What a great generic putdown. You don't even have to address the argument, and the pink-cheeked audience guffaws and applauds a truly mindless comeback. Hurray, our Hero! Truly he is wise.
AOL, to their credit, are not trying to "dominate" the market for a player. They simply want to be able to use Realplayer if they like, and MS wants them to torpedo it and cut off Real's air supply.
AOL may be a content provider, but they are trying to point out that MS wants to be the ONLY CONTENT PLAYER in existence. And that is frightening.
Well, of course it's cheaper. Real has to actually make a profit by charging for licenses. Microsoft can give it away for free, if necessary, to destroy Real. And it will, as soon as the Chicago School judges in that court repeal the monopoly verdict.
Then we're gonna see some REAL monopoly wieldin', brother.
Before it dies, the quality of Real's products will decline significantly compared to MS. And the free marketers will proclaim that Realplayer died because it could not compete, without mentioning that the Real product couldn't keep up with WMP because MS cut off their air supply by giving WMP away for free, or just by licensing it for ALWAYS less than Real could. Because that's what being a rich monopoly gives ya. The power to starve your competitors to death.
What?.wma (copy controled) is an open standard?.NET is open? Media Player is open? Their acknowledged plan is to replace media file formats with their proprietary one. And eventually, closing the architecture of the PC to make it impossible to copy certain files without authorization, files such as video, music, e-books...
Their "innovative" hardware they mostly develop by acquiring companies, or purchasing interests in those companies. I don't recall many hardware innovations they claim over the last 20 years that weren't copies of someone else's ideas or products. Curved keyboards, mice, trackballs, all these things were made by someone else before Official Microsoft Innovative Products came along.
Why don't you set a savings or checking account at a bank, and get a VISA debit card? Works like a credit card, but simply deducts money from your balance.
Or get a credit card with a 100 dollar maximum limit?
I understand your reluctance about credit cards. I have the same reluctance in this context, but for a different reason. I don't like VISA having a blow-by-blow file on everything I ever buy online for the rest of my life. I don't see the purpose. They sell that information in various ways. And even if they don't, they or the successor company to buy their assets can change the rules.
Their organization was convicted many times in Canada, of slander, infiltrating government agencies, you name it. They are a little woozy up there. People aren't as cowed by them up there. No doubt they have plants worming their careers through useful places right now, but they don't have the critical mass they have here in the U.S in the State Department and various D.A. offices and police departments.
Ah, the ARS days..
Nah. Slamming all Travolta flicks 'cause he's a Scieno would just make the critics look over the top. And it accomplishes little, and makes him look persecuted.
I notice we got only one Scientologist posting so far? Come on Office of Special Affairs, show your stuff! Let's hear the pedophile smears!
As a previous poster ingeniously pointed out, books are almost always printed on paper containing acid. Those books of yours will be paste in less than a century.
Your argument is a straw man that I've been fighting for over ten years. E-books will not supplant paper books; the publication of paper books will increase every year until the price of paper drags paper books into the luxury range. E-books will not replace them, in the sense of destroying their sales.
What will happen is this: the actual number of "books", in e format, will increase exponentially until there are orders of magnitude more "books" stored as bits than as paper. You will look around you, and say, "There are more paper books now that ever -- e-books are a failure!". But the truth is that the e-libraries of the world will have more capacity than all of the Barnes and Nobles and Borders combined, by staggering factors. And you won't see any of it, not physically. Consider how many web-pages of text are out there... I think it likely that it would be inpossible to "print" them all on paper if the WWW wasn't there. There just aren't enough trees.
Another reason e-books will go nuclear: not everyone in the world can afford $32US for a book. Actually, a miniscule proportion of the world can. Hell, I can't afford them. E-books will be the cause of an explosion in the planet's literacy. Books will be, even if it is via the undeground, flashed in massive batches all over the third world, and I'll be glad of that. You can't have too many readers. It will, I think, be a source of stabilization in many ways.
As for the price of the reader -- well, tech is not there yet for a cheap reader. Maybe not now. But I can see it happening very soon. If you can build a few for $500US, you can mass produce it for $20, eventually. And even at $500, it's cheaper to have that reader and free books than it is to but the books physically, especially with the way the lumber companies are gouging the world.
This rosy picture will be fought viciously by IP owners, so who knows how it'll turn out in the short run. I assume the manufacture of e-book readers will be constrained by copy-control and lawsuits. But we ain't the whole world, and eventually the books will go running free.
Also, laptops are in no way necessary to view text. Nor is Windows, or evn Linux. One could create a rather SIMPLE OS that could do the job, and also be freeware. Ya know, this is so simple I bet it even exists.
It's being done at some colleges as a pilot program, but, you'll not be surprised,they don't give a break on the price per copy. A little taste of the future: the prices stay the same, and the book company and the college keep the new profits generated by the savings by not printing the book on presses.
I also seem to recall that the U.S. Congress has helpfully made any attempt to digitize a textbook a felony.
God, my back... I remember how much those damned paper books weighted in high school and college!
And you'd think that it would be an obvious application - those e-texts could be updated yearly, or even on the fly as mistakes were discovered. And they shouldbe cheaper.
Don't bet on it, tho. The textbook industry is small and ferocious, and will go ape$%$@ if anyone tries to ease them out of the picture.
Here's a frightening thought for the publishers to chew on... open source textbooks...
If a series of eBook readers actually caught on, and if they were all using copy-controlled hardware and software, then eBook content would truly become a subscription service, because they would not pass through a general purpose PC, ever. Tho hackers might find a way somehow, the critical mass necessary to create a free library of "controlled" content would never surface. Somewhat like Gnutella, the only books available for free (and technically pirated) would be a fairly small geek library.
May the publishers and distributors be greedy and nasty!
In the nearer term, ebook readers are going to create immense amounts of toxic waste, because, as you say, the marketplace may rule, but corporations need new sales - so each reader model will go out of production fast. There is no way to stop them.
Longer term, the toxic garbage accumulating in a few thousand places will not be a patch on the devastation of all the worlds forests that the paper industry represents. Even if they replant trees, the loss of the trees causes a slow washaway of the topsoil. Nothing is without consequences. And also, the demand for paper will grow exponentially as 6.5 - 12 billion people become literate and buy more and more books. We NEED ebooks, for the human race's literacy, and for the prevention of the utter devastation of the trees (not that that would not happen for other reasons. Sigh.)
BTW, it occured to me last night - building an ebook is totally within a bright technician's abilities -- picture a wooden frame, nicely done, housing some non-volatile MRAM, a generic processor, some DOS-like OS, a simple control interface, and mayhap an LED or organic screen... shouldn't be too expensive, and with copy control coming down with felony force, it may be the only way to have a truly free reader.
A ship that big probably couldn't be taken down quickly by a Scud. It's over a thousand feet long, and it's not a gasbag, it is composed of independent cells of gas. Not that the ship wouldn't have an interesting time of it as the center of gravity whipped.... it'd kiss the ground, but probably at a slower rate than a plane would.
I've been reading about these monster airship/trucks for over twenty years now, and I can say in that time I've had some thoughts.
The most apparent thing, to me, was that it gives homebuilding a whole new dimension of economy. Imagine if you can a car built in your back yard -- importing the steel, the laborers, the machines to stamp the parts, all of it -- how much would that car cost? Well, that's how houses are built. Stick by stick, on the ground (yes, I know modularity has increased and all that). Theoretically, a house built in a factory, with quality control, on an assembly line, would reduce the price of houses to a commodity item.
As I am now old and cynical, I know that even if they cut the cost of home manufacture in half, we the buyers would never see the price decrease. The factories would eat the entire savings as new profit, put stick builders out of biz if possible, and use the profits to buy up related industries and strive for a vertical monopoly in time-honored fashion. Sigh.
I love the idea of simply building the house as a well-designed unit and flying it to a foundation somewhere. BUT -- think of this -- it means that houses could be built in national parks, wilderness areas, all the places it was impossible to get to before... but now it could be done. There is no advance so wonderful that humans can't find an evil use for it...
Another thing I thought of, long ago. A lot of municipalites are not going to allow factory-built houses to be flown in, to protect the local building trades. And most certainly Americans will panic (they are good at that -- the safest country in the world is the most personally paranoid) at the thought of a house flying overhead at 60 MPH. The Hindenburg is still, wrongly, viewed as the end of airships because they were unsafe.
A last thing. A few years ago, a researcher got a hold of an actual swathe of the cloth used on the hull of the Hindenburg. Apparently, the paint was incredibly flammable. When the Hindy went up, it was the paint that made it go WHOMPH into flame, not the hydrogen. The hydrogen, if you look at the film, was burning up in any case. The passengers did not by and large die of the fire -- they died from jumping off the ship. I remember it being said that if most of them had kept their heads and jumped off just before the ship hit the ground (and, I assume, ran like hell), they would have had a good chance of survival.
Pity -- primarily because of that disaster, airships died in the U.S. as a commercial venture. They were such magnificent beasts!
It is called PBS and NPR. Although free-marketers want them commercialized, and are partway succeeding... hate to see corporate logos before PBS shows. Arg.
Is it any wonder PBS and NPR have the best available news coverage?
The end for the greatest new era on TV came when the networks folded their non-profitable news operations into their entertaiment divisions. The predictable happened. And we act surprised. Sigh.
If IP is not deserving of property status, why do afford physical property the privilege of protection under law?
Because physical property actually exists. You can point at it. It is finite. Theft of it deprives the owner of its use.
And also: copyright violation is not "theft". In no way. It is a not a crime, it is a civil offense called infringement. Copyright "violators" are never criminals, and they are not "stealing".
Many so-called "primitive" people (certain indeginous nations in the Americas, for example) had no notion of physical property, yet were highly succesful for thousands of years
They also didn't worry about theft, either, as a concept as it applied to land, etc. That was a European import.
I'm not really talking about copies. I guess I'm talking about redistribution. Are you saying that making a complete analog copy of a copyrighted work (whether it's dubbing a tape or Xeroxing a book) and then giving that copy to your friend, has been the law since the 1700s?
At least since the 1800's. It was understood that poor people would make manual copies of books -- and they did. The publishers didn't care unless it was commercial (they were selling it). Which didn't happen -- copying a book by hand is hard work. That was analog recording at its finest...
The idea of copyright almost didn't make it into the U.S. Constitution. There were some voices against it, and I'm going to strain my bad memory here, Jefferson was one of those voices. The idea was that ideas and works were the property of mankind, and all art was based on someone's prior art somewhere, so how does one draw the line? They compromised by setting the copyright term at about 20 years. It's now effectively eternal. "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright! (Probably. It was last I heard).
The difference between copying and redistribution seems to be what, quantity? Intent?
This is probably the most important issue of our time. Who will wind up owning copyrighted works? How is this going to end? Seems that it's inevitable that a very few large corporations or associations are going to hold IP in their vaults, one way or another, sometimes quite literally. The laws about copyright, or the interpretation of them, are changing, and you can draw the line on the graph and see where it's heading, and fast. IP isn't going to benefit the creators, mostly, it's going to make the controllers and owners of the distribution channels rich. History and common sense insist that they will screw the artists at every opportunity.
The street perfomers method is the only way guaranteed to make a musician money. But think of this: John Fogerty couln't play any CCR tunes in person or on media for over 20(?) years. The owner of his works decided he was going to punish him. That is the future. What's going on is that RIAA/MPAA are maneuvering to control all online distribution channels, so that somehow, someway, they get a chunk out of everyone. It's about control, not rights. But the artists have to back the labels, if they have any dreams of making it, because those labels own the means for them to succeed.
There was a demonstration of a very large LCD "screen" a few years ago that was composed of two LCDs mated together vertically. The join line was very thin; exactly one pixel wide, I recall, so that it would be unnoticable.
I thought it a good idea at the time. Why isn't anyone trying it on the market? What was the problem?
Then that's a fucked up law that should be repealed at the same time DMCA is. This has nothing to do with being a tool of the industry; it goes to the core of whether you think IP should exist or not. And that is a seperate issue.
I believe that Fair Use was a part of the nation's laws since the 1700's, and I think it's a little late now to get rid of it. More precisely, non-commercial copies have always been legal with analog equipment, and only big money lobbying has bought laws that declare digital copies to be somehow different.
"Intellectual property" is not a concept supported in law until quite recently, really -- think of it. The idea is that somehow this type of property is not a physical thing, something that the theft of which would deprive the owner of its use. IP is the incredible idea that patterns of bits are a piece of inventory that can be somehow taken from some metaphysical warehouse. Digital copying removes the scarcity factor from the market -- we must adjust to this somehow.
The bands I listen to can barely even break even. In fact, quite a few of them lose money, and have to dump money from their day jobs into recording their albums.
Why is that? Is it because the record companies and associated studios have near-monopoly on publication, marketing, and distribution, so they set incredible prices for which the bands must sell their souls? How is home recording doing this to them? Is it not in fact the record companies, not the listeners, that impoverish the bands?
Just a couple of weeks ago I went to El Paso to see Angel Dust, Nevermore, and Opeth (and also some shitty band called God Forbid). Nevermore and Opeth had to cancel because the club didn't sell enough tickets so they couldn't pay the musicians enough.
Maybe they didn't sell out because not enough people thought them a good enough draw to buy a ticket. No one promised musicians that they could make a living at it. Hell, the market is oversaturated with them -- there just aren't enough customers to make all of them wealthy, or even give them enough money to give up their day jobs. And let's not forget that the bulk of the money spent on concerts and albums go into the companies' pockets -- it takes a long, long time for a band to pay back its "bill" to the company. Intentionally.
BTW, the only reason that law allows "non-commercial" propagation is that ignorant lawmakers (and perhaps the industry that bribed them as well) were so visionless that they thought non-commercial copying was small-time and even when it happened, it largely served to promote the music rather than reduce sales. They were wrong, as anyone who has seen Napster knows.
What industry bribed congress to let us make copies?
Sales are not down, an impressive thing considering that the economy has downturned. Napster did nothing perceptible to music sales. Not that this is an argument. Buggy whip manufacturers took a lasting hit from the auto industry.
Congress made Fair Use copying legal because in classic theory, when I bought the record, tape, CD, whatever, I owned the item. I could copy it, sell it to someone (right of First Sale), set it on fire, write on its pristine surface. No one considered the owner of the media to be merely licensing "intellectual property". The owner owned the tape, the book, the CD. This was settled by the Supremes over a decade ago.
What seems to be happening today is that the federal judiciary was seeded over two decades with pro-business judges who seem to think that law should enable businesses to make profits in a time-honored fashion even if that fashion is obsolete. IP is a concept that is being molded by the collective rulings of some really misguided jurists -- we are losing First Sale rights, Fair Use rights, and the concept that we actually own the CD or whatever we paid for at the store. This is not good, people.
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I meant the ex-president, not you, vis-a-vis the slam. That was not a flame against you, sorry.
I just never liked Reagan's "aphorisms".
And that ex-president was a moron.
What a great generic putdown. You don't even have to address the argument, and the pink-cheeked audience guffaws and applauds a truly mindless comeback. Hurray, our Hero! Truly he is wise.
AOL, to their credit, are not trying to "dominate" the market for a player. They simply want to be able to use Realplayer if they like, and MS wants them to torpedo it and cut off Real's air supply.
AOL may be a content provider, but they are trying to point out that MS wants to be the ONLY CONTENT PLAYER in existence. And that is frightening.
Well, of course it's cheaper. Real has to actually make a profit by charging for licenses. Microsoft can give it away for free, if necessary, to destroy Real. And it will, as soon as the Chicago School judges in that court repeal the monopoly verdict.
Then we're gonna see some REAL monopoly wieldin', brother.
Before it dies, the quality of Real's products will decline significantly compared to MS. And the free marketers will proclaim that Realplayer died because it could not compete, without mentioning that the Real product couldn't keep up with WMP because MS cut off their air supply by giving WMP away for free, or just by licensing it for ALWAYS less than Real could. Because that's what being a rich monopoly gives ya. The power to starve your competitors to death.
What? .wma (copy controled) is an open standard? .NET is open? Media Player is open? Their acknowledged plan is to replace media file formats with their proprietary one. And eventually, closing the architecture of the PC to make it impossible to copy certain files without authorization, files such as video, music, e-books...
Their "innovative" hardware they mostly develop by acquiring companies, or purchasing interests in those companies. I don't recall many hardware innovations they claim over the last 20 years that weren't copies of someone else's ideas or products. Curved keyboards, mice, trackballs, all these things were made by someone else before Official Microsoft Innovative Products came along.
So many of these "costs" are just the old ways insisting on surviving.
Recording costs are real. But who is setting these prices?
"Getting between" is the operative phrase. So much of the CD's costs is just a line of people with their hands out.
Why don't you set a savings or checking account at a bank, and get a VISA debit card? Works like a credit card, but simply deducts money from your balance.
Or get a credit card with a 100 dollar maximum limit?
I understand your reluctance about credit cards. I have the same reluctance in this context, but for a different reason. I don't like VISA having a blow-by-blow file on everything I ever buy online for the rest of my life. I don't see the purpose. They sell that information in various ways. And even if they don't, they or the successor company to buy their assets can change the rules.
Their organization was convicted many times in Canada, of slander, infiltrating government agencies, you name it. They are a little woozy up there. People aren't as cowed by them up there. No doubt they have plants worming their careers through useful places right now, but they don't have the critical mass they have here in the U.S in the State Department and various D.A. offices and police departments.
Ah, the ARS days.. Nah. Slamming all Travolta flicks 'cause he's a Scieno would just make the critics look over the top. And it accomplishes little, and makes him look persecuted.
I notice we got only one Scientologist posting so far? Come on Office of Special Affairs, show your stuff! Let's hear the pedophile smears!
As a previous poster ingeniously pointed out, books are almost always printed on paper containing acid. Those books of yours will be paste in less than a century.
Well...
The people copying his book digitally aren't making money. So that dog don't hunt.
And, his books have been converted to digital text, and they are already out there on the peer-to-peer networks, as well as FTP, IRC, and the USENET.
No one seems to be crushed yet, and it also seems that Sterling is not impoverished.
Everyone seems to be doing fine.
Your argument is a straw man that I've been fighting for over ten years. E-books will not supplant paper books; the publication of paper books will increase every year until the price of paper drags paper books into the luxury range. E-books will not replace them, in the sense of destroying their sales.
What will happen is this: the actual number of "books", in e format, will increase exponentially until there are orders of magnitude more "books" stored as bits than as paper. You will look around you, and say, "There are more paper books now that ever -- e-books are a failure!". But the truth is that the e-libraries of the world will have more capacity than all of the Barnes and Nobles and Borders combined, by staggering factors. And you won't see any of it, not physically. Consider how many web-pages of text are out there... I think it likely that it would be inpossible to "print" them all on paper if the WWW wasn't there. There just aren't enough trees.
Another reason e-books will go nuclear: not everyone in the world can afford $32US for a book. Actually, a miniscule proportion of the world can. Hell, I can't afford them. E-books will be the cause of an explosion in the planet's literacy. Books will be, even if it is via the undeground, flashed in massive batches all over the third world, and I'll be glad of that. You can't have too many readers. It will, I think, be a source of stabilization in many ways.
As for the price of the reader -- well, tech is not there yet for a cheap reader. Maybe not now. But I can see it happening very soon. If you can build a few for $500US, you can mass produce it for $20, eventually. And even at $500, it's cheaper to have that reader and free books than it is to but the books physically, especially with the way the lumber companies are gouging the world.
This rosy picture will be fought viciously by IP owners, so who knows how it'll turn out in the short run. I assume the manufacture of e-book readers will be constrained by copy-control and lawsuits. But we ain't the whole world, and eventually the books will go running free.
Also, laptops are in no way necessary to view text. Nor is Windows, or evn Linux. One could create a rather SIMPLE OS that could do the job, and also be freeware. Ya know, this is so simple I bet it even exists.
It's being done at some colleges as a pilot program, but, you'll not be surprised,they don't give a break on the price per copy. A little taste of the future: the prices stay the same, and the book company and the college keep the new profits generated by the savings by not printing the book on presses.
I also seem to recall that the U.S. Congress has helpfully made any attempt to digitize a textbook a felony.
God, my back... I remember how much those damned paper books weighted in high school and college!
And you'd think that it would be an obvious application - those e-texts could be updated yearly, or even on the fly as mistakes were discovered. And they shouldbe cheaper.
Don't bet on it, tho. The textbook industry is small and ferocious, and will go ape$%$@ if anyone tries to ease them out of the picture.
Here's a frightening thought for the publishers to chew on... open source textbooks...
A random yet maybe useful thought occurs.
If a series of eBook readers actually caught on, and if they were all using copy-controlled hardware and software, then eBook content would truly become a subscription service, because they would not pass through a general purpose PC, ever. Tho hackers might find a way somehow, the critical mass necessary to create a free library of "controlled" content would never surface. Somewhat like Gnutella, the only books available for free (and technically pirated) would be a fairly small geek library.
May the publishers and distributors be greedy and nasty!
In the nearer term, ebook readers are going to create immense amounts of toxic waste, because, as you say, the marketplace may rule, but corporations need new sales - so each reader model will go out of production fast. There is no way to stop them.
Longer term, the toxic garbage accumulating in a few thousand places will not be a patch on the devastation of all the worlds forests that the paper industry represents. Even if they replant trees, the loss of the trees causes a slow washaway of the topsoil. Nothing is without consequences. And also, the demand for paper will grow exponentially as 6.5 - 12 billion people become literate and buy more and more books. We NEED ebooks, for the human race's literacy, and for the prevention of the utter devastation of the trees (not that that would not happen for other reasons. Sigh.)
BTW, it occured to me last night - building an ebook is totally within a bright technician's abilities -- picture a wooden frame, nicely done, housing some non-volatile MRAM, a generic processor, some DOS-like OS, a simple control interface, and mayhap an LED or organic screen... shouldn't be too expensive, and with copy control coming down with felony force, it may be the only way to have a truly free reader.
A ship that big probably couldn't be taken down quickly by a Scud. It's over a thousand feet long, and it's not a gasbag, it is composed of independent cells of gas. Not that the ship wouldn't have an interesting time of it as the center of gravity whipped.... it'd kiss the ground, but probably at a slower rate than a plane would.
I've been reading about these monster airship/trucks for over twenty years now, and I can say in that time I've had some thoughts.
The most apparent thing, to me, was that it gives homebuilding a whole new dimension of economy. Imagine if you can a car built in your back yard -- importing the steel, the laborers, the machines to stamp the parts, all of it -- how much would that car cost? Well, that's how houses are built. Stick by stick, on the ground (yes, I know modularity has increased and all that). Theoretically, a house built in a factory, with quality control, on an assembly line, would reduce the price of houses to a commodity item.
As I am now old and cynical, I know that even if they cut the cost of home manufacture in half, we the buyers would never see the price decrease. The factories would eat the entire savings as new profit, put stick builders out of biz if possible, and use the profits to buy up related industries and strive for a vertical monopoly in time-honored fashion. Sigh.
I love the idea of simply building the house as a well-designed unit and flying it to a foundation somewhere. BUT -- think of this -- it means that houses could be built in national parks, wilderness areas, all the places it was impossible to get to before... but now it could be done. There is no advance so wonderful that humans can't find an evil use for it...
Another thing I thought of, long ago. A lot of municipalites are not going to allow factory-built houses to be flown in, to protect the local building trades. And most certainly Americans will panic (they are good at that -- the safest country in the world is the most personally paranoid) at the thought of a house flying overhead at 60 MPH. The Hindenburg is still, wrongly, viewed as the end of airships because they were unsafe.
A last thing. A few years ago, a researcher got a hold of an actual swathe of the cloth used on the hull of the Hindenburg. Apparently, the paint was incredibly flammable. When the Hindy went up, it was the paint that made it go WHOMPH into flame, not the hydrogen. The hydrogen, if you look at the film, was burning up in any case. The passengers did not by and large die of the fire -- they died from jumping off the ship. I remember it being said that if most of them had kept their heads and jumped off just before the ship hit the ground (and, I assume, ran like hell), they would have had a good chance of survival.
Pity -- primarily because of that disaster, airships died in the U.S. as a commercial venture. They were such magnificent beasts!
Then why in da world is a 22 inch mated double screen LCD not available? It'd be scalable to larger screens, as well. You listening, Apple?
Ten digital copying... :)
It is called PBS and NPR. Although free-marketers want them commercialized, and are partway succeeding... hate to see corporate logos before PBS shows. Arg.
Is it any wonder PBS and NPR have the best available news coverage?
The end for the greatest new era on TV came when the networks folded their non-profitable news operations into their entertaiment divisions. The predictable happened. And we act surprised. Sigh.
Justice belongs to he who can afford a lawyer.
And also: copyright violation is not "theft". In no way. It is a not a crime, it is a civil offense called infringement. Copyright "violators" are never criminals, and they are not "stealing".
They also didn't worry about theft, either, as a concept as it applied to land, etc. That was a European import.
The idea of copyright almost didn't make it into the U.S. Constitution. There were some voices against it, and I'm going to strain my bad memory here, Jefferson was one of those voices. The idea was that ideas and works were the property of mankind, and all art was based on someone's prior art somewhere, so how does one draw the line? They compromised by setting the copyright term at about 20 years. It's now effectively eternal. "Happy Birthday" is still under copyright! (Probably. It was last I heard).
The difference between copying and redistribution seems to be what, quantity? Intent?
This is probably the most important issue of our time. Who will wind up owning copyrighted works? How is this going to end? Seems that it's inevitable that a very few large corporations or associations are going to hold IP in their vaults, one way or another, sometimes quite literally. The laws about copyright, or the interpretation of them, are changing, and you can draw the line on the graph and see where it's heading, and fast. IP isn't going to benefit the creators, mostly, it's going to make the controllers and owners of the distribution channels rich. History and common sense insist that they will screw the artists at every opportunity.
The street perfomers method is the only way guaranteed to make a musician money. But think of this: John Fogerty couln't play any CCR tunes in person or on media for over 20(?) years. The owner of his works decided he was going to punish him. That is the future. What's going on is that RIAA/MPAA are maneuvering to control all online distribution channels, so that somehow, someway, they get a chunk out of everyone. It's about control, not rights. But the artists have to back the labels, if they have any dreams of making it, because those labels own the means for them to succeed.
There was a demonstration of a very large LCD "screen" a few years ago that was composed of two LCDs mated together vertically. The join line was very thin; exactly one pixel wide, I recall, so that it would be unnoticable.
I thought it a good idea at the time. Why isn't anyone trying it on the market? What was the problem?
"Intellectual property" is not a concept supported in law until quite recently, really -- think of it. The idea is that somehow this type of property is not a physical thing, something that the theft of which would deprive the owner of its use. IP is the incredible idea that patterns of bits are a piece of inventory that can be somehow taken from some metaphysical warehouse. Digital copying removes the scarcity factor from the market -- we must adjust to this somehow.
Why is that? Is it because the record companies and associated studios have near-monopoly on publication, marketing, and distribution, so they set incredible prices for which the bands must sell their souls? How is home recording doing this to them? Is it not in fact the record companies, not the listeners, that impoverish the bands?
Maybe they didn't sell out because not enough people thought them a good enough draw to buy a ticket. No one promised musicians that they could make a living at it. Hell, the market is oversaturated with them -- there just aren't enough customers to make all of them wealthy, or even give them enough money to give up their day jobs. And let's not forget that the bulk of the money spent on concerts and albums go into the companies' pockets -- it takes a long, long time for a band to pay back its "bill" to the company. Intentionally.
What industry bribed congress to let us make copies?
Sales are not down, an impressive thing considering that the economy has downturned. Napster did nothing perceptible to music sales. Not that this is an argument. Buggy whip manufacturers took a lasting hit from the auto industry.
Congress made Fair Use copying legal because in classic theory, when I bought the record, tape, CD, whatever, I owned the item. I could copy it, sell it to someone (right of First Sale), set it on fire, write on its pristine surface. No one considered the owner of the media to be merely licensing "intellectual property". The owner owned the tape, the book, the CD. This was settled by the Supremes over a decade ago.
What seems to be happening today is that the federal judiciary was seeded over two decades with pro-business judges who seem to think that law should enable businesses to make profits in a time-honored fashion even if that fashion is obsolete. IP is a concept that is being molded by the collective rulings of some really misguided jurists -- we are losing First Sale rights, Fair Use rights, and the concept that we actually own the CD or whatever we paid for at the store. This is not good, people.