In Asia, nearly 54 percent of software programs were pirated. Reducing the rate 10 points to 44 percent by 2006 could create 1.1 million new jobs, increase economic growth by US$170 billion, and generate another US$15 billion in tax revenues.
Basic logical fallacy.
What they mean to say is, *increasing* the market of legitimate asian software by 22% (shifting 10% of existing installations from illegal to legally purchased, or even just finding 22% more people to buy your software) would have those impacts.
Reducing piracy by that amount, without a corresponding increase in legitimate licensing, would have absolutely no impact whatsoever on jobs, US economic growth, or tax revenues.
It's irrelevant whether or not their numbers are correct (they seem to be way off, and besides, the formulas used to generate job growth are based on manufacturing sectors, not stuff like software), since what they said wasn't even true on the face of it.
He also claimed that if they gave a statistic saying 10,000 people pirated a $5,000 piece of software, it wouldn't actually equate $50 million in losses because many of those people wouldn't have purchased the product in the first place. That's what I was arguing against. You just can't say that, because it actually legitimizes piracy.
What planet are you reading from?
In order to lose $50 million, you have to actually *have* that $50 million, or some way of obtaining it. If you stop those 10k people from pirating that $5k piece of software, you don't get $50 million from it. You get 10k fewer people using the software. It's not the same thing as losing, or gaining, $50 million in sales.
This simple fact of arithmetic has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with whether you believe software piracy is right, wrong, or purple.
See for example how Via makes some living selling cheap C3 CPUs. Yes, they're not fast chips. But here's how it works: some poor chinese wants to get a computer. He/she can't pirate a CPU, and can't afford to pay 400$ for a top of the line Intel chip. So he/she gets a 40$ VIA chip instead.
Which in turn keeps some people employed at VIA.
That's how it would work for software too.
No, not really. There's a big difference in job generation between manufactured goods and services. If an entirely new software product is created because those people can't pirate from Microsoft anymore, you create a few jobs... but not many. If you simply broaden existing markets, you create practically zero jobs.
If Via needs to make low-end chips for some markets, they have to make capital investments in the assembly line and assign workers to build those chips for as long as they're making them. If Open Office needs to be translated into Chinese, they hire a translator or two on contract for a little while, and bring them back every so often when they add functionality to the interface. Maybe they even hire one full-time, but that's *one job*.
Just think about this: Microsoft has 55,000 employees, and they are by far the largest software vendor in the world. Intel, which makes a whole lot of the processors out there, but isn't anywhere near as dominant in the market as Microsoft, has 78,700 employees.
I don't see how anyone could have been "locked" into using an illegal copy of Windows XP.
There is software that is only available for Windows XP (such as the latest version of Adobe Premiere). If your industry requires a software package that does not work even on Windows 2000 (much less Mac or Linux) you are locked into Windows XP. Now you have a choice to pay for it (and support Microsoft's business practices) or pirate it.
The software industry is structured such that you cannot boycott some manufacturers without losing the ability to use others at the same time. Imagine if boycotting Dole pineapple meant you couldn't get Sunkist oranges, either, even though the two companies share no ownership or employees? Our entire market system would be very different if consumer choice had been restricted this way all along.
If there is an unpatched Windows machine causing problems on the network, the ISPs should simply enforce their terms of service and disconnect the offending machine, whether the software is pirated or not.
Um... then how is the user supposed to get their machine patched?
And no, I can't think of a good reason for pirates being supplied with free upgrades.
Me either, but that's not what this thread is about. An upgrade is something that adds or improves functionality, IMO; a patch fixes a mistake that never should have been there. I don't think (and neither does Microsoft) that *anyone* should get free upgrades necessarily. That's why it costs to get Windows XP even if you have a legitimate copy of Windows 2000. But believe me, after the last batch of patches I installed (which screwed something having to do with video drivers that made me boot in slow motion), it's ludicrous to call critical updates "upgrades."
So you're saying that once I'm at the library, it takes me 20 seconds to look up the call number/location of Who's Who, turn to the appropriate page, and list out all of the man's books? Right.
No, they're saying that when someone who works as a reference librarian (I'm pretty sure this guy must) knows exactly where Who's Who is on the reference shelf, it takes them 20 seconds to grab the book and look up the information.
You may think that this is an unfair advantage... but, if they were having an ordinary joe schmoe do the library search, they'd also have to have someone with similar familiarity do the Google search... and the difference between how long it takes, say, my mom to find something on Google compared to me is pretty huge. (I'm not even the greatest at it... my husband usually kicks my ass at googling.)
Mankind has survived for many thousands of years without advertising. It's one of the things I feel we can still do without. Marketing, and the fact that a lot of crap and garbage is sold (as a side effect of marketing) is proably a huge drain on resources, and the only "plus" I can think of is that a lot of people have incomes because of it. I'd gladly increase social security benefits in exchange for a total removal of all marketing from society.
You missed something here. I asked about the effect on the economy, not on society. Sure, mankind has done without marketing for thousands of years... pretty much up until the Industrial Revolution. But if we suddenly got rid of the concept of paying someone a fee to allow you to use their medium to promote your product, I don't think you'd get an increase in social security benefits out of it. I think it would probably plunge us pretty well into economic chaos for quite a while until we reached a new equilibrium.
Currently, advertising revenue has a redistributive effect on the economy. It means we pay for things we don't "need" as much, like television entertainment, when we buy things we do "need," like groceries. If television was all subscription-based, it would be a much smaller industry. Better quality, maybe... once people got used to paying for it. But that's a lot of jobs that would just evaporate right there.
Since my tastes differ from the average person, some company that does good market research would be even less likely to make a product I would want.
How do you know that your tastes differ from the average person? Have you done extensive market research?;-)
Besides, ever hear of a niche market? Do you suppose the "average person" would get a credit card based on additional security features for online transactions? How about the "average person" and in-home air purifiers? I participated in a whole focus group about those once. Yet most people don't find them necessary at all.
Now, some people don't really want to participate in market research, and that's perfectly fine with me. I just find it sort of funny when the same people complain that no one's marketing stuff they want.
Point well taken. I tend to think that American society (and most of Western society, but we're the worst) is way too caught up in consumerism. It's damaging on many levels.
But anyone who does own plenty of stuff and claims to disdain all marketing is blind to the effects marketing has on them... which is, IMO, even worse.
I can watch a commercial, and at the end, know whether the commercial had a positive, negative, or neutral effect on me. I'm aware of whether or not I am the target market, whether I consume products like the one being advertised, and whether I am more likely to buy them afterward. I'm also aware of *why* a particular commercial worked or didn't work... I can identify whether it taught me something I didn't know about the product, or if I identified with/despised the characters used in the commercial, or if it just made me feel good/bad about the company. (The worst commercials are the ones where, a few seconds later, I can't remember what they were advertising at all.)
I also know that pretty much all of the information I get about products comes in one way or another from either personal experience or a marketing department. Sometimes both, when someone gives out free samples.
People who aren't aware of the marketing they're not supposed to notice are, I think, far more susceptible to it.
Yeah we would all prefer TV without commercials but we have them and they influence some people enough to make them worth buying.
Well, I might not mind TV without commercials... I only watch one show, so it wouldn't cost me too much to keep up my habit. Most American TV addicts would go NUTS if they had to pay separately for their fix, though. It's so much more palatable when the charge is chopped up into itty-bitty pieces and embedded in every other frigging thing we buy.
What you are describing is advertising - having a product, and then telling people about your product. Marketing is different. Marketting is more the other way around - deciding what product to make based on what you think people would want.
Advertising is one aspect of marketing. What you're talking about is market research. Marketing is generally the process of establishing a market for your product, whether by creating a desire through advertising or discovering a niche through research.
Frankly, I love market research. Any time someone wants to call me and survey me I always say yes. I even participate in focus groups a couple times a year. Why? Because it improves the chances that someone will make a product that *I* want.
I'm convinced it works... some years ago I got a call surveying about new technologies in credit cards. A couple years later, I found a brochure about Blue from American Express, and basically said "ooooo shiny I want!" (Well, the feature I liked the most is the ability to get a temporary number for use in a single online transaction. Sadly, I haven't gotten around to using that feature yet... but damn that card is pretty!)
Seriously, how many of you that decry the concept of market research *also* complain that companies aren't making the products you'd like to see?
It's like that with movies, to me. I seek out Ebert and Roeper's reviews, watch them, and go to see movies they recommend. Paramount or Fox does not have to force me to learn about their works - if they are good, I will learn about it, and without advertising. Same thing with the food I eat, the computer I use, the car I drive. I seek out information from knowledgable sources, learn what will fill my needs, and go out and consume. I don't need some suspender wearing, BMW-driving, latte sipping, golf club toating gekko FORCING me to become aware of his shit so he can afford to send Jeremy to Montessori and summer at the Vineyard.
Have you ever worked anywhere near a marketing department?
How did Ebert and Roper see that film? Marketing sent them screening passes. How did anyone find out that restaurant existed? Even if you just walked by and saw the sign over the door, that sign is an example of marketing, from the name they chose to the color of the lettering. The computer you use you probably chose based on reviews... Tom's Hardware and Anandtech don't *buy* all the machinery they write about. It gets sent to them by marketing. When you bought your car, you either talked to a salesperson -- part of marketing -- or you bought it on a website (yes, you can buy some cars online) -- also produced by the marketing department.
The *bad* marketing is the stuff you don't like. The *good* marketing is the stuff you don't even notice... but I challenge you to come up with a *single* product that you decided to buy without any marketing happening between the company's release and your decision. Somewhere along the line, if you got information about it, it almost certainly came through a marketing department.
Now I'll just end this here so you can go and try to wash that icky feeling off your hands;-)
Marketing is an industry where the idea is to insinuate onesself where one is not wanted. An honest and upright man will not go where he is not wanted - marketers make a living at it.
Marketing is an industry built to make you want things you didn't previously want. There are two types of things you don't want: things you know about and don't want, and things you don't know about yet but might or might not want. Marketing both brings products you did not know about to your attention and tries to convince you that you want them.
It can be done well or poorly. Probably 30-40% of the calls we get on our home phone are telemarketing of one kind or another (though we get substantially fewer since we opted out of long-distance service all together, so we don't have AT&T calling to try to sell us their local service and SBC calling to try to sell us their long-distance service in alternate weeks). There are telemarketers who call knowing that they're trying to sell you something and that you might already know you don't want it, and there are those who just don't know the difference. Lately, I've had pretty good success at ending calls quickly and painlessly by making it clear that I know about the product and don't want it. i.e. "Hi, my name is [name] and I'm calling from the Los Angeles Times--" "Hi. We don't want the paper. Not even just on Sundays. We get all our news from the internet. Save a tree." "Ok, thank you, have a good day."
If there were no marketing, you probably wouldn't own half the stuff you do. Marketing departments send demos of new products to places that publish the reviews you may read when deciding what to buy. They place ads in the Yellow Pages. There are a lot of methods of marketing that don't fall into the narrow definition you gave above... in fact, *most* marketing is non-intrusive; you just haven't noticed it. (By design.)
Now, I have wondered what the effect on our economy would be if there were no more advertising. Television would all be public or by subscription. All entertainment would be more expensive. On the other hand, many products would cost a lot less, because they currently have such huge advertising budgets. I truly wonder if a significant proportion of the wealth in our economy is *created* by the existence of advertising, and I speculate that some of our economic growth is dependent on innovations in advertising (hey, we can sell ads in public restrooms!)
But marketing is not inherently an unethical business. It's easy to do it that way, of course. But the same is true of freelance computer support, health care, legal assistance... almost any service.
There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.
Oh, dude, that is an AWESOME idea! There's this whole space at the bottom of most remotes, where the heel of your hand usually goes, that is just blank except for the company logo. Put a little LCD screen down there, beam ads straight to it, and we'll make a fortune!
Seriously, there is nowhere they won't put ads these days. The bathroom, your credit card statement, the bucket your popcorn comes in at the movie... any space that people see has a price. Now DON'T GIVE THEM ANY NEW IDEAS.
It's not Jack Valenti's job to make sure there are legal DVD players for Linux. It's his job to make sure that there are NOT illegal DVD players for Linux.
Neither is his job. It's his job to make sure the movie studios can make money off of their movies. His grandest gesture in that regard has been the DMCA... and it makes many things that were legal under old copyright illegal, to make it more inconvenient to do a few things that were already illegal.
It's possible today for someone to license the technology needed to make a legal DVD player for Linux, but everyone in the position to do so knows that the Linux users will just use the illegal players for free rather than pay for the legal ones.
It's possible to *pay a lot of money* to license the technology, but that generally doesn't happen with open source projects. So, since it's not actually necessary for any technical reason, people haven't done it. If it's cheaper to buy a set-top box or a copy of Windows than to license the technology, which are you going to do? Well, duh.
Now, let's see how we could apply this method to other areas of copyright law. Books are copyrighted, right? Now, what if we wrote a book entirely in code, and offered people the opportunity to pay to take classes to learn the code, so they can read the book. But breaking the code without taking the class circumvents encryption, so it's not legal under the DMCA. It might cost only $100 to take the class in a big city, but in a more remote area where there are no certified instructors, it costs $1500 to go through the certification process so that you can teach the classes.
If some bright guy who likes cryptograms lives in Podunk, Missouri, and wants to read the book, does it really make any sense whatsoever to you that he should be arrested for figuring it out himself?
The essential difference is between use and access. Copyright law historically has governed use. The DMCA governs access. It makes perfectly legal uses illegal simply because of the method of access, solely to make it *slightly* more inconvenient and illegal to do things that were *always* illegal uses.
Linux users do not have a God or country given right to watch American Wedding on their Linux box.
I'm an atheist; I don't think anyone has a god-given right to do anything. But I think that copyright law gives me the right to watch a movie that I legally obtained for that purpose. It is the DMCA that says "but only if you do it the way WE think you should." Those restrictions have nothing to do with how I use the copyrighted material, they have to do with how I access it.
Just like when DVDs started to get popular people had to replace their VCRs with DVD players, Linux users need to give up their technology that doesn't work correctly and use that which does.
Plenty of people still get movies on VHS, and don't have DVD players. If you want to play a DVD, you need a DVD player. But that is because it is not TECHNOLOGICALLY FEASIBLE to play a DVD with a standard VCR. If Columbia Pictures starts putting a stamp on VHS tapes saying it's not legal to put them into VCRs not made by Sony, will you go out and replace your Panasonic VCR? Is it their right to decide who makes the hardware you use to view their media? How far does copyright go?
I'm relatively sure that he got his job and doesn't know anything about it.
I am too, though I'm not at all sure you meant to say that.;-)
His job is to protect against illegal players, not to make sure legal players exist for all platforms.
Neither is his job. His job is to protect against illegal *use*. Barring certain methods of playing DVDs is how he has chosen to (lobby Congress to) do that. Unfortunately, he's completely unaware of how much *legal* use he has barred with this same law.
It is no more his job to hinder legal use of media than it is to legislate what constitutes illegal use. In fact, it's specifically the MPAA's job to make sure that all sorts of people are *legally* viewing movies. The DMCA throws the baby, all its toys, and half the bathroom out with the bathwater. If it was his job to get the DMCA passed (and he seems to have taken on that job) it's his job to know what it does.
Right, because it has nothing to do with just not wanting to pay for something. It's because of several minutes of commercials. Okay.
Actually, what pisses me off the most about those stupid ads is that I only see them after I paid $9-14 bucks for my seat.
They should pay for airtime on television if they want to get this message to the "right" people. The way they're doing it now, they're preaching to the choir... and sometimes, that has the effect of making the choir feel more like misbehaving (if they're going to talk to us like criminals, why should we play by the rules?)
Of course, there are other issues with those ads and the message behind them, as you can see from my sig (taken from an Entertainment Weekly article about the ads, just before they were released).
Sure most people don't want to build their own sets. But you let those who do, do so; that is, unless you want a dumbed-down, incompetent populace... down to the very last potential engineer.
I seem to recall learning some time ago that, back in the days of The Phone Company, it was "illegal" to hook up a phone not owned by TPC to a jack in your own house.
You couldn't even *buy* a telephone back then... you had to rent it, for a ridiculous price, from Ma Bell. (This was still the case when I was a child, and I'm only 30.)
In that case, were there hobbyists who built their own phones? Were they ever actually charged with criminal activities by AT&T? I'm too lazy to do the research right now, but it would be an interesting comparison I think, if someone else wants to hunt it up;-)
I think it was unfortunate that the interviewer chose to browbeat Valenti with technical questions and focus on a single side effect of the core issue that Valenti could not be expected to be an expert on (the DVD situation on Linux). Had he stuck to the more general issues, like the fact that the behavior of legally purchased hardware is not entirely under the owner's control, he might have obtained more coherent answers that reveal more about Valenti's position...
But Valenti has many forums in which to reveal his position, if he's really interested in doing so. Personally, I think it's wonderful that the interviewer chose to take Valenti onto unfamiliar ground, to show the Jackass how much he truly doesn't know about his job.
The legislation Valenti and the MPAA have pushed through has serious and real consequences for technology. It's not all right for them to ignore or dismiss those consequences. It's time someone called them on how much they don't know about what they're doing.
Spain now can't email a LOT of places. Spain. Not just TDE customers, but ALL people there.
Did you see something in the article that I didn't? Does Spain only have the one ISP? Granted, TDE is probably the biggest one, being the one run by the government... but unless it's actually not legal/possible to get internet access from any other provider in Spain, this isn't true.
Basically while using windows unless you have roaming profiles set up, and all software on network installs which work from all workstations, you don't have the ability to sit down anywhere and work, period.
Or you could do what they do at our lab at school: push applications from the server, and have *no profiles* at all. That's right: no matter how many times you've logged into BackPC015, it will still ask you "Would you like a tour of Windows XP?" and "are you sure you want to go from an encrypted page to an unencrypted page?" every time.
Pay attention: most geeks think SCO is a stock scam. Well, even if it is, they are good at it! How did the price go up over $8 after threats of pulling all their cash?
Probably because Baystar clarified that it's not so much that they want their money back; it's that they want SCO to stop toying around with Unix products and become a full-time litigation company, since their IP is their only saleable asset as far as Baystar is concerned.
Sure, they've demanded their money back. But they're not going to push it if SCO just starts running the business the way Baystar wants them to.
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In Asia, nearly 54 percent of software programs were pirated. Reducing the rate 10 points to 44 percent by 2006 could create 1.1 million new jobs, increase economic growth by US$170 billion, and generate another US$15 billion in tax revenues.
Basic logical fallacy.
What they mean to say is, *increasing* the market of legitimate asian software by 22% (shifting 10% of existing installations from illegal to legally purchased, or even just finding 22% more people to buy your software) would have those impacts.
Reducing piracy by that amount, without a corresponding increase in legitimate licensing, would have absolutely no impact whatsoever on jobs, US economic growth, or tax revenues.
It's irrelevant whether or not their numbers are correct (they seem to be way off, and besides, the formulas used to generate job growth are based on manufacturing sectors, not stuff like software), since what they said wasn't even true on the face of it.
He also claimed that if they gave a statistic saying 10,000 people pirated a $5,000 piece of software, it wouldn't actually equate $50 million in losses because many of those people wouldn't have purchased the product in the first place. That's what I was arguing against. You just can't say that, because it actually legitimizes piracy.
What planet are you reading from?
In order to lose $50 million, you have to actually *have* that $50 million, or some way of obtaining it. If you stop those 10k people from pirating that $5k piece of software, you don't get $50 million from it. You get 10k fewer people using the software. It's not the same thing as losing, or gaining, $50 million in sales.
This simple fact of arithmetic has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with whether you believe software piracy is right, wrong, or purple.
See for example how Via makes some living selling cheap C3 CPUs. Yes, they're not fast chips. But here's how it works: some poor chinese wants to get a computer. He/she can't pirate a CPU, and can't afford to pay 400$ for a top of the line Intel chip. So he/she gets a 40$ VIA chip instead.
Which in turn keeps some people employed at VIA.
That's how it would work for software too.
No, not really. There's a big difference in job generation between manufactured goods and services. If an entirely new software product is created because those people can't pirate from Microsoft anymore, you create a few jobs... but not many. If you simply broaden existing markets, you create practically zero jobs.
If Via needs to make low-end chips for some markets, they have to make capital investments in the assembly line and assign workers to build those chips for as long as they're making them. If Open Office needs to be translated into Chinese, they hire a translator or two on contract for a little while, and bring them back every so often when they add functionality to the interface. Maybe they even hire one full-time, but that's *one job*.
Just think about this: Microsoft has 55,000 employees, and they are by far the largest software vendor in the world. Intel, which makes a whole lot of the processors out there, but isn't anywhere near as dominant in the market as Microsoft, has 78,700 employees.
I don't see how anyone could have been "locked" into using an illegal copy of Windows XP.
There is software that is only available for Windows XP (such as the latest version of Adobe Premiere). If your industry requires a software package that does not work even on Windows 2000 (much less Mac or Linux) you are locked into Windows XP. Now you have a choice to pay for it (and support Microsoft's business practices) or pirate it.
The software industry is structured such that you cannot boycott some manufacturers without losing the ability to use others at the same time. Imagine if boycotting Dole pineapple meant you couldn't get Sunkist oranges, either, even though the two companies share no ownership or employees? Our entire market system would be very different if consumer choice had been restricted this way all along.
If there is an unpatched Windows machine causing problems on the network, the ISPs should simply enforce their terms of service and disconnect the offending machine, whether the software is pirated or not.
Um... then how is the user supposed to get their machine patched?
And no, I can't think of a good reason for pirates being supplied with free upgrades.
Me either, but that's not what this thread is about. An upgrade is something that adds or improves functionality, IMO; a patch fixes a mistake that never should have been there. I don't think (and neither does Microsoft) that *anyone* should get free upgrades necessarily. That's why it costs to get Windows XP even if you have a legitimate copy of Windows 2000. But believe me, after the last batch of patches I installed (which screwed something having to do with video drivers that made me boot in slow motion), it's ludicrous to call critical updates "upgrades."
So you're saying that once I'm at the library, it takes me 20 seconds to look up the call number/location of Who's Who, turn to the appropriate page, and list out all of the man's books? Right.
No, they're saying that when someone who works as a reference librarian (I'm pretty sure this guy must) knows exactly where Who's Who is on the reference shelf, it takes them 20 seconds to grab the book and look up the information.
You may think that this is an unfair advantage... but, if they were having an ordinary joe schmoe do the library search, they'd also have to have someone with similar familiarity do the Google search... and the difference between how long it takes, say, my mom to find something on Google compared to me is pretty huge. (I'm not even the greatest at it... my husband usually kicks my ass at googling.)
Mankind has survived for many thousands of years without advertising. It's one of the things I feel we can still do without. Marketing, and the fact that a lot of crap and garbage is sold (as a side effect of marketing) is proably a huge drain on resources, and the only "plus" I can think of is that a lot of people have incomes because of it. I'd gladly increase social security benefits in exchange for a total removal of all marketing from society.
You missed something here. I asked about the effect on the economy, not on society. Sure, mankind has done without marketing for thousands of years... pretty much up until the Industrial Revolution. But if we suddenly got rid of the concept of paying someone a fee to allow you to use their medium to promote your product, I don't think you'd get an increase in social security benefits out of it. I think it would probably plunge us pretty well into economic chaos for quite a while until we reached a new equilibrium.
Currently, advertising revenue has a redistributive effect on the economy. It means we pay for things we don't "need" as much, like television entertainment, when we buy things we do "need," like groceries. If television was all subscription-based, it would be a much smaller industry. Better quality, maybe... once people got used to paying for it. But that's a lot of jobs that would just evaporate right there.
Since my tastes differ from the average person, some company that does good market research would be even less likely to make a product I would want.
;-)
How do you know that your tastes differ from the average person? Have you done extensive market research?
Besides, ever hear of a niche market? Do you suppose the "average person" would get a credit card based on additional security features for online transactions? How about the "average person" and in-home air purifiers? I participated in a whole focus group about those once. Yet most people don't find them necessary at all.
Now, some people don't really want to participate in market research, and that's perfectly fine with me. I just find it sort of funny when the same people complain that no one's marketing stuff they want.
...you say that like it's a bad thing.
Point well taken. I tend to think that American society (and most of Western society, but we're the worst) is way too caught up in consumerism. It's damaging on many levels.
But anyone who does own plenty of stuff and claims to disdain all marketing is blind to the effects marketing has on them... which is, IMO, even worse.
I can watch a commercial, and at the end, know whether the commercial had a positive, negative, or neutral effect on me. I'm aware of whether or not I am the target market, whether I consume products like the one being advertised, and whether I am more likely to buy them afterward. I'm also aware of *why* a particular commercial worked or didn't work... I can identify whether it taught me something I didn't know about the product, or if I identified with/despised the characters used in the commercial, or if it just made me feel good/bad about the company. (The worst commercials are the ones where, a few seconds later, I can't remember what they were advertising at all.)
I also know that pretty much all of the information I get about products comes in one way or another from either personal experience or a marketing department. Sometimes both, when someone gives out free samples.
People who aren't aware of the marketing they're not supposed to notice are, I think, far more susceptible to it.
Yeah we would all prefer TV without commercials but we have them and they influence some people enough to make them worth buying.
Well, I might not mind TV without commercials... I only watch one show, so it wouldn't cost me too much to keep up my habit. Most American TV addicts would go NUTS if they had to pay separately for their fix, though. It's so much more palatable when the charge is chopped up into itty-bitty pieces and embedded in every other frigging thing we buy.
What you are describing is advertising - having a product, and then telling people about your product. Marketing is different. Marketting is more the other way around - deciding what product to make based on what you think people would want.
Advertising is one aspect of marketing. What you're talking about is market research. Marketing is generally the process of establishing a market for your product, whether by creating a desire through advertising or discovering a niche through research.
Frankly, I love market research. Any time someone wants to call me and survey me I always say yes. I even participate in focus groups a couple times a year. Why? Because it improves the chances that someone will make a product that *I* want.
I'm convinced it works... some years ago I got a call surveying about new technologies in credit cards. A couple years later, I found a brochure about Blue from American Express, and basically said "ooooo shiny I want!" (Well, the feature I liked the most is the ability to get a temporary number for use in a single online transaction. Sadly, I haven't gotten around to using that feature yet... but damn that card is pretty!)
Seriously, how many of you that decry the concept of market research *also* complain that companies aren't making the products you'd like to see?
It's like that with movies, to me. I seek out Ebert and Roeper's reviews, watch them, and go to see movies they recommend. Paramount or Fox does not have to force me to learn about their works - if they are good, I will learn about it, and without advertising. Same thing with the food I eat, the computer I use, the car I drive. I seek out information from knowledgable sources, learn what will fill my needs, and go out and consume. I don't need some suspender wearing, BMW-driving, latte sipping, golf club toating gekko FORCING me to become aware of his shit so he can afford to send Jeremy to Montessori and summer at the Vineyard.
;-)
Have you ever worked anywhere near a marketing department?
How did Ebert and Roper see that film? Marketing sent them screening passes. How did anyone find out that restaurant existed? Even if you just walked by and saw the sign over the door, that sign is an example of marketing, from the name they chose to the color of the lettering. The computer you use you probably chose based on reviews... Tom's Hardware and Anandtech don't *buy* all the machinery they write about. It gets sent to them by marketing. When you bought your car, you either talked to a salesperson -- part of marketing -- or you bought it on a website (yes, you can buy some cars online) -- also produced by the marketing department.
The *bad* marketing is the stuff you don't like. The *good* marketing is the stuff you don't even notice... but I challenge you to come up with a *single* product that you decided to buy without any marketing happening between the company's release and your decision. Somewhere along the line, if you got information about it, it almost certainly came through a marketing department.
Now I'll just end this here so you can go and try to wash that icky feeling off your hands
Marketing is an industry where the idea is to insinuate onesself where one is not wanted. An honest and upright man will not go where he is not wanted - marketers make a living at it.
Marketing is an industry built to make you want things you didn't previously want. There are two types of things you don't want: things you know about and don't want, and things you don't know about yet but might or might not want. Marketing both brings products you did not know about to your attention and tries to convince you that you want them.
It can be done well or poorly. Probably 30-40% of the calls we get on our home phone are telemarketing of one kind or another (though we get substantially fewer since we opted out of long-distance service all together, so we don't have AT&T calling to try to sell us their local service and SBC calling to try to sell us their long-distance service in alternate weeks). There are telemarketers who call knowing that they're trying to sell you something and that you might already know you don't want it, and there are those who just don't know the difference. Lately, I've had pretty good success at ending calls quickly and painlessly by making it clear that I know about the product and don't want it. i.e. "Hi, my name is [name] and I'm calling from the Los Angeles Times--" "Hi. We don't want the paper. Not even just on Sundays. We get all our news from the internet. Save a tree." "Ok, thank you, have a good day."
If there were no marketing, you probably wouldn't own half the stuff you do. Marketing departments send demos of new products to places that publish the reviews you may read when deciding what to buy. They place ads in the Yellow Pages. There are a lot of methods of marketing that don't fall into the narrow definition you gave above... in fact, *most* marketing is non-intrusive; you just haven't noticed it. (By design.)
Now, I have wondered what the effect on our economy would be if there were no more advertising. Television would all be public or by subscription. All entertainment would be more expensive. On the other hand, many products would cost a lot less, because they currently have such huge advertising budgets. I truly wonder if a significant proportion of the wealth in our economy is *created* by the existence of advertising, and I speculate that some of our economic growth is dependent on innovations in advertising (hey, we can sell ads in public restrooms!)
But marketing is not inherently an unethical business. It's easy to do it that way, of course. But the same is true of freelance computer support, health care, legal assistance... almost any service.
There is no reason to have an ad on a page meant solely for navigation. It's like pasting ads on somebody's remote control as they watch TV.
Oh, dude, that is an AWESOME idea! There's this whole space at the bottom of most remotes, where the heel of your hand usually goes, that is just blank except for the company logo. Put a little LCD screen down there, beam ads straight to it, and we'll make a fortune!
Seriously, there is nowhere they won't put ads these days. The bathroom, your credit card statement, the bucket your popcorn comes in at the movie... any space that people see has a price. Now DON'T GIVE THEM ANY NEW IDEAS.
It's not Jack Valenti's job to make sure there are legal DVD players for Linux. It's his job to make sure that there are NOT illegal DVD players for Linux.
Neither is his job. It's his job to make sure the movie studios can make money off of their movies. His grandest gesture in that regard has been the DMCA... and it makes many things that were legal under old copyright illegal, to make it more inconvenient to do a few things that were already illegal.
It's possible today for someone to license the technology needed to make a legal DVD player for Linux, but everyone in the position to do so knows that the Linux users will just use the illegal players for free rather than pay for the legal ones.
It's possible to *pay a lot of money* to license the technology, but that generally doesn't happen with open source projects. So, since it's not actually necessary for any technical reason, people haven't done it. If it's cheaper to buy a set-top box or a copy of Windows than to license the technology, which are you going to do? Well, duh.
Now, let's see how we could apply this method to other areas of copyright law. Books are copyrighted, right? Now, what if we wrote a book entirely in code, and offered people the opportunity to pay to take classes to learn the code, so they can read the book. But breaking the code without taking the class circumvents encryption, so it's not legal under the DMCA. It might cost only $100 to take the class in a big city, but in a more remote area where there are no certified instructors, it costs $1500 to go through the certification process so that you can teach the classes.
If some bright guy who likes cryptograms lives in Podunk, Missouri, and wants to read the book, does it really make any sense whatsoever to you that he should be arrested for figuring it out himself?
The essential difference is between use and access. Copyright law historically has governed use. The DMCA governs access. It makes perfectly legal uses illegal simply because of the method of access, solely to make it *slightly* more inconvenient and illegal to do things that were *always* illegal uses.
Linux users do not have a God or country given right to watch American Wedding on their Linux box.
I'm an atheist; I don't think anyone has a god-given right to do anything. But I think that copyright law gives me the right to watch a movie that I legally obtained for that purpose. It is the DMCA that says "but only if you do it the way WE think you should." Those restrictions have nothing to do with how I use the copyrighted material, they have to do with how I access it.
Just like when DVDs started to get popular people had to replace their VCRs with DVD players, Linux users need to give up their technology that doesn't work correctly and use that which does.
Plenty of people still get movies on VHS, and don't have DVD players. If you want to play a DVD, you need a DVD player. But that is because it is not TECHNOLOGICALLY FEASIBLE to play a DVD with a standard VCR. If Columbia Pictures starts putting a stamp on VHS tapes saying it's not legal to put them into VCRs not made by Sony, will you go out and replace your Panasonic VCR? Is it their right to decide who makes the hardware you use to view their media? How far does copyright go?
I'm relatively sure that he got his job and doesn't know anything about it.
;-)
I am too, though I'm not at all sure you meant to say that.
His job is to protect against illegal players, not to make sure legal players exist for all platforms.
Neither is his job. His job is to protect against illegal *use*. Barring certain methods of playing DVDs is how he has chosen to (lobby Congress to) do that. Unfortunately, he's completely unaware of how much *legal* use he has barred with this same law.
It is no more his job to hinder legal use of media than it is to legislate what constitutes illegal use. In fact, it's specifically the MPAA's job to make sure that all sorts of people are *legally* viewing movies. The DMCA throws the baby, all its toys, and half the bathroom out with the bathwater. If it was his job to get the DMCA passed (and he seems to have taken on that job) it's his job to know what it does.
Right, because it has nothing to do with just not wanting to pay for something. It's because of several minutes of commercials. Okay.
Actually, what pisses me off the most about those stupid ads is that I only see them after I paid $9-14 bucks for my seat.
They should pay for airtime on television if they want to get this message to the "right" people. The way they're doing it now, they're preaching to the choir... and sometimes, that has the effect of making the choir feel more like misbehaving (if they're going to talk to us like criminals, why should we play by the rules?)
Of course, there are other issues with those ads and the message behind them, as you can see from my sig (taken from an Entertainment Weekly article about the ads, just before they were released).
Sure most people don't want to build their own sets. But you let those who do, do so; that is, unless you want a dumbed-down, incompetent populace... down to the very last potential engineer.
;-)
I seem to recall learning some time ago that, back in the days of The Phone Company, it was "illegal" to hook up a phone not owned by TPC to a jack in your own house.
You couldn't even *buy* a telephone back then... you had to rent it, for a ridiculous price, from Ma Bell. (This was still the case when I was a child, and I'm only 30.)
In that case, were there hobbyists who built their own phones? Were they ever actually charged with criminal activities by AT&T? I'm too lazy to do the research right now, but it would be an interesting comparison I think, if someone else wants to hunt it up
I think it was unfortunate that the interviewer chose to browbeat Valenti with technical questions and focus on a single side effect of the core issue that Valenti could not be expected to be an expert on (the DVD situation on Linux). Had he stuck to the more general issues, like the fact that the behavior of legally purchased hardware is not entirely under the owner's control, he might have obtained more coherent answers that reveal more about Valenti's position...
But Valenti has many forums in which to reveal his position, if he's really interested in doing so. Personally, I think it's wonderful that the interviewer chose to take Valenti onto unfamiliar ground, to show the Jackass how much he truly doesn't know about his job.
The legislation Valenti and the MPAA have pushed through has serious and real consequences for technology. It's not all right for them to ignore or dismiss those consequences. It's time someone called them on how much they don't know about what they're doing.
What can politicians possibly do to stop spam?
This is a social problem. Not a political problem. Trying to make it a political problem is just going to make the situation worse.
- Politicians run the government.
- The government of Spain runs TDE.
- TDE is blacklisted as a spam ISP.
Who *but* the politicians can do something about this?
Spain now can't email a LOT of places. Spain. Not just TDE customers, but ALL people there.
Did you see something in the article that I didn't? Does Spain only have the one ISP? Granted, TDE is probably the biggest one, being the one run by the government... but unless it's actually not legal/possible to get internet access from any other provider in Spain, this isn't true.
Nonsense, the government has no say in what policies a private Spanish company implements.
No, but it has a say in what their own companies implement.
"TDE is the govt run ISP of Spain," it says at the top of the FA.
In some countries, the government actually provides internet access. Imagine that... what will the think of next, health care?
Basically while using windows unless you have roaming profiles set up, and all software on network installs which work from all workstations, you don't have the ability to sit down anywhere and work, period.
:-/.
Or you could do what they do at our lab at school: push applications from the server, and have *no profiles* at all. That's right: no matter how many times you've logged into BackPC015, it will still ask you "Would you like a tour of Windows XP?" and "are you sure you want to go from an encrypted page to an unencrypted page?" every time.
It's just a tiny bit frustrating
Pay attention: most geeks think SCO is a stock scam. Well, even if it is, they are good at it! How did the price go up over $8 after threats of pulling all their cash?
Probably because Baystar clarified that it's not so much that they want their money back; it's that they want SCO to stop toying around with Unix products and become a full-time litigation company, since their IP is their only saleable asset as far as Baystar is concerned.
Sure, they've demanded their money back. But they're not going to push it if SCO just starts running the business the way Baystar wants them to.
IBM makes more money, has more employees, and is a bigger company. Go check out the facts at some point...
MS has a bigger user base. Their actions have an effect on more people.