I know there have been alot of errors mentioned but I didn't see this one yet. In 20 years, by Moore's law, processors won't be just 40 times faster (if that's what was implied by the 40Ghz statement) they will be more like 5,160 times faster. Because speed (or at least transistors)will have doubled like 13.333 times. I am not sure if I did the math right but only 40Ghz? We should be there in about 6 1/2 years following Moore's law. I will finally be able to run Quake III at my desired 50,000 frames/second. I can tell the difference I swear!!
So I've been reading the posts and I am impressed with the slashdot level of knowledge about Micrsoft. After what I've read it seems that this could be something very useful to everyone who supports alternative OS's. If Micrsoft does end up being split, and.NET is supposed to render operating systems irrelevant by becoming a standard (a real standard submitted to a committee not a standard like windows) then it would be a big push for alternative OS's. My biggest support would probably have to go to java because its easy and somewhat standard although I understand why some people don't like Sun as a company. I don't want to use windows, but the reason I do is because of the GUI and software. The GUI isn't really relevant to this, but if all software was truly portable I would have no problem switching to linux and making due with the gui.
I haven't had much luck with freenet so far so I don't have it installed, that is why I am not going to, I don't want to sound like too much of a hypocrite.
But who would be held accountable? the user? an advantage would be that people could prevent "bad" things from being saved on their hard drives that they wouldn't want to distribute (child porn and such). But yes, it would would put a damper on some of the advantages that freenet offers, although for most things it wouldn't even matter.
I think you have underestimated freenet. It has alot of niches that it fills. One: obviously it can't be shut down so people can depend on it for the long hall - unlike scour or napster(although I am sure that Napster will be around for a long time and is not as vololtile as many people think - (journalists) ). Right now, I can get mp3's from audio galaxy but I can't get movies from anywhere efficiently. IRC is pretty difficult sometimes with the overloaded f-serves and whatnot. Gnutella cannot scale well. Encryption and being anonymouse are not why freenet is a big deal, it just helps with the concept of file sharing that is very distributed and resilient. The average joecool@aol.com doesn't care about encryption but I'll bet he does care about getting a DVD ripper that uses DeCSS or a movie that's still in the theatre, or a very popular new song without any waiting, and all from the same place.
And Napster has a great interface, simple and elegant, not bloated and easy to use.
That is extremely interesting, something more than just speculation. And if Kenetix - (it Discreet now that owns 3D studio) didn't care about it, you can bet that Adobe doesn't. What kind of protection does Adobe use? serial numbers? Like that's going to stop anyone? And windows too, copy protection by serial numbers and forced upgrades by not allowing the installation of another full OS might circumvent some people but to people who severly detest the idea of paying for a Microsoft OS (like me) so much that even if I was a millionare I wouldn't pay, its not going to stop anything. If I had to pay for windows, I would never use it. Knowledge base is everything. Think about it, if everyone knew everything about every OS (hypothetically of course) which one would be the most common?
And actually even having the same name is not really any crutch. I know I have seen more expamples but the only one that I can think of now is The Patriot... starring Steven Segal! Oh yeah!
Don't forget passive aggressive abuses of power like turning on sprinklers by remote control, hating authority figures, and always always techno music. Oh and righting up manifestos and sending them to 'feds'.
Re:What about hang overs?
on
Beer In Space
·
· Score: 2
Actually I would be willing to bet that probably every astronaught has puked in space.
I think it is almost impossible that every employee thought that what the company was doing was right, but it doesn't mean that the major desicion makers (which is being referred to as "the company" here) intentionally created a lawsuit for the sake of publicity.
Just a note, when the whole etoy/etoys chaos was going on a friend of mine was trying to get a job and one of the places he looked at was etoys. Apparently when he was talking to the person doing the hiring she said that the lawsuit was their major source of publicity. I am glad they went under, on some level they wanted publicity from it all, maybe that was the the only reason they did it at all.
If you've tried DSL or cable, you'll realize that it makes the current Web much more bearable than a dial-up connection -- it does NOT, however, suddenly turn your computer into an interactive TV set. It is not the promised revolution -- it just makes for a pleasant Web experience, period. There's certainly not enough here to spark a new revolution -- yet.
I guarantee that if everyone had cable or faster, and CD burners, once people learned how to use them, no one would buy CD's on a regular basis again. Not to mention movies. Or the endless possibilities of something as well crafted as freenet. I would call that a revolution. I am just waiting until there is a moviegalaxy.com.
OK, I'll admit that I am karma whorin' a bit, but I think that I wrote a fairly good essay and someone might even like reading it. I wrote this essay for my final project in an english class. While it is not comprehensive, even in my own knowledge, and certainly a small fraction of what is really evil about huge companies it was written to give people who just didn't understand what the big deal was about having large corporations in charge. I wrote it with the average person in mind (dumbed down and not at slashdot level). I do think that is a fairly good essay to show people to give them a solid idea of why you feel anger towards large corporations (if you do) without having to write an essay yourself or give a speech to every person you want to tell. I know that some things might not be entirely accurate but I did try to cover all angles, so don't come down too hard on the mistakes. Also, if you ever wanted to know just how much the big record companies screw artists out of money check out
This link It is Steve Albini (producer of In Utero) talking about the manipulations of some recod companies. My point in this is that something like this WILL NOT help consumers, and is only used as a tool for further influence by large corporations. So anyway...
Large Media Corporations are Abusing Their Power
By: Simeon Bassett
The larger the corporation, the more collective influence they will have over their industry. There is a point in the rise of power of anything that can work as whole that the power becomes too great, and it is abused. It has happened in every society that has given power to a specific person or a group with similar motives. One example is the emperors of ancient China. One emperor, Quin Shihuangdi wanted himself to be remembered as the first emperor of China, and went on a crusade to erase anything from the past and to make China start over under his rule. He burned literature and destroyed libraries, reminiscent of the thought control portrayed in George Orwell's 1984. He originally wanted to have his personal army buried alive with him after his death to protect himself in the afterlife. This nightmarish example of tyranny seems to be almost cliché in history, but thought is not given seriously to the parallels of the present. The United States of America was founded so that people would have choices throughout their lives when dealing with their religious beliefs and any other elements that affect them. Branches of government were created to balance the power and create subtle conflict so that decisions are not made out of personal interest from a select few in power.
The biggest culprits of corporate over-control and consumer neglect are the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Sure, there are companies such as Microsoft, which is under scrutiny because of their monopolistic practices with their huge (90%) user base on desktop computers. Intel, which is out of hot water because of a recent rise of competition, took their time releasing incrementally faster microprocessors until they had someone to compete with (Advance Micro Devices). Cisco, who has a much-overlooked tendency to buy up competition before they turn into a threat, seems like the Microsoft of the networking world, but never seems to be under corporate pressure. All of these are examples of companies that have clearly abused their power in many instances, but they pale in comparison to the two giant alliances of media powers.
To quote Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when talking about digital movies: "Our attorneys believe we need to pursue this very cautiously. Industry wide compacts where you sit down and say, `This is what seven or eight companies are going to do' - that's very dangerous ground." To say that this is hypocritical is something of an understatement. Seven giant companies acting collectively is, for the most part, what the MPAA is. It is an organization made up of the following major film companies: Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Universal Studios, Inc., and Warner Bros. Each one of these companies is a household name and together they make a massive monolith that has influence on almost everyone in the country. Unions of workers were created to give more power to the working class. A union of giants gives exponentially more power back to the titans of the corporate world. You can observe the control of the MPAA yourself by looking for their logo. Have you ever seen the symbol at the end of the credits of a movie with the oval shape, inner oval, and five dots in the middle? If you haven't, look for it and you'll find it - on almost every movie you see.
While I won't go into everything the MPAA has done that crosses the line between business tactics and monopolistic practices, and I won't debate whether or not Ronald Regan was right in cutting the separation of the movie industry and movie theatre chains, I will go into one recent, blatant, and insulting event that has taken place at the hands of the MPAA.
I say recent because the court decision in favor of the MPAA is still in the appeal process, blatant because hopefully it will be easy to see why this is such an extreme violation, and insulting because it flies in the face of the first amendment. A program written by Jon Johansen called DeCSS decrypts (unscrambles) the encoding that the MPAA has put onto all DVD movie discs (more on this later). He put the source code into the public domain, and not only was he attacked by the MPAA, but so were web sites that merely linked to places where the DeCSS source code could be acquired. Source code, which is text describing a program, can be read just as anything else can, and not jut by a computer. So why is it that it is not protected under free speech laws? The MPAA's answer would be that its primary purpose was the unauthorized copying of DVD discs. They maintained this stance throughout the trial even though they could not document one case of piracy due to the program. The intent as stated by the author and the users of the program was that they wanted to create their own DVD movie playing software so that they wouldn't be contained to using the software made by other companies, which is mostly sold commercially. It would enable them to watch the DVD movies they own on any computer they wanted to program for, not just ones sanctioned by the MPAA. This would actually increase the number of potential buyers of DVDs but the MPAA still came down hard. Even if the intent of the software was for copying DVD movies, it should still be considered free speech. If something can be sung in a song, or put on a t-shirt then clearly it can and should be treated as speech. In fact, both of these things were done, the song was taken down from mp3.com for "offensive lyrics" and the retailers of the t-shirts, copyleft.net, were given a subpoena by the MPAA. At least they're consistent.
Even if you overlook all of atrocious logic of the MPAA, the fact still remains that they sued and won their case against 2600 magazine for merely providing a link to the source code of the program. This is the equivalent of one person telling another where to buy gasoline and getting blamed because that person could potentially use it to harm someone. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the judge presiding over the case, Judge Kaplan, is a former employee of the MPAA. How do they get away with all of this? Maybe it's the huge political involvement they have, from the parties thrown at Republican national conventions to the large amount of financial support for the Democratic Party.
This isn't an isolated problem either; the RIAA is just as bad or worse than the MPAA. They're recent bought with digital music distribution methods like Napster, have been much publicized by the media, but the sheer legal aggression that they have shown in their battle to maintain their current revenue stream without increasing their quality of service, has been passed over for the most part. To quote the RIAA website directly: "RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States." Ninety percent control is a lot. Especially when it covers the entire industry. Microsoft has about a ninety percent control over the operating systems of desktop computers (the program that keeps everything running) with Windows, but a parallel example would be if they controlled ninety percent of all the software commercially sold. To be fair, the RIAA is composed of many more companies than the MPAA. Any record label that meets their requirements can apply. This should make everything fine as long as being a part of the group doesn't require monopolistic practices like price control. But it does. They even have an acronym for it - MAP. MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price scheme. It says that no company can advertise CD's for below a certain price. Shouldn't the FCC step in and do something about this? They are, and it's about time. Deals have been struck out of court so that companies that don't agree with advertising for a certain price, like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City don't get angry. But now the FCC is finally stepping up and alleging that fixed pricing schemes have cost consumers $480 million.
This is a typical pattern for the RIAA; they seem to want both ends of every deal. Another example would be that they receive royalties from any blank CD sold. This is supposedly to compensate for anticipated piracy, but the cost is spread around to everyone who buys CD-R discs, whether they use the blank CD's to copy and resell music or not. If I as a musician want to make music and distribute it recorded on CD-R discs, then I am not only paying the company that made the disk, I am paying the RIAA, my major competitor, with every CD I create. You would think that they would be satisfied, but they have still created large-scale efforts against supposed music piracy. I guess the compensation isn't enough.
One such effort is the ongoing lawsuits against music distributors such as mp3.com and Napster. Napster has made no money at all from its efforts at the time of this writing and even though they distribute no music themselves, and the people that do distribute music do it with no money changing hands at any point, the RIAA still feels that they are a threat created through illegal means. Even more odd, is that Napster should technically be shielded by the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, which states that any distribution of music that is not being sold by any standard is legal. It was meant to facilitate the copying of music between friends and such, and at the same time, compensate the RIAA with royalties from the mediums of choice. Now that there is no medium, as with network file sharing, there are no royalties and the piece of legislation that the RIAA personally created, lobbied for, and oversaw through congress, is now Napster's suit (pun intended) of armor, and what the RIAA is fighting against.
Another battle being waged is over mp3.com. A service offered by mp3.com allowed people to listen to music they owned whenever they were at a computer connected to the Internet. This was seen as a violation of the RIAA's property and mp3.com was attacked in a lawsuit, which they lost, and which crippled the entire company. Now mp3.com must pay royalties on every song that is "owned" by the RIAA and that the service offers, which has forced them into charging fees for the users (the service was originally free). In the end people are paying more money to listen to songs they already own. Could all this tight control be that the RIAA is looking out for the interests of the artist? Not likely. Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana's "In Utero", stated in an essay that in a typical situation with a hot band the money is distributed as follows: Lawyer: $12,000, Agent: $7,500, Previous Label: $50,000, Studio: $52,000, Manager: 51,000, Producer: $90,000, Record Company: $710,000, Band member net income each: $4,031. That's a total of $976,531 that the band has made. It is unfortunate that each band member gets 00.41% of the money they create. Yes, less than half of a percent comes back to each band member.
The RIAA and MPAA do not care about the consumer, or the artists that are making them rich. They have used tactics and business practices that go far beyond the limits of capitalism. As I have alluded to, there is much more to the story and many more instances of the RIAA, MPAA, and many other large companies flexing their corporate muscle to gain an unfair advantage in their industry, and to ultimately exploit consumers.
Maybe if some of the mod makers fused with lawyers and trained hard in 100x gravity they could gain a higher power level than Funimation and defeat them in a epic battle over the fate of earth!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I think that the target market is to put movies and such on them. Too expensive? yes. Would it be incredible to see? definitly.
I know there have been alot of errors mentioned but I didn't see this one yet. In 20 years, by Moore's law, processors won't be just 40 times faster (if that's what was implied by the 40Ghz statement) they will be more like 5,160 times faster. Because speed (or at least transistors)will have doubled like 13.333 times. I am not sure if I did the math right but only 40Ghz? We should be there in about 6 1/2 years following Moore's law. I will finally be able to run Quake III at my desired 50,000 frames/second. I can tell the difference I swear!!
For the current price of a DVD-ROM drive, you could buy a CD-ROM drive and have enough money left over to tack on another 20GB to your hard drive,
I doubt that I could find a cd-rom and 20gb hard drive for $50
Jazz Disks
So I've been reading the posts and I am impressed with the slashdot level of knowledge about Micrsoft. After what I've read it seems that this could be something very useful to everyone who supports alternative OS's. If Micrsoft does end up being split, and .NET is supposed to render operating systems irrelevant by becoming a standard (a real standard submitted to a committee not a standard like windows) then it would be a big push for alternative OS's. My biggest support would probably have to go to java because its easy and somewhat standard although I understand why some people don't like Sun as a company. I don't want to use windows, but the reason I do is because of the GUI and software. The GUI isn't really relevant to this, but if all software was truly portable I would have no problem switching to linux and making due with the gui.
I played doom yesterday network style. On windows ME. It was awsome. I was glad for the backwards compatibility.
I haven't had much luck with freenet so far so I don't have it installed, that is why I am not going to, I don't want to sound like too much of a hypocrite.
Someone should put the kernel on freenet if it isn't already there in some form.
But who would be held accountable? the user? an advantage would be that people could prevent "bad" things from being saved on their hard drives that they wouldn't want to distribute (child porn and such). But yes, it would would put a damper on some of the advantages that freenet offers, although for most things it wouldn't even matter.
I think you have underestimated freenet. It has alot of niches that it fills. One: obviously it can't be shut down so people can depend on it for the long hall - unlike scour or napster(although I am sure that Napster will be around for a long time and is not as vololtile as many people think - (journalists) ). Right now, I can get mp3's from audio galaxy but I can't get movies from anywhere efficiently. IRC is pretty difficult sometimes with the overloaded f-serves and whatnot. Gnutella cannot scale well. Encryption and being anonymouse are not why freenet is a big deal, it just helps with the concept of file sharing that is very distributed and resilient. The average joecool@aol.com doesn't care about encryption but I'll bet he does care about getting a DVD ripper that uses DeCSS or a movie that's still in the theatre, or a very popular new song without any waiting, and all from the same place.
And Napster has a great interface, simple and elegant, not bloated and easy to use.
where?
That is extremely interesting, something more than just speculation. And if Kenetix - (it Discreet now that owns 3D studio) didn't care about it, you can bet that Adobe doesn't. What kind of protection does Adobe use? serial numbers? Like that's going to stop anyone? And windows too, copy protection by serial numbers and forced upgrades by not allowing the installation of another full OS might circumvent some people but to people who severly detest the idea of paying for a Microsoft OS (like me) so much that even if I was a millionare I wouldn't pay, its not going to stop anything. If I had to pay for windows, I would never use it. Knowledge base is everything. Think about it, if everyone knew everything about every OS (hypothetically of course) which one would be the most common?
And actually even having the same name is not really any crutch. I know I have seen more expamples but the only one that I can think of now is The Patriot ... starring Steven Segal! Oh yeah!
Don't forget passive aggressive abuses of power like turning on sprinklers by remote control, hating authority figures, and always always techno music. Oh and righting up manifestos and sending them to 'feds'.
Actually I would be willing to bet that probably every astronaught has puked in space.
It took them three years to develop that? Maybe they tested it too much.
Actually I never took part in any boycott, but if what you say is true, then you are completely right and I apologize for being so pessimistic.
I think it is almost impossible that every employee thought that what the company was doing was right, but it doesn't mean that the major desicion makers (which is being referred to as "the company" here) intentionally created a lawsuit for the sake of publicity.
Just a note, when the whole etoy/etoys chaos was going on a friend of mine was trying to get a job and one of the places he looked at was etoys. Apparently when he was talking to the person doing the hiring she said that the lawsuit was their major source of publicity. I am glad they went under, on some level they wanted publicity from it all, maybe that was the the only reason they did it at all.
Finally java comes to my NES and Sega Master System! Now I can .... do nothing more than I previously could.
BT rocks, I especially like Lullaby To Gaia and Believer, oh wait, the article is talking about British Telecom. I wonder if they do any techno?
If you've tried DSL or cable, you'll realize that it makes the current Web much more bearable than a dial-up connection -- it does NOT, however, suddenly turn your computer into an interactive TV set. It is not the promised revolution -- it just makes for a pleasant Web experience, period. There's certainly not enough here to spark a new revolution -- yet.
I guarantee that if everyone had cable or faster, and CD burners, once people learned how to use them, no one would buy CD's on a regular basis again. Not to mention movies. Or the endless possibilities of something as well crafted as freenet. I would call that a revolution. I am just waiting until there is a moviegalaxy.com.
That's interesting, I didn't even consider other industries, thanks for the reply.
OK, I'll admit that I am karma whorin' a bit, but I think that I wrote a fairly good essay and someone might even like reading it. I wrote this essay for my final project in an english class. While it is not comprehensive, even in my own knowledge, and certainly a small fraction of what is really evil about huge companies it was written to give people who just didn't understand what the big deal was about having large corporations in charge. I wrote it with the average person in mind (dumbed down and not at slashdot level). I do think that is a fairly good essay to show people to give them a solid idea of why you feel anger towards large corporations (if you do) without having to write an essay yourself or give a speech to every person you want to tell. I know that some things might not be entirely accurate but I did try to cover all angles, so don't come down too hard on the mistakes. Also, if you ever wanted to know just how much the big record companies screw artists out of money check out This link It is Steve Albini (producer of In Utero) talking about the manipulations of some recod companies. My point in this is that something like this WILL NOT help consumers, and is only used as a tool for further influence by large corporations. So anyway ...
e ut/index.html
k _napster/index.html
l ?pagewanted=6
Large Media Corporations are Abusing Their Power By: Simeon Bassett
The larger the corporation, the more collective influence they will have over their industry. There is a point in the rise of power of anything that can work as whole that the power becomes too great, and it is abused. It has happened in every society that has given power to a specific person or a group with similar motives. One example is the emperors of ancient China. One emperor, Quin Shihuangdi wanted himself to be remembered as the first emperor of China, and went on a crusade to erase anything from the past and to make China start over under his rule. He burned literature and destroyed libraries, reminiscent of the thought control portrayed in George Orwell's 1984. He originally wanted to have his personal army buried alive with him after his death to protect himself in the afterlife. This nightmarish example of tyranny seems to be almost cliché in history, but thought is not given seriously to the parallels of the present. The United States of America was founded so that people would have choices throughout their lives when dealing with their religious beliefs and any other elements that affect them. Branches of government were created to balance the power and create subtle conflict so that decisions are not made out of personal interest from a select few in power.
The biggest culprits of corporate over-control and consumer neglect are the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). Sure, there are companies such as Microsoft, which is under scrutiny because of their monopolistic practices with their huge (90%) user base on desktop computers. Intel, which is out of hot water because of a recent rise of competition, took their time releasing incrementally faster microprocessors until they had someone to compete with (Advance Micro Devices). Cisco, who has a much-overlooked tendency to buy up competition before they turn into a threat, seems like the Microsoft of the networking world, but never seems to be under corporate pressure. All of these are examples of companies that have clearly abused their power in many instances, but they pale in comparison to the two giant alliances of media powers.
To quote Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, when talking about digital movies: "Our attorneys believe we need to pursue this very cautiously. Industry wide compacts where you sit down and say, `This is what seven or eight companies are going to do' - that's very dangerous ground." To say that this is hypocritical is something of an understatement. Seven giant companies acting collectively is, for the most part, what the MPAA is. It is an organization made up of the following major film companies: Walt Disney Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Inc., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Universal Studios, Inc., and Warner Bros. Each one of these companies is a household name and together they make a massive monolith that has influence on almost everyone in the country. Unions of workers were created to give more power to the working class. A union of giants gives exponentially more power back to the titans of the corporate world. You can observe the control of the MPAA yourself by looking for their logo. Have you ever seen the symbol at the end of the credits of a movie with the oval shape, inner oval, and five dots in the middle? If you haven't, look for it and you'll find it - on almost every movie you see.
While I won't go into everything the MPAA has done that crosses the line between business tactics and monopolistic practices, and I won't debate whether or not Ronald Regan was right in cutting the separation of the movie industry and movie theatre chains, I will go into one recent, blatant, and insulting event that has taken place at the hands of the MPAA.
I say recent because the court decision in favor of the MPAA is still in the appeal process, blatant because hopefully it will be easy to see why this is such an extreme violation, and insulting because it flies in the face of the first amendment. A program written by Jon Johansen called DeCSS decrypts (unscrambles) the encoding that the MPAA has put onto all DVD movie discs (more on this later). He put the source code into the public domain, and not only was he attacked by the MPAA, but so were web sites that merely linked to places where the DeCSS source code could be acquired. Source code, which is text describing a program, can be read just as anything else can, and not jut by a computer. So why is it that it is not protected under free speech laws? The MPAA's answer would be that its primary purpose was the unauthorized copying of DVD discs. They maintained this stance throughout the trial even though they could not document one case of piracy due to the program. The intent as stated by the author and the users of the program was that they wanted to create their own DVD movie playing software so that they wouldn't be contained to using the software made by other companies, which is mostly sold commercially. It would enable them to watch the DVD movies they own on any computer they wanted to program for, not just ones sanctioned by the MPAA. This would actually increase the number of potential buyers of DVDs but the MPAA still came down hard. Even if the intent of the software was for copying DVD movies, it should still be considered free speech. If something can be sung in a song, or put on a t-shirt then clearly it can and should be treated as speech. In fact, both of these things were done, the song was taken down from mp3.com for "offensive lyrics" and the retailers of the t-shirts, copyleft.net, were given a subpoena by the MPAA. At least they're consistent.
Even if you overlook all of atrocious logic of the MPAA, the fact still remains that they sued and won their case against 2600 magazine for merely providing a link to the source code of the program. This is the equivalent of one person telling another where to buy gasoline and getting blamed because that person could potentially use it to harm someone. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the judge presiding over the case, Judge Kaplan, is a former employee of the MPAA. How do they get away with all of this? Maybe it's the huge political involvement they have, from the parties thrown at Republican national conventions to the large amount of financial support for the Democratic Party.
This isn't an isolated problem either; the RIAA is just as bad or worse than the MPAA. They're recent bought with digital music distribution methods like Napster, have been much publicized by the media, but the sheer legal aggression that they have shown in their battle to maintain their current revenue stream without increasing their quality of service, has been passed over for the most part. To quote the RIAA website directly: "RIAA® members create, manufacture and/or distribute approximately 90% of all legitimate sound recordings produced and sold in the United States." Ninety percent control is a lot. Especially when it covers the entire industry. Microsoft has about a ninety percent control over the operating systems of desktop computers (the program that keeps everything running) with Windows, but a parallel example would be if they controlled ninety percent of all the software commercially sold. To be fair, the RIAA is composed of many more companies than the MPAA. Any record label that meets their requirements can apply. This should make everything fine as long as being a part of the group doesn't require monopolistic practices like price control. But it does. They even have an acronym for it - MAP. MAP stands for Minimum Advertised Price scheme. It says that no company can advertise CD's for below a certain price. Shouldn't the FCC step in and do something about this? They are, and it's about time. Deals have been struck out of court so that companies that don't agree with advertising for a certain price, like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Circuit City don't get angry. But now the FCC is finally stepping up and alleging that fixed pricing schemes have cost consumers $480 million.
This is a typical pattern for the RIAA; they seem to want both ends of every deal. Another example would be that they receive royalties from any blank CD sold. This is supposedly to compensate for anticipated piracy, but the cost is spread around to everyone who buys CD-R discs, whether they use the blank CD's to copy and resell music or not. If I as a musician want to make music and distribute it recorded on CD-R discs, then I am not only paying the company that made the disk, I am paying the RIAA, my major competitor, with every CD I create. You would think that they would be satisfied, but they have still created large-scale efforts against supposed music piracy. I guess the compensation isn't enough.
One such effort is the ongoing lawsuits against music distributors such as mp3.com and Napster. Napster has made no money at all from its efforts at the time of this writing and even though they distribute no music themselves, and the people that do distribute music do it with no money changing hands at any point, the RIAA still feels that they are a threat created through illegal means. Even more odd, is that Napster should technically be shielded by the Home Audio Recording Act of 1992, which states that any distribution of music that is not being sold by any standard is legal. It was meant to facilitate the copying of music between friends and such, and at the same time, compensate the RIAA with royalties from the mediums of choice. Now that there is no medium, as with network file sharing, there are no royalties and the piece of legislation that the RIAA personally created, lobbied for, and oversaw through congress, is now Napster's suit (pun intended) of armor, and what the RIAA is fighting against.
Another battle being waged is over mp3.com. A service offered by mp3.com allowed people to listen to music they owned whenever they were at a computer connected to the Internet. This was seen as a violation of the RIAA's property and mp3.com was attacked in a lawsuit, which they lost, and which crippled the entire company. Now mp3.com must pay royalties on every song that is "owned" by the RIAA and that the service offers, which has forced them into charging fees for the users (the service was originally free). In the end people are paying more money to listen to songs they already own. Could all this tight control be that the RIAA is looking out for the interests of the artist? Not likely. Steve Albini, who produced Nirvana's "In Utero", stated in an essay that in a typical situation with a hot band the money is distributed as follows: Lawyer: $12,000, Agent: $7,500, Previous Label: $50,000, Studio: $52,000, Manager: 51,000, Producer: $90,000, Record Company: $710,000, Band member net income each: $4,031. That's a total of $976,531 that the band has made. It is unfortunate that each band member gets 00.41% of the money they create. Yes, less than half of a percent comes back to each band member.
The RIAA and MPAA do not care about the consumer, or the artists that are making them rich. They have used tactics and business practices that go far beyond the limits of capitalism. As I have alluded to, there is much more to the story and many more instances of the RIAA, MPAA, and many other large companies flexing their corporate muscle to gain an unfair advantage in their industry, and to ultimately exploit consumers.
Bibliography 1. Music retailers irked by CD discounting (2000). 5 Dec. 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/SHOWBIZ/Music/12/05/cds.r
2. Who we are (2000). href="http://www.riaa.com/About-Who.cfm
3. Cave, Damien. A hacker crackdown? (2000). 7 Aug. 2000 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/07/yoin
4. Sabin, Rob. The Movie's Digital Future is in Sight and it Works (2000). 26 Nov. 2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/26/arts/26SABI.htm
5. Albini, Steve. The Problem With Music. href="http://www.negativland.com/albini.html.
6. Gross, Robin D. Court Uphold Right to Digital Music (1999). 29 June. 1999 href="http://www.mp3.com/news/283.html?lang=eng
Maybe if some of the mod makers fused with lawyers and trained hard in 100x gravity they could gain a higher power level than Funimation and defeat them in a epic battle over the fate of earth!