1. Make own song, 1 minute long (must be original, but quality not important). 2. Put it on youtube 3. Join PRS 4. Write a script to hit the page every minute 5. Profit! but not much... 0.085p x 1224 minutes per day = £1.04, minus PRS joining free of £10 and their 12.5% commission.
According to their commission rates, I guess this would come under 'broadcast blanket licensing' so the PRS gets 12.5% and the songwriter gets 87.5%. The PRS also takes a 1-off joining fee of £10, deductible from royalties.
I can do it for $4 not $31, and I already mentioned how.
CD Baby charge $4 per CD to do all the warehousing, shipping, website etc. that you listed. Multiply by 1000 and you get the "...$4,000 if you sell them all through a distributor like CD Baby" that I included in the parent post.
You ask why you can't make your own CDs as well... if you are going to be doing that, you might as well skip Amazon's on-demand manufacturing entirely, once you've got past the high set up cost for traditional pressing, the unit cost is far lower than Amazon's on-demand service offers.
Once you consider the manufacturing and distribution costs it doesn't look so bad. Compare it with CD Baby, who are an independent distributor, they take $4 per CD for warehousing and distribution, and you supply them with CDs which will cost you about $1 a pop to make in 'small band' quantities. You'll make a tiny bit more profit that way, but there is an up-front investment and the strong possibility of not breaking even to worry about.
While this looks good for low quantities, a lot of people don't like burned CD-Rs which these will probably be (but I'll hold off judgement on that until the service is launched).
If you are selling 1000CDs, the deal isn't so great. If you go direct to a pressing plant you can get 1000 CDs made for $999. If you match Amazon's $8.98 price, your profit will be $7,899 minus postage costs, which will be zero if you sell at your live gigs, or at most $4,000 if you sell them all through a distributor like CD Baby.
In comparison the Amazon deal would give you just $3590 profit (with postage paid), but you won't have any stock to sell at gigs or mail out for promotion unless you buy it at retail, you're limited to just the packaging they support (no gatefolds, digipacks, free postcards, signed copies, 2CD sets etc.), and unlike mailing them yourselves, you don't get to build up a mailing list of fan's addresses, which can be invaluable later in your carreer.
You make a lot of interesting points, I'll be interested to see how Mechscape (the new game from the Runescape people) pans out. They have solved the funding issue by using some of their huge warchest to set up a dev team as big a runescape has, and they have a history of adding lots of new content on a regular basis, and they are doing remarkable things in-browser. Full screen accelerated graphics were added to runescape last year - it's not as pretty as WoW, but it's pretty enough, and it's simplicity allows new content to be added almost every other week without price increases.
I'm not sure that they will make a WoW killer, but I think they have as good a chance as anyone, and I think that there's a big market for a sci-fi MMO game that isn't as hard-core as EVE.
Here's a big problem with this idea... Let's imagine you're a photographer who uses this new system, and asks for 8% of gross. I'm a printer, and I want to use your work. I have to give you 8% of gross for a birthday card made from your work, 96% of gross for a 12 month calendar using your work and 11 of your friends work, and illustrating an encyclopedia would cost me many times more than gross!
This is just the fine for doing this in the EU, I'm sure the courts in the rest of the world will be happy to add their own penalties for their own jurisdictions, and I'm sure that in many jurisdictions AMD (and other chip makers) will be able to claim damages too.
Office Max and Sam's Club are not in a monopoly position, so the laws on monopoly abuse don't affect them. If they became monopolies, they would indeed have to stop anticompetitive behaviour.
All the EU claims you must not do is leverage a monopoly position to crush your opposition, which is a very sensible law indeed.
It's not the finding them guilty that counts, it's the actually making them pay up and change their ways. The appeal process can be strung out almost indefinitely, as Microsoft have proved.
This is a list of application types that will be rejected. I think it's safe to assume there will also be a list of application content that will be rejected, which will cover the sort of things you mention.
I think it might be allowed, the wording isn't all that clear about it (so much for the question of clarity!). It prohibits apps that "replace, remove or modify the default dialer". Does this include alternate dialers that peacefully coexist with the default one? That depends how you interpret the word 'replace'.
Ignore the sensationalist headline, Microsoft's VOIP policy is actually the same as Apple's. VOIP is prohibited when it's over the mobile carrier's network, but it's allowed if it's not going over the mobile network.
This means the an app that only connects over wifi, like Skype for the iPhone, would be fine.
The top 2 things in the prohibited list are "Applications that link to, incent users to download, or otherwise promote alternate marketplaces" and "Applications that are or distribute alternate marketplaces".
This doesn't fill me with confidence about the future of alternatives to Microsoft's store, surely they must be envious of Apple's 30% cut of 1 billion app sales.
This isn't a particularly good test of plagiarism detection at all, since the data corpus is computer generated. Real-world plagiarism detection needs to take account of subject matter (correct answers to a physics paper will be less diverse than ones on wide ranging literary topics) and allowable duplication, such as quotations, restatement of the question, citations of sources, etc.
In Runescape, the difference was that gold seller controlled bots made it almost impossible for human players to compete for certain resources.
If you chose to ignore the fun parts of the game and did the boring grind through 60 levels of woodcutting in the free version of Runescape, you could eventually unlock the highly profitable ability to chop yew logs... but you'd find that every yew tree in the game was surrounded by dozens of bots, meaning you had little chance of actually getting any logs.
This has nothing to do with Jagex IP-banning gold sellers, they always did that. The reason so many players left Runescape is that when IP-banning wasn't working, Jagex made a massively unpopular decision to remove a huge portion of the gameplay in order to stop the gold sellers.
Overnight, it became impossible to kill other players and take their items, to give gifts of any substantial value, to sell items for prices more than 5% away from a value assigned by Jagex, to have duels for worthwhile stakes, and to do a lot of other things that would take a lot explaining such as the World 66 Laws company.
Basically, they threw so much of the game away that a large portion of their playerbase quit (I'm guessing much more that the 10% of paying members mentionied in the article), overnight it went from being a Massive Multiplayer Online Game to being a Massive Singleplayer Online Game with chat features. Even if (like me) you didn't enjoy the player vs player part of the game, the changes were very bad news, as much of the economy was based around making supplies for player vs player combat.
To parse that very badly written sentence, you need to know that Jagex calls subscribers 'members' and free players 'non-members'. What the article is trying to say is that is that they lost about 10% of their paying customers and 50% of their non-paying ones.
Could a couple of concerned US citizens set up a a test case and 'fully litigate' it in order to set a legal precedent?
I'm sure we could find a slashdotter who can write a song (quality unimportant), copyright it, and then have it pirated by another slashdotter and then press for RIAA style damages (which would be given back in the unlikely event of a win).
The problem with blocking kdawson is that you lose all the stories that are posted by kdawson. We don't want to get rid of the content, we just want to get rid of the editor.
Corporations dying or not is irrelevant, the right expires 95 years after the author dies, not the owner. The original reason for copyright extending beyond the author's life time was that back in the days before it was common for women to have jobs and for diseases to be curable the wives and children of authors would suffer a double blow if the author died, they would be widowed and deprived of their income, while the publishers would get a big financial bonus because they would no longer be paying royalties.
Given the way that pop records sell vastly more copies on the tragic death of the musician, coupled with the RIAA's known tendency towards evil, I really don't think that they should have a large financial incentive to encourage artists to become the next Tupac/Cobain/Hendrix/Joplin etc.
Personally, I'd go for 'copyright last x years after first publication, rights sold to coporations revert to the author if the work is not commercially exploited, rights reverted to the author expire quickly if the work is still not commercially exploited', and I'd say x should be around 30 to 50 ish.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Make own song, 1 minute long (must be original, but quality not important).
2. Put it on youtube
3. Join PRS
4. Write a script to hit the page every minute
5. Profit! but not much... 0.085p x 1224 minutes per day = £1.04, minus PRS joining free of £10 and their 12.5% commission.
According to their commission rates, I guess this would come under 'broadcast blanket licensing' so the PRS gets 12.5% and the songwriter gets 87.5%. The PRS also takes a 1-off joining fee of £10, deductible from royalties.
I can do it for $4 not $31, and I already mentioned how.
CD Baby charge $4 per CD to do all the warehousing, shipping, website etc. that you listed. Multiply by 1000 and you get the "...$4,000 if you sell them all through a distributor like CD Baby" that I included in the parent post.
You ask why you can't make your own CDs as well... if you are going to be doing that, you might as well skip Amazon's on-demand manufacturing entirely, once you've got past the high set up cost for traditional pressing, the unit cost is far lower than Amazon's on-demand service offers.
It's 40% of turnover, not of profit.
Once you consider the manufacturing and distribution costs it doesn't look so bad. Compare it with CD Baby, who are an independent distributor, they take $4 per CD for warehousing and distribution, and you supply them with CDs which will cost you about $1 a pop to make in 'small band' quantities. You'll make a tiny bit more profit that way, but there is an up-front investment and the strong possibility of not breaking even to worry about.
While this looks good for low quantities, a lot of people don't like burned CD-Rs which these will probably be (but I'll hold off judgement on that until the service is launched).
If you are selling 1000CDs, the deal isn't so great. If you go direct to a pressing plant you can get 1000 CDs made for $999. If you match Amazon's $8.98 price, your profit will be $7,899 minus postage costs, which will be zero if you sell at your live gigs, or at most $4,000 if you sell them all through a distributor like CD Baby.
In comparison the Amazon deal would give you just $3590 profit (with postage paid), but you won't have any stock to sell at gigs or mail out for promotion unless you buy it at retail, you're limited to just the packaging they support (no gatefolds, digipacks, free postcards, signed copies, 2CD sets etc.), and unlike mailing them yourselves, you don't get to build up a mailing list of fan's addresses, which can be invaluable later in your carreer.
Actually, that's an iTunes restriction that tunecore are passing on, and it only applies to the front cover artwork of the album.
You make a lot of interesting points, I'll be interested to see how Mechscape (the new game from the Runescape people) pans out. They have solved the funding issue by using some of their huge warchest to set up a dev team as big a runescape has, and they have a history of adding lots of new content on a regular basis, and they are doing remarkable things in-browser. Full screen accelerated graphics were added to runescape last year - it's not as pretty as WoW, but it's pretty enough, and it's simplicity allows new content to be added almost every other week without price increases.
I'm not sure that they will make a WoW killer, but I think they have as good a chance as anyone, and I think that there's a big market for a sci-fi MMO game that isn't as hard-core as EVE.
The second link in the article says yes, it is rechargeable.
Here's a big problem with this idea... Let's imagine you're a photographer who uses this new system, and asks for 8% of gross. I'm a printer, and I want to use your work. I have to give you 8% of gross for a birthday card made from your work, 96% of gross for a 12 month calendar using your work and 11 of your friends work, and illustrating an encyclopedia would cost me many times more than gross!
This is just the fine for doing this in the EU, I'm sure the courts in the rest of the world will be happy to add their own penalties for their own jurisdictions, and I'm sure that in many jurisdictions AMD (and other chip makers) will be able to claim damages too.
Office Max and Sam's Club are not in a monopoly position, so the laws on monopoly abuse don't affect them. If they became monopolies, they would indeed have to stop anticompetitive behaviour.
All the EU claims you must not do is leverage a monopoly position to crush your opposition, which is a very sensible law indeed.
It's not the finding them guilty that counts, it's the actually making them pay up and change their ways. The appeal process can be strung out almost indefinitely, as Microsoft have proved.
This is a list of application types that will be rejected. I think it's safe to assume there will also be a list of application content that will be rejected, which will cover the sort of things you mention.
I think it might be allowed, the wording isn't all that clear about it (so much for the question of clarity!). It prohibits apps that "replace, remove or modify the default dialer". Does this include alternate dialers that peacefully coexist with the default one? That depends how you interpret the word 'replace'.
Ignore the sensationalist headline, Microsoft's VOIP policy is actually the same as Apple's. VOIP is prohibited when it's over the mobile carrier's network, but it's allowed if it's not going over the mobile network.
This means the an app that only connects over wifi, like Skype for the iPhone, would be fine.
The top 2 things in the prohibited list are "Applications that link to, incent users to download, or otherwise promote alternate
marketplaces" and "Applications that are or distribute alternate marketplaces".
This doesn't fill me with confidence about the future of alternatives to Microsoft's store, surely they must be envious of Apple's 30% cut of 1 billion app sales.
This isn't a particularly good test of plagiarism detection at all, since the data corpus is computer generated. Real-world plagiarism detection needs to take account of subject matter (correct answers to a physics paper will be less diverse than ones on wide ranging literary topics) and allowable duplication, such as quotations, restatement of the question, citations of sources, etc.
In Runescape, the difference was that gold seller controlled bots made it almost impossible for human players to compete for certain resources.
If you chose to ignore the fun parts of the game and did the boring grind through 60 levels of woodcutting in the free version of Runescape, you could eventually unlock the highly profitable ability to chop yew logs... but you'd find that every yew tree in the game was surrounded by dozens of bots, meaning you had little chance of actually getting any logs.
This has nothing to do with Jagex IP-banning gold sellers, they always did that. The reason so many players left Runescape is that when IP-banning wasn't working, Jagex made a massively unpopular decision to remove a huge portion of the gameplay in order to stop the gold sellers.
Overnight, it became impossible to kill other players and take their items, to give gifts of any substantial value, to sell items for prices more than 5% away from a value assigned by Jagex, to have duels for worthwhile stakes, and to do a lot of other things that would take a lot explaining such as the World 66 Laws company.
Basically, they threw so much of the game away that a large portion of their playerbase quit (I'm guessing much more that the 10% of paying members mentionied in the article), overnight it went from being a Massive Multiplayer Online Game to being a Massive Singleplayer Online Game with chat features. Even if (like me) you didn't enjoy the player vs player part of the game, the changes were very bad news, as much of the economy was based around making supplies for player vs player combat.
To parse that very badly written sentence, you need to know that Jagex calls subscribers 'members' and free players 'non-members'. What the article is trying to say is that is that they lost about 10% of their paying customers and 50% of their non-paying ones.
Could a couple of concerned US citizens set up a a test case and 'fully litigate' it in order to set a legal precedent?
I'm sure we could find a slashdotter who can write a song (quality unimportant), copyright it, and then have it pirated by another slashdotter and then press for RIAA style damages (which would be given back in the unlikely event of a win).
The problem with blocking kdawson is that you lose all the stories that are posted by kdawson. We don't want to get rid of the content, we just want to get rid of the editor.
could have been worse, it's nearly MOOBBS
Or just wait until 2013 when the patent expires?
Corporations dying or not is irrelevant, the right expires 95 years after the author dies, not the owner. The original reason for copyright extending beyond the author's life time was that back in the days before it was common for women to have jobs and for diseases to be curable the wives and children of authors would suffer a double blow if the author died, they would be widowed and deprived of their income, while the publishers would get a big financial bonus because they would no longer be paying royalties.
Given the way that pop records sell vastly more copies on the tragic death of the musician, coupled with the RIAA's known tendency towards evil, I really don't think that they should have a large financial incentive to encourage artists to become the next Tupac/Cobain/Hendrix/Joplin etc.
Personally, I'd go for 'copyright last x years after first publication, rights sold to coporations revert to the author if the work is not commercially exploited, rights reverted to the author expire quickly if the work is still not commercially exploited', and I'd say x should be around 30 to 50 ish.