They would simply make it much more expensive for Covad to do business, hoping that I'd cave in and go ahead and pay them directly. Hardly a strategy surprise, and practically what they've been doing already.
Does your provider actually own the wires? In my neck of the woods I have a non-Bell DSL provider, but the Bell still owns the wires. With this decision, the chances of my provider sticking around in the face of the Bell deciding it wants to be a jerk about it are about nil.
Yep, it's all our fault that the RIAA/MPAA can't be bothered to actually try to price their commodities competitively (there is a level at which it's easier to buy a legit copy than pirate one with glitches/compression in it), and would rather abuse the legislative process to force their vision on us, completely bypassing the rights of the public to fair use of copyrighted material under any circumstances, not just stopping piracy.
So why aren't you a member of eMusic.com then? You get pretty much unlimited downloads from them for less than $1 a song. MP3.com sells whole albums (of more than 8 tracks) for $8 for a CD and $4 for a "netCD". That means this isn't such a revolution after all. And you'll note that there aren't huge numbers of people flocking to eMusic instead of Gnutella for their MP3's now that they're "reasonably priced".
The market may bear $1 a song for uncompressed music, with artwork & liner notes but I really don't think it'll bear it for compressed bare songs.
I'm a musician, and I have friends who are not only musicians, but nationally distributed and known musicians (though not "stars"). I know those things go into the cost of a CD. Guess what? Most artists don't spend ($18 - $2.64) * # of cd's sold on all those things, or even close. The $18 is there because every middleman who touches the little plastic disk wants his cut. But the fact of the matter is, there is no need to have so many middlemen that it drives up the cost 500%!
So you either have: 1) way to damn many middlemen--in which case you need to improve your efficiency so that you can compete on price, or 2)a few people who are excessively greedy (and potentially fixing prices with the other labels, since everyone seems to have the same range of hyperinflated pricing).
Think hard: do the artists at fightcloud have no costs to record and engineer their music? Is it really likely that the costs of a good amateur production studio are so infinitesimally smaller than a professional studio? Do they have no gigging costs? No artwork costs? Keep in mind, the "professional" releases can spread their costs over millions of CDs whereas the amateurs are lucky to spread them over thousands--you'd expect the amateur productions to have those costs make up a BIGGER percentage of the per CD cost, even if the total costs are less.
Finally, you need to go re-read Courtney Love's essay about who bears the production costs with the majors--it comes out of the artist's royalties, which are a small fraction of that $18. That's true for big artists and small on the major labels; it's not like the label is paying that artist extra specially to stick around in most cases.
On the other hand, $2.64 for a full length CD, physically present in my hands with a jewelcase and artwork and everything really puts the lie to the "necessity" of paying $18 apiece at joe's CD shack.
If you want people to believe what doesn't exist, deny it's existence. If you want people to not believe what does exist, admit it existence. Basic lesson from Illuminatus!
So I post a reply with the clear intent of demonstrating that high number of patches per unit time != horrible quality, and your reply is "but you suck!" and we suck based on NOT providing MORE patches per unit time at that.
Seriously, the answer is clear. The copyright would be owned by the PERSON who writes a bit of code. There would be no copyright on the whole
package. For code that is rewritten by other people inside the same company, they would all sign agreements that they allow royalty free perpetual
licenses to everyone else in the company.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. What if the only change I make to the code is going through and renaming a particular variable because it is colliding with a different namespace? Do I then own the copyright on that variable name, but none of the rest of the code? I'm sure anyone who's programmed much can think of many other examples of "microchanges" that don't lend themselves well to this model of copyright.
It's all about the fence
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 2
The submission asks:
What laws can be written that will be fair both to content creators and to users, while cutting the middleman?
But the commentary along with it asks:
How would you revise or restructure
IP and copyright law to make both sides of the fence happy?
The problem is it's not two sides of the fence. The people making the biggest problem here are the people who are the fence! The fence has the most complete control of the exchange of money for IP properties, and that's the biggest problem.
There is definitely a role for distributors etc. because your typical creator is not necessarily good at the business aspects of distribution. But whatever changes are made, they need to minimize the distributor's opportunities to skim, restrict, and otherwise control the flow of money and IP to their own gain and the detriment of the parties on either side.
The point was not about specific time to patch issues (which any huge organization is going to have trouble executing consistently) but rather to do with overall frequency of patches in spite of the assumed "lots of patches mean crap" in the original comment I was responding to. It's a rare week that Sun doesn't issue several new patches, regardless of how old the issues the patch fixes might be. Issue response time is unrelated, and I agree could use a lot of work.
One thing you probably want to think about is, whether or not your college of choice allows students to be sysadmins in some areas of the school. If you really think you want to be a sysadmin, such an environment would be a great place to cut your teeth, because you'll see a lot of the variety of user behavior that as a sysadmin you'd be dealing with for the rest of your career.
In case it's not clear, I'm supporting the "go to college" choice too, but with the availability of student sysadmin jobs, you can work your way towards what you think you want to do too.
For me, my college experience helped a lot in developing research and "first principles" types of thought patterns. Logical approaches to troubleshooting can make all the difference, and a good curriculum (in any field, actually, my degree was E.E.) will help teach you that.
If you call that rocking hard, you must have thought the original Batman movie was better than all of Star Wars. Because Batman the movie beats the pants off that joke called Spider-Man the movie. I can't imagine any "love scenes" much worse than Spider-Man, actually, though from the reviews it sounds like Lucas is giving the title a go.
I work for Sun Enterprise Services. Back when I was direct field support for customers, I had to deal with questions like this every so often.
One of my favorites was a pair of A5000 disk arrays that were delivered in pristine boxes, but when you opened the boxes, the brackets they were bolted into were bent 4 inches over, at a 90 degree angle. Think straight (but misaligned), bent 90 degrees right for 4 inches, bent 90 degrees left and there following the edge of the array.
It was obvious these arrays had been 1) mishandled and 2) repackaged. This wasn't something you could do by accidentally dropping the arrays either; both edges of the bracket had the same bend. It was like they had hit it really hard with a forklift or something, wrapping the bracket across the front of the array, and then said "oh no" and boxed them back up again.
We told the customer to work with our shipping dept and the shipper to resolve the responsibility, and I never heard about it again, so I presume they got satisfaction from someone.
Or if you want something a bit more legal (but not much) check out the reissue of Plunderphonics as a 2 disc set in a beautiful book with lots of notes about the songs. Basically Oswald split the tracks up into "songs" and "tunes" (songs are mostly with lyrics, tunes are mostly without) and added a bunch of additional things, mostly stuff that was commissioned at one time or another. Things like the 4 (?) tracks for Elektra's Rubayat covers, commissions for Naked City, Kronos Quartet, etc. Really fantastic stuff, and worth the trouble to find (in the bay area, Ameoba should have it; that's where I got mine). Published by Negativland's label Seeland....
BTW "a bit more legal" means they tried to get licensing for everything but failed (rumor has it it foundered on the Michael Jackson track, "Dab"), and Seeland went ahead and published it anyway, allegedly without Oswald's cooperation.
It's also worth noting that while this stuff is very much *like* the mashups, it is also very much *different* as well. I can only think of a couple of the songs that are much like a mashup, most of the rest cut the songs up and "reduce them to their essence" in some fashion that is still recognizeable, but not necessarily much like the original.
Slashdot Mirror
They would simply make it much more expensive for Covad to do business, hoping that I'd cave in and go ahead and pay them directly. Hardly a strategy surprise, and practically what they've been doing already.
Does your provider actually own the wires? In my neck of the woods I have a non-Bell DSL provider, but the Bell still owns the wires. With this decision, the chances of my provider sticking around in the face of the Bell deciding it wants to be a jerk about it are about nil.
There you go. $1 per MP3 might not even be reasonable to you, since I haven't seen anyone say it's over 128kbps.
To quote a longtime friend: "Pot. Kettle. Bang!"
Yep, it's all our fault that the RIAA/MPAA can't be bothered to actually try to price their commodities competitively (there is a level at which it's easier to buy a legit copy than pirate one with glitches/compression in it), and would rather abuse the legislative process to force their vision on us, completely bypassing the rights of the public to fair use of copyrighted material under any circumstances, not just stopping piracy.
The market may bear $1 a song for uncompressed music, with artwork & liner notes but I really don't think it'll bear it for compressed bare songs.
Sorry, but $1 is NOT a reasonable price for a single song. I refuse to reward the majors for only getting it halfway.
So you either have:
1) way to damn many middlemen--in which case you need to improve your efficiency so that you can compete on price, or
2)a few people who are excessively greedy (and potentially fixing prices with the other labels, since everyone seems to have the same range of hyperinflated pricing).
Think hard: do the artists at fightcloud have no costs to record and engineer their music? Is it really likely that the costs of a good amateur production studio are so infinitesimally smaller than a professional studio? Do they have no gigging costs? No artwork costs? Keep in mind, the "professional" releases can spread their costs over millions of CDs whereas the amateurs are lucky to spread them over thousands--you'd expect the amateur productions to have those costs make up a BIGGER percentage of the per CD cost, even if the total costs are less.
Finally, you need to go re-read Courtney Love's essay about who bears the production costs with the majors--it comes out of the artist's royalties, which are a small fraction of that $18. That's true for big artists and small on the major labels; it's not like the label is paying that artist extra specially to stick around in most cases.
On the other hand, $2.64 for a full length CD, physically present in my hands with a jewelcase and artwork and everything really puts the lie to the "necessity" of paying $18 apiece at joe's CD shack.
If you want people to believe what doesn't exist, deny it's existence. If you want people to not believe what does exist, admit it existence. Basic lesson from Illuminatus!
dude, your sig is like so out of date.
foreheads on their real heads
either that or a rock to tie a string around, I forget
How very slashdot.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. What if the only change I make to the code is going through and renaming a particular variable because it is colliding with a different namespace? Do I then own the copyright on that variable name, but none of the rest of the code? I'm sure anyone who's programmed much can think of many other examples of "microchanges" that don't lend themselves well to this model of copyright.
What laws can be written that will be fair both to content creators and to users, while cutting the middleman?
But the commentary along with it asks:
How would you revise or restructure IP and copyright law to make both sides of the fence happy?
The problem is it's not two sides of the fence. The people making the biggest problem here are the people who are the fence! The fence has the most complete control of the exchange of money for IP properties, and that's the biggest problem.
There is definitely a role for distributors etc. because your typical creator is not necessarily good at the business aspects of distribution. But whatever changes are made, they need to minimize the distributor's opportunities to skim, restrict, and otherwise control the flow of money and IP to their own gain and the detriment of the parties on either side.
The point was not about specific time to patch issues (which any huge organization is going to have trouble executing consistently) but rather to do with overall frequency of patches in spite of the assumed "lots of patches mean crap" in the original comment I was responding to. It's a rare week that Sun doesn't issue several new patches, regardless of how old the issues the patch fixes might be. Issue response time is unrelated, and I agree could use a lot of work.
B.S. Sun Microsystems releases patches for Solaris quite often, and we're a market leader for commercial Unix systems.
I wonder if this might explain the Chinese Embassy bombing?
Some women like hot horney chicks :-)
In case it's not clear, I'm supporting the "go to college" choice too, but with the availability of student sysadmin jobs, you can work your way towards what you think you want to do too.
For me, my college experience helped a lot in developing research and "first principles" types of thought patterns. Logical approaches to troubleshooting can make all the difference, and a good curriculum (in any field, actually, my degree was E.E.) will help teach you that.
If you call that rocking hard, you must have thought the original Batman movie was better than all of Star Wars. Because Batman the movie beats the pants off that joke called Spider-Man the movie. I can't imagine any "love scenes" much worse than Spider-Man, actually, though from the reviews it sounds like Lucas is giving the title a go.
unless of course the book is banned. Nice try though.
One of my favorites was a pair of A5000 disk arrays that were delivered in pristine boxes, but when you opened the boxes, the brackets they were bolted into were bent 4 inches over, at a 90 degree angle. Think straight (but misaligned), bent 90 degrees right for 4 inches, bent 90 degrees left and there following the edge of the array.
It was obvious these arrays had been 1) mishandled and 2) repackaged. This wasn't something you could do by accidentally dropping the arrays either; both edges of the bracket had the same bend. It was like they had hit it really hard with a forklift or something, wrapping the bracket across the front of the array, and then said "oh no" and boxed them back up again.
We told the customer to work with our shipping dept and the shipper to resolve the responsibility, and I never heard about it again, so I presume they got satisfaction from someone.
The only "mellow" version I've heard of Teen Spirit is Tori Amos' version. What are you smoking?
BTW "a bit more legal" means they tried to get licensing for everything but failed (rumor has it it foundered on the Michael Jackson track, "Dab"), and Seeland went ahead and published it anyway, allegedly without Oswald's cooperation.
It's also worth noting that while this stuff is very much *like* the mashups, it is also very much *different* as well. I can only think of a couple of the songs that are much like a mashup, most of the rest cut the songs up and "reduce them to their essence" in some fashion that is still recognizeable, but not necessarily much like the original.