I agree. The RIAA are not protecting rights, they are protecting a business model for their members.
These are two very different things. If you will review the Declaration of Independence and the early Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, the concept of rights that informs them is very different than that which underlies the RIAA's tactics.
The early documents see rights as inherent in individuals, and that these individual rights must be defended against government's inevitable grasp for more power over the individual.
In contrast, the RIAA depends on a theory of rights which sees government as the grantor or creator of rights, which have no existence apart from government fiat. The intellectual property assertions held to be rights according to the RIAA have been created by the legislative process. They do not inhere in individuals nor do they proceed from any transcendent principle or universal convention, but are artificial creations of content producers, who are trying to sustain a business model.
The tactics of the RIAA are tantamount to buggy whip manufacturers lobbying Congress to make the manufacture and sale of automobiles illegal so as to protect their business model. Surely the analogy is far from perfect, but hopefully it is illustrative.
I think you're correct - cable itself isn't the greatest expense - even the custom ends on the cables are fairly cheap, though more expensive than with copper as they are a bit finicky. But the installation is the expensive part. Civil utilities are installed in new subdivisions by government contractors by the local city or county in most places, but television cable and phone lines? I'm not so sure who foots the bill for that infrastructure. This doesn't even mention that installing new fiber in already existing subdivisions of single family homes has got to be expen$ive for sure. Telco and cable monopolies have little incentive to upgrade existing infrastructure in the last mile until current infrastructure has inadequate bandwidth for content. They're already running into some bandwidth contention during peak hours, which is why they are increasingly using throttling techniques and traffic shaping (like the forged RTS packets my own provider, Comcast, has recently gained so much noteriety for). That has turned out to be problematic for public relations and will rapidly provide diminishing returns, but I don't expect cable providers and telcos to do much until they absolutely are forced to do so. Adding customers adds to monthly cashflow; redeploying infrastructure doesn't.
I suggest an actuarial decision will drive the deployment: When paid HD content outgrows the existing pipe in the last mile, the providers will build the infrastructure they need to reap those new revenues. So I expect content, not Internet traffic, will be the driver for the deployment.
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I agree. The RIAA are not protecting rights, they are protecting a business model for their members. These are two very different things. If you will review the Declaration of Independence and the early Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, the concept of rights that informs them is very different than that which underlies the RIAA's tactics. The early documents see rights as inherent in individuals, and that these individual rights must be defended against government's inevitable grasp for more power over the individual.
In contrast, the RIAA depends on a theory of rights which sees government as the grantor or creator of rights, which have no existence apart from government fiat. The intellectual property assertions held to be rights according to the RIAA have been created by the legislative process. They do not inhere in individuals nor do they proceed from any transcendent principle or universal convention, but are artificial creations of content producers, who are trying to sustain a business model.
The tactics of the RIAA are tantamount to buggy whip manufacturers lobbying Congress to make the manufacture and sale of automobiles illegal so as to protect their business model. Surely the analogy is far from perfect, but hopefully it is illustrative.
Follow the money - and follow the money behind the money. Betcha Darl has another source of cashflow besides dregs of SCOX...
I think you're correct - cable itself isn't the greatest expense - even the custom ends on the cables are fairly cheap, though more expensive than with copper as they are a bit finicky. But the installation is the expensive part. Civil utilities are installed in new subdivisions by government contractors by the local city or county in most places, but television cable and phone lines? I'm not so sure who foots the bill for that infrastructure. This doesn't even mention that installing new fiber in already existing subdivisions of single family homes has got to be expen$ive for sure. Telco and cable monopolies have little incentive to upgrade existing infrastructure in the last mile until current infrastructure has inadequate bandwidth for content. They're already running into some bandwidth contention during peak hours, which is why they are increasingly using throttling techniques and traffic shaping (like the forged RTS packets my own provider, Comcast, has recently gained so much noteriety for). That has turned out to be problematic for public relations and will rapidly provide diminishing returns, but I don't expect cable providers and telcos to do much until they absolutely are forced to do so. Adding customers adds to monthly cashflow; redeploying infrastructure doesn't. I suggest an actuarial decision will drive the deployment: When paid HD content outgrows the existing pipe in the last mile, the providers will build the infrastructure they need to reap those new revenues. So I expect content, not Internet traffic, will be the driver for the deployment.