Which means what, exactly? That you do not consume? That you do not enter into consumer-producer relationships with those who produce things?
I think I see your point, but I'm not sure. I'm guessing you mean to complain about framing the question in terms of "consumers" and "producers", instead of in terms of "citizens", but I really have no idea where you're going with this distinction. What are you trying to imply? What is the benefit of abandoning the "consumer-producer" terminology in this context? What, exactly, are we overlooking, that you are trying (not very hard, I might add) to draw our attention to?
What, in a nutshell, is your point?
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
Copyright Rumblings
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're confusing "what it was designed to do" with "what it technically and legally actually does".
It's true that the DMCA was designed to prevent copyright violations, but it does this by making it illegal to work around DRM technology.
Thus, by law, it's always illegal to work around DRM technology, regardless of whether or not you're violating a copyright.
This particular compromise would be ideal for the content industry. On the one hand, the content industry would get optimal support for dealing with copyright violators, and give them perpetual control (via the DMCA) for any content they locked up with DRM technology. Sure, you could copy it when the term expired... but only if you do it without working around the DRM technology. And don't forget that under this compromise, everybody will have agreed that the content industry is justified in coming down as hard as they like, if you do try to work around the DRM tech.
The only way this compromise could be a good thing is if they rework the DMCA to allow DRM workarounds on content whose copyright has expired. Since the DMCA (as I understand it)currently doesn't parse this way, the compromise is a Bad Thing.
Maybe this $300 billion company figured they could strong-arm the trademark owner out of the name like they strong-arm everyone else in the industry?
Or maybe the other company figured they could make some easy money in an out-of-court-settlement by preemptively filing a trademark on a name they knew Microsoft was using but hadn't trademarked yet. It could happen.
Won't they feel silly when they discover that "Palladium" was just a code name, and MS never had any intention of trademarking it as a brand name anyway!
The windows paradigm works. Fooling around with widgets and making making arbitrary changes to the convention is neither improving the current model, nor producing a better model. We're not going to get a next-generation UI from Joe Engineer, whose idea of innovation is a widget cool enough for Microsoft to steal.
The next-generation UI is going to come from UI experts, who have the sense to keep what is good, and the insight to replace what is bad with something even more intuitive. It's going to come from the people who have sane UI standards, and stick to them, not from the people who think that haring off each in their own direction is "the next big thing". It's going to come from the people who reward me for the knowledge I've already accumulated, not from the people that punish me for not already knowing their one true way.
Besides, the real UI improvements will be in the fundamental design, not the superficial appearances. We probably won't even notice most of those innovations, because they'll be effectively improving our experience without intruding on our consciousness. Wake me up when user-customizeable skins and widgets can do that.
See, I already have enough things to remember in my life. Why should I have to remember every application's "magic keys", anyway? Here's something that's even easier to remember:
For for all sensibly designed GUIs, there's a consistent menu bar across the top of each window that leads you intuitively to whatever function you're looking for, even if you've never even thought about it before, let alone read the man page and memorized a bunch of "magic keys".
There's no rule against providing both a sane checkbox interface for quick adjustments when you don't want to do serious scripting and whatnot, and a sensible command line (or at least command line accessibility) for when you do.
As long as this attitude exists there will never be any innovation on the desktop.
This would be true if this attitude really was widespread, and we really were grovelling through a decades-old, obviously painful interface purely out of fear of change.
As it is, every non-UI-desiging idiot out there is trying to design a new UI to go with their pet programming project, and none of them improve significantly on the current model, and none of them seem to have any idea of how painful their "new and improved" UI will be to anyone else who might otherwise want to use their program for its obvious technical benefits.
The UI conventions should at least stop changing for a little while, before we start saying that it's time for a change, don't you think?
I had to reboot my f-ing windows box 4 times this week.
That's your own damn fault. I personally administrate over 200 Windows boxes, and average about 4 reboots a month over the entire group. Counting installs and upgrades.
Um... yeah, like Emusic. Guess I haven't been doing my due diligence. I'll have to check them out before I open my mouth again:)
Things I'll be considering, when I visit their site:
- Monthly subscription. I don't really care much for this model. It didn't do much for me when Columbia House did it, and I'm really much more interested in paying per download on a track-by-track basis.
- Bitrate. It'd be nice to have the quality of my MP3s limited on my end, by bandwidth or storage space constraints. I'd like to choose from a range of bitrates, based on my needs and capabilities.
- Selection. I happen to like some of the big-company acts. And what if I want to fill out my Bach collection? Or my Jim Croce collection? There's a huge catalog of worthwhile music that Emusic just doesn't provide.
It sounds like Emusic is pretty close to the service I describe, so I'm quite happy to agree with you that I mean like Emusic--with emphasis on "like". It looks like there's still room for healthy comptetion, and plenty of opportunity to improve, extend, and refine this kind of service. Emusic is definitely a step in the right direction, but it definitely isn't the final step.
It has nothing to do with Kazaa going "legitimate". It has nothing to do with Napster's good faith deal attempt. It has nothing to do with the file trading community and the recording industry[1] hating each other.
It has everything to do with quality of service for a reasonable price. Kazaa's service sucks, honestly. The only reason I use it at all is because it happens to provide better service for the price than my local music store. And even that isn't always true. It's also illegal, which is a problem even from a purely pragmatic point of view.
All the "music industry" has to do is provide a better service than Kazaa (and really, how hard could that be?), and filesharing dwindles to a mere freckle on the ass of the artists, producers, and distributors.
The filesharers haven't invented anything. They're simply doing exactly what the Internet was designed to do all along. Is it a new thing? Sure, if information-transfer models dating back to the 1970s is "new". But don't try to tell me that the Napsters and Kazaas of the world are some kind of paradigm-shifting geniuses. You're thinking of the guys at RAND who prototyped ARPANET.
And anyway, the "recording industry" isn't selling horses and buggies at all. It's selling music: music which it (collectively), has written, recorded, produced, funded, marketed, and distributed. There's no need for weak analogies when we can simply say that there are better methods of accomplishing some of these tasks, and that some people are using these methods to compete in this particular market. Analogies often don't make as much sense as a simple description of the facts. All the "recording industry" has to do is adopt more efficient, more competitive practices. It doesn't even have to invent anything new--the Internet is already there, and the technology is already proven.
[1] The "recording industry" will not perish, by the way. What are the (music) filesharers going to share, if people stop writing, performing, recording, distributing, and advertising music?
See, I thought he was saying that $17 is a fair price for a CD. Which raises the question: If $17 covers the cost of the content, the cost of the media, the cost of distribution, and a reasonable profit margin for a CD, then why don't DVDs go for about $100 each, since the media, distribution, and profit margin costs all stay roughly the same, but the content cost is much higher?
It seems much more reasonable to assume that the MPAA has inadvertently stumbled upon a sane price-to-performance ratio, while the RIAA is apparently afflicted by some sort of bizarre space madness.
There's a lot of advantages to a properly legitimate service. If I could download music for ten cents a track, from servers that were always up, never served truncated files or lied about their contents, provided a database of content searchable on a variety of fields (track name, album name, producer, &c.), without DRM or any other restrictions on redistribution, and with a decent cut going to the artist, here's what would happen:
I'd stop downloading from P2P networks altogether. Why waste my time and bandwidth on a bunch of amateurs when I could be doing business with respectable professionals?
I wouldn't bother to share my non-copy-protected music with anybody. Why waste my bandwidth pushing files to some punkass who a) can't scrape together 10 cents to get his own copy, and b) is apparently too stupid to figure out that Kazaa really can't compete with proper customer service.
I'd still burn copies of my music, because hey, it's my music--I'm paying for the right to listen to it on my own terms, after all. So I'd have one copy on my computer/multimedia center, one copy in my mp3-man, and one copy in my car. BFD. I might burn the occasional compilation or sample album for a friend, but probably not too often. That whole "it's so cheap and easy they could do it themselves" thing, again.
And you know what? The price would actually be negotiable. After all, I could throw some files around to acquaintances, and maybe use limited P2P to preview new stuff... but I wouldn't ask my friend to let me download every single track by an artist he'd introduced me to--why waste our time and bandwidth? I could simply go to the official server and pay 20, or 30, or maybe even 50 cents for tracks I know are worthwhile. And how do I know they're worthwhile? Because it's so damn easy to hear about them from other people.
So first off, everybody would be too busy making money to sue, and second, everybody would be too busy getting on to the official website where all the marketing, distribution, collating, and... what was that word? Oh, right... where all the money is to prompt a lawsuit anyway.
If the record "industry" survives at all, it will be as an Internet-based pay-for file sharing service.
And the rats are going to replace her with a sharp-toothed, feces-smothered, flea-ridden, plague-carrying, baby-eating monster that is going to make her look like a cupcake.
THe stores are only making a couple of dollars on the cd. You have to factor in the cost... The cost is always passed back to the consumer.
So?
Look, if the only way to break even (or make a decent profit) is to raise the prices above what the customer thinks is reasonable, then the proper thing to do is go out of business. The proper thing is not to whine about how much it costs to sell your product, in the hopes that the consumer will give you bonus sympathy dollars, instead of saving their money and getting better goods and services for lower prices elsewhere.
Not to mention the fact that DVDs cost just as much to manufacture and distribute, and the content costs several orders of magnitude more to produce... by your reasoning, Black Hawk Down should cost five or six times more than the its own soundtrack, instead of almost exactly the same price.
But my first point is so important that I'm going to repeat it: if you can't sell a product at a price that people will pay, get out of the business.
You say this like you're the only one who's ever figured it out. Since there's already been a whole Simpsons episode devoted to it, you can safely assume everybody already knows about the problem. Here's a question from the current state of the conversation: Is the rise in American obesity some kind of "Barbie backlash"?
That's because people are retards. My daily commute is the best time I have to listen to music. Ironically, it's probably the worst time to be chatting on a cell phone.
Saying "people favor the war because the media tells them to" is quite different from saying "people favor the war because the media is lying to them". At least frame your argument properly. And while we're sticking to reality, do you really think Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction?
This is insightful: The big difference is that it used to be quite clear when you were looking at a contract, and you knew you were supposed to take a good look at it (preferably with a lawyer). Now that contracts are masquerading as installation checkboxes (all the better to fool you with, my dear), All those End-User 101 students are suddenly flunking Advanced Installer Trickery without even realizing they'd been enrolled in the class.
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Which means what, exactly? That you do not consume? That you do not enter into consumer-producer relationships with those who produce things?
I think I see your point, but I'm not sure. I'm guessing you mean to complain about framing the question in terms of "consumers" and "producers", instead of in terms of "citizens", but I really have no idea where you're going with this distinction. What are you trying to imply? What is the benefit of abandoning the "consumer-producer" terminology in this context? What, exactly, are we overlooking, that you are trying (not very hard, I might add) to draw our attention to?
What, in a nutshell, is your point?
It's true that the DMCA was designed to prevent copyright violations, but it does this by making it illegal to work around DRM technology.
Thus, by law, it's always illegal to work around DRM technology, regardless of whether or not you're violating a copyright.
This particular compromise would be ideal for the content industry. On the one hand, the content industry would get optimal support for dealing with copyright violators, and give them perpetual control (via the DMCA) for any content they locked up with DRM technology. Sure, you could copy it when the term expired... but only if you do it without working around the DRM technology. And don't forget that under this compromise, everybody will have agreed that the content industry is justified in coming down as hard as they like, if you do try to work around the DRM tech.
The only way this compromise could be a good thing is if they rework the DMCA to allow DRM workarounds on content whose copyright has expired. Since the DMCA (as I understand it)currently doesn't parse this way, the compromise is a Bad Thing.
Or maybe the other company figured they could make some easy money in an out-of-court-settlement by preemptively filing a trademark on a name they knew Microsoft was using but hadn't trademarked yet. It could happen.
Won't they feel silly when they discover that "Palladium" was just a code name, and MS never had any intention of trademarking it as a brand name anyway!
No, I don't.
The windows paradigm works. Fooling around with widgets and making making arbitrary changes to the convention is neither improving the current model, nor producing a better model. We're not going to get a next-generation UI from Joe Engineer, whose idea of innovation is a widget cool enough for Microsoft to steal.
The next-generation UI is going to come from UI experts, who have the sense to keep what is good, and the insight to replace what is bad with something even more intuitive. It's going to come from the people who have sane UI standards, and stick to them, not from the people who think that haring off each in their own direction is "the next big thing". It's going to come from the people who reward me for the knowledge I've already accumulated, not from the people that punish me for not already knowing their one true way.
Besides, the real UI improvements will be in the fundamental design, not the superficial appearances. We probably won't even notice most of those innovations, because they'll be effectively improving our experience without intruding on our consciousness. Wake me up when user-customizeable skins and widgets can do that.
. . .
See, I already have enough things to remember in my life. Why should I have to remember every application's "magic keys", anyway? Here's something that's even easier to remember:
For for all sensibly designed GUIs, there's a consistent menu bar across the top of each window that leads you intuitively to whatever function you're looking for, even if you've never even thought about it before, let alone read the man page and memorized a bunch of "magic keys".
There's no rule against providing both a sane checkbox interface for quick adjustments when you don't want to do serious scripting and whatnot, and a sensible command line (or at least command line accessibility) for when you do.
This would be true if this attitude really was widespread, and we really were grovelling through a decades-old, obviously painful interface purely out of fear of change.
As it is, every non-UI-desiging idiot out there is trying to design a new UI to go with their pet programming project, and none of them improve significantly on the current model, and none of them seem to have any idea of how painful their "new and improved" UI will be to anyone else who might otherwise want to use their program for its obvious technical benefits.
The UI conventions should at least stop changing for a little while, before we start saying that it's time for a change, don't you think?
That's your own damn fault. I personally administrate over 200 Windows boxes, and average about 4 reboots a month over the entire group. Counting installs and upgrades.
Things I'll be considering, when I visit their site:
- Monthly subscription. I don't really care much for this model. It didn't do much for me when Columbia House did it, and I'm really much more interested in paying per download on a track-by-track basis.
- Bitrate. It'd be nice to have the quality of my MP3s limited on my end, by bandwidth or storage space constraints. I'd like to choose from a range of bitrates, based on my needs and capabilities.
- Selection. I happen to like some of the big-company acts. And what if I want to fill out my Bach collection? Or my Jim Croce collection? There's a huge catalog of worthwhile music that Emusic just doesn't provide.
It sounds like Emusic is pretty close to the service I describe, so I'm quite happy to agree with you that I mean like Emusic--with emphasis on "like". It looks like there's still room for healthy comptetion, and plenty of opportunity to improve, extend, and refine this kind of service. Emusic is definitely a step in the right direction, but it definitely isn't the final step.
It has everything to do with quality of service for a reasonable price. Kazaa's service sucks, honestly. The only reason I use it at all is because it happens to provide better service for the price than my local music store. And even that isn't always true. It's also illegal, which is a problem even from a purely pragmatic point of view.
All the "music industry" has to do is provide a better service than Kazaa (and really, how hard could that be?), and filesharing dwindles to a mere freckle on the ass of the artists, producers, and distributors.
The filesharers haven't invented anything. They're simply doing exactly what the Internet was designed to do all along. Is it a new thing? Sure, if information-transfer models dating back to the 1970s is "new". But don't try to tell me that the Napsters and Kazaas of the world are some kind of paradigm-shifting geniuses. You're thinking of the guys at RAND who prototyped ARPANET.
And anyway, the "recording industry" isn't selling horses and buggies at all. It's selling music: music which it (collectively), has written, recorded, produced, funded, marketed, and distributed. There's no need for weak analogies when we can simply say that there are better methods of accomplishing some of these tasks, and that some people are using these methods to compete in this particular market. Analogies often don't make as much sense as a simple description of the facts. All the "recording industry" has to do is adopt more efficient, more competitive practices. It doesn't even have to invent anything new--the Internet is already there, and the technology is already proven.
[1] The "recording industry" will not perish, by the way. What are the (music) filesharers going to share, if people stop writing, performing, recording, distributing, and advertising music?
It seems much more reasonable to assume that the MPAA has inadvertently stumbled upon a sane price-to-performance ratio, while the RIAA is apparently afflicted by some sort of bizarre space madness.
As long as it takes ;)
There is bartering going on! We're in the middle of negotiations right now! What did you think this whole controversy was about?
I'd stop downloading from P2P networks altogether. Why waste my time and bandwidth on a bunch of amateurs when I could be doing business with respectable professionals?
I wouldn't bother to share my non-copy-protected music with anybody. Why waste my bandwidth pushing files to some punkass who a) can't scrape together 10 cents to get his own copy, and b) is apparently too stupid to figure out that Kazaa really can't compete with proper customer service.
I'd still burn copies of my music, because hey, it's my music--I'm paying for the right to listen to it on my own terms, after all. So I'd have one copy on my computer/multimedia center, one copy in my mp3-man, and one copy in my car. BFD. I might burn the occasional compilation or sample album for a friend, but probably not too often. That whole "it's so cheap and easy they could do it themselves" thing, again.
And you know what? The price would actually be negotiable. After all, I could throw some files around to acquaintances, and maybe use limited P2P to preview new stuff... but I wouldn't ask my friend to let me download every single track by an artist he'd introduced me to--why waste our time and bandwidth? I could simply go to the official server and pay 20, or 30, or maybe even 50 cents for tracks I know are worthwhile. And how do I know they're worthwhile? Because it's so damn easy to hear about them from other people.
So first off, everybody would be too busy making money to sue, and second, everybody would be too busy getting on to the official website where all the marketing, distribution, collating, and... what was that word? Oh, right... where all the money is to prompt a lawsuit anyway.
If the record "industry" survives at all, it will be as an Internet-based pay-for file sharing service.
But an evil cupcake.
See, I would start a war to get rid of Britney Spears.
So?
Look, if the only way to break even (or make a decent profit) is to raise the prices above what the customer thinks is reasonable, then the proper thing to do is go out of business. The proper thing is not to whine about how much it costs to sell your product, in the hopes that the consumer will give you bonus sympathy dollars, instead of saving their money and getting better goods and services for lower prices elsewhere.
Not to mention the fact that DVDs cost just as much to manufacture and distribute, and the content costs several orders of magnitude more to produce... by your reasoning, Black Hawk Down should cost five or six times more than the its own soundtrack, instead of almost exactly the same price.
But my first point is so important that I'm going to repeat it: if you can't sell a product at a price that people will pay, get out of the business.
Yeah, but is he dumber than Cotton?
Well, aren't we?
No, just twinkies.
You say this like you're the only one who's ever figured it out. Since there's already been a whole Simpsons episode devoted to it, you can safely assume everybody already knows about the problem. Here's a question from the current state of the conversation: Is the rise in American obesity some kind of "Barbie backlash"?
That's because people are retards. My daily commute is the best time I have to listen to music. Ironically, it's probably the worst time to be chatting on a cell phone.
I can see it now: "In Emacs, old mail incorporates you!"
Saying "people favor the war because the media tells them to" is quite different from saying "people favor the war because the media is lying to them". At least frame your argument properly. And while we're sticking to reality, do you really think Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction?
This is insightful: The big difference is that it used to be quite clear when you were looking at a contract, and you knew you were supposed to take a good look at it (preferably with a lawyer). Now that contracts are masquerading as installation checkboxes (all the better to fool you with, my dear), All those End-User 101 students are suddenly flunking Advanced Installer Trickery without even realizing they'd been enrolled in the class.