This is irrelevant - plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and welders are all vocational jobs. There is no four-year degree equivalent that puts them in the same work. Hence, there is ONLY blue-collar jobs to compare. There is no white collar data to compare to it - otherwise I suspect that the white collar side would be paid more.
You're assuming that people are a. searching for his book, and b. actually downloading it in the first place.
I would love to know how he is certain that piracy is affecting his bottom line. After all, he's hardly going to be able to get download figures from the piraters. Couldn't it be that nobody is reading it in the first place?
Yes, he has fallen into the classic "if people are downloading it, they must not be buying it, and thus I must be losing sales."
As we have discussed time and again, a download != a lost sale. The problem with that logic is that it assumes the downloader would have paid for it if it were not available for download. This is a false premise. As an example, for college, I am told that I need to buy expensive textbooks. If they are available for download, I will download them. Otherwise I simply don't purchase them.... ever. A download does not equal a lost sale in this case because I was simply never, ever, going to pay money for it.
This is precisely what I was getting at. The only reason that these things came from DoD research was because DoD was the only one with enough money to fund said research. Spend the same money on another organization and you would have come out with the same product, just with a different research name slapped on it.
I am a big supporter of getting back into a R&D based funding operation. And I don't mean we should be R&Ding war tools, we should be developing better telecommunications tools, better healthcare tools, better computers for both business and consumer, better cars, better planes, better boats, better shipping technology... everything. There is no reason that America shouldn't be the world leader in all of these things.
No doubt, but like the scammers of yore, if you attach a consequence for not listening (you lose all your data, or you expose your private data, etc) and tell them that there are few outlets to lean on, they will listen - eventually.
Like I mention in a lower reply, if people want to be ignorant and think that someone will always make it good again, thats their problem, not mine.
The question becomes: is she addicted to the game, or to the people she consoles on the game?
Furthermore, if we define addiction to be using your hobbies to remove stress or feelings of doubt, then people who build model trains must be addicted, people who go boating must be addicted, people who jog must be addicted.
Furthermore, this "study" says nothing for people beyond the age of 18. University is a different place, its more aggressive and its more intense. It assumes people can take charge of their own life. I don't believe that, even if people payed attention in high school, they would learn the skills they needed to succeed in college. As a matter of fact, if you look at college drop-out rates, I am sure they will support my hypothesis. College is as much about learning life as it is learning job skills.
Finally, I play a lot of WoW and still succeed in college just fine. I don't see how she could be so different considering shes in her last year there and its probably not her first year playing WoW.
Seems like a logical fallacy here. It assumes we have tried to educate users, which I don't really feel we have. Anti-virus companies WANT users to remain uneducated, because if they become educated that will put most AV companies out of the job. So, I disagree that education can't work because we haven't even tried. I never learned about safe internet techniques in school, or at work, or anywhere... it was something I had to learn on my own.
When we start aggressively educating people, and THAT fails, then we can talk.
These problems are beyond the scope of botnet research. SQL exploits are a completely different animal than botnets. A botnet is a fairly sophisticated piece of code that requires the host to download some file for it to plant itself in the system. If users are aware of the fact that downloading files that are not trustworthy and most people didn't do it, botnets would cease to exist. Botnets rely on a majority of people being stupid, and if we can get the majority to be smart, than botnets would be a thing of the past.
Ignorance is really no excuse. If people are going to be ignorant, than leave it to them to work out their own solutions. Why should I pay money (likely tax dollars) so people get to be more ignorant about computers? Knowledge is power when it comes to defending yourself on the internet, and if people took like 30 minutes to learn about safe procedures and obvious warning signs then all of this would be moot. If people don't want to invest this kind of time, that's their problem, not mine.
Teach users to be safe on the internet and not download any old thing that pops up on the screen... seems cheaper and easier than waging an all out witch hunt on botnet admins.
Even if I assume that the study is true (which I don't) lets look at what kids are up against:
Studying, homework, school, and teachers. vs. Playing video games on the internet with friends.
Which would you have picked when you were 8-18 years old? I know what choice I would have made (actually, the choice I did make). Kids don't really think out into the future and realize that their choices have long-term effects, especially at the age of 8. You can't expect them to understand the need to study to get good grades to go to school. Furthermore, lulz @ high school... who cares. Just make it out of that shit and you are straight. High school is a joke and colleges know it.
Developers, musicians, artists, writers, etc are quick to say "pirates ruin our ability to profit from out works" but they often ignore the facts: computers are never going away, pirating is never going away. As long as there is a way to make something electronic, there will be a way to get it for free. People want/crave/NEED art of all forms to be cheap, accessible, and easy to use. Pirating answers two of those three requirements, a business model which previously did not exist.
Before: if you wanted software, games, music, etc you had to get in your car and drive and drive and drive (spending gas and time, all the while) then plunk down $50+ for a bunch of manuals and pictures and shit you dont need, then drive and drive and drive back home and install.
After: you browse to a website, click a link, go eat chicken, come back and install.
To be honest, as a fellow developer of "for-profit" software, I really don't mind that pirates exist, for 2 reasons. 1. they buy more games, music, books, and art than any other demographic (a fact that the industry loves to ignore) and 2. they represent a REQUIRED shift in business model of for-profit organizations.
Who really needs to change here? The pirates? Or the businesses? When there is a drastic technological shift that causes MANY users to ignore civil restraints and some corporate-driven laws, its on the corporations to shift their ethics and their business model, not the end-user. The end-user will ALWAYS get what he wants, the way he wants it. The corp is just going to have to live and grow with that fact in mind.
Does not matter. The server gives it to us without any complaining. At that point, we have a license. Whatever is stated in the HTML (that you can only read after downloading it) at that point, is completely irrelevant.
Of else, I could just print a text on my shirt, put a copyright / author's right note below it, and sue everyone who looks at me. ^^
You've obviously never heard of a EULA or a TOS, which can often only be read after purchasing software, but binds you immediately to an agreement.
I never said metal died... just the mainstream metal did. Sure, you have the nu-metal, hard-rock acts like korn or whatever, but the real metal doesn't get played on the radio. Mainstream metal, the kind of music heard on every radio across the country, never survived the 80s. In those days, a metal song back then was the equivalent to the latest Britney song today, or insert whoever they play on the radio every 5 minutes in place of Britney.
You must not know what the definition of "lossless" is vs. lossy... which is amazing because you use the term lossy, so you must know the other end of the scale: lossless.
I will concur that FLAC is a niche market... today. Just like MP3s were a niche market 10 years ago, and CDs were a niche market 10 years before that. However, has HDD space grows and people begin to realize that those nice tiny MP3s aren't the same thing as a track from a CD, the market space for FLAC grows. More and more MP3 players are beginning to support FLAC as a format. Yes, the average consumer on the street today is not likely to know about FLAC, but when I tell them about FLAC (as I have done) they immediatly become concerned that they should have been using FLAC all along. The problem with the average consumer is that they don't even know what lossy vs. lossless is, let alone FLAC vs. MP3. They think that MP3 is the one and only - but when they are told otherwise they quickly want the true quality version. I assure you that if the Apple iTunes store ran a little ad at the top of their site that said "These are compressed audio files, for uncompressed, full quality files go here" they would get A LOT more hits on the FLAC stuff. If given the option, people want the bigger, better version - the problem is that most people don't even know they have a choice.
It's a bit of both: a CD is how the RIAA stays alive, as they make very little money on tours or merchandise sales (at least not if an artist has structured his contract correctly). If artists start recording their own music and releasing their music digitally, the need for a label to back CD pressing suddenly disappears, which, by transitive properties, makes the RIAA suddenly disappear. The RIAA needs to adopt a new business model based on these reduced recording costs and the digital age. Something tells me they could make huge amounts of money by offering their artists music, in FLAC, for a cheap price all in one repository, thats DRM free. However, its "cheaper to keep her" and changing their business model at this point is expensive. It's easier in the short-term to just try and litigate people into CD sales. Hopefully they will see that their bottom line is not improved by a business model thats based on litigation.
True story... the industry has become saturated through their own greed. To be honest, if I was an aspiring musician, I would be very afraid in this climate because labels gobble you up, force you to churn out 3 albums or so, and then spit you out never to be seen again. Every radio station plays the same handful of songs that all sound that same, with more air time dedicated to commercials or chit-chat than actual music. No wonder people have become so brutally hateful of radio and mainstream music. The industry has adopted a generic model of rap song, rock song, r&b song, pop song, and country song and if your music doesn't fall into their generic model, you might as well forget about your hopes and dreams. They got money to make and they aren't going to risk investing in an artist that they can't rely on. This is just the same thing that happened in the 80s to heavy metal; it became all about the power ballad and if you didn't have a power ballad you were a joke, and if you wrote a power ballad thats all anyone knew you for. Artists lost their identity and heavy metal lost its identity to the almighty power ballad.
Fast forward to 2009 and you have the same thing going on. Its terrible, and the industry needs to stop blaming other reasons for its own downfall.
FLAC is really an unsung hero in the digital age. MP3 kind of hurt the transition to digital music in a bad way because of the amount of compression it does. It makes sense though, given that at the time we didn't have 1TB hard-drives to store all that FLAC, so MP3 was really the way to go. However, more and more, people are realizing that FLAC is just as good as CD quality, and can be dropped onto a CD with very little work should the need for a CD arise.
There is, of course, always the linear notes argument, but in reality the linear notes are good for all of 10 minutes. Lyrics can be found online for even the most obscure bands, most artists post their photos and (now) videos on their website, so you don't need linear notes for that. The only thing left that linear notes provide are details on who made the album (which can also be found online) and some cute copyright and label information (which can also be found online). So, even linear notes is nonsense at this point.
I think where the RIAA goes wrong is using CD sales as its only metric for profitability. In reality, CDs are essentially a dead technology. The only places CDs are still widely used are car CD players, home hi-fi systems, and DJ booths. Otherwise people are going digital. If I were to purchase a CD (I am one of the 17 million, except I dropped out years ago), I would buy it, open it, immediatly rip it to FLAC, convert those files to MP3 V0, and drop it on my MP3 player. From that point forward, if I am at my computer, I am listening to FLAC, and if I am away, I am listening on my MP3 player.
CDs, at this point, are simply are not required to be purchased because if you can get the music in FLAC(whether it be through a legit source or not), you can just make your own CD. The music industry desperately needs to come to grips with the fact that no one is lugging around bulky CD players anymore, they want MP3 players that fit in half a pocket and hold 1000 songs and have 8 hours of battery life (all of which are advantages over the CD model). Factor in the cost of a CD vs. its digital counterpart and its really not a choice anymore. It's really not surprising at all that CD sales have declined, even while music sales are up.
Even if they had evidence, how does one determine which are blurred and which stay unblurred? Schools might be blurred, but then I value my life, so maybe they should blur my companies building. I also value my life when I am at home, so maybe they should blur that to. Oooo, also, I am sure most of the people I know value their lives so we should blur their homes and businesses to... just in case.
I can't wait to see what kinda slippery slope we are getting into.
If you are involved in a deal where your record label is also selling your merchandise, you are in a bad deal. Its a record contract. Which means the record label should only really be dealing with the albums. Take what little money you get from the albums, reinvest it in your own merchandise, sell it. There is no reason an artist shouldn't look at what they do as anything more than a business. You should be controlling your actions like you are running a business. What you do when you sign over everything to a record label is the same as signing over a business to someone else. They control everything. No reason to do this.
I think the music industry is plagued by lazy people who want the label to do everything, and what they end up with is being controlled by the label. Here's a business model for any emerging band:
Write some music
Record it in your basement, mix, and master it - get help with this, there are many local guys that will help for cheap or free
Market it online for cheap, dollar a song is the going rate - get it on torrents and every single p2p source you can
take ALL money from the sold songs and reinvest it into merchandise
take all money from merchandise, reinvest in shows
take profit from shows and reinvest in the entire act
Slashdot Mirror
This is irrelevant - plumbers, electricians, carpenters, and welders are all vocational jobs. There is no four-year degree equivalent that puts them in the same work. Hence, there is ONLY blue-collar jobs to compare. There is no white collar data to compare to it - otherwise I suspect that the white collar side would be paid more.
A lot of their issues have always contained some kind of explicit cartoon - this time they are just taking it to another degree.
You're assuming that people are a. searching for his book, and b. actually downloading it in the first place.
I would love to know how he is certain that piracy is affecting his bottom line. After all, he's hardly going to be able to get download figures from the piraters. Couldn't it be that nobody is reading it in the first place?
Yes, he has fallen into the classic "if people are downloading it, they must not be buying it, and thus I must be losing sales."
As we have discussed time and again, a download != a lost sale. The problem with that logic is that it assumes the downloader would have paid for it if it were not available for download. This is a false premise. As an example, for college, I am told that I need to buy expensive textbooks. If they are available for download, I will download them. Otherwise I simply don't purchase them.... ever. A download does not equal a lost sale in this case because I was simply never, ever, going to pay money for it.
This is precisely what I was getting at. The only reason that these things came from DoD research was because DoD was the only one with enough money to fund said research. Spend the same money on another organization and you would have come out with the same product, just with a different research name slapped on it.
I am a big supporter of getting back into a R&D based funding operation. And I don't mean we should be R&Ding war tools, we should be developing better telecommunications tools, better healthcare tools, better computers for both business and consumer, better cars, better planes, better boats, better shipping technology... everything. There is no reason that America shouldn't be the world leader in all of these things.
No doubt, but like the scammers of yore, if you attach a consequence for not listening (you lose all your data, or you expose your private data, etc) and tell them that there are few outlets to lean on, they will listen - eventually.
Like I mention in a lower reply, if people want to be ignorant and think that someone will always make it good again, thats their problem, not mine.
The question becomes: is she addicted to the game, or to the people she consoles on the game?
Furthermore, if we define addiction to be using your hobbies to remove stress or feelings of doubt, then people who build model trains must be addicted, people who go boating must be addicted, people who jog must be addicted.
Furthermore, this "study" says nothing for people beyond the age of 18. University is a different place, its more aggressive and its more intense. It assumes people can take charge of their own life. I don't believe that, even if people payed attention in high school, they would learn the skills they needed to succeed in college. As a matter of fact, if you look at college drop-out rates, I am sure they will support my hypothesis. College is as much about learning life as it is learning job skills.
Finally, I play a lot of WoW and still succeed in college just fine. I don't see how she could be so different considering shes in her last year there and its probably not her first year playing WoW.
Seems like a logical fallacy here. It assumes we have tried to educate users, which I don't really feel we have. Anti-virus companies WANT users to remain uneducated, because if they become educated that will put most AV companies out of the job. So, I disagree that education can't work because we haven't even tried. I never learned about safe internet techniques in school, or at work, or anywhere... it was something I had to learn on my own.
When we start aggressively educating people, and THAT fails, then we can talk.
These problems are beyond the scope of botnet research. SQL exploits are a completely different animal than botnets. A botnet is a fairly sophisticated piece of code that requires the host to download some file for it to plant itself in the system. If users are aware of the fact that downloading files that are not trustworthy and most people didn't do it, botnets would cease to exist. Botnets rely on a majority of people being stupid, and if we can get the majority to be smart, than botnets would be a thing of the past.
Ignorance is really no excuse. If people are going to be ignorant, than leave it to them to work out their own solutions. Why should I pay money (likely tax dollars) so people get to be more ignorant about computers? Knowledge is power when it comes to defending yourself on the internet, and if people took like 30 minutes to learn about safe procedures and obvious warning signs then all of this would be moot. If people don't want to invest this kind of time, that's their problem, not mine.
Teach users to be safe on the internet and not download any old thing that pops up on the screen... seems cheaper and easier than waging an all out witch hunt on botnet admins.
Even if I assume that the study is true (which I don't) lets look at what kids are up against:
Studying, homework, school, and teachers.
vs.
Playing video games on the internet with friends.
Which would you have picked when you were 8-18 years old? I know what choice I would have made (actually, the choice I did make). Kids don't really think out into the future and realize that their choices have long-term effects, especially at the age of 8. You can't expect them to understand the need to study to get good grades to go to school. Furthermore, lulz @ high school... who cares. Just make it out of that shit and you are straight. High school is a joke and colleges know it.
Developers, musicians, artists, writers, etc are quick to say "pirates ruin our ability to profit from out works" but they often ignore the facts: computers are never going away, pirating is never going away. As long as there is a way to make something electronic, there will be a way to get it for free. People want/crave/NEED art of all forms to be cheap, accessible, and easy to use. Pirating answers two of those three requirements, a business model which previously did not exist.
Before: if you wanted software, games, music, etc you had to get in your car and drive and drive and drive (spending gas and time, all the while) then plunk down $50+ for a bunch of manuals and pictures and shit you dont need, then drive and drive and drive back home and install.
After: you browse to a website, click a link, go eat chicken, come back and install.
To be honest, as a fellow developer of "for-profit" software, I really don't mind that pirates exist, for 2 reasons. 1. they buy more games, music, books, and art than any other demographic (a fact that the industry loves to ignore) and 2. they represent a REQUIRED shift in business model of for-profit organizations.
Who really needs to change here? The pirates? Or the businesses? When there is a drastic technological shift that causes MANY users to ignore civil restraints and some corporate-driven laws, its on the corporations to shift their ethics and their business model, not the end-user. The end-user will ALWAYS get what he wants, the way he wants it. The corp is just going to have to live and grow with that fact in mind.
Does not matter. The server gives it to us without any complaining. At that point, we have a license. Whatever is stated in the HTML (that you can only read after downloading it) at that point, is completely irrelevant.
Of else, I could just print a text on my shirt, put a copyright / author's right note below it, and sue everyone who looks at me. ^^
You've obviously never heard of a EULA or a TOS, which can often only be read after purchasing software, but binds you immediately to an agreement.
Everyone loves a nice poll, amirite?
I never said metal died... just the mainstream metal did. Sure, you have the nu-metal, hard-rock acts like korn or whatever, but the real metal doesn't get played on the radio. Mainstream metal, the kind of music heard on every radio across the country, never survived the 80s. In those days, a metal song back then was the equivalent to the latest Britney song today, or insert whoever they play on the radio every 5 minutes in place of Britney.
You must not know what the definition of "lossless" is vs. lossy... which is amazing because you use the term lossy, so you must know the other end of the scale: lossless.
I will concur that FLAC is a niche market... today. Just like MP3s were a niche market 10 years ago, and CDs were a niche market 10 years before that. However, has HDD space grows and people begin to realize that those nice tiny MP3s aren't the same thing as a track from a CD, the market space for FLAC grows. More and more MP3 players are beginning to support FLAC as a format. Yes, the average consumer on the street today is not likely to know about FLAC, but when I tell them about FLAC (as I have done) they immediatly become concerned that they should have been using FLAC all along. The problem with the average consumer is that they don't even know what lossy vs. lossless is, let alone FLAC vs. MP3. They think that MP3 is the one and only - but when they are told otherwise they quickly want the true quality version. I assure you that if the Apple iTunes store ran a little ad at the top of their site that said "These are compressed audio files, for uncompressed, full quality files go here" they would get A LOT more hits on the FLAC stuff. If given the option, people want the bigger, better version - the problem is that most people don't even know they have a choice.
It's a bit of both: a CD is how the RIAA stays alive, as they make very little money on tours or merchandise sales (at least not if an artist has structured his contract correctly). If artists start recording their own music and releasing their music digitally, the need for a label to back CD pressing suddenly disappears, which, by transitive properties, makes the RIAA suddenly disappear. The RIAA needs to adopt a new business model based on these reduced recording costs and the digital age. Something tells me they could make huge amounts of money by offering their artists music, in FLAC, for a cheap price all in one repository, thats DRM free. However, its "cheaper to keep her" and changing their business model at this point is expensive. It's easier in the short-term to just try and litigate people into CD sales. Hopefully they will see that their bottom line is not improved by a business model thats based on litigation.
True story... the industry has become saturated through their own greed. To be honest, if I was an aspiring musician, I would be very afraid in this climate because labels gobble you up, force you to churn out 3 albums or so, and then spit you out never to be seen again. Every radio station plays the same handful of songs that all sound that same, with more air time dedicated to commercials or chit-chat than actual music. No wonder people have become so brutally hateful of radio and mainstream music. The industry has adopted a generic model of rap song, rock song, r&b song, pop song, and country song and if your music doesn't fall into their generic model, you might as well forget about your hopes and dreams. They got money to make and they aren't going to risk investing in an artist that they can't rely on. This is just the same thing that happened in the 80s to heavy metal; it became all about the power ballad and if you didn't have a power ballad you were a joke, and if you wrote a power ballad thats all anyone knew you for. Artists lost their identity and heavy metal lost its identity to the almighty power ballad.
Fast forward to 2009 and you have the same thing going on. Its terrible, and the industry needs to stop blaming other reasons for its own downfall.
FLAC is really an unsung hero in the digital age. MP3 kind of hurt the transition to digital music in a bad way because of the amount of compression it does. It makes sense though, given that at the time we didn't have 1TB hard-drives to store all that FLAC, so MP3 was really the way to go. However, more and more, people are realizing that FLAC is just as good as CD quality, and can be dropped onto a CD with very little work should the need for a CD arise.
There is, of course, always the linear notes argument, but in reality the linear notes are good for all of 10 minutes. Lyrics can be found online for even the most obscure bands, most artists post their photos and (now) videos on their website, so you don't need linear notes for that. The only thing left that linear notes provide are details on who made the album (which can also be found online) and some cute copyright and label information (which can also be found online). So, even linear notes is nonsense at this point.
I think where the RIAA goes wrong is using CD sales as its only metric for profitability. In reality, CDs are essentially a dead technology. The only places CDs are still widely used are car CD players, home hi-fi systems, and DJ booths. Otherwise people are going digital. If I were to purchase a CD (I am one of the 17 million, except I dropped out years ago), I would buy it, open it, immediatly rip it to FLAC, convert those files to MP3 V0, and drop it on my MP3 player. From that point forward, if I am at my computer, I am listening to FLAC, and if I am away, I am listening on my MP3 player.
CDs, at this point, are simply are not required to be purchased because if you can get the music in FLAC(whether it be through a legit source or not), you can just make your own CD. The music industry desperately needs to come to grips with the fact that no one is lugging around bulky CD players anymore, they want MP3 players that fit in half a pocket and hold 1000 songs and have 8 hours of battery life (all of which are advantages over the CD model). Factor in the cost of a CD vs. its digital counterpart and its really not a choice anymore. It's really not surprising at all that CD sales have declined, even while music sales are up.
Never read the comics or books, Send me to see it on the /. dime and I will give you an opinion on how it was just as a movie. =P
Even if they had evidence, how does one determine which are blurred and which stay unblurred? Schools might be blurred, but then I value my life, so maybe they should blur my companies building. I also value my life when I am at home, so maybe they should blur that to. Oooo, also, I am sure most of the people I know value their lives so we should blur their homes and businesses to... just in case.
I can't wait to see what kinda slippery slope we are getting into.
...then the industrial revolution happened.
I think the music industry is plagued by lazy people who want the label to do everything, and what they end up with is being controlled by the label. Here's a business model for any emerging band: