*sigh* The companies are not LOSING anything, their INCOME is reduced from a potential represented by the people who obtain the unlicensed copies. There is a very significant difference.
A numbers game: Say, a record is printed in 200,000 copies and sold in stores. These somehow manage to sell out, but in addition we assume 10,000 or so illegal downloaders obtain copies without paying for them (in this case they could not have anyway). Did the record company lose anything? No, they sold what they expected.
Now, if the company grossly overestimated sales and only 50k of those 200k copies sold, then the 10k illegal downloaders come inside the "range" of the 150k unsold records. However, instead of admitting their estimates were utter crap, executives now grab onto these downloaders as a decoy to remove the attention from their incompetence.
Getting the State to use the tax payer's money to aid in securing revenue to an industry comes very close to an indirect subsidy, if you ask me.
(Also: Pirates are evil people who raid ships in the China Sea and off the African coast. Abusing the term by applying it to people who leech off the industrial products of megacorporations is an insult to piracy victims.)
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly. It only makes sense the granter enforces it, like it enforces the monopolies to kill granted to those executing death sentences, by prosecuting unlicensed murderers.
Or in the case of sexual conduct with a teen under the age of consent: statutory rape.
(I just mention it because a lot of people think that doing that makes you a pedophile, but the latter are attracted to pre-pubertal children. Age of consent on the other hand varies from 12-21 around the world and thus is hard to use as a marking stick in that sense.)
That 3% (which is underestimated and old info - currently 5% is more correct) of a HUGE market FLOODED with vendors actually make them the third largest. Go figure.
If a scalper allowed you to get a ticket that you otherwise would not have, then they have added value.
But they didn't - they took it away from the place you would normally get it, i.e. the venue ticket office or another authorized seller. Then they added a delay where you had to wait for them to get the tickets and announce their scalping services in some totally different channel than the ticket office you would normally assume the ticket to be sold from. That's not "added value" that's "diminished value".
Of course, it could be you refer to not being able to get the ticket because of a background check that the scalper would not bother with, then yes you are right.
The only real solution would be to assign tickets to names, like they do for airplane tickets.
But the ticket is not a "thing", it's an access right to a venue. What if the initial sellers did a background check on the buyer, then the reseller did not and sold tickets to a family event to Joe Pedo? What if the item was a bottle of whiskey, why should there be laws against selling that to a 13-year old? Free enterprise for the win!
You see, the right to private enterprise is not the same as the right to insert yourself as a leech between a seller and the real customer, nor to resell a restricted good in an unrestricted way. Such "scammers" are nothing better than a street mugger or those roadblocks you encounter in less civilized countries where policemen or soldiers add to their income by requesting a "fee" for letting you through.
That's totally irrelevant to the subject. I cannot "supply" more tickets to a venue than there are seats (and I am sure the venue owners would not accept my home-made tickets anyway). And if there is an excess demand there will not be more seats either. So there is no free market. (Of course, capitalism - maximizing profits and amassing wealth - is the antithesis to a free market anyway.)
The theoretical ideal free market is one where an infinite number of customers have perfect knowledge of the unlimited products from an infinite number of suppliers. In this market, goods are by necessity sold at cost and hence zero profits. The further you get from this ideal, the less free a market is.
For tickets, there are a limited number of suppliers (one per venue), a limited number of products (the seats), and a limited time in which it is sold (until game start). So, very non-free.
What ticket scalpers do is to insert themselves as middlemen that benefit neither supplier nor end customer. To prevent that from happening, you need government regulation, the same way you need government to provide the police to stop the "enterprise" of street muggers.
They team doesn't care about whether or not fans can buy tickets. The team cares about making money and having control.
The team cares about filling aisles with fans who spend their extra money on all the stuff sold at the venue. If that money instead is given to a scalper who ADDS NO FUCKING VALUE then they lose out, and the fans lose out.
Also: A ticket is not property, it's a license, or a right of entry.
No, you are reducing the purchaser's dispensable income and hence how much they will spend on drinks, food and other things sold at the stadium. You are just enriching the hoarder. You might as well argue that street muggings increase wealth in society just because it changes owner. But there is no value added in any of those cases which is what wealth increase is supposed to be.
Also: Sports teams and venue owners - often one and the same - do NOT want the empty seats resulting from non-fan hoarders who did not manage to sell their tickets.
If the gougers did not hoard tickets for resale, those tickets WOULD be available for purchase. It's precisely because non-fans bought them that they are unavailable to fans.
Yes but unless I remember wrong, Usenet servers use static routing for their store-and-forward and thus taking out the most central hubs would create "islands" until the routing was changed to target servers that were still up.
You mean in the "if there aren't ads every five minutes when will I find the time to pee" sense I guess? Well, you are supposed to watch the ads, dammit!
It's a myth that you need to make an extra effort to make information available both as a good-looking web site and as a more basic presentation like a text-only browser. HTML has been designed from the beginning to allow degrading of presentation. And we are talking about businesses that spend tons more on traditional media ads anyway. Spending a few more dollars to adhere to law A is no different from spending money to adhere to law B (like SOX).
And these days, with CSS and all that jazz, that is even easier to make one degrading version than it used to be.
By the way, is this still Slashdot? I thought the "require Javascript" and "require Flash" ideas were heresy here...
And what if it wasn't "blind users" but "non-IE users"? Would it be acceptable to require you to quit Firefox and fire up IE to see the content?
You should pray they don't stop designing web sites for stupid people. Why do you accept that web DUH-signers wrap textual content in some Flash application? Perhaps you laugh at people who read books instead of just watching movies as well?
Slashdot Mirror
... but hookers are "physical satisfaction consultants" now.
I get so confused.
genetically Semitic
It's a language group, but who's arguing.
Because Slashdotters of today aren't the Slashdotters of yesteryear, that was a reference to George Orwell's 1984.
*sigh* The companies are not LOSING anything, their INCOME is reduced from a potential represented by the people who obtain the unlicensed copies. There is a very significant difference.
A numbers game: Say, a record is printed in 200,000 copies and sold in stores. These somehow manage to sell out, but in addition we assume 10,000 or so illegal downloaders obtain copies without paying for them (in this case they could not have anyway). Did the record company lose anything? No, they sold what they expected.
Now, if the company grossly overestimated sales and only 50k of those 200k copies sold, then the 10k illegal downloaders come inside the "range" of the 150k unsold records. However, instead of admitting their estimates were utter crap, executives now grab onto these downloaders as a decoy to remove the attention from their incompetence.
Getting the State to use the tax payer's money to aid in securing revenue to an industry comes very close to an indirect subsidy, if you ask me.
(Also: Pirates are evil people who raid ships in the China Sea and off the African coast. Abusing the term by applying it to people who leech off the industrial products of megacorporations is an insult to piracy victims.)
Copyright is a government-granted monopoly. It only makes sense the granter enforces it, like it enforces the monopolies to kill granted to those executing death sentences, by prosecuting unlicensed murderers.
Or in the case of sexual conduct with a teen under the age of consent: statutory rape.
(I just mention it because a lot of people think that doing that makes you a pedophile, but the latter are attracted to pre-pubertal children. Age of consent on the other hand varies from 12-21 around the world and thus is hard to use as a marking stick in that sense.)
WHY IS A TEN YEAR OLD EATING HER TOYS !??
....
1. She was peckish.
2. Hormone-like additives had brought about puberty early, she had PMS and acted irrationally.
3.
4. She profited!
You are thinking of Washington, D.C.
"I am sorry, dear voter, I cannot recall that campaign promise."
He would have to be Swedish (sex = six) not German (sechs = six).
(and quite successful EVE hacker)
Thanks for reminding me why I left that sorry excuse for an Excel spreadsheet with an animated background.
That 3% (which is underestimated and old info - currently 5% is more correct) of a HUGE market FLOODED with vendors actually make them the third largest. Go figure.
I am sure lap dancers would prefer paper notes to coins. If that's what the clerk was thinking of.
And hey, who wouldn't be?
So you prefer to be an accomplice to fraud? Are you perhaps in the Mob and hold friendships above the law?
If a scalper allowed you to get a ticket that you otherwise would not have, then they have added value.
But they didn't - they took it away from the place you would normally get it, i.e. the venue ticket office or another authorized seller. Then they added a delay where you had to wait for them to get the tickets and announce their scalping services in some totally different channel than the ticket office you would normally assume the ticket to be sold from. That's not "added value" that's "diminished value".
Of course, it could be you refer to not being able to get the ticket because of a background check that the scalper would not bother with, then yes you are right.
The only real solution would be to assign tickets to names, like they do for airplane tickets.
But the ticket is not a "thing", it's an access right to a venue. What if the initial sellers did a background check on the buyer, then the reseller did not and sold tickets to a family event to Joe Pedo? What if the item was a bottle of whiskey, why should there be laws against selling that to a 13-year old? Free enterprise for the win!
You see, the right to private enterprise is not the same as the right to insert yourself as a leech between a seller and the real customer, nor to resell a restricted good in an unrestricted way. Such "scammers" are nothing better than a street mugger or those roadblocks you encounter in less civilized countries where policemen or soldiers add to their income by requesting a "fee" for letting you through.
Supply and demand.
That's totally irrelevant to the subject. I cannot "supply" more tickets to a venue than there are seats (and I am sure the venue owners would not accept my home-made tickets anyway). And if there is an excess demand there will not be more seats either. So there is no free market. (Of course, capitalism - maximizing profits and amassing wealth - is the antithesis to a free market anyway.)
The theoretical ideal free market is one where an infinite number of customers have perfect knowledge of the unlimited products from an infinite number of suppliers. In this market, goods are by necessity sold at cost and hence zero profits. The further you get from this ideal, the less free a market is.
For tickets, there are a limited number of suppliers (one per venue), a limited number of products (the seats), and a limited time in which it is sold (until game start). So, very non-free.
What ticket scalpers do is to insert themselves as middlemen that benefit neither supplier nor end customer. To prevent that from happening, you need government regulation, the same way you need government to provide the police to stop the "enterprise" of street muggers.
They team doesn't care about whether or not fans can buy tickets. The team cares about making money and having control.
The team cares about filling aisles with fans who spend their extra money on all the stuff sold at the venue. If that money instead is given to a scalper who ADDS NO FUCKING VALUE then they lose out, and the fans lose out.
Also: A ticket is not property, it's a license, or a right of entry.
No, you are reducing the purchaser's dispensable income and hence how much they will spend on drinks, food and other things sold at the stadium. You are just enriching the hoarder. You might as well argue that street muggings increase wealth in society just because it changes owner. But there is no value added in any of those cases which is what wealth increase is supposed to be.
Also: Sports teams and venue owners - often one and the same - do NOT want the empty seats resulting from non-fan hoarders who did not manage to sell their tickets.
If the gougers did not hoard tickets for resale, those tickets WOULD be available for purchase. It's precisely because non-fans bought them that they are unavailable to fans.
Yes but unless I remember wrong, Usenet servers use static routing for their store-and-forward and thus taking out the most central hubs would create "islands" until the routing was changed to target servers that were still up.
copywrited music
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/miss_spellings
You mean in the "if there aren't ads every five minutes when will I find the time to pee" sense I guess? Well, you are supposed to watch the ads, dammit!
It's a myth that you need to make an extra effort to make information available both as a good-looking web site and as a more basic presentation like a text-only browser. HTML has been designed from the beginning to allow degrading of presentation. And we are talking about businesses that spend tons more on traditional media ads anyway. Spending a few more dollars to adhere to law A is no different from spending money to adhere to law B (like SOX).
And these days, with CSS and all that jazz, that is even easier to make one degrading version than it used to be.
By the way, is this still Slashdot? I thought the "require Javascript" and "require Flash" ideas were heresy here...
And what if it wasn't "blind users" but "non-IE users"? Would it be acceptable to require you to quit Firefox and fire up IE to see the content?
You should pray they don't stop designing web sites for stupid people. Why do you accept that web DUH-signers wrap textual content in some Flash application? Perhaps you laugh at people who read books instead of just watching movies as well?