Because it is. In the United States, the songwriter is guaranteed at least 8 cents per track. That's 40 percent of your target price point right there.
The only one being impaired of happiness. or suffering is Richard Stallman.
Or anybody who wants to work on both the Linux kernel and revision control software. Even if working on Linux and working on Subversion are separate jobs, the restrictions of the Bitkeeper license apply to the person and thus cross from one job to the other, as I mentioned in my other comment.
Why is the Gates Foundation sponsoring a campaign to buy Apple laptops?
For one thing, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft Corporation are completely separate bodies; GF might have simply chosen what computer would benefit students the most. For another, MS Office and MS IE run on Macintosh computers.
make it a dollar per track, but I'm licensed to use that track for my entire lifetime, in whatever current music format is popular, that way I don't have to re-buy the song for my 8-track, cassette, LP and MP3 players.
That's what the current model does. A 10-track disc costs $10, and under the Betamax precedent, you can copy it to whatever writable medium is popular at any time.
let me mix and burn my own music without the need of my own PC
Mix your own music without a PC? How are you supposed to do beat-matched crossfaded transitions between songs? Yes, I do that on my own mix discs, even of rock music.
And why does a CD with one hour of audio (which cost thousands of dollars to produce) cost as much as a DVD
A soundtrack album (or any other CD for that matter) is as expensive as the movie because unlike the movie, you can play an CD in your car, in the kitchen, in your pocket player while jogging. Unlike a movie, a recording doesn't demand your full attention. Thus, you play it more often.
Since when is Everything2.com the last bastion of truth in the Universe. It is only slightly less apocryphal that the Hitch Hikers Guide...
Yes, I know that E2 and H2G2.com have similar user contribution systems, but I wrote the E2 article I linked to. Would you believe me more if I posted a mirror of the article on my web site and linked to that?
Only a non-musician would consider melody to be the only force at work within music.
I am a musician, but I wrote the article from the perspective of somebody who is standing face-to-face with a federal judge. Most federal judges are not musicians.
One "set charge per track" will break in a lot of ways.
Yeah, but it's the law. In the USA, a songwriter gets a fixed 8 cent cut per song five minutes or less in duration. (The royalty increases with the duration of the composition.) The songwriter typically splits the royalties 50/50 with a publisher, meaning that on a typical album with twelve songs, the songwriter gets just under half a buck a disc.
if and when Palladium and trusted security prevents the average non-techie home Windows user from burning his or her own CDs
And that's a big if, to which the answer is "probably not." Microsoft has repeatedly stated that Palladium will not interfere with any applications that don't know anything about Palladium, such as CDex or CDRDAO. The only way your scenario will play out is if a future version of Windows places CD audio extraction and recording into a Palladium vault, which I don't see as likely to happen given the big stink that users raised about CD writing software not working with Windows XP. Microsoft doesn't want another black eye.
Sure you get to cut the worthless songs but even then the prices match the store prices
The price matches, but the quality I can get for a given price increases dramatically. When I go to Best Buy and plunk down my hard-earned 13 USD for an album with 13 songs on it, I want 13 songs I like, not three. The way I see it, these CDs will be four times cheaper than[1] the CDs I can buy at Best Buy.
[1] Pedants: "Cheapness" here refers to the number of discs I can afford with a given amount of money. Thus, "Four times cheaper than" means "one-fourth as expensive as".
This is not far enough a benefit to make it a sustainable venture.
How can you be sure that four times cheaper for the average fan of oldies singles isn't enough of a benefit?
Of course, I would have to figure out which stories fell into the Sonny Bono Act black hole
Anything first published before 1923 has fallen into the public domain in the United States. The earlier Lovecraft works are in this category. Project Gutenberg republishes works in this category.
Anything first published from 1923 to 1963, whose copyright was not renewed, has fallen into PD in the US. According to the link you gave, the later Lovecraft works are most likely in this category. Project Gutenberg republishes works in this category.
Anything first published from 1923 to 1926, whose copyright has been renewed, has fallen into PD in the US PROVIDED that the Bono Act is unconstitutional. My Civil Disobedience page republishes works in this category.
Duh, that's why I copyright the *words* not the melody.
A copyright on a musical work covers both the music and the accompanying lyrics. A songwriter generally sends a copy of the lead sheet (notated melody + chords + lyrics) to the copyright office for an optional but recommended copyright registration.
Seriously though, unless your talking instrumentals (not songwriters then)
The books on "songwriting" that I could find at my local BN covered both melody and lyrics. However, they did not cover innocent infringement, which is my main concern keeping me away from composition.
the important part is the song. Not the singer, the music, but the song.
Handel v. Silver found infringement in four notes, even when the lyrics had nothing to do with one another ("Hal-le-lu-jah" vs. "Yes we have no").
I just finished Kindergarten, where we learned our ABC's, and I've invented an alphabet that can be read 7 times as fast, with only one third the effort. Why didn't some PhD come up with this before?
There are alphabets that are better than Latin in some respect. Take Tengwar for instance. The script is designed along sound phonological principles (no pun intended): voiced consonants, fricatives, and nasals have a predictable change in shape from the basic voiceless stops (p, t, c, q). It's been adapted to at least English, Sindarin, Quenya, Polish, Lojban, Esperanto, and Toki Pona. On the other hand, some people have expressed increased dyslexia due to use of Tengwar.
I'll be grabbing some of the works published in 1923 to 1926, which would currently be in PD were it not for the Bono Act, and posting them on my web site in civil disobedience of the Bono Act. Come and get me beotch.
And so I can make sure that the federal police is reading this, I'm throwing in a few Echelon keywords (which, incidentally, are good for getting around lameness filters):
air strikes Cuba Libya Iran Iraq Korea Sudan Syria axis of evil Saddam Hussein Osama bin Laden jihad Taliban harboring terrorist Al Qaeda bomb World Trade Center FBI CIA NSA DOJ Unabomber FC Bomberman MI5 MI6 Bond espionage counter intelligence AG Ashcroft national security UN IRS rob banks 2600 hacking pay phone cracking DES crypto anarchy
What will happen if copyright keeps getting extended?
From what I gathered in the transcript of the Supreme Court argument of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supremes seem not to have a high opinion of the Bono Act. Even if the Supremes narrowly affirm the 1998 extension, a third extension in under half a century (1976, 1998, 2020) may constitute clearer evidence of Congress's pattern of behavior, that instead of deciding the balance that would best "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", Congress is trying to go around the "limited times" language of the Constitution. In that case, the court would almost surely overturn a further extension. Think about it: a 19-year extension in 1976 (which had been phased in from 1962), a 20-year extension in 1998, and a hypothetical third extension in the early 2020's?
What I don't understand is where the law is that says you are entitled to make huge sums of money because you can write and record a good song.
It actually says you're not. The copyright owner has the exclusive right to prepare derivative works from a copyrighted work, and the courts have interpreted "derivative work" quite broadly, especially in the commercial arena, where "fair use" seldom applies. Only 50,000 melodies exist in the Western musical scale, and by now, somebody probably owns them all. It's possible to infringe copyright without even knowing it. Without the ability to build on previous works, how will it be possible to create new works?
Doesn't "uniform density" mean "as opposed to something like swiss cheese"? I was talking about holes as in donut, not holes as in swiss cheese or holes as in IIS. Can a torus have a uniform density?
But if John Doe down the street is also doing my wife, and I kill him, but he's a postman, it's a federal offense, even though the motive for the murder has nothing to do with his job?
Probably. That's how the federal government was able to nail Timothy McVeigh. Some of the people he killed with that bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building were federal employees.
Is it trying to prove that there can exist a 4-dimensional object that has all points equidistant from a single point in space-time or something?
Assume that you have a sculpture made of Play-Doh® modeling compound, without any holes in it. If the Poincaré conjecture is true, then you can reshape the sculpture into a ball without breaking or joining anything.
Slashdot Mirror
They may argue $0.20/track is way too cheap
Because it is. In the United States, the songwriter is guaranteed at least 8 cents per track. That's 40 percent of your target price point right there.
Put up or shut time, /.
OK, so each disc costs $10, but because of the platform limitations of the client software, the first one you buy costs at least $299 + $10.
The only one being impaired of happiness. or suffering is Richard Stallman.
Or anybody who wants to work on both the Linux kernel and revision control software. Even if working on Linux and working on Subversion are separate jobs, the restrictions of the Bitkeeper license apply to the person and thus cross from one job to the other, as I mentioned in my other comment.
Why is the Gates Foundation sponsoring a campaign to buy Apple laptops?
For one thing, the Gates Foundation and Microsoft Corporation are completely separate bodies; GF might have simply chosen what computer would benefit students the most. For another, MS Office and MS IE run on Macintosh computers.
vote Libertarian if you're on the right, Green Party if you're on the left
What are you supposed to vote in the middle? Libertarian National Socialist Green Party?
Incite and insight are two different words
Grandparent AC knew this. The word "Inciteful" is supposed to mean "likely to incite a hot argument", that is, flamebait.
See also my analysis of Slashdot's comment moderation adjectives.
make it a dollar per track, but I'm licensed to use that track for my entire lifetime, in whatever current music format is popular, that way I don't have to re-buy the song for my 8-track, cassette, LP and MP3 players.
That's what the current model does. A 10-track disc costs $10, and under the Betamax precedent, you can copy it to whatever writable medium is popular at any time.
let me mix and burn my own music without the need of my own PC
Mix your own music without a PC? How are you supposed to do beat-matched crossfaded transitions between songs? Yes, I do that on my own mix discs, even of rock music.
And why does a CD with one hour of audio (which cost thousands of dollars to produce) cost as much as a DVD
A soundtrack album (or any other CD for that matter) is as expensive as the movie because unlike the movie, you can play an CD in your car, in the kitchen, in your pocket player while jogging. Unlike a movie, a recording doesn't demand your full attention. Thus, you play it more often.
Since when is Everything2.com the last bastion of truth in the Universe. It is only slightly less apocryphal that the Hitch Hikers Guide...
Yes, I know that E2 and H2G2.com have similar user contribution systems, but I wrote the E2 article I linked to. Would you believe me more if I posted a mirror of the article on my web site and linked to that?
Only a non-musician would consider melody to be the only force at work within music.
I am a musician, but I wrote the article from the perspective of somebody who is standing face-to-face with a federal judge. Most federal judges are not musicians.
One "set charge per track" will break in a lot of ways.
Yeah, but it's the law. In the USA, a songwriter gets a fixed 8 cent cut per song five minutes or less in duration. (The royalty increases with the duration of the composition.) The songwriter typically splits the royalties 50/50 with a publisher, meaning that on a typical album with twelve songs, the songwriter gets just under half a buck a disc.
if and when Palladium and trusted security prevents the average non-techie home Windows user from burning his or her own CDs
And that's a big if, to which the answer is "probably not." Microsoft has repeatedly stated that Palladium will not interfere with any applications that don't know anything about Palladium, such as CDex or CDRDAO. The only way your scenario will play out is if a future version of Windows places CD audio extraction and recording into a Palladium vault, which I don't see as likely to happen given the big stink that users raised about CD writing software not working with Windows XP. Microsoft doesn't want another black eye.
Sure you get to cut the worthless songs but even then the prices match the store prices
The price matches, but the quality I can get for a given price increases dramatically. When I go to Best Buy and plunk down my hard-earned 13 USD for an album with 13 songs on it, I want 13 songs I like, not three. The way I see it, these CDs will be four times cheaper than[1] the CDs I can buy at Best Buy.
[1] Pedants: "Cheapness" here refers to the number of discs I can afford with a given amount of money. Thus, "Four times cheaper than" means "one-fourth as expensive as".
This is not far enough a benefit to make it a sustainable venture.
How can you be sure that four times cheaper for the average fan of oldies singles isn't enough of a benefit?
Of course, I would have to figure out which stories fell into the Sonny Bono Act black hole
It's an old K5 machine that runs at 100mhz
Does that help explain why that other site is so slow sometimes?
Duh, that's why I copyright the *words* not the melody.
A copyright on a musical work covers both the music and the accompanying lyrics. A songwriter generally sends a copy of the lead sheet (notated melody + chords + lyrics) to the copyright office for an optional but recommended copyright registration.
Seriously though, unless your talking instrumentals (not songwriters then)
The books on "songwriting" that I could find at my local BN covered both melody and lyrics. However, they did not cover innocent infringement, which is my main concern keeping me away from composition.
the important part is the song. Not the singer, the music, but the song.
Handel v. Silver found infringement in four notes, even when the lyrics had nothing to do with one another ("Hal-le-lu-jah" vs. "Yes we have no").
posting them on my web site in civil disobedience of the Bono Act
Come and break the law with me. http://www.pineight.com/bono/
This is called digital watermarking.
But unlike Digimarc watermarks, this kind of watermark isn't designed to survive being sent through the analog hole.
who gives a flying, well, anything, about some industry assoc in a foreign country?
The MPAA has an export arm called MPA whose job is to market MPAA films worldwide. It has been called the "State Department of the MPAA".
I just finished Kindergarten, where we learned our ABC's, and I've invented an alphabet that can be read 7 times as fast, with only one third the effort. Why didn't some PhD come up with this before?
There are alphabets that are better than Latin in some respect. Take Tengwar for instance. The script is designed along sound phonological principles (no pun intended): voiced consonants, fricatives, and nasals have a predictable change in shape from the basic voiceless stops (p, t, c, q). It's been adapted to at least English, Sindarin, Quenya, Polish, Lojban, Esperanto, and Toki Pona. On the other hand, some people have expressed increased dyslexia due to use of Tengwar.
I'll be grabbing some of the works published in 1923 to 1926, which would currently be in PD were it not for the Bono Act, and posting them on my web site in civil disobedience of the Bono Act. Come and get me beotch.
And so I can make sure that the federal police is reading this, I'm throwing in a few Echelon keywords (which, incidentally, are good for getting around lameness filters):
What will happen if copyright keeps getting extended?
From what I gathered in the transcript of the Supreme Court argument of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supremes seem not to have a high opinion of the Bono Act. Even if the Supremes narrowly affirm the 1998 extension, a third extension in under half a century (1976, 1998, 2020) may constitute clearer evidence of Congress's pattern of behavior, that instead of deciding the balance that would best "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts", Congress is trying to go around the "limited times" language of the Constitution. In that case, the court would almost surely overturn a further extension. Think about it: a 19-year extension in 1976 (which had been phased in from 1962), a 20-year extension in 1998, and a hypothetical third extension in the early 2020's?
Three strikes and you're out. I vote.
silly man, MTV doesn't play videos :)
I understand that MTV has expanded its non-music-video lineup, but MTV's daily line-up still contains blocks for music videos.
What I don't understand is where the law is that says you are entitled to make huge sums of money because you can write and record a good song.
It actually says you're not. The copyright owner has the exclusive right to prepare derivative works from a copyrighted work, and the courts have interpreted "derivative work" quite broadly, especially in the commercial arena, where "fair use" seldom applies. Only 50,000 melodies exist in the Western musical scale, and by now, somebody probably owns them all. It's possible to infringe copyright without even knowing it. Without the ability to build on previous works, how will it be possible to create new works?
Aye, as most objects of uniform density do :)
Doesn't "uniform density" mean "as opposed to something like swiss cheese"? I was talking about holes as in donut, not holes as in swiss cheese or holes as in IIS. Can a torus have a uniform density?
But if John Doe down the street is also doing my wife, and I kill him, but he's a postman, it's a federal offense, even though the motive for the murder has nothing to do with his job?
Probably. That's how the federal government was able to nail Timothy McVeigh. Some of the people he killed with that bomb in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building were federal employees.
But now this is getting way offtopic.
Is it trying to prove that there can exist a 4-dimensional object that has all points equidistant from a single point in space-time or something?
Assume that you have a sculpture made of Play-Doh® modeling compound, without any holes in it. If the Poincaré conjecture is true, then you can reshape the sculpture into a ball without breaking or joining anything.