"The industry says it needs to use the lock-box approach to music to prevent consumers, armed with CD-authoring software and hardware and a quick Internet connection, from downloading and burning the recording industry out of existence."
If inherently flawed technology and government intervention are the only things standing between the recording industry and oblivion, then they have already lost. The RIAA folks have forgotten their high school economics classes. The laws of economics are more powerful than the laws of the USA and the EU. And the laws of economics dictate that a middleman adding no value is doomed. These middlemen no longer add value, they now merely represent a costly inefficiency.
What a load of whining self-centered bullshit. You are going to graduate in a few months with a valuable University degree. About 80% of the rest of the world would love to have your problems. Sounds like your real problem is that it doesn't look like an easy path to fame and fortune any more.
If you can't cut it, go do something else because you will be competing with people that do love it, or who are hungry for success. In either case, you don't stand a chance.
If you want a nice life handed to you on a plate, then get prozac. You won't get the nice life, but it won't bother you as much
The secret part is that MS will open all the backdoors to the CIA so that they can track Osama bin Laden's email, ICQ logs, bank transactions, etc. That way, the spooks don't need to trouble themselves with say, getting a Swiss bank's permission to examine transactions. They can just waltz right in and have a look anytime they want. The Swiss bank won't even know. Call it patriotism. Microsoft's little contribution to the war on Terrorism.
This Slashdot story from July 2000 lays it all out. This is exactly the strategy he described.
The idea that Judge Patel is going to blow the record companies out of the water is tantalizing. And her reference to "massive discovery" must make the record executive's blood run cold.
Well, colder.
Do any of the US readers here know the limits of her mandate to look into things like artist's contracts?
There is absolutly no reason that a given distro should work across every machine manufactured in the last ten years. In any case, you are missing the point of Mandrake. They are putting a lot of work into stuff that you don't want or need. So why use it at all? You remind me of the theatre owner in Korea that found "The Sound of Music" was too long for 3 showings each evening. so he cut all the songs out of his print.
Probably Debian or a roll your own would suit you better. Linux is not becoming like Microsoft. Just like Linus is not becoming like Bill Gates. The fact that you can choose Mandrake or Debian kind of makes that point.
Uh Oh... You haven't been paying attention.
This story from May explains how Microsoft and ebay are conspiring to make life easier for themselves.
Hard to say if MS is conceding the point at hand, or if they are intentionally confusing the situation. In any case, they do not directly address what we are talking about here. The article does mention that MS is going after "infringing" software with no specific definition of what constitutes infringing.
You are underestimating Joe Public. More than 50% of US households have computers. In some other countries its higher. People listen to cds a lot on their computers. Helpful companies like Microsoft encourage it.
My parents fell in love with Napster. They downloaded like crazy. But just CDs they owned, or artists that were dead. "How can I be stealing from a dead man?" my dad asked as he got his nth Elvis song.
The only place that they listen to CDs now is...in the car! Since cars have CD players nowadays, that's about 10 million new potentially pissed off consumers every year.
I would really like to see some new ideas about security. What we have now are mostly checkpoints, little more than the same thing you would have seen in the Middle Ages. Just augmented with some technology.
What about new ways of looking at these problems. Some systemic or process changes that would make security checks more efficient.
In the present climate, the people who should be natural allies, airport security and 99.999% of passengers, have a false adversarial relationship. Security checks amount to punishment.
In 1979, I flew out of Belfast airport. My passport was checked six times, my boarding pass eight times and everything I had was searched at least once. By hand. It was friendly, fast and no inconvenience. There are better ways
Very interesting discussion. But one aspect of it frightens me. There is no talk about the biggest threat to America listed in the article. The "crackdown" on rights.
A "crackdown"? Like these rights are some nuciance misdemenour the legal system has been putting up with, but has now decided to "crackdown" on?
Am I missing something? Your chances of getting killed by terrorists in the US are around 1 in 250,000. Your chances of having your rights taken away look like they are going to be 100%. And none of you are talking about it.
From the ashes of freedom rises a new order. An order that repudiates the anarchy of the few, for the benifit of the many. An order that will ensure property freedoms are respected once again in this great land. An order that will stop the mockery of freedom that passes for liberty in this country today.
We will outlaw those that seek to abuse our great system of governement for thier exlcusive and private benifit. We will crush the degenerates that use technology to disguise their perversions. The time has come to make the law apply equally to all citizens. For who but criminals and gangsters wishies to hide their faces? Finally, we can isolate those that want to destroy America, whether with drugs, or technology, or racism, or hate or the stigmatizing of disadvantaged groups. And eradicate them.
I pledge to you today, that no crime will be too small to go unpunished. That no effort will be spared. That we will make any sacrifice to acheieve final victory over the enemies of justice and freedom.
This war will take years. But we will be able finally to combine our struggles to eradicate drugs, outlaw technology and free speech run amok. For the first time since the end of the cold war, our enemy is clearly revealed. They will be crushed unmercifully!
Bang on. The one place where MS has serious competition and no monopoly advantages is hardware. And what are their products like? Arguably the best on the market.
Good technology, good prices, excellent quality, innovative. Really good value for the money.
Strip away the paranoia and there is a great company there, struggling to get out.
Now that the commies are out of the picture, A new villain is needed. The Chinese are maturing nicely, but won't be ready for some time. Child molesters and kiddie porn perveyors have filled the gap, but people are getting bored, and most of them are in prison by now anyway.
I know, let's get the geeks. Nobody knows what they do, and they look funny. Besides, they are responsible for the dangerous notion that democracy is more than dutifully not voting in elections.
Adobe, if they are serious and not on a PR bender, should hire an attorney for Dimitry. They wrongfully had him put in jail. The least they can do is pay the cost to get him out.
The funny thing is that the Internet DOES follow "basic economic laws". If it didn't, they wouldn't be basic laws, would they? All the quote shows is that the Internet doesn't follow the laws this twit can remember from school.
This is typical, the business equivalent of the slashdot knee jerk condemnation, and follows the law of regression to the mean. If the mean intellegence of all the creatures on the planet is about that of a carp, then this guy has a scaley back.
IANAL, but have had lots of dealings with trademark in my job as a marketing weenie.
Remember the way trademark law works. If a company becomes aware of a trademark violation, they MUST take action. Why? Because if they do not, then when someone serious, like MS, appropriates the trademark, they can argue in court that you were not policing use of the trademark and so it can't be integral to your business. If a trademark is not integral to the business, then you can't hold that mark. It would be like cybersquatting.
So if any Tom, Dick or Jurgen in Germany turns up an instance of possible infringement, Adobe MUST act when they become aware of it. They don't have to compensate Tom, Dick or Jergen, but they DO have to issue a cease and desist to the person doing the infringing. As you can see, this legal setup means the only rational course for any business holding trademarks is to shoot first and ask questions later. Thus the obligatory cease and desist as the first gambit.
The problem is not why people won't pay for content. Why should they pay for content? They don't pay on radio or TV (PPV, etc. is not the same, you pay extra for 10% or 20% of your overall viewing).
The problem is advertising. It should be able to support websites that generate lots of traffic. But it doesn't. Internet advertising is where TV was in 1950. People reading radio scripts into the camera. As long as people try to re-invent existing ad media on the Internet, it will continue to fail. Banner ads, pop ups, broadband commercials. All crappy retooling of existing media. When the only goal of an ad is to get a click, then you have a really shitty ad.
When people figure out how to do things on the Internet that they can't do on a billboard or TV ad, then Internet advertising will take off. That's when we will start to see some good creative. And guess what? Good advertising needs good creative, not good technology, just like its always been.
The really big ad spenders are brand companies like Coke. When they start to spend 25% or 30% of their ad budget online, then thousands of sites will become self supporting. Then the marketplace will be one of real content and ideas, not hype and gloss.
Why would Coke spend that much online? Because that's where the people are. Why don't they now? Because Internet ads are completely inappropriate for their business model. Click throughs and the like do nothing for them. What are they going to do? Sell you a bottle of Coke online? Get you to sign up for mailing list so they can spam you? When sites can do effective brand advertising, then the Internet will become the most effective ad medium ever invented.
When that happens, paying for content will become irrelevant, except for "premium" content like porn or PPV stuff. Just like TV today.
I am pleased to see that the three organizations mentioned in the story are laughing this idiot off. Part of the fallout from so many articles about IP abuse on places like/. is that there are a lot of well informed netziens out there. This kind of tactic would have worked a charm two or three years ago. No longer.
So, if polls of people in various European countries in 1940 had consistently shown that people were in favour of persecuting Jews, would that have made concentration camps ok?
Slashdot Mirror
Here is the best quote in the article:
"The industry says it needs to use the lock-box approach to music to prevent consumers, armed with CD-authoring software and hardware and a quick Internet connection, from downloading and burning the recording industry out of existence."
If inherently flawed technology and government intervention are the only things standing between the recording industry and oblivion, then they have already lost. The RIAA folks have forgotten their high school economics classes. The laws of economics are more powerful than the laws of the USA and the EU. And the laws of economics dictate that a middleman adding no value is doomed. These middlemen no longer add value, they now merely represent a costly inefficiency.
Just like there are no more independent convenience stores? or restaurants? or gas stations? of video stores?...
Translate the China answer from Ballmer and you get:
There are no problems with human rights or freedoms in China because I never hear about any when I visit. And I go there twice a year!
Awwww... Poor baby. No fun.
What a load of whining self-centered bullshit. You are going to graduate in a few months with a valuable University degree. About 80% of the rest of the world would love to have your problems. Sounds like your real problem is that it doesn't look like an easy path to fame and fortune any more.
If you can't cut it, go do something else because you will be competing with people that do love it, or who are hungry for success. In either case, you don't stand a chance.
If you want a nice life handed to you on a plate, then get prozac. You won't get the nice life, but it won't bother you as much
The secret part is that MS will open all the backdoors to the CIA so that they can track Osama bin Laden's email, ICQ logs, bank transactions, etc. That way, the spooks don't need to trouble themselves with say, getting a Swiss bank's permission to examine transactions. They can just waltz right in and have a look anytime they want. The Swiss bank won't even know. Call it patriotism. Microsoft's little contribution to the war on Terrorism.
This Slashdot story from July 2000 lays it all out. This is exactly the strategy he described.
The idea that Judge Patel is going to blow the record companies out of the water is tantalizing. And her reference to "massive discovery" must make the record executive's blood run cold.
Well, colder.
Do any of the US readers here know the limits of her mandate to look into things like artist's contracts?
There is absolutly no reason that a given distro should work across every machine manufactured in the last ten years. In any case, you are missing the point of Mandrake. They are putting a lot of work into stuff that you don't want or need. So why use it at all? You remind me of the theatre owner in Korea that found "The Sound of Music" was too long for 3 showings each evening. so he cut all the songs out of his print.
Probably Debian or a roll your own would suit you better. Linux is not becoming like Microsoft. Just like Linus is not becoming like Bill Gates. The fact that you can choose Mandrake or Debian kind of makes that point.
Uh Oh... You haven't been paying attention. This story from May explains how Microsoft and ebay are conspiring to make life easier for themselves. Hard to say if MS is conceding the point at hand, or if they are intentionally confusing the situation. In any case, they do not directly address what we are talking about here. The article does mention that MS is going after "infringing" software with no specific definition of what constitutes infringing.
You are underestimating Joe Public. More than 50% of US households have computers. In some other countries its higher. People listen to cds a lot on their computers. Helpful companies like Microsoft encourage it.
My parents fell in love with Napster. They downloaded like crazy. But just CDs they owned, or artists that were dead. "How can I be stealing from a dead man?" my dad asked as he got his nth Elvis song.
The only place that they listen to CDs now is...in the car! Since cars have CD players nowadays, that's about 10 million new potentially pissed off consumers every year.
I would really like to see some new ideas about security. What we have now are mostly checkpoints, little more than the same thing you would have seen in the Middle Ages. Just augmented with some technology.
What about new ways of looking at these problems. Some systemic or process changes that would make security checks more efficient.
In the present climate, the people who should be natural allies, airport security and 99.999% of passengers, have a false adversarial relationship. Security checks amount to punishment.
In 1979, I flew out of Belfast airport. My passport was checked six times, my boarding pass eight times and everything I had was searched at least once. By hand. It was friendly, fast and no inconvenience. There are better ways
Very interesting discussion. But one aspect of it frightens me. There is no talk about the biggest threat to America listed in the article. The "crackdown" on rights.
A "crackdown"? Like these rights are some nuciance misdemenour the legal system has been putting up with, but has now decided to "crackdown" on?
Am I missing something? Your chances of getting killed by terrorists in the US are around 1 in 250,000. Your chances of having your rights taken away look like they are going to be 100%. And none of you are talking about it.
The US "surrendered" in the same way that Microsoft "won" the appeal.
Mr. Moglen seems politically naive. Hollywood is not monolithic, and Dubya cannot simply say "surrender" to the DOJ. It's not that simple.
He has the same myopic view that got MS into trouble at the trial. They thought that the real world works like the computer industry. It does not.
From the ashes of freedom rises a new order. An order that repudiates the anarchy of the few, for the benifit of the many. An order that will ensure property freedoms are respected once again in this great land. An order that will stop the mockery of freedom that passes for liberty in this country today.
We will outlaw those that seek to abuse our great system of governement for thier exlcusive and private benifit. We will crush the degenerates that use technology to disguise their perversions. The time has come to make the law apply equally to all citizens. For who but criminals and gangsters wishies to hide their faces? Finally, we can isolate those that want to destroy America, whether with drugs, or technology, or racism, or hate or the stigmatizing of disadvantaged groups. And eradicate them.
I pledge to you today, that no crime will be too small to go unpunished. That no effort will be spared. That we will make any sacrifice to acheieve final victory over the enemies of justice and freedom.
This war will take years. But we will be able finally to combine our struggles to eradicate drugs, outlaw technology and free speech run amok. For the first time since the end of the cold war, our enemy is clearly revealed. They will be crushed unmercifully!
Bang on. The one place where MS has serious competition and no monopoly advantages is hardware. And what are their products like? Arguably the best on the market.
Good technology, good prices, excellent quality, innovative. Really good value for the money.
Strip away the paranoia and there is a great company there, struggling to get out.
That's the real tragedy, IMHO.
SR-71 is no longer operational
Now that the commies are out of the picture, A new villain is needed. The Chinese are maturing nicely, but won't be ready for some time. Child molesters and kiddie porn perveyors have filled the gap, but people are getting bored, and most of them are in prison by now anyway.
I know, let's get the geeks. Nobody knows what they do, and they look funny. Besides, they are responsible for the dangerous notion that democracy is more than dutifully not voting in elections.
Adobe, if they are serious and not on a PR bender, should hire an attorney for Dimitry. They wrongfully had him put in jail. The least they can do is pay the cost to get him out.
The funny thing is that the Internet DOES follow "basic economic laws". If it didn't, they wouldn't be basic laws, would they? All the quote shows is that the Internet doesn't follow the laws this twit can remember from school. This is typical, the business equivalent of the slashdot knee jerk condemnation, and follows the law of regression to the mean. If the mean intellegence of all the creatures on the planet is about that of a carp, then this guy has a scaley back.
Two pixels? These guys are having flashbacks. But to the 60s not the 30s.
Those free trial disks are going to start looking good again!
IANAL, but have had lots of dealings with trademark in my job as a marketing weenie.
Remember the way trademark law works. If a company becomes aware of a trademark violation, they MUST take action. Why? Because if they do not, then when someone serious, like MS, appropriates the trademark, they can argue in court that you were not policing use of the trademark and so it can't be integral to your business. If a trademark is not integral to the business, then you can't hold that mark. It would be like cybersquatting.
So if any Tom, Dick or Jurgen in Germany turns up an instance of possible infringement, Adobe MUST act when they become aware of it. They don't have to compensate Tom, Dick or Jergen, but they DO have to issue a cease and desist to the person doing the infringing. As you can see, this legal setup means the only rational course for any business holding trademarks is to shoot first and ask questions later. Thus the obligatory cease and desist as the first gambit.
The problem is not why people won't pay for content. Why should they pay for content? They don't pay on radio or TV (PPV, etc. is not the same, you pay extra for 10% or 20% of your overall viewing).
The problem is advertising. It should be able to support websites that generate lots of traffic. But it doesn't. Internet advertising is where TV was in 1950. People reading radio scripts into the camera. As long as people try to re-invent existing ad media on the Internet, it will continue to fail. Banner ads, pop ups, broadband commercials. All crappy retooling of existing media. When the only goal of an ad is to get a click, then you have a really shitty ad.
When people figure out how to do things on the Internet that they can't do on a billboard or TV ad, then Internet advertising will take off. That's when we will start to see some good creative. And guess what? Good advertising needs good creative, not good technology, just like its always been.
The really big ad spenders are brand companies like Coke. When they start to spend 25% or 30% of their ad budget online, then thousands of sites will become self supporting. Then the marketplace will be one of real content and ideas, not hype and gloss.
Why would Coke spend that much online? Because that's where the people are. Why don't they now? Because Internet ads are completely inappropriate for their business model. Click throughs and the like do nothing for them. What are they going to do? Sell you a bottle of Coke online? Get you to sign up for mailing list so they can spam you? When sites can do effective brand advertising, then the Internet will become the most effective ad medium ever invented.
When that happens, paying for content will become irrelevant, except for "premium" content like porn or PPV stuff. Just like TV today.
"the enemy of my enemy is my friend"
I am pleased to see that the three organizations mentioned in the story are laughing this idiot off. Part of the fallout from so many articles about IP abuse on places like /. is that there are a lot of well informed netziens out there. This kind of tactic would have worked a charm two or three years ago. No longer.
So, if polls of people in various European countries in 1940 had consistently shown that people were in favour of persecuting Jews, would that have made concentration camps ok?