposedly had an anti-Microsoft bias Their arguement concerning his bias was very weak, but the appeals court decided that the original judge shouldn't have been so hasty in dismissing their request that he be removed, so they over-turned the original decision. Now Microsoft continually points to this earlier overturn on appeal and "spins" it to make it look like the government gave them a seal of approval to do what they did with IE.
I wondered the same thing back when this trial was going on - why on earth would Microsoft being acting like such enormous asses? I saw no way that they could possibly gain from being so hostile, but amazingly enough it turned out to be a brilliant plan. Not only did they get the original decision overturned because the appeals court saw them as being treated unfairly (even though they were really, really asking for it), they now go on and on about how this previous case gave them the green light for their bundling and aggressive "marketing".
Ah, so you've never heard of snake oil then?
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
How so? This seems counter-intuitive, but then again so do a lot of things in relativity, so if you could point me to a URL with a more detailed explanation I'd appreciate it. Here's what my intuition says: say I were on the moon and I was observing events down on earth. If I were watching them through a telescope there would be a delay of about a second or two between the events occuring and me seing them due to the time it takes light to travel that far. Now if there were some way for me to observe the events half a second sooner the information would be travelling to me faster than the speed of light, but it's still well after the events happened. I don't understand how I could have a chance to change the original event.
Riiiiight... and isolated, lonely nerds never go to the library.
Well, a nice side effect for Sony of having a hard drive in the Playstation is that hard drives generally have a lifespan of a few years which means that people will be back in a few years for seconds (or to buy Playstation III's). That's the one thing which has been bothering me about everything turning into a dedicated PC - the lifespan is being shortened on these things because failures are much more likely when you having moving parts (i.e., the hard drive). Then again, five years from now when the hard drives fail in my PSX, TiVo, and whatever else, the state of the art will probably have advanced so much that I'll be excited to upgrade.
The news.com article on this is at http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-1629387.html? tag=st.ne.1002.thed.1003-200-1629387 . It's not much more informative than the Declan McCullagh article at the moment, but News.com has a habit of updating their articles so they may give some more insightful analysis in a bit.
I take it you meant to say "over something that I really don't think anybody needs or wants". Well, I for one love their BeamIt service, so you can't say that nobody wants it. I supposed I don't need it, but I feel that I have a right to it as I'm using it to listen to music that I have paid for. Anyway, you should give BeamIt a try. I use it at work all the time, and I find it so incredibly useful that I even use it at home sometimes even though I have my entire CD collection sitting right in front of me (because it is a very convenient way to make playlists, among other reasons). And it works great on Linux.
I own a ReplayTV and it most certainly makes a local call.
OK, so it may be local for you, but it isn't local for everybody. Don't take my word for it... read some comments from actual ReplayTV users over at the AVS forum. One poster said it costs him $40-50 per month.