Of course, that's assuming by "free trade" you really mean, "fair and mutually beneficial commercial relations that do not result in the exploitation of one party by another," and not "corporate imporialism/hegemony."
People who oppose "globalization" are generally greatly in favor of international dialogue and cultural exchange, but oppose commercial and cultural dominance/exploitation.
Incidentally, sending computers and other communications equipment to a needy country, if done correctly and followed through on, is actually a far better initiative in terms of improving local conditions than sending the same dollar amount of food. There's a general tendency in foreign aid and foreign charity to create a state of dependence rather than foster indigenous production, commerce and enterprise. Give a man a fish vs. Teach a man to fish, etc etc etc. That's what communications and technology can do.
The bottom line is that "These People" don't trust extra-national corportate interests to improve the conditions of third world countries and seek to improve the conditions there by fostering more robust local economic conditions rather than a state of international dependence.
I just feel bad that people have lost such faith in their _votes_ in a democracy that they feel the only way to deal with unethical business practices is to expect people to stop participating in a market (in the case of a monopoly/cartel such as music) all together instead of vote for politicians who's ethics cannot be had for a price.
Would that such politicians abounded or had much of a chance of winning elections!
Hey, if you're like me and you don't have the skillz to hack a laotian l10n or the time/committment to travel to Laos (though this is incredibly appealing), you can always just give some of your hrrible corpulent filty soul-polluting lucre to their cause. I spend $5 on lunch without thinking about it. This is cooler than lunch.
Two days this week I eat home-make mac'n'cheeze and the project gets the $5 I save. It's that simple. For us consumer-americans, realizing the power of our spending choices is the first step to re-taking a position of active relavence in society.
Sadly I wasn't reading slashdot this weekend and I came late to this lively discussion.
I just wanted to tell you, as an ardent media critic with a fascination with marketing and a realistic sense of economics, the system you proposed is actually quite brilliant. Did you come up with it off the top of your head or is there any more thinking around this concept documented anywhere?
You can get in touch with me via my website or just respond to this.
Well, this is nice news, because it should also give the others a kick in the rear to get their next-gen plans working. However, I want to know if all this bandwidth-boosting is going to improve call quality. I still get dropped calls in my home (brooklyn) and in certain parts of NYC I inexplicably go on analog roam for two or three blocks at a time.
I'd be really happy if this meant I could finally really for real loose my landline.
Hehe... I know we're on the same side. But what's a cause without bitter infighting?;)
Thanks for the statistical breakdown. I think our disagreement boils down to:
A2 can be rephrased as "people who will download the album INSTEAD of buying it, if they can download it"
My general experience is that most people in this group (which includes me much of the time) would not have purchased the album anyway. I never had the disposable income growing up to buy more than a few CDs a year and the habbit stuck. However, I've downloaded hundreds of mp3s I never would have purchased. Sometimes it was novelty, sometimes it was curiosity, sometimes it was a recommendation. A lot of the time I threw the song out when I realized that it sucked. Sometimes I got turned on to a whole new thing. Sometimes I even bought a record or a t-shirt or went to see a concert.
My point is, you really have to break A2 down into A2 and A3. For this purpose we'll go with your definition of A2 as "people who download instead of purchasing". A3 then represents people who download exclusively, who would not purchase regardless of the p2p factor. They just don't spend a lot of money on music, for whatever reason.
Group A3, then, are not very active music consumers. But when they get turned on, the might go out and buy one more album (11 a year instead of ten). More realistically they might decide to see a live show or buy a t-shirt online. That's got a positive economic impact for the band.
I would say that A3 is really crucial group in p2p economics, because they represent the possibilities of *expanding the market*, what business types call "category management". This is a big deal for record labels because instead of fighting eachother for the same slice of A1 and A2 consumers, they could be drawing in a whole new crowd of A3s from the fringe.
The truth is, in 20 years the music business is not going to be about selling albums. That will still be a part of the deal, but it's going to be a much smaller part. Peer to Peer technology represents a huge opportunity for an enterprising label to grow the market for music and music-related products and services. The fact that none of the labels have Gotten It and they're using the RIAA's lobbying power to try and legally cement their business model is downright stupid. Unamerican, even. But you understand that, 'cause we're on the same team.;)
I must assume from this model that they are really only targeting the numb masses of people who don't like the nuts and bolts of linux.
Bingo! Give that man a ham. Obviously this is what they are doing. They're trying to take Linux and sell it in to big business server markets. You don't get united linux for your hack box at home, you get it when you need to run a robust server and you don't have your own crack team of propellorheads to build it up for you. They're attacking microsoft and sun's server territory, and unfortunately that battle is fought on M$/Sun's terms: biz-speak, FUD and memebers only fee-based support.
Until we "community types" (damn hippies) get our collective act together and break down the massively inhumanizing and undemocratic loci of power known as corporations, this is what it will take to get said institutions to use GNU/Linux. In the best of all possible worlds it will work like a seed from within, but that's probably a little too optomistic, since as you point out the whole point of UL is to releive the client of the need or inclination to look under the hood.
Me? I'm a borne hot-rodder. If I make it big I'm buying an old Mustang I can repair myself. But the prevailing coporate culture favors the Lexus. Ever seen a lexus engine? It's a typical feat of blackbox engineering. No way you could fix it on your own, and why would you want to. So sad that so many people never get to feel that power of creating something, fixing something, hacking something with your own ingenuity.
I stand corrected. Pardon my knee-jerk reaction to bad memes getting around. I see your point, but I think it's probably an irresponsible way to talk about the issue. The fact that, as you say, "there are a nonzero number of people who download instead of buying" is superceeded by the fact that many if not all of those people would not have bought (or even listened) anyway.
Given that, saying that this "unarguably (sic) hurts sales in some aspect" is a little bit convoluted, since you concede your belief that the net outcome is positive. I have a hard time understanding what this "aspect" is. It's not as though you could break it down by demographic (though perhaps with the proper research you could) and say, "p2p technologies have reduced record sales among populations X and increased sales among population Y." It sounds almost as though you're speaking about the timing of purchases (less people rush out and buy the first week), though I'm not sure about that either.
In the end, the only real "aspect" of sales is numbers of albums sold. Peer to peer technology's impact on this is at this stage anyone's guess.
In any event, since this argument basically amounts to a culture war between the RIAA and tech savvy consumers of music, I think it's important that we (the good guys) make sure our arguments and rhetoric are water tight. Cheers!
Since I don't have the mod points to bring up one of the other posts...
You're correct when you say that P2P hurts sales...
No, he's not. Please stop this inane dittoheading. There's absolutely zero emperical evidence to suggest this, and in fact the anecdotal evidence points towards to opposite. Record sales boomed when napster boomed. When napster was shut down, there was an immediate fallback in record sales.
Now, I know that most of us just went to gnutella, but for your average dorm-livin' college student, there was a chunk of time before you had a real viable alternative, and even today it's not like it used to be. This gap corrisponds rather nicely in time with the drop in record sales.
Is this merely coincidence? Perhaps. But the RIAA FUD that p2p networks have a negative impact on sales is just as much hot air. No one has the answer on this one, and saying that file sharing hurts album sales is "common sense" is just a cop out.
Mozilla still doesn't work with bad javascript, more of a feature than a bug though...
Actually this causes me all sorts of problems. I agree with you that the average browsing experience of mozilla blows MSIE out of the water, and I use it for all work-related tasks and such.
However, many important web portals I use to pay my bills (citibank, spring, verizon and 2 student loan companies) often use heavily crufted javascript. As a result, when I want to 'conduct business' online, I have to fire up IE. It just feels nasty. Any suggestions?
Sure, no one wants their heavenly connection to the starry dynamo cut off, but if enough cable and DSL providers move to this kind of pricing plan, it might just be a Good Thing(tm) for the rest of us. Here's why:
The/. crowd and other Interner/Broadband power users do not represent the typical cable/dsl broadband customer. We don't do what they think we should with broadband, which amounts to looking at cnn.com, sending hotmail, and participating in other information-consumer activities. Not only are we much higher-end consumers of service, but we're also much more technically savvy. We create the net just as much as they do. We have the technology, and we can do this ourselves if there's enough motivation to get us off our collective asses.
There are already numerous instances of tech-savvy citizens lobbying their local municipality (and providing advice) into setting up a community-owned broadband network. These networks are far more effienct and cost-effective than the monsterous nationwise Cable and Phone-Company 0wned systems. They offer better service for less money because they are built to suit a community's needs without the (bloat bloat) overhead of a multinational communications behemoth.
If you're in a metro area where municipal lobbying is ineffective on the individual scale, start your own Community Interest group. Check out distances, lines of sight, etc. If you get 20 geeks together within a square mile, that's enough expertise and purchasing power to buy a fractional T1 and set up your own wifi cloud.
If you're a rural customer, you're in a bit of a bind at the moment, but hang on. Boosted signals and moddedd antenai are gaining in range all the time. You just have to find enough friends between you and town to get the link happening.
The internet will remain Cool(tm) only as long as we continue to work at making it so. The collective purchasing power of just the/. community dwarfs that of many corporations (do the math, it's true), but we don't work with eachother. We prefer to bitch when The Man doesn't kowtow to our needs. It's understandable, because up until now The Man has been a pretty good sport about thing, but he's still The Man, and no real friend of a free-thinking geek.
I'll say it again, we have the technology to build our own nets. It's already happening. Community-owned infrastructure is the future of a free and exciting internet, and that's why the inefficiency and greed of the big cable and DSL companies just might be a good thing: the kick in the butt we need.
Look, no one said this (the information revolution) was going to be easy. Only by putting in the hours and voting with our dollars can individuals make an impact. But the fantastic thing about this time, as opposed to other massive shifts in the economy (e.g. industrial revolution), is that it's potentially very empowering to individuals and communities. Necessity is the mother of invention, so lets get inventive.
I just said a bunch of random stuff and not all of it is accurate or precise or true or meaningful
Well at least you admit it.
Look, the GPL does not compel you to release, share or even present your source code if you're using a GPL-coded application. It only stipulates that if you share your code (in source or compiled binary form), you must do so under the terms of the GPL.
The government could easily act as a single entity here (an umbrella over all the various agencies, e.g FAA, FBi, etc) and use all the GPL'ed software it wants and be under zero obligation to share with anyone. That is, of course, assuming the develop it in-house. If they want the participation of the worldwide OSS/Libre Software development community, it becomes a bit more tricky. Hoever, they could always have the spooks scramble a few bits and keep the kinks to themselves.
There is a big distinction between the GPL and the BSD-style licenses. The GPL is all about making sure that people who use GPL licensed code release their new code under the GPL too.
Except that using GPL code doesn't compel you to "release" anything. It only means that if you elect to share your code with another party, you do so under the terms of the GPL.
The.gov could pick up a bunch of GPL code, hire some hakers (or use the NSA) to brew their own system and simply make the decision not to share the code. That's nice and legal. They'd simply make distribution a matter of national security.
The only security issue with the GPL is the security of companies who derive revenue from selling proprietary code.
Re:How is the Brooks article unintentionally funny
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The Almighty Buck
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· Score: 2
Poor here is defined as "earning between $17,000 and $34,000 a year."
I don't make much more than that, and I've got all of these computers, and an XBox, and a Dreamcast, and...
No doubt, but I'll bet your single, young and in good health. That's a 2-child household income in a lot of places. Bringing up baby cuts into the gaming money real fast. But you've got a point. The article does sort of hit home.
I actually found it a little sickening, but also very difficult to refute. I've been thinking about this topic long and hard already after a recent trip to the Netherlands. Their country makes so much more sense than America in terms of infrastructure, land use, and even on some levels culture (e.g. live events are more popular than TV), and yet there's a certain spark over here in the US that just doesn't seem as present. For all the great stuff they've done with their nation, the Dutch struck me as generally bored, laconic, maybe even a little down in the dumps. And I know it's not just because their Football team didn't qualify for the world cup.
So this article does a good job of capturing That Thing (opportunity, real or perceved) that makes America glimmer, hum and sing, but it convienently glosses over the rough spots. I'm talking about things like the amount of trash we produce, the violent crime, or the soaring numbers of citizens who subscribe to anti-depressant prescriptions. You know, all the fscked up stuff that's wrong with this place.
The trouble with the cult of money is that as good as it is for getting people off their ass, it's an empty temple. There's no there there, no nirvana, no peace, only endless and relentless pursuit. I'm fine with this kind of thing in theory. It is, after all, all about the journey. We're still evolving as a nation, thank the constitution, gutted as it may be, but we're not there yet. That's why it's so important to keep the playing fields open (copyright law) and the spooks off our backs (civil liberties) and keep a careful eye out for the nasty leviathans that tend to rise up (anti-trust). If we declare this or any other time to be, as they used to say, 'the end of history', then we will surely go the way of the Romans.
In the end, I encourage the impulses that drive the consumer machine. How can I not? It's energy, and energy is the potential to make some of the wrong things right. We've all got a bit of that progressive energy in us. I just wish we were a little more progressive about how we applied it.
You can still get Digital Video cameras for a grand...
And this is what they're really scared s*itless about: loosing control over both distribution and content. Distribution is the cash cow for the MPAA, but control over content is where they really get their power jollies. Ego and hollywood are deeply intertrined, and the idea that some people from East Podunk Nebraska can live their dream, make a film, and make it equally accessibly to the viewing world at large frightens the bajeezus out of them. It simultaniously cuts off their stream of manna and exposes them as the unnecessary, wasteful, anti-creative, soul-sucking culturemongers that they are.
watching a movie in a theatre is way different than watching a movie on a computer monitor, on your TV, or on cable. If the MPAA has that all locked up, we are that much poorer culturally.
I don't know... multiplexes have been getting more and more impersonal for years. I remember when i was a kid there used to be an intermission in a lot of films. It was a lot more like the theater: you talk with people (sometimes *gasp* strangers) about what you're seeing and generally turn your attention from the screen to your fellow human beings.
This is the total bugaboo of it all. Corporate dominated american consumer culture is built on a platform of unhappiness. The widespread sense of social isolation and inadequacy indisuputably fuel the consumer urge. Ask anyone in advertising. The basic message is alwyas, "there's something wrong with you, and our product can fix it." Now, there's a lot of money standing on all this anomie, and it doesn't like being disturbed. It's been proven: when people connect with eachother in meaningful and fulfilling ways, they perform fewer empty consumerist experiences. And by god we'd better keep people lonely and isolated. What would happen to the economy?
Hopefully digital projectors will get cheap and easy just like the cameras have: I'll open my own f'ing cinema, with beer and coffee and social functions.
Machine-renerated/readable licenses are the future
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Creative Commons
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· Score: 2
It is these sorts of licenses that are truly a big threat to the creation of a 'creative commons.'.... if every clip and contribution is distributed under its own, tailormade license, I will likely be unable to do this in any project, even taking material from the creative commons.
I disagree. The critical thing here is the machine-aided roll-your-own licencing based on standardized template components. Right now the custom license is based off six simple clauses. This could eventually expand to include variables such as cost (with automatic payment systems) duration and so forth. By keeping the compnent clauses simple and common (just like HTML tags are simple and common) you should have no problems quickly checking the compatability of licenses. Since everything is machine-readable (xml) you could build this right into some DRM software that chould check all the materials you're sampling: you'd debug your license like you would your code.
This is exactly the kind of application that we (content creators, artists: I'm one) need to take control of copyright. It gets us out from under the thumb of lawyers and lets us fight fire with fire (our own licensing terms to combat restrictive corporation-favoring IP laws).
I remember working with someone on this idea (machine-maintained licenses) 4 years ago. Back then, nobody saw it. Hopefully creativecommons.org will help bring that innovation to light.
Go forth and compete. Stop jerking off to porn and reading your little comic books, how about working 100 hours a week on what you think the market wants -- Microsoft won't prevent you from taking out a loan, running an ad campaign, and shipping a better product, so why aren't you doing it?
No, that's where you're wrong. If you were actually to compete with M$ on any of their many playing fields, you would inevitbly face some of the anti-competative business practices which the company has already been convicted of implementing. Extortion-like pricing, custom-crufted code and underground whisper campaigns are only a few of their dirty tricks.
I'm all for free enterprise and entrepeneurialism. In fact that's why I dislike M$, because they discourage these things. But if you don't have any checks and/or balances, two bad things occur:
1) Only that which profits will survive. This is an ok (though not great) way to run a business, but it's no way to run a society. The maxim that "everyone in pursuit of their self-interest generates the best common good" has been roundly disprooved in history. This is because all people are not created economically equal, and hence many people's self-interest trumps that of others for highly arbitrary reasons. Furthermore, there are a great many things that a society should have that should not be profit motivated. Roads are a good example. The interstate highway system makes no money, but without this vital infrastructure commerce would fail. Defence is another example. You don't want your army going out to the highest bidder. This is why citizens collectivize to mutually provide funds (aka taxes) so that these social institutions can be run in absence of profit motivation.
2) Without checks and regulations on a market, you're likely to have a highly unstable situation. Die-hard lesse faire advocates will tell you that things will eventually even out, and this is true, but it would take many generations for a stable global economy to emerge (if it ever did) from the chaos of an unregulated market.
Look, anti-trust law was instituted for a couple of good reasons. On the one hand, it prevents monopoly companies from abusing consumers (e.g. selling tainted meat or fixing the price of oil). It keep's them honest. Secondly, it forces them to innovate, since they cannot retain market dominance by controling the market. A monopoly market occurs when one player controls the entire game. Therefore it make a lot more sense to have a player who is (at least in principle) working in the best interest of citizens, aka the government, in control, and let this player make sure everyone plays fair. We have a teacher watching the kids play at recess, and the teacher steps in to tell bullies to play nice.
The truth is that right now M$ is more economically powerful than you, I, or perhaps even the entire aggrigated slashdot community. Ergo, should they decide to focus their wrath on me for whatever reason, I'd like someone to be there to keep them off me.
In the end, the fatal flaw of free market idealism is the incontrovertable fact that the most important elements of life bear only a tangential relationship to the profit motive.
Hardly. I would call music perhaps the highest aesthetic, spiritual, intelectual and cultural acheivement of our species. It is one of the few elements of a society that is common across every nation, present in every civilization we know of back into tribal pre-history.
If you've never been transported by the ecstatic alignment of harmonious sound and your own thought and activities, I suggest you leave your sterio on more often, or at least try some new tunes.
I won't bother to repeat the hundred or so prior "No legislation is good legislation" arguments. They're right, by the way. Legislating in someone's business model is bad for law and (in the long run) bad for the economy.
I do, however, have something original to add. If you want to go with the information superhighway as your dominant metaphor, creating a highway patroll wouldn't be such a bad thing. It would be a hassle, but it might make the content providers happy.
The iHP (internet highway patrol) could look for documentable instances of piracy (though avoiding entrapment might be hard) and issue notices and penalties on par with traffic offenses. A $15 ticket for downloading an MP3, a $100 ticket for pirating M$ office. The penalty would be in proportion to the value of the IP stolen. Repeat offenders could face harsher penalties.
Of course, this would require a huge nationwide beuraucracy and investment in tracking technology and personnel, so it's something I as a taxpayer would be loath to shell out for, but it's an alternative. But the Real Truth is that there's no evidence that piracy of music, software or movies hurts anyone's bottom line. The only emperical evidence I'm aware of points to the opposite conclusion.
This, however, doesn't seem to sway the content-owning agencies as what they are really afraid of is loosing their control over content, not loosing a few copies to piracy. They want to create barriers so that artists and other content-creators cannot distribute outside their system, just like every other distributor has done in response to the internet.
What the media provide is superficial familiarity -- images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn't just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people's lives remain parochial
The author is (I think) talking about passive media here: sattelite broadcasts and CNN.com. The real value of an interconnected globe will only be realized when individuals worldwide are engaged in creating the media discourse, not merely consuming it.
As has already been noted the current "golbal media" is more like a series of biased propaganda machines with a global scope than anything else. I can read kavkaz.org and get a different viewpoint from CNN.com, but I don't know where I can log into a chat room and actually talk with a real person "over there".
It goes all the way back to the cluetrain: until the people are interconnecting and building the discourse with their own hearts and minds and stories, we will never create a social fabric that can resist being torn by demogaguery, be it from facistic leaders or bias news outlets.
Hopefully this interconnection is already happening, but it's going to take time. We (America/The West) are fairly settled into our consumer culture mode. Unless we really decide to take it upon ourselves to become citizens of our own nation and the world, we're not even going to be able to approach the utopian ideal of a global community.
Forgetting for the moment that no evidence exists to show that the current levels of piracy are actually hurting the industry's bottom line, I still can't believe some of the FUD they sling:
Boston-based Internet research firm Viant puts the daily worldwide number of unauthorized movie downloads at 350,000.
Where the hell does that come from? Even a highly compressed divix rip is about 500mb. I've never downloaded one for that reason. If this statistic is to be believed, there are hundereds of thousands of broadband users doing nothing but downloading rips 24/7.
Really, this is just unbelievable. Reminds me of the "research" the plaintiffs did in the original DeCSS case. IIRC they wrote in the brief how it was "simple and easy" to pirate a DVD with divx and that the average home-user could turn to piracy with no headache. Under cross-examination, it came out that they actually had to hire two consultants for their case study and it took them 2 days.
These people are dispicable. Collectively they are the microsoft of culture: a corpulent oligarcy pumping out mediocre to poor products and fighting like mad to keep their control over the creation and distribution of content.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, why are they against free trade?
Anti-Globalization != Anti-Free-Trade
Of course, that's assuming by "free trade" you really mean, "fair and mutually beneficial commercial relations that do not result in the exploitation of one party by another," and not "corporate imporialism/hegemony."
People who oppose "globalization" are generally greatly in favor of international dialogue and cultural exchange, but oppose commercial and cultural dominance/exploitation.
Incidentally, sending computers and other communications equipment to a needy country, if done correctly and followed through on, is actually a far better initiative in terms of improving local conditions than sending the same dollar amount of food. There's a general tendency in foreign aid and foreign charity to create a state of dependence rather than foster indigenous production, commerce and enterprise. Give a man a fish vs. Teach a man to fish, etc etc etc. That's what communications and technology can do.
The bottom line is that "These People" don't trust extra-national corportate interests to improve the conditions of third world countries and seek to improve the conditions there by fostering more robust local economic conditions rather than a state of international dependence.
I just feel bad that people have lost such faith in their _votes_ in a democracy that they feel the only way to deal with unethical business practices is to expect people to stop participating in a market (in the case of a monopoly/cartel such as music) all together instead of vote for politicians who's ethics cannot be had for a price.
Would that such politicians abounded or had much of a chance of winning elections!
Man! This project just gets better and better! Soon you'll be able to support these guys with your caffeine habbit. I know I will. Check the link:
http://www.jhai.org/jhai_coffee.htm
Hey, if you're like me and you don't have the skillz to hack a laotian l10n or the time/committment to travel to Laos (though this is incredibly appealing), you can always just give some of your hrrible corpulent filty soul-polluting lucre to their cause. I spend $5 on lunch without thinking about it. This is cooler than lunch.
Two days this week I eat home-make mac'n'cheeze and the project gets the $5 I save. It's that simple. For us consumer-americans, realizing the power of our spending choices is the first step to re-taking a position of active relavence in society.
Sadly I wasn't reading slashdot this weekend and I came late to this lively discussion.
I just wanted to tell you, as an ardent media critic with a fascination with marketing and a realistic sense of economics, the system you proposed is actually quite brilliant. Did you come up with it off the top of your head or is there any more thinking around this concept documented anywhere?
You can get in touch with me via my website or just respond to this.
...indeed.
Thank's for those memos, Bill.
Right after I invested in a new phone...
Well, this is nice news, because it should also give the others a kick in the rear to get their next-gen plans working. However, I want to know if all this bandwidth-boosting is going to improve call quality. I still get dropped calls in my home (brooklyn) and in certain parts of NYC I inexplicably go on analog roam for two or three blocks at a time.
I'd be really happy if this meant I could finally really for real loose my landline.
Hehe... I know we're on the same side. But what's a cause without bitter infighting? ;)
;)
Thanks for the statistical breakdown. I think our disagreement boils down to:
A2 can be rephrased as "people who will download the album INSTEAD of buying it, if they can download it"
My general experience is that most people in this group (which includes me much of the time) would not have purchased the album anyway. I never had the disposable income growing up to buy more than a few CDs a year and the habbit stuck. However, I've downloaded hundreds of mp3s I never would have purchased. Sometimes it was novelty, sometimes it was curiosity, sometimes it was a recommendation. A lot of the time I threw the song out when I realized that it sucked. Sometimes I got turned on to a whole new thing. Sometimes I even bought a record or a t-shirt or went to see a concert.
My point is, you really have to break A2 down into A2 and A3. For this purpose we'll go with your definition of A2 as "people who download instead of purchasing". A3 then represents people who download exclusively, who would not purchase regardless of the p2p factor. They just don't spend a lot of money on music, for whatever reason.
Group A3, then, are not very active music consumers. But when they get turned on, the might go out and buy one more album (11 a year instead of ten). More realistically they might decide to see a live show or buy a t-shirt online. That's got a positive economic impact for the band.
I would say that A3 is really crucial group in p2p economics, because they represent the possibilities of *expanding the market*, what business types call "category management". This is a big deal for record labels because instead of fighting eachother for the same slice of A1 and A2 consumers, they could be drawing in a whole new crowd of A3s from the fringe.
The truth is, in 20 years the music business is not going to be about selling albums. That will still be a part of the deal, but it's going to be a much smaller part. Peer to Peer technology represents a huge opportunity for an enterprising label to grow the market for music and music-related products and services. The fact that none of the labels have Gotten It and they're using the RIAA's lobbying power to try and legally cement their business model is downright stupid. Unamerican, even. But you understand that, 'cause we're on the same team.
I must assume from this model that they are really only targeting the numb masses of people who don't like the nuts and bolts of linux.
Bingo! Give that man a ham. Obviously this is what they are doing. They're trying to take Linux and sell it in to big business server markets. You don't get united linux for your hack box at home, you get it when you need to run a robust server and you don't have your own crack team of propellorheads to build it up for you. They're attacking microsoft and sun's server territory, and unfortunately that battle is fought on M$/Sun's terms: biz-speak, FUD and memebers only fee-based support.
Until we "community types" (damn hippies) get our collective act together and break down the massively inhumanizing and undemocratic loci of power known as corporations, this is what it will take to get said institutions to use GNU/Linux. In the best of all possible worlds it will work like a seed from within, but that's probably a little too optomistic, since as you point out the whole point of UL is to releive the client of the need or inclination to look under the hood.
Me? I'm a borne hot-rodder. If I make it big I'm buying an old Mustang I can repair myself. But the prevailing coporate culture favors the Lexus. Ever seen a lexus engine? It's a typical feat of blackbox engineering. No way you could fix it on your own, and why would you want to. So sad that so many people never get to feel that power of creating something, fixing something, hacking something with your own ingenuity.
I stand corrected. Pardon my knee-jerk reaction to bad memes getting around. I see your point, but I think it's probably an irresponsible way to talk about the issue. The fact that, as you say, "there are a nonzero number of people who download instead of buying" is superceeded by the fact that many if not all of those people would not have bought (or even listened) anyway.
Given that, saying that this "unarguably (sic) hurts sales in some aspect" is a little bit convoluted, since you concede your belief that the net outcome is positive. I have a hard time understanding what this "aspect" is. It's not as though you could break it down by demographic (though perhaps with the proper research you could) and say, "p2p technologies have reduced record sales among populations X and increased sales among population Y." It sounds almost as though you're speaking about the timing of purchases (less people rush out and buy the first week), though I'm not sure about that either.
In the end, the only real "aspect" of sales is numbers of albums sold. Peer to peer technology's impact on this is at this stage anyone's guess.
In any event, since this argument basically amounts to a culture war between the RIAA and tech savvy consumers of music, I think it's important that we (the good guys) make sure our arguments and rhetoric are water tight. Cheers!
Since I don't have the mod points to bring up one of the other posts...
You're correct when you say that P2P hurts sales...
No, he's not. Please stop this inane dittoheading. There's absolutely zero emperical evidence to suggest this, and in fact the anecdotal evidence points towards to opposite. Record sales boomed when napster boomed. When napster was shut down, there was an immediate fallback in record sales.
Now, I know that most of us just went to gnutella, but for your average dorm-livin' college student, there was a chunk of time before you had a real viable alternative, and even today it's not like it used to be. This gap corrisponds rather nicely in time with the drop in record sales.
Is this merely coincidence? Perhaps. But the RIAA FUD that p2p networks have a negative impact on sales is just as much hot air. No one has the answer on this one, and saying that file sharing hurts album sales is "common sense" is just a cop out.
Mozilla still doesn't work with bad javascript, more of a feature than a bug though...
Actually this causes me all sorts of problems. I agree with you that the average browsing experience of mozilla blows MSIE out of the water, and I use it for all work-related tasks and such.
However, many important web portals I use to pay my bills (citibank, spring, verizon and 2 student loan companies) often use heavily crufted javascript. As a result, when I want to 'conduct business' online, I have to fire up IE. It just feels nasty. Any suggestions?
Sure, no one wants their heavenly connection to the starry dynamo cut off, but if enough cable and DSL providers move to this kind of pricing plan, it might just be a Good Thing(tm) for the rest of us. Here's why:
/. crowd and other Interner/Broadband power users do not represent the typical cable/dsl broadband customer. We don't do what they think we should with broadband, which amounts to looking at cnn.com, sending hotmail, and participating in other information-consumer activities. Not only are we much higher-end consumers of service, but we're also much more technically savvy. We create the net just as much as they do. We have the technology, and we can do this ourselves if there's enough motivation to get us off our collective asses.
/. community dwarfs that of many corporations (do the math, it's true), but we don't work with eachother. We prefer to bitch when The Man doesn't kowtow to our needs. It's understandable, because up until now The Man has been a pretty good sport about thing, but he's still The Man, and no real friend of a free-thinking geek.
The
There are already numerous instances of tech-savvy citizens lobbying their local municipality (and providing advice) into setting up a community-owned broadband network. These networks are far more effienct and cost-effective than the monsterous nationwise Cable and Phone-Company 0wned systems. They offer better service for less money because they are built to suit a community's needs without the (bloat bloat) overhead of a multinational communications behemoth.
If you're in a metro area where municipal lobbying is ineffective on the individual scale, start your own Community Interest group. Check out distances, lines of sight, etc. If you get 20 geeks together within a square mile, that's enough expertise and purchasing power to buy a fractional T1 and set up your own wifi cloud.
If you're a rural customer, you're in a bit of a bind at the moment, but hang on. Boosted signals and moddedd antenai are gaining in range all the time. You just have to find enough friends between you and town to get the link happening.
The internet will remain Cool(tm) only as long as we continue to work at making it so. The collective purchasing power of just the
I'll say it again, we have the technology to build our own nets. It's already happening. Community-owned infrastructure is the future of a free and exciting internet, and that's why the inefficiency and greed of the big cable and DSL companies just might be a good thing: the kick in the butt we need.
Look, no one said this (the information revolution) was going to be easy. Only by putting in the hours and voting with our dollars can individuals make an impact. But the fantastic thing about this time, as opposed to other massive shifts in the economy (e.g. industrial revolution), is that it's potentially very empowering to individuals and communities. Necessity is the mother of invention, so lets get inventive.
Are you sure they're giving you the binary? Did they give you that nice monitor on your desk, or would you say its still owned by the company?
Precisely. Well put. If I wasn't posted here I would mod that up.
I just said a bunch of random stuff and not all of it is accurate or precise or true or meaningful
Well at least you admit it.
Look, the GPL does not compel you to release, share or even present your source code if you're using a GPL-coded application. It only stipulates that if you share your code (in source or compiled binary form), you must do so under the terms of the GPL.
The government could easily act as a single entity here (an umbrella over all the various agencies, e.g FAA, FBi, etc) and use all the GPL'ed software it wants and be under zero obligation to share with anyone. That is, of course, assuming the develop it in-house. If they want the participation of the worldwide OSS/Libre Software development community, it becomes a bit more tricky. Hoever, they could always have the spooks scramble a few bits and keep the kinks to themselves.
There is a big distinction between the GPL and the BSD-style licenses. The GPL is all about making sure that people who use GPL licensed code release their new code under the GPL too.
.gov could pick up a bunch of GPL code, hire some hakers (or use the NSA) to brew their own system and simply make the decision not to share the code. That's nice and legal. They'd simply make distribution a matter of national security.
Except that using GPL code doesn't compel you to "release" anything. It only means that if you elect to share your code with another party, you do so under the terms of the GPL.
The
The only security issue with the GPL is the security of companies who derive revenue from selling proprietary code.
Poor here is defined as "earning between $17,000 and $34,000 a year."
I don't make much more than that, and I've got all of these computers, and an XBox, and a Dreamcast, and...
No doubt, but I'll bet your single, young and in good health. That's a 2-child household income in a lot of places. Bringing up baby cuts into the gaming money real fast. But you've got a point. The article does sort of hit home.
I actually found it a little sickening, but also very difficult to refute. I've been thinking about this topic long and hard already after a recent trip to the Netherlands. Their country makes so much more sense than America in terms of infrastructure, land use, and even on some levels culture (e.g. live events are more popular than TV), and yet there's a certain spark over here in the US that just doesn't seem as present. For all the great stuff they've done with their nation, the Dutch struck me as generally bored, laconic, maybe even a little down in the dumps. And I know it's not just because their Football team didn't qualify for the world cup.
So this article does a good job of capturing That Thing (opportunity, real or perceved) that makes America glimmer, hum and sing, but it convienently glosses over the rough spots. I'm talking about things like the amount of trash we produce, the violent crime, or the soaring numbers of citizens who subscribe to anti-depressant prescriptions. You know, all the fscked up stuff that's wrong with this place.
The trouble with the cult of money is that as good as it is for getting people off their ass, it's an empty temple. There's no there there, no nirvana, no peace, only endless and relentless pursuit. I'm fine with this kind of thing in theory. It is, after all, all about the journey. We're still evolving as a nation, thank the constitution, gutted as it may be, but we're not there yet. That's why it's so important to keep the playing fields open (copyright law) and the spooks off our backs (civil liberties) and keep a careful eye out for the nasty leviathans that tend to rise up (anti-trust). If we declare this or any other time to be, as they used to say, 'the end of history', then we will surely go the way of the Romans.
In the end, I encourage the impulses that drive the consumer machine. How can I not? It's energy, and energy is the potential to make some of the wrong things right. We've all got a bit of that progressive energy in us. I just wish we were a little more progressive about how we applied it.
You can still get Digital Video cameras for a grand...
And this is what they're really scared s*itless about: loosing control over both distribution and content. Distribution is the cash cow for the MPAA, but control over content is where they really get their power jollies. Ego and hollywood are deeply intertrined, and the idea that some people from East Podunk Nebraska can live their dream, make a film, and make it equally accessibly to the viewing world at large frightens the bajeezus out of them. It simultaniously cuts off their stream of manna and exposes them as the unnecessary, wasteful, anti-creative, soul-sucking culturemongers that they are.
watching a movie in a theatre is way different than watching a movie on a computer monitor, on your TV, or on cable. If the MPAA has that all locked up, we are that much poorer culturally.
I don't know... multiplexes have been getting more and more impersonal for years. I remember when i was a kid there used to be an intermission in a lot of films. It was a lot more like the theater: you talk with people (sometimes *gasp* strangers) about what you're seeing and generally turn your attention from the screen to your fellow human beings.
This is the total bugaboo of it all. Corporate dominated american consumer culture is built on a platform of unhappiness. The widespread sense of social isolation and inadequacy indisuputably fuel the consumer urge. Ask anyone in advertising. The basic message is alwyas, "there's something wrong with you, and our product can fix it." Now, there's a lot of money standing on all this anomie, and it doesn't like being disturbed. It's been proven: when people connect with eachother in meaningful and fulfilling ways, they perform fewer empty consumerist experiences. And by god we'd better keep people lonely and isolated. What would happen to the economy?
Hopefully digital projectors will get cheap and easy just like the cameras have: I'll open my own f'ing cinema, with beer and coffee and social functions.
It is these sorts of licenses that are truly a big threat to the creation of a 'creative commons.' .... if every clip and contribution is distributed under its own, tailormade license, I will likely be unable to do this in any project, even taking material from the creative commons.
I disagree. The critical thing here is the machine-aided roll-your-own licencing based on standardized template components. Right now the custom license is based off six simple clauses. This could eventually expand to include variables such as cost (with automatic payment systems) duration and so forth. By keeping the compnent clauses simple and common (just like HTML tags are simple and common) you should have no problems quickly checking the compatability of licenses. Since everything is machine-readable (xml) you could build this right into some DRM software that chould check all the materials you're sampling: you'd debug your license like you would your code.
This is exactly the kind of application that we (content creators, artists: I'm one) need to take control of copyright. It gets us out from under the thumb of lawyers and lets us fight fire with fire (our own licensing terms to combat restrictive corporation-favoring IP laws).
I remember working with someone on this idea (machine-maintained licenses) 4 years ago. Back then, nobody saw it. Hopefully creativecommons.org will help bring that innovation to light.
Go forth and compete. Stop jerking off to porn and reading your little comic books, how about working 100 hours a week on what you think the market wants -- Microsoft won't prevent you from taking out a loan, running an ad campaign, and shipping a better product, so why aren't you doing it?
No, that's where you're wrong. If you were actually to compete with M$ on any of their many playing fields, you would inevitbly face some of the anti-competative business practices which the company has already been convicted of implementing. Extortion-like pricing, custom-crufted code and underground whisper campaigns are only a few of their dirty tricks.
I'm all for free enterprise and entrepeneurialism. In fact that's why I dislike M$, because they discourage these things. But if you don't have any checks and/or balances, two bad things occur:
1) Only that which profits will survive. This is an ok (though not great) way to run a business, but it's no way to run a society. The maxim that "everyone in pursuit of their self-interest generates the best common good" has been roundly disprooved in history. This is because all people are not created economically equal, and hence many people's self-interest trumps that of others for highly arbitrary reasons. Furthermore, there are a great many things that a society should have that should not be profit motivated. Roads are a good example. The interstate highway system makes no money, but without this vital infrastructure commerce would fail. Defence is another example. You don't want your army going out to the highest bidder. This is why citizens collectivize to mutually provide funds (aka taxes) so that these social institutions can be run in absence of profit motivation.
2) Without checks and regulations on a market, you're likely to have a highly unstable situation. Die-hard lesse faire advocates will tell you that things will eventually even out, and this is true, but it would take many generations for a stable global economy to emerge (if it ever did) from the chaos of an unregulated market.
Look, anti-trust law was instituted for a couple of good reasons. On the one hand, it prevents monopoly companies from abusing consumers (e.g. selling tainted meat or fixing the price of oil). It keep's them honest. Secondly, it forces them to innovate, since they cannot retain market dominance by controling the market. A monopoly market occurs when one player controls the entire game. Therefore it make a lot more sense to have a player who is (at least in principle) working in the best interest of citizens, aka the government, in control, and let this player make sure everyone plays fair. We have a teacher watching the kids play at recess, and the teacher steps in to tell bullies to play nice.
The truth is that right now M$ is more economically powerful than you, I, or perhaps even the entire aggrigated slashdot community. Ergo, should they decide to focus their wrath on me for whatever reason, I'd like someone to be there to keep them off me.
In the end, the fatal flaw of free market idealism is the incontrovertable fact that the most important elements of life bear only a tangential relationship to the profit motive.
Doesn't this describe music in its entirety?
Hardly. I would call music perhaps the highest aesthetic, spiritual, intelectual and cultural acheivement of our species. It is one of the few elements of a society that is common across every nation, present in every civilization we know of back into tribal pre-history.
If you've never been transported by the ecstatic alignment of harmonious sound and your own thought and activities, I suggest you leave your sterio on more often, or at least try some new tunes.
In short, get jiggy with it, comrade.
I won't bother to repeat the hundred or so prior "No legislation is good legislation" arguments. They're right, by the way. Legislating in someone's business model is bad for law and (in the long run) bad for the economy.
I do, however, have something original to add. If you want to go with the information superhighway as your dominant metaphor, creating a highway patroll wouldn't be such a bad thing. It would be a hassle, but it might make the content providers happy.
The iHP (internet highway patrol) could look for documentable instances of piracy (though avoiding entrapment might be hard) and issue notices and penalties on par with traffic offenses. A $15 ticket for downloading an MP3, a $100 ticket for pirating M$ office. The penalty would be in proportion to the value of the IP stolen. Repeat offenders could face harsher penalties.
Of course, this would require a huge nationwide beuraucracy and investment in tracking technology and personnel, so it's something I as a taxpayer would be loath to shell out for, but it's an alternative. But the Real Truth is that there's no evidence that piracy of music, software or movies hurts anyone's bottom line. The only emperical evidence I'm aware of points to the opposite conclusion.
This, however, doesn't seem to sway the content-owning agencies as what they are really afraid of is loosing their control over content, not loosing a few copies to piracy. They want to create barriers so that artists and other content-creators cannot distribute outside their system, just like every other distributor has done in response to the internet.
What the media provide is superficial familiarity -- images without context, indignation without remedy. The problem isn't just the content of the media, but the fact that while images become international, people's lives remain parochial
The author is (I think) talking about passive media here: sattelite broadcasts and CNN.com. The real value of an interconnected globe will only be realized when individuals worldwide are engaged in creating the media discourse, not merely consuming it.
As has already been noted the current "golbal media" is more like a series of biased propaganda machines with a global scope than anything else. I can read kavkaz.org and get a different viewpoint from CNN.com, but I don't know where I can log into a chat room and actually talk with a real person "over there".
It goes all the way back to the cluetrain: until the people are interconnecting and building the discourse with their own hearts and minds and stories, we will never create a social fabric that can resist being torn by demogaguery, be it from facistic leaders or bias news outlets.
Hopefully this interconnection is already happening, but it's going to take time. We (America/The West) are fairly settled into our consumer culture mode. Unless we really decide to take it upon ourselves to become citizens of our own nation and the world, we're not even going to be able to approach the utopian ideal of a global community.
Does Slash retrofit the correction to your previous posts?
Looks like it. Good old slashcode.
Forgetting for the moment that no evidence exists to show that the current levels of piracy are actually hurting the industry's bottom line, I still can't believe some of the FUD they sling:
Boston-based Internet research firm Viant puts the daily worldwide number of unauthorized movie downloads at 350,000.
Where the hell does that come from? Even a highly compressed divix rip is about 500mb. I've never downloaded one for that reason. If this statistic is to be believed, there are hundereds of thousands of broadband users doing nothing but downloading rips 24/7.
Really, this is just unbelievable. Reminds me of the "research" the plaintiffs did in the original DeCSS case. IIRC they wrote in the brief how it was "simple and easy" to pirate a DVD with divx and that the average home-user could turn to piracy with no headache. Under cross-examination, it came out that they actually had to hire two consultants for their case study and it took them 2 days.
These people are dispicable. Collectively they are the microsoft of culture: a corpulent oligarcy pumping out mediocre to poor products and fighting like mad to keep their control over the creation and distribution of content.