Sorry dude, but there's nothing wrong with the law differentiating between me lighting a bag of dogshit on your doorstep and me lighting a burning cross on your lawn.
In the absence of 'hate crime' laws, planting a burning cross on a black family's lawn is little more than mischief. That's probably not appropriate.
And there's nothing wrong with the law differentiating between you picking a fight in a bar with a guy because he hit on your girlfriend versus picking a fight with a guy because you don't like [fill-in-the-blank-minority group].
Calling this 'thought crime' is not really fair, as all we're talking about is the degree and type of criminal intent. Like how the big difference between first and second degree murder is premeditation. Does that make the distinction of first-degree murder 'thought crime' too?
Well, it's true that while socialism and fascism seem like opposite ends on one particular spectrum, on the other hand, if you compare on a scale of "totalitarianism vs freedom", it turns out that the "left wing" in some countries like the USSR has more in common with the right-wing hard liners in another country.
"Unions, safety regulations, and some smart employers(Like Mr. Ford) combined with a labor crunch changed that, at least for a while.
Then hiring US citizens became too expensive and stuff was outsourced to other countries where the old conditions prevailed because it was cheaper."
That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that as trade barriers were reduced, our system of "globalization" has essentially institutionalized what we used to call "dumping".
The combination of trade treaties and telecommunications has made it easy for employers/companies to shop around for a jurisdiction. Somehow, we in North America have been convinced that the destruction of our manufacturing sector in exchange for cheap chinese-manufactured goods at wal-mart is a good deal.
You know when guys like Adam Smith were writing, it was assumed, it went without saying, that labor was mobile and capital (mostly was in the form of land back then) wasn't. Now, capital is mobile and labor isn't. That's probably worth thinking about.
Um, sorry, we've signed that treaty, but we haven't _ratified_ it. Just like the Kyoto protocol. When any government of Canada decides to take steps to ratify Kyoto, talk to me about the WIPO treaty.
All your discussion of broadcasters and exclusive rights seems a bit sophistic to me, sort of a 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' argument.
All I'm saying is, in terms of the actual consequences, I can download a show, and have a private, non-commercial-use copy of it, or I can have essentially the same thing by downloading it.
The levy doesn't cover me RIGHT NOW for tv/video, the copyright board has never addressed the question, so one might make the argument the jury's still out. They made no reference to tv/video at all, yay or nay.
I think they'll eventually address that question, so we'll have to wait and see. I'm prepared to eat some crow if they answer 'nay'.
But, again, I ask you - what's the difference between me downloading a TV show vs me recording it on my VCR? Movies, different story, but I fail to see the substantive difference.
Well, to clarify, all I meant by 'movies don't have a piracy problem' is that ticket sales are still quite strong, despite complaints of declining quality in recent years.
So, since there's no way to 'pirate' the experience of "seeing it on the big screen", the industry faces no threat from piracy. If the home video industry didn't exist (which, incidentally was what Jack Valenti and the MPAA first asked for, with the betamax suit) , the movie industry would still be fine. People will still go to the movies. So, unless something changes to fuck with the economics of operating a theater, the movie industry is safe as a church.
Yep, Carl Sagan made a similar argument in "contact", the idea that companies (for example, pepsi vs coke) spend millions convincing people to buy one product over the other, when both in fact are nearly identical. If they didn't spend a fortune on advertising, maybe they'd, y'know, like, actually put that money into making a better product?
I seem to recall that Buckminster Fuller made a similar argument, but I can't remember where, I could be wrong.
This is just one more reason why I think the way copyright/pirating/infringement debate will be settled will be a statutory/compulsory license, using the radio airplay royalty system as an inspiration, you pay it as a surcharge on your ISP bill. I don't see that you'll ever be able to stop pirating of TV shows/movies/music. Now, that's not a problem for movies, ticket sales continue to be strong, but the other two? They're going to be in trouble eventually.
So, we can either interfere in the free market and civil liberties of everybody with a compulsory "Trusted/Treacherous Computing" model, or we can just pay an extra 10 bucks or whatever on our ISP bills.
Of course, copyright holders/owners don't want this, because they don't want any discussion of 'fairness' when it comes to pricing. For a compulsory license to work, they'll have to forget about charging the same amount for 2 episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" as you'd pay for a 2-hour movie that cost 150 million to make.
You can see the same attitude in how the record labels fought against the 'flat rate of 99 cents' for ITMS. (which, IMO, is still about 2 or 3 times too much...)
Well, IANAL, this is not legal advice, YMMV, but one might make the case that at the time that the copyright board expressly stated that downloading of _music_ was permitted, that downloading of video files was not yet as common in Canada as it is now, so the copyright board didn't address that question, and that if they were to do so, they might rule the same way for video files as they did for music.
Really, on an ethical/moral level, what's the difference between somebody downloading last week's episode of "house" and setting my VCR to record it?
Sure, there's a lot of slashbots who might see profits as evil, but surely you don't honestly suggest that there's nothing wrong with anti-trust/restraint of trade behaviors?
I'm sick and tired of this attitude that "we're in business to make money, so that's all that matters, and we have to make as much as possible" being used as excuse to somehow exempt people in business from any discussion of ethics or morality.
If all that matters is maximizing investor return, then why don't AT & T and Verizon sell crack, too? Or import Russian prostitutes?
Here, here. I can't stand this idea that by saying "it's just business" you get to absolve yourself of any discussion of ethics. People are essentially asserting that, by saying 'it's just intelligent business' that you ought to be able to operate in an atmosphere of applied amorality.
As much as many of his stuff annoys the hell out of me, Michael Moore had a line one time about "why doesn't Chrysler sell crack?"
When a company does something unethical, they say they have not just a right but a responsibility to maximize return for shareholders. So, if that's all that matters, why not sell crack? Or heroin, or Russian hookers, for that matter?
The obvious answer is that we as a society have decided (granted this is not perfect) that certain behaviors are so harmful or immoral or unethical that we say "nobody is allowed to do this", which is perfectly reasonable in a democracy.
Now, we could have a lot of room for debate over what exactly should or should not be allowed, but I'm sick and tired of people taking the approach that businesses should operate in a morality/ethics-free zone.
Seems like a pretty sound idea. I told a friend of mine about Dexter, she downloaded the first episode or 2, loved it, and bought the season 1 DVDs.
A friend of mine, who actually works as a club DJ on the side, and probably owns 10,000 CDs, describes a similar process by which he downloads music to check it out, and if he likes it, buys it.
On a similar note, I heard one of the musicians for the Canadian band Broken Social Scene interviewed on CBC radio. He said that thanks to P2P, almost before they even had an album released, they had enough of a fan base in Europe to tour 5 or 10 European cities.
There's some Dickens line about "reducing the sum total of human existence, from cradle to grave, to nothing more than a bargain across a counter."
Scary how much the early 21st century looks like the 'gilded age' around the late 19th Century/early 20th, isn't it? Never mind that in terms of geopoltics, the same is true.
Change the British Empire to the USA, and the 20th century ends basically the same as it begun, just with more internet porn. So there's that, at least...
Where he suggests that technophobes in congress didn't understand the technology, and they were somehow sold the bogus bill of goods that IP like music/movies/software would somehow be more important than say, the manufacturing sector. Or, as doctorow phrased it, "as if 'police academy' sequels would somehow replace the rust belt in the US economy."
Given that there were powerful interests at work at the time that really really liked the idea of replacing UAW workers with slave labor in China, this was a convenient thing for lots of people to believe.
Two friends of mine, married couple, (actually ex-housemates) both work in film/TV. He's an actor, she's a producer/writer/occasional actor.
The two of them are both non-technical people, to say the least. And they both by into the propaganda that OMG those dirty pirates! They're going to take our jobs!
Besides, hollywood movies don't have a piracy problem. TV and music industries do, but the business of making a movie, just counting revenue from ticket sales and nothing else, is safe as a church, because there's no way to pirate "seeing a movie in a theater". The whole industry, from the guys setting up the buffet tables to the CEOs at the top has been in the past, and can be in the future, supported by that revenue stream.
Home video makes it such that it's almost impossible for a major movie to lose money, all funny accounting "forrest gump didn't break even" aside.
And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that under capitalism, risk and rewards should be proportional. The idea of a risk-free enterprise sounds more like socialism to me, eh?
And, according to the Competition Board (sort of the Canadian equivalent of the FTC) private non-commercial downloading is perfectly legal in Canada.
And whether or not it's immoral is a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact. Given that I could just as easily record most of those shows from over-the-air TV signals on my VCR or DVR, I fail to see how it's immoral. Unless you're making the assertion that by not watching ads on a TV show is immoral?
That aside, I'd be perfectly OK with renting or buying the DVD's of the above shows, were downloading not available somehow.
On top of which, I don't think it's my distorted perspective that brings me to wonder if we'd be better off without TV advertising, because I lived without TV entirely from about 1999 to 2001, and did exactly zero downloading then. And I still felt the same way then on the subject of the effects of TV advertising.
Greg Egan had a line in one of his books where a character remarked that "a race that possesses that particular psychopathology of capacity for warfare developing interstellar travel wasn't exactly _impossible_, but trying to imagine how it could happen would be sort of like imagining a virus developing atomic weaponry."
And, given some things that may be root causes of warfare (greed, zero-sum games, power drives, geometric population growth, archaic/barbaric economic systems), I'm not sure he's wrong.
So, the statement "aggressive civilizations destroy themselves and/or never develop interstellar travel" is either true or false. (my personal conjecture/bet is that it's true).
If it's false, then if there's a civilization out there w/interstellar travel, that's aggressive, there won't ever be anything we can do about it. So not much point worrying about it.
Good point, that's true, still not 60 min, but still better than network TV. And the lack of interruptions is very, very nice.
Personally, I get most of my TV shows (BSG/Dexter/The wire/Sopranos/the office/30 rock) from bittorent. And speaking as somebody who just recently gave up my cable TV, I can't help but wonder if we'd be better off if the whole TV advertising industry went the way of the dodo.
Nothing's really been proven, but there's been some psych studies that have suggest that the deliberate manipulation of your emotions/unconscious motivations by the advertising industry may not be good for society as a whole. I mean, can it be good for a democracy to have regular doses of messages telling you to not trust your own judgment, and that you'll be happier if you just buy [product X]?
And that's without even discussing the impact that the huge high cost of TV advertising has on elections. I can't remember where I heard this (or verify it's veracity) but the statistic I heard was that a US senator needs to raise $10,000 a day every day he's in washington to pay for his re-election. So there's definitely a relationship between the high cost of TV advertising and how beholden politicians are to monied interests.
First let me say how I envy you for having a decent radio station... Although a news-junkie like me tends to listen to CBC mostly up here in the great white north...
But anyways...
Yeah, you're absolutely right, it's the desire to squeeze every single last drop of revenue. Which, I suspect, is why the best shows on the air (my personal vote is for "The Wire" and "Dexter") have been HBO/showcase et. al., 1 hour timeslot really means basically 1 hour that way.
A bit off topic, but didn't the royalty system for radio airplay have to be enforced on copyright holders by the government?
My prediction is, eventually, a compulsory license will be the only way.
You probably can't stop piracy short of Trusted Computing, and that's if and only if trusted computing turns out to be 'unhackable', which history shows is probably unlikely. And the down sides to Trusted Computing aren't worth it anyway.
So, eventually, the only way is a flat fee compulsory license that is tacked onto your ISP bill. Then some system of measuring "# of downloads per show/song/movie", distribute funds accordingly.
Now, the elephant in the room is, this may lead to a situation where meat-puppets who won a genetic lottery that makes them nice to look at will not be making 7 and 8-figure salaries for a movie that takes less than a year to shoot.
Historically, actors and musicians were somewhere between working class types and prostitutes, on the social status ladder. It may end up returning to that eventually. Same with producers and directors etc. These guys seem to think that they're entitled to office space at 100 bucks/sq. ft, private planes, and 7-figure salaries, like it's in the constitution or something.
You'd then be in the same boat as commercial radio - they've made a product so crappy that not only will people not use it for free, they'll pay 10-15 bucks a month to use something else.
Guess it just goes to show that, human society might get electricity and indoor plumbing and internet porn and cell phones, but we really haven't changed that much.
Neither the church, nor anybody else said the world is flat.
I can't site exactly where, (a friend of mine's a history phd) but there's a passage in one of Thomas Aquino's works where he says something like "...We know this as surely as we know the world is round."
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry dude, but there's nothing wrong with the law differentiating between me lighting a bag of dogshit on your doorstep and me lighting a burning cross on your lawn.
In the absence of 'hate crime' laws, planting a burning cross on a black family's lawn is little more than mischief. That's probably not appropriate.
And there's nothing wrong with the law differentiating between you picking a fight in a bar with a guy because he hit on your girlfriend versus picking a fight with a guy because you don't like [fill-in-the-blank-minority group].
Calling this 'thought crime' is not really fair, as all we're talking about is the degree and type of criminal intent. Like how the big difference between first and second degree murder is premeditation. Does that make the distinction of first-degree murder 'thought crime' too?
Well, it's true that while socialism and fascism seem like opposite ends on one particular spectrum, on the other hand, if you compare on a scale of "totalitarianism vs freedom", it turns out that the "left wing" in some countries like the USSR has more in common with the right-wing hard liners in another country.
Ever see this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism
Yeah, actually, that's bang-on analysis.
Sounds more like Italy under Mussolini or Chile under Pinochet than the USSR under Stalin.
I will consider myself adequately chastised!
"Unions, safety regulations, and some smart employers(Like Mr. Ford) combined with a labor crunch changed that, at least for a while. Then hiring US citizens became too expensive and stuff was outsourced to other countries where the old conditions prevailed because it was cheaper."
That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that as trade barriers were reduced, our system of "globalization" has essentially institutionalized what we used to call "dumping".
The combination of trade treaties and telecommunications has made it easy for employers/companies to shop around for a jurisdiction. Somehow, we in North America have been convinced that the destruction of our manufacturing sector in exchange for cheap chinese-manufactured goods at wal-mart is a good deal.
You know when guys like Adam Smith were writing, it was assumed, it went without saying, that labor was mobile and capital (mostly was in the form of land back then) wasn't. Now, capital is mobile and labor isn't. That's probably worth thinking about.
"Berne Convention/WIPO treaty signatory status"
Um, sorry, we've signed that treaty, but we haven't _ratified_ it. Just like the Kyoto protocol. When any government of Canada decides to take steps to ratify Kyoto, talk to me about the WIPO treaty.
All your discussion of broadcasters and exclusive rights seems a bit sophistic to me, sort of a 'how many angels can dance on the head of a pin' argument.
All I'm saying is, in terms of the actual consequences, I can download a show, and have a private, non-commercial-use copy of it, or I can have essentially the same thing by downloading it.
The levy doesn't cover me RIGHT NOW for tv/video, the copyright board has never addressed the question, so one might make the argument the jury's still out. They made no reference to tv/video at all, yay or nay.
I think they'll eventually address that question, so we'll have to wait and see. I'm prepared to eat some crow if they answer 'nay'.
But, again, I ask you - what's the difference between me downloading a TV show vs me recording it on my VCR? Movies, different story, but I fail to see the substantive difference.
Well, to clarify, all I meant by 'movies don't have a piracy problem' is that ticket sales are still quite strong, despite complaints of declining quality in recent years.
So, since there's no way to 'pirate' the experience of "seeing it on the big screen", the industry faces no threat from piracy. If the home video industry didn't exist (which, incidentally was what Jack Valenti and the MPAA first asked for, with the betamax suit) , the movie industry would still be fine. People will still go to the movies. So, unless something changes to fuck with the economics of operating a theater, the movie industry is safe as a church.
Scott Adams said something about 'as soon as robot sex or virtual reality becomes cheaper than dating, humanity has ~1 generation left'.
Yep, Carl Sagan made a similar argument in "contact", the idea that companies (for example, pepsi vs coke) spend millions convincing people to buy one product over the other, when both in fact are nearly identical. If they didn't spend a fortune on advertising, maybe they'd, y'know, like, actually put that money into making a better product?
I seem to recall that Buckminster Fuller made a similar argument, but I can't remember where, I could be wrong.
This is just one more reason why I think the way copyright/pirating/infringement debate will be settled will be a statutory/compulsory license, using the radio airplay royalty system as an inspiration, you pay it as a surcharge on your ISP bill. I don't see that you'll ever be able to stop pirating of TV shows/movies/music. Now, that's not a problem for movies, ticket sales continue to be strong, but the other two? They're going to be in trouble eventually.
So, we can either interfere in the free market and civil liberties of everybody with a compulsory "Trusted/Treacherous Computing" model, or we can just pay an extra 10 bucks or whatever on our ISP bills.
Of course, copyright holders/owners don't want this, because they don't want any discussion of 'fairness' when it comes to pricing. For a compulsory license to work, they'll have to forget about charging the same amount for 2 episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" as you'd pay for a 2-hour movie that cost 150 million to make.
You can see the same attitude in how the record labels fought against the 'flat rate of 99 cents' for ITMS. (which, IMO, is still about 2 or 3 times too much...)
Well, IANAL, this is not legal advice, YMMV, but one might make the case that at the time that the copyright board expressly stated that downloading of _music_ was permitted, that downloading of video files was not yet as common in Canada as it is now, so the copyright board didn't address that question, and that if they were to do so, they might rule the same way for video files as they did for music.
Really, on an ethical/moral level, what's the difference between somebody downloading last week's episode of "house" and setting my VCR to record it?
Oh, gimme a break.
Sure, there's a lot of slashbots who might see profits as evil, but surely you don't honestly suggest that there's nothing wrong with anti-trust/restraint of trade behaviors?
I'm sick and tired of this attitude that "we're in business to make money, so that's all that matters, and we have to make as much as possible" being used as excuse to somehow exempt people in business from any discussion of ethics or morality.
If all that matters is maximizing investor return, then why don't AT & T and Verizon sell crack, too? Or import Russian prostitutes?
Here, here. I can't stand this idea that by saying "it's just business" you get to absolve yourself of any discussion of ethics. People are essentially asserting that, by saying 'it's just intelligent business' that you ought to be able to operate in an atmosphere of applied amorality.
As much as many of his stuff annoys the hell out of me, Michael Moore had a line one time about "why doesn't Chrysler sell crack?"
When a company does something unethical, they say they have not just a right but a responsibility to maximize return for shareholders. So, if that's all that matters, why not sell crack? Or heroin, or Russian hookers, for that matter?
The obvious answer is that we as a society have decided (granted this is not perfect) that certain behaviors are so harmful or immoral or unethical that we say "nobody is allowed to do this", which is perfectly reasonable in a democracy.
Now, we could have a lot of room for debate over what exactly should or should not be allowed, but I'm sick and tired of people taking the approach that businesses should operate in a morality/ethics-free zone.
Seems like a pretty sound idea. I told a friend of mine about Dexter, she downloaded the first episode or 2, loved it, and bought the season 1 DVDs.
A friend of mine, who actually works as a club DJ on the side, and probably owns 10,000 CDs, describes a similar process by which he downloads music to check it out, and if he likes it, buys it.
On a similar note, I heard one of the musicians for the Canadian band Broken Social Scene interviewed on CBC radio. He said that thanks to P2P, almost before they even had an album released, they had enough of a fan base in Europe to tour 5 or 10 European cities.
There's some Dickens line about "reducing the sum total of human existence, from cradle to grave, to nothing more than a bargain across a counter."
Scary how much the early 21st century looks like the 'gilded age' around the late 19th Century/early 20th, isn't it? Never mind that in terms of geopoltics, the same is true.
Change the British Empire to the USA, and the 20th century ends basically the same as it begun, just with more internet porn. So there's that, at least...
In this column:
http://informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199903173
Where he suggests that technophobes in congress didn't understand the technology, and they were somehow sold the bogus bill of goods that IP like music/movies/software would somehow be more important than say, the manufacturing sector. Or, as doctorow phrased it, "as if 'police academy' sequels would somehow replace the rust belt in the US economy."
Given that there were powerful interests at work at the time that really really liked the idea of replacing UAW workers with slave labor in China, this was a convenient thing for lots of people to believe.
Two friends of mine, married couple, (actually ex-housemates) both work in film/TV. He's an actor, she's a producer/writer/occasional actor.
The two of them are both non-technical people, to say the least. And they both by into the propaganda that OMG those dirty pirates! They're going to take our jobs!
Besides, hollywood movies don't have a piracy problem. TV and music industries do, but the business of making a movie, just counting revenue from ticket sales and nothing else, is safe as a church, because there's no way to pirate "seeing a movie in a theater". The whole industry, from the guys setting up the buffet tables to the CEOs at the top has been in the past, and can be in the future, supported by that revenue stream.
Home video makes it such that it's almost impossible for a major movie to lose money, all funny accounting "forrest gump didn't break even" aside.
And, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that under capitalism, risk and rewards should be proportional. The idea of a risk-free enterprise sounds more like socialism to me, eh?
"Your opinion is based on a perverted perspective - you're getting the stuff for free by doing something illegal and immoral. "
I have to take exception to that assertion, because, like everybody else in Canada, I'm paying for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Canada
And, according to the Competition Board (sort of the Canadian equivalent of the FTC) private non-commercial downloading is perfectly legal in Canada.
And whether or not it's immoral is a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact. Given that I could just as easily record most of those shows from over-the-air TV signals on my VCR or DVR, I fail to see how it's immoral. Unless you're making the assertion that by not watching ads on a TV show is immoral?
That aside, I'd be perfectly OK with renting or buying the DVD's of the above shows, were downloading not available somehow.
On top of which, I don't think it's my distorted perspective that brings me to wonder if we'd be better off without TV advertising, because I lived without TV entirely from about 1999 to 2001, and did exactly zero downloading then. And I still felt the same way then on the subject of the effects of TV advertising.
Greg Egan had a line in one of his books where a character remarked that "a race that possesses that particular psychopathology of capacity for warfare developing interstellar travel wasn't exactly _impossible_, but trying to imagine how it could happen would be sort of like imagining a virus developing atomic weaponry."
And, given some things that may be root causes of warfare (greed, zero-sum games, power drives, geometric population growth, archaic/barbaric economic systems), I'm not sure he's wrong.
So, the statement "aggressive civilizations destroy themselves and/or never develop interstellar travel" is either true or false. (my personal conjecture/bet is that it's true).
If it's false, then if there's a civilization out there w/interstellar travel, that's aggressive, there won't ever be anything we can do about it. So not much point worrying about it.
Good point, that's true, still not 60 min, but still better than network TV. And the lack of interruptions is very, very nice.
Personally, I get most of my TV shows (BSG/Dexter/The wire/Sopranos/the office/30 rock) from bittorent. And speaking as somebody who just recently gave up my cable TV, I can't help but wonder if we'd be better off if the whole TV advertising industry went the way of the dodo.
Nothing's really been proven, but there's been some psych studies that have suggest that the deliberate manipulation of your emotions/unconscious motivations by the advertising industry may not be good for society as a whole. I mean, can it be good for a democracy to have regular doses of messages telling you to not trust your own judgment, and that you'll be happier if you just buy [product X]?
And that's without even discussing the impact that the huge high cost of TV advertising has on elections. I can't remember where I heard this (or verify it's veracity) but the statistic I heard was that a US senator needs to raise $10,000 a day every day he's in washington to pay for his re-election. So there's definitely a relationship between the high cost of TV advertising and how beholden politicians are to monied interests.
First let me say how I envy you for having a decent radio station... Although a news-junkie like me tends to listen to CBC mostly up here in the great white north...
But anyways...
Yeah, you're absolutely right, it's the desire to squeeze every single last drop of revenue. Which, I suspect, is why the best shows on the air (my personal vote is for "The Wire" and "Dexter") have been HBO/showcase et. al., 1 hour timeslot really means basically 1 hour that way.
A bit off topic, but didn't the royalty system for radio airplay have to be enforced on copyright holders by the government?
My prediction is, eventually, a compulsory license will be the only way.
You probably can't stop piracy short of Trusted Computing, and that's if and only if trusted computing turns out to be 'unhackable', which history shows is probably unlikely. And the down sides to Trusted Computing aren't worth it anyway.
So, eventually, the only way is a flat fee compulsory license that is tacked onto your ISP bill. Then some system of measuring "# of downloads per show/song/movie", distribute funds accordingly.
Now, the elephant in the room is, this may lead to a situation where meat-puppets who won a genetic lottery that makes them nice to look at will not be making 7 and 8-figure salaries for a movie that takes less than a year to shoot.
Historically, actors and musicians were somewhere between working class types and prostitutes, on the social status ladder. It may end up returning to that eventually. Same with producers and directors etc. These guys seem to think that they're entitled to office space at 100 bucks/sq. ft, private planes, and 7-figure salaries, like it's in the constitution or something.
You'd then be in the same boat as commercial radio - they've made a product so crappy that not only will people not use it for free, they'll pay 10-15 bucks a month to use something else.
Guess it just goes to show that, human society might get electricity and indoor plumbing and internet porn and cell phones, but we really haven't changed that much.
Damn fine wikipedia-ing!
Oh, bullshit.
Neither the church, nor anybody else said the world is flat.
I can't site exactly where, (a friend of mine's a history phd) but there's a passage in one of Thomas Aquino's works where he says something like "...We know this as surely as we know the world is round."