If you all think that these laws just happened to come together to form something inherently evil, you're wrong. This sure seems like a concerted effort to me. Consider this:
* 1996 Telecommunications act makes it possible for radio stations to consolidate.
The effect of this is that in 6 years, 2 large companies own 50% of the radio stations in the country, multiple stations in many markets. And this percentage grows every day. These stations, in order to consolidate operations, have common playlists, and some even broadcast canned programming at night, when advertising dollars are weaker. The consolidation is done to allow the stations to attract national advertising campaigns. It also gives the RIAA a peer to talk with.
In some cases these stations are owned by media conglomerates which also own record labels (Viacom). This fits into the Master Plan -- produce music, get it played on MTV, publicize it in the magazines, get the bands featured on TV shows, and finally play them on the radio. If the music isn't owned by you, only play it if it becomes a major hit.
With this consolidation, the quality of radio plummets. Normally market forces would kick in and upstarts would be created to fill the creative void, giving consumers what they want. But the startup costs for radio stations are immense, and there are limited frequencies. It is not possible for competition to fill the void as quickly as it has been created.
Now the internet comes along and starts to fill the void. If you aren't happy with a radio station in your market, you can listen to a station in a different market. All radio has the potential to become national. Smaller radio stations who play a nice variety of music like this development; if they can prove that they're getting a large national audience, they can attract national advertisers (instead of the local used car lots).
The big radio station companies can't be too happy about this. They have the potential to be scooped by the little guy again. Competition only means headaches for them.
* DCMA/CARP is born. It effectively places huge costs upon people trying to broadcast music on the internet. These costs can't possibly be recouped -- they are higher than costs put on broadcast stations, and they are in addition to the publisher fees that broadcast stations pay.
Oddly enough, the money goes to the record companies (not to the artists), giving the large conglomerates a huge advantage, because they're going to be paying themselves...
This sounds like anti-trust at its finest. The large media companies become 1000-pound gorillias primarily through laws passed through Congress, and these laws, although written generically, require payments which wind up in the pocket of the gorillas. So the gorillas get fatter and the small companies get bled dry.
The laws that have been created do exactly what they were intended to do -- they squash the little guys who have the potential to upset the apple card, they lock up the content with the large media conglomerates (who will just get larger), and they reduce the choices of the consumer (which cuts costs for them, because if you have to choose between Britney Spears and 100 other artists, chances are you won't choose Britney, but if your choice is between Britney and 4 other artists, you have a 20% chance of choosing Britney).
I wouldn't be surprised if, when the conglomerates own most of the stations in the country, that they introduce these new fees onto radio, with the claim that "the internet has these fees, why shouldn't broadcast radio", effectively locking the music market for good.
And this is all paid for by us. We pay extra money so that the conglomerates can bribe the Government.
I'll start off by stating that I don't think that the Napster culture was a good one. It shouldn't be easy to download music for free in lieu of buying it. However, that said, I did use Napster in conjunction with online music, and I think that it could have worked a little differently.
I don't listen to local radio anymore. Why? Because they don't play what I like. All the "new rock" stations have turned into metal. All the other stations are N-Sync, Brittney, etc. They're all Clear-Channel with the same exact playlists of 50 songs.
At one point, when online music was at its peak, I listened to some cool stations where I enjoyed the music. It was frustrating though, because I could get exposed to those songs when I happened to find them on one of the online stations.
I then dowloaded Napster, and was able to download and listen to those songs on my PC. Napster, however, is frustrating, because you could never get an entire album, and it took a long time to get all the tracks, etc.
So I wound up buying the CDs. Everyone won.
If it was easy with Napster to download an entire album, then I probably wouldn't have bought the CDs. That's how Napster could have been very bad for the RIAA. But Napster was good for the RIAA because it did allow me to hear the songs. I don't buy music on faith, I buy it because I've heard it before. That's where the RIAA makes their mistake, they assume that you will buy a CD without hearing it first.
Ideally, a Napster-like tool should allow you to download any songs you want, let you keep the songs for a little while, like shareware, but then they wouldn't work after a period of time. That would be the best for everyone. I don't know how anyone who claims to support artists could argue with that one.
And of course, those online stations are mostly gone due to the new RIAA fees (or the threats of those fees). So I can't listen to new music, so consequently I haven't bought a CD in about 6 months.
The RIAA had a legitimate concern, but they overreacted because they thought that we would all pay money to have the privilege of hearing new artists. They also want to squash the "Alternative distribution methods" that will cause them to lose their stranglehold on the music industry.
To further this argument, no other medium defines success as "stealing visitors", yet that is the only success defined for banner ads -- you have to abandon the original content (by clicking on the banner) in order for the ad to be successful.
That would be like an ad running in the middle of Friends saying "Hey, they're in the middle of the final Survivor tribunal, switch over now!", and NBC would only be paid if people stopped watching their channel.
It would be like an ad in the Wall Street Journal that said "Throw your paper away and start reading USA Today right now!".
It would be like an ad on your favorite music station saying "Hey, we've got some great stories on NPR now, change the channel".
No respectible content medium bases success on abandoning the content. But internet advertising defines this as the only way of success.
That's why banner advertising doesn't "work" -- because it was designed wrong.
What I see is that (and it has already started happening in the last year or so) all these little web sites will be bought up by a conglomerate and mergered together. The economics of this is quite smart. I mean, it's not really economical for one small company to have a 10K server and a 1k/month internet connection. If 10 of these sites have been merged together, they would come to 1/10 (maybe a little more) of the original cost. Examples of this are seen here at Slashdot, eVite by Excite, and others.
This would be a tragic thing. Think ClearCast Broadcasting. If all the niche publishing sites were bought up by conglomerates, then only the most dumbed-down, appeal-to-everyone sites would survive. That's the current state of the newspaper and radio industries.
Remember, when companies are owned by conglomerates, they are expected to perform as an investment for their investors. That means they should be making 20-40% profit yearly. If an independent site is happy making a couple of thousand dollars, a corporate-owned site would be shut down if it was performing like that, or it would want to "tweak" its format to make more money. Imagine this memo: "Say, that Slashdot is pretty slick, but way too technical. Let's omit the articles that most of the US doesn't understand".
Even if there are people willing to pay for the content, it might not matter if there aren't millions of them.
Sharing may not be a sinister thing, but Napster was to sharing as Robin Hood was to charity.
It's sharing when your friend misses Gilligan's Island and you loan him your tape. It's illegal when you take that tape and make it publically available to the world.
Even though you may choose to ignore this fact, Napster was so much more than "sharing".
Of course, if a show wasn't popular enough to survive for 100 episodes, it's unlikely to have a big enough market to make a video release financially viable. There may be 10,000 people who loved the live-action Tick series, but even if all 10,000 people buy the DVD set, will that cover the cost of pressing and marketing the discs?
I think this may be a fallicy though. Don't the costs of recording the show, paying the actors & producers, and promoting it dwarf the costs associated with printing DVD's? Isn't "marketing" a poor excuse? If it was standard that all shows were available for purchase, then they are for the most part self-marketed. Heck, the simple act of the show being shown in re-runs is "marketing", similar to a song being played on the radio.
I know there's a cost to making something available on DVD, but c'mon, if people can do it from their houses and trade/pirate the DVD's, how is it that this can't be done on a larger scale for a lower per-unit cost?
True, royalties aren't paid on pirate copies, but could this just be a case of the media companies cost-accounting the head honcho's salaries all the way down to the cost of producing a DVD of Kojak and saying "it's going to cost us too much to press 10,000 copies of this DVD because we have 2 million in salary that we have to push to the cost model"?
I am against pirating stuff en-masse (i.e. Napster, posting on websites). One-off trading shouldn't be a big concern to the content holders. If I tape a show and give it to a friend, yes, that's illegal, but it's essentially insignificant because it's usually more trouble than its worth, its uncommon, and its a drop in the bucket. I doubt I'd ever be prosecuted for loaning a copy of Star Trek that was just on yesterday to a friend who forgot to tape it.
However, the prevalence of trading shows that there is a demand for this stuff. Why not make it available for sale? Who says that shows need to be off-the-air for a couple of years before they're made available? Who says that only the most popular shows should be made available?
Why isn't the distribution process streamlined so that printing 5000 DVDs for the 5000 people who want to see "Cop Rock" is still profitable?
There are plenty of TV shows that I would gladly purchase on DVD. I was happy to see "Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1" on DVD -- not because I want to buy it, but because I'm hoping that means that shows like "Kojak, Season 1" make it.
I suspect that the media companies are at a crossroads. Do they sell their content and possibly ruin the repeat-TV market, or do they hold it close and risk people trading it among themselves?
Because your argument doesn't scale. If I make a copy of 1 song for 1 person, that might give them incentive to buy a CD, compensating the artist.
If I make copies of all CD's by an artist for 1 person, that doesn't really give them incentive to buy a CD that I've just given them, does it?
If I make copies of all CD's by an artist available for everyone to copy for free, why would someone buy them? If you had the choice of hauling your butt to Walmart to pay $15 for a CD or sitting at home and downloading it for free, which would you choose? Sure, a few people -- mostly those who didn't yet have fast modems and CD burners -- might buy a copy after hearing it, but most people would not.
People always gravitate towards free things over things that have a price. Napster is the perfect example of this.
I don't disagee with you that too much power has been given to the current crop of IP laws -- Di$ney's extension of copyright to be almost infinity is a good example of this. However, I don't agree with your premise that once a work has been "born", that it isn't owned by anyone. I don't think that eliminaton of IP is the way to solve the problem.
Think about this -- if there was no such thing as copyright, if someone is still brave enough to create a great work, then there would be a gaggle of companies rushing to take that work and distribute it, giving $0 compensation to the work's creator.
The party making the most money from the work will be the party with the most efficient distribution network. If Sony has the ability to take a CD that some starving artist is selling on the internet to niche groups for $5, and sell it on the internet to the world for $1 (without compensating the artist), then who wins there? Sure, the consumers may, but how many starving artists will continue to create if their work is just going to be used for others' gain?
Musicians and movie producers produce movies and music for people to watch and listen to. They put a copyright on their work so nobody else can make identical copies of their work and distribute it as their own work, and so that the proper author's are credited, not necessarily in monetary value.
Are you trying to make the claim that films are made, music is written, and books are written irrespective of money? Why are those things any different from someone writing a good piece of software, or someone who is a really good salesperson? Are you arguing that no one should be compensated for anything? Because that's the road your taking by claiming that artists are primarily concerned with credit, not with compensation.
Say what you want about people still creating creative works, but when you have to work 40+ hours a week, there is little fuel left in the brain for creativity. I know that I perform my most creatively on the weekends or when I'm on vacation -- not after a 10-hour day at work. Do you think people will quit their day jobs so that they can make music that Sony will just take and sell without compensation?
Copyright just doensn't protect the big guy -- it protects the little guy too. It's just swung a little too much in the big guy's favor now.
This is almost undoubtably a troll, but I'll respond anyways since some unenlightend people may still cling to this idea.
Intellectual Property is a fiction, it is not property (as in tangible asset) at all. The act of creation ceases when the work is born, only in the 'intellectual property world" does a producer feel the right to control a work once he has borne it.
You state this as a fact, yet it is opposite of what the law says. Intellectual property is a reality, and there are laws that back it up.
You may not like it, but that doesn't matter -- the law is what governs you, and if you choose to ignore it, then you are doing so at the risk of the penalties written in that law.
If you don't buy that argument, would you like it if I walked into you house and said "Property rights are a fiction; everything is derived from the earth, which no one owns, so you can't possibly own that DVD player", and walk out with it? Who made you the supreme lawmaker so that you can declare that "intellectual property is a fiction", claiming that all such works are in the public domain? How could you even be so arrogant.
Technology now changes too fast for someone to spend 40 years fastening rivets or programming personal computers that run Windows. A society of citizens with sufficient education in science, technology and business will be flexible enough to keep up with the changing world and do exactly what our capitalist system says we should: keep getting more efficient and finding better uses of our time and resources.
I don't agree with this. The turmoil is being caused because the changes are occuring too rapidly, and transition between careers is nearly impossible.
It is very hard to change careers because experience is necessary for most jobs, and if you're a programmer you're not going to get true experience in customer service to the point where you can compete with someone with even 1 year of experience in the field. I suppose it might be possible to "start at the bottom", but for all practical purposes you can't start at the bottom once you hit a certain age -- because you won't be hired. Presented with the choice to hire someone out of college and train them or to hire a 45-year old ex-carpet maker and train them, which would 99.999% of managers choose?
So what do you do when your industry gets wiped out when you're 45-50 years old and the change happens overnight? How do you even plan for something like that? Ask yourself this question: "if my occupation goes away in 2 years, what will I do? Will I be able to find another job at even 50% of the salary I'm at?" Odds are the answer will be no.
Ralph
This won't ever happen
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
This won't happen. Why? Because the potential for this is already out there, and it hasn't been used yet.
Why not just play a sporting event between the two countries? Why not just take 50 people from each country and put them in a room, and whoever lives wins the war? Because that's not humiliating and decimating enough to the loser, and because the loser always has another battlefield to fall back on -- human fighting.
Remember, these people are at war, which isn't something you do because someone stuck their tongue out at someone else. You go to war because of serious, grave issues. You go because diplomacy has failed. When you go to war, a country can't lose yet still be 100% intact -- because they will just take the fight to the next level.
This is what makes nuclear weapons so frightening. Do you think that any country that possesses nuclear weapons will allow themselves to be taken over without using them, no matter how horrible their use is? Given the choice of being wiped out by a country that invades you or blowing that country up with nukes, possibly creating a lot of pollution (somewhere else), which would most countries pick?
The only reason that nukes haven't been used yet is that the wars fought by the countries that possess them haven't been important enough for their use. We had nukes in Vietnam. We could have used them. But in the end, we didn't care about that country enough to justify using nukes to win the war. Russia didn't care enough about Afghanistan to justify using nukes to win that war.
Bottom line -- the only way that war can be won or lost between two equal powers is if the powers use their most horrible weapons. Those weapons will not be limited to robots because a country will never accept defeat if only its robots lose the battle.
I *do* have a problem with this. Call me an isolationist, but the living conditions and quality of life is vastly different in China and India than it is in the US.
I heard a story on NPR about how India trains people for call centers. They can take a $35,000 job from the US and turn it into a $4,000 job in India.
So what happens to the person making $35,000 over here? Should they take a pay cut to $4,000?
Similarly, I'm sure that people in India and China would be willing to do development for $10/hour. A globalist would say "Great! We can save money by doing that". But what happens to the developers over here?
Hey, I guess they can just move into the textile industry instead. Wait, those jobs are all overseas. How about customer service? Nope -- those are being outsourced too. Manufacturing? No, those are long gone. Auto-making? Nope -- gone to Mexico.
Before long, any job that *can* be done remotely *will* be done remotely when you can pay someone in another country $10/hour to work (plus, want to bet that they have benefits over there?). Which means that a vast majority of professionals will be out of work.
Then what?
We should be calling our representatives about such things. There should be duties paid on software developed in other countries just as there are duties in other industries. I'm not saying that because I want to take a protectionist stance just for the sake of doing so. I'm saying it because there is a huge difference between someone in living India and someone living in Silicon Valley. That difference should not be exploited by corporations looking to save a buck.
Otherwise our standard of living, which is probably the highest in the world, will get lower while the rest of the world's gets higher.
It's like littering -- if one or two companies do it, it's only a nusiance, but when everyone starts to do it, it's a disaster for everyone yet no one can be held accountable for the disaster.
I find it interesting that a majority of the comments here are:
"free software developers should get paid for their time"
"I always donate to free software companies"
"there should be a way for these people to get paid".
"We should have micropayments so that we can be charged a little bit per use"
"If I like a piece of software, I try and buy something from the developer to support them"
However, when a similar article highlighting the problems of web site publishing came up, the comments were:
"the companies deserve to fail, they have a bad business model"
"If a web site tries to charge me, I'll just go elsewhere"
"I run ad-blocking software so I don't have to put up with the ads. I don't care if the site gets paid"
"People shouldn't get paid to create content"
"The only thing that content-providers should be compensated for is bandwidth."
I didn't see anyone advocating rewriting open-source software to disable payment mechanisms. (That's the equivalent of ad-blocking software).
I saw people recognizing that developers should be compensated, and that there are other expenses (such as rent) that exist for free software. Yet no one bought into this for content.
I saw sympathy towards free-software companies that were financially in trouble. Compare that with the scorn against content providers that are in trouble.
Here's the basic problem. The WWW is probably the best medium to get current and updated information out to people. It's nearly instantaneous. And the excellent side benefit of the information being avaialble long after the event has happened. Plus it's searchable.
That doesn't work so well with newspapers, magazines, and even TV.
But the problem is that there is a cost to producing this information immediately in a reliable manner -- the cost to create the content. Sure, when the WTC got hit, that news made it out pretty fast on all channels. But what if you want to know about Massachusetts plan to raise tolls on the Pike? How many amateurs do you know writing articles on that?
Take sports scores. True, you could try to rely on amateurs to post scores. That might work for popular sports. But do you think you'll reliably be able to get Horse Racing Results from Saratoga every single day of the season -- within 10 minutes of the race closing -- from volunteers? Every day, without exception? I doubt it.
I'm always amazed by the people wishing for the "good old days" of the internet. The good old days may have been ad-free, and charge-free, but the information was largely stale. Someone put up a cool site, maintained it for a couple of weeks, and then let it die once they were bored with it. How many of your favorite sites from 1995 are still up and being updated? When money came, stability followed.
I run a fairly popular website right now -- about 2.5 million pages per month. I've been running it for about 4 years. It's costing me exactly $150/month to host.
If someone told me that they would pay for my hosting fees but that's all I could ever make, I don't think I'd keep the site up indefinitely. There are times when the only reason I'm willing to spend 20+ hours a week on the site is because I have the chance of making some extra money from it -- not a killing, but maybe enough to pay some bills.
Although innovation and creativity isn't dependent on money, money is still an excellent stimulant. If a law was passed that said "as of tomorrow you cannot ever make any money from anything on the internet, not even to recoup your costs", how many sites do you think would remain up and updated?
So you're arguing that people should only pay for transfer, that no site should be compensated for creating content, and that every site should only be compensated their costs for transferring that content to others, but no more?
That's seems to be like saying that an employer should only pay their employees enough to drive to work every day.
Is it your right to not watch commercials on TV? Of course it is. But if a device that extracts commercials is 100% legal, and everyone adopts it, then free TV programs as we know them will end. The networks will need to find a new business model. Will this be painless? No way. They'll experiment with every intrusive form of advertising that they can. The war won't go away -- it will intensify.
Do you still have doubts? Look at the internet. Banner blockers knock out the 468x60 ads, so we now have all kinds of new, resource-intensive, in-your-face formats. We have popups and popunders. We have birds that fly across your web page. We have "affiliate" pages which masquerade as informational pages, trying to trick you into buying products. And we'll soon have full-screen ads that you have to watch for X seconds before proceeding.
Why do we have this? Because no one is responding to less intrusive banner ads. Creative content costs money to produce, and no one should be happy about preventing money from going the people who produce it.
So although it may be our right to block/skip ads, remember, those ads are what keep the content free. Once they stop working, TV becomes a billable service.
You may be looking at the "itch" from a major radio market perspective. How about the rest of us?
I live in a market where there are 6 "rock" stations within range. They break down like this:
2 Classic Rock (Stones, Beatles, etc.)
3 Hard/Metal Rock (Metallica/Poison/Limp Bizkit/Rage)
1 "Progressive Rock" (same as Hard, but without the older metal)
Everything else is either 100% pop/R&B (Britney Spears), 100% Adult Contemporary, or 100% Country/Western. And there is a Bluesy station too. There's NPR, but classical isn't my bag. The college stations play mostly hip-hop, that is when they're on the air (never early in the morning, it seems).
Plus, most of the stations are all-talk for the morning/evening drives. There's often *no* music on.
So of the 20 or so stations, there are about 5 different kinds of music. They all have the same playlists.
I don't like *any* of it. And yes, I have a CD player in my car. But the point of the radio is to discover new music. If I only listen to CD's, then I'm stuck within my own musical limitations. I never hear anything new.
I rarely listen to music on my PC -- most of my listening time comes in the car. But on occassion I will listen to other stations over the internet and I'm blown away with the cool music that's out there -- even from other commercial stations in larger cities. I enjoy travelling to these cities just to hear the music.
I want to hear that kind of music, but up until now the only way to get that in my car was to move to a big city like New York or Boston.
I would pay $10/month for more variety -- to hear stuff that is not the same 15 bands that the local stations focus on.
There's a right way that satellite can work and a wrong way. If they're just going to be regurgitating the same 50 songs on a 3-hour loop, then I won't subscribe. But if they're going to essentially have 100 different radio stations with unique playlists, then I'll be a very happy camper.
In my mind that's bad moviemaking. His quote -- "you've got to remember you just watched a movie about talking monkeys in outer space. Don't look for too much logic, you know." -- is asinine. Just because a movie has supernatural elements doesn't give you carte blanche to violate premises established in the first 99% of the movie just to get a spectacular ending.
It would be like at the end of Star Wars, if everyone magically became invincible without explanation, and were able to defeat the death star.
Let's pretend that advertising didn't support TV. What would that mean?
You could pay per individual show. Of course, how would you know if the show was good enough to pay for without seeing it first? Would you get your money back for a show that stunk? Would you enjoy doing a value judgment every time a new show came on -- "hmm, is it worth $5 to me to watch this show"?
You could subscribe to each show for the season. Of course, if you've never seen the show before why would you subscribe? How would you find out about new shows?
You could pay for cable and let cable decide which shows to send you. Of course, the shows are grouped into networks and there are a finite number of shows which makes is somewhat easier for the cable company to choose. Since there would be no advertising your cable bills would probably run $100 per channel though.
My point: I don't think that TV could survive without advertising. Advertising is like a giant tax put on the nation to support TV. Everyone pays the cost of advertising in the form of higher product prices. And we get TV with ads in return.
Likewise I don't think the internet can survive without advertising. There's just no good way to pay for everything.
This has horrible consequences for historians. The basic argument was that the newspapers claimed that an online historical database was simply a new "edition" of the paper while the writers claimed that it was a new medium and therefore permission must be granted to publish the information. The writers won.
The main effect of this is that newspapers will have to pay royalties to publish archives of their papers, and they'll have to negotiate those royalties per article/writer. Since this is a huge pain, akin to a radio station negotiating a royalty with every artist per song, it will not happen. Therefore a huge trove of information will never be republished.
I wonder if this affects microfilm. Film is essentially a new medium, similar to an online database but just a lot harder to use -- it's not indexed and it's only visible a page at a time. I could use the same argument to say that the newspaper shouldn't be able to publish the information, right?
If microfilm isn't covered, then there is an non-obvious loophole here -- the newspapers could use the electronic text of the articles to provide indexing/search criteria, and could then just display the image of the page that the article appears on. This wouldn't even be a new edition of the paper -- it would be a copy of the old edition of the paper (albeit electronic) that would not require royalty payments.
This could affect one of the greatest research projects underway -- Paper of Record, the project to digitize historical newspapers in their entirety so that they could be easily searched. Think of the knowledge and history that could be unlocked by such a project -- instead of trying to scan through old scratchy microfilm searching for a buried article, you could just do an index search on the words you want and instantly see every article on the subject ever printed.
Of course, with the Supreme Court's ruling, that would not be possible. The archive could not be created without a significant burden on the papers to obtain the permission of every article writer. And article writers wouldn't even have to give their permission -- they could just refuse.
I'm all for royalties, but in this case I believe a music-like organization should be created to distribute royalties on a prenegotiated basis. That system allows someone to record a version of a song as long as they pay the royalties, and radio stations to play the songs as long as they pay too. That's what is needed for article distribution as well.
That's not the way it works -- a plane can't see your plates from above. They radio ahead to a trooper trap which pulls you over and tells you how the plane clocked you at X MPH.
This isn't 100% relevant to finding real estate, but you can see what other properties in the neighborhood have sold for so that you can tell if you're overpaying a property.
http://www.domainia.com
allows you to put in an address, a street, or a neighborhood, and you can see the sale prices of all real estate since 1987 to present.
You can see what the previous owner paid for the house if he/she bought it since then!
You're not generating the content -- so although you are funding the site from your pocket, it seems to me that the site could run on its own since the users provide the content. You can work nights and weekends to make the money to keep the server going. I don't even see an e-mail address there to contact you.
How much time do you spend a week on the site? Contrast that to someone who runs an online comic strip, or a site that has daily-updated articles. Or even a site like GeekPress which has to hunt down and filter articles.
I know that I'm being somewhat abrasive, but I always find that the people who say "you should provide content for free" typically have never provided any content for free for any length of time.
Slashdot Mirror
If you all think that these laws just happened to come together to form something inherently evil, you're wrong. This sure seems like a concerted effort to me. Consider this:
* 1996 Telecommunications act makes it possible for radio stations to consolidate.
The effect of this is that in 6 years, 2 large companies own 50% of the radio stations in the country, multiple stations in many markets. And this percentage grows every day. These stations, in order to consolidate operations, have common playlists, and some even broadcast canned programming at night, when advertising dollars are weaker. The consolidation is done to allow the stations to attract national advertising campaigns. It also gives the RIAA a peer to talk with.
In some cases these stations are owned by media conglomerates which also own record labels (Viacom). This fits into the Master Plan -- produce music, get it played on MTV, publicize it in the magazines, get the bands featured on TV shows, and finally play them on the radio. If the music isn't owned by you, only play it if it becomes a major hit.
With this consolidation, the quality of radio plummets. Normally market forces would kick in and upstarts would be created to fill the creative void, giving consumers what they want. But the startup costs for radio stations are immense, and there are limited frequencies. It is not possible for competition to fill the void as quickly as it has been created.
Now the internet comes along and starts to fill the void. If you aren't happy with a radio station in your market, you can listen to a station in a different market. All radio has the potential to become national. Smaller radio stations who play a nice variety of music like this development; if they can prove that they're getting a large national audience, they can attract national advertisers (instead of the local used car lots).
The big radio station companies can't be too happy about this. They have the potential to be scooped by the little guy again. Competition only means headaches for them.
* DCMA/CARP is born. It effectively places huge costs upon people trying to broadcast music on the internet. These costs can't possibly be recouped -- they are higher than costs put on broadcast stations, and they are in addition to the publisher fees that broadcast stations pay.
Oddly enough, the money goes to the record companies (not to the artists), giving the large conglomerates a huge advantage, because they're going to be paying themselves...
This sounds like anti-trust at its finest. The large media companies become 1000-pound gorillias primarily through laws passed through Congress, and these laws, although written generically, require payments which wind up in the pocket of the gorillas. So the gorillas get fatter and the small companies get bled dry.
The laws that have been created do exactly what they were intended to do -- they squash the little guys who have the potential to upset the apple card, they lock up the content with the large media conglomerates (who will just get larger), and they reduce the choices of the consumer (which cuts costs for them, because if you have to choose between Britney Spears and 100 other artists, chances are you won't choose Britney, but if your choice is between Britney and 4 other artists, you have a 20% chance of choosing Britney).
I wouldn't be surprised if, when the conglomerates own most of the stations in the country, that they introduce these new fees onto radio, with the claim that "the internet has these fees, why shouldn't broadcast radio", effectively locking the music market for good.
And this is all paid for by us. We pay extra money so that the conglomerates can bribe the Government.
Ralph
I'll start off by stating that I don't think that the Napster culture was a good one. It shouldn't be easy to download music for free in lieu of buying it. However, that said, I did use Napster in conjunction with online music, and I think that it could have worked a little differently.
I don't listen to local radio anymore. Why? Because they don't play what I like. All the "new rock" stations have turned into metal. All the other stations are N-Sync, Brittney, etc. They're all Clear-Channel with the same exact playlists of 50 songs.
At one point, when online music was at its peak, I listened to some cool stations where I enjoyed the music. It was frustrating though, because I could get exposed to those songs when I happened to find them on one of the online stations.
I then dowloaded Napster, and was able to download and listen to those songs on my PC. Napster, however, is frustrating, because you could never get an entire album, and it took a long time to get all the tracks, etc.
So I wound up buying the CDs. Everyone won.
If it was easy with Napster to download an entire album, then I probably wouldn't have bought the CDs. That's how Napster could have been very bad for the RIAA. But Napster was good for the RIAA because it did allow me to hear the songs. I don't buy music on faith, I buy it because I've heard it before. That's where the RIAA makes their mistake, they assume that you will buy a CD without hearing it first.
Ideally, a Napster-like tool should allow you to download any songs you want, let you keep the songs for a little while, like shareware, but then they wouldn't work after a period of time. That would be the best for everyone. I don't know how anyone who claims to support artists could argue with that one.
And of course, those online stations are mostly gone due to the new RIAA fees (or the threats of those fees). So I can't listen to new music, so consequently I haven't bought a CD in about 6 months.
The RIAA had a legitimate concern, but they overreacted because they thought that we would all pay money to have the privilege of hearing new artists. They also want to squash the "Alternative distribution methods" that will cause them to lose their stranglehold on the music industry.
Ralph
To further this argument, no other medium defines success as "stealing visitors", yet that is the only success defined for banner ads -- you have to abandon the original content (by clicking on the banner) in order for the ad to be successful.
That would be like an ad running in the middle of Friends saying "Hey, they're in the middle of the final Survivor tribunal, switch over now!", and NBC would only be paid if people stopped watching their channel.
It would be like an ad in the Wall Street Journal that said "Throw your paper away and start reading USA Today right now!".
It would be like an ad on your favorite music station saying "Hey, we've got some great stories on NPR now, change the channel".
No respectible content medium bases success on abandoning the content. But internet advertising defines this as the only way of success.
That's why banner advertising doesn't "work" -- because it was designed wrong.
Ralph Slate
What I see is that (and it has already started happening in the last year or so) all these little web sites will be bought up by a conglomerate and mergered together. The economics of this is quite smart. I mean, it's not really economical for one small company to have a 10K server and a 1k/month internet connection. If 10 of these sites have been merged together, they would come to 1/10 (maybe a little more) of the original cost. Examples of this are seen here at Slashdot, eVite by Excite, and others.
This would be a tragic thing. Think ClearCast Broadcasting. If all the niche publishing sites were bought up by conglomerates, then only the most dumbed-down, appeal-to-everyone sites would survive. That's the current state of the newspaper and radio industries.
Remember, when companies are owned by conglomerates, they are expected to perform as an investment for their investors. That means they should be making 20-40% profit yearly. If an independent site is happy making a couple of thousand dollars, a corporate-owned site would be shut down if it was performing like that, or it would want to "tweak" its format to make more money. Imagine this memo: "Say, that Slashdot is pretty slick, but way too technical. Let's omit the articles that most of the US doesn't understand".
Even if there are people willing to pay for the content, it might not matter if there aren't millions of them.
Ralph
Sharing may not be a sinister thing, but Napster was to sharing as Robin Hood was to charity.
It's sharing when your friend misses Gilligan's Island and you loan him your tape. It's illegal when you take that tape and make it publically available to the world.
Even though you may choose to ignore this fact, Napster was so much more than "sharing".
Ralph
I think this may be a fallicy though. Don't the costs of recording the show, paying the actors & producers, and promoting it dwarf the costs associated with printing DVD's? Isn't "marketing" a poor excuse? If it was standard that all shows were available for purchase, then they are for the most part self-marketed. Heck, the simple act of the show being shown in re-runs is "marketing", similar to a song being played on the radio.
I know there's a cost to making something available on DVD, but c'mon, if people can do it from their houses and trade/pirate the DVD's, how is it that this can't be done on a larger scale for a lower per-unit cost?
True, royalties aren't paid on pirate copies, but could this just be a case of the media companies cost-accounting the head honcho's salaries all the way down to the cost of producing a DVD of Kojak and saying "it's going to cost us too much to press 10,000 copies of this DVD because we have 2 million in salary that we have to push to the cost model"?
Ralph Slate
I am against pirating stuff en-masse (i.e. Napster, posting on websites). One-off trading shouldn't be a big concern to the content holders. If I tape a show and give it to a friend, yes, that's illegal, but it's essentially insignificant because it's usually more trouble than its worth, its uncommon, and its a drop in the bucket. I doubt I'd ever be prosecuted for loaning a copy of Star Trek that was just on yesterday to a friend who forgot to tape it.
However, the prevalence of trading shows that there is a demand for this stuff. Why not make it available for sale? Who says that shows need to be off-the-air for a couple of years before they're made available? Who says that only the most popular shows should be made available?
Why isn't the distribution process streamlined so that printing 5000 DVDs for the 5000 people who want to see "Cop Rock" is still profitable?
There are plenty of TV shows that I would gladly purchase on DVD. I was happy to see "Buffy the Vampire Slayer, season 1" on DVD -- not because I want to buy it, but because I'm hoping that means that shows like "Kojak, Season 1" make it.
I suspect that the media companies are at a crossroads. Do they sell their content and possibly ruin the repeat-TV market, or do they hold it close and risk people trading it among themselves?
Ralph Slate
OK, let's go back and apply your argument to the London Underground situation.
What if I printed up my own tickets for the London Underground and gave them away to people for free?
By your argument, that's just sharing, and there's nothing wrong with that, right?
Ralph
Because your argument doesn't scale. If I make a copy of 1 song for 1 person, that might give them incentive to buy a CD, compensating the artist.
If I make copies of all CD's by an artist for 1 person, that doesn't really give them incentive to buy a CD that I've just given them, does it?
If I make copies of all CD's by an artist available for everyone to copy for free, why would someone buy them? If you had the choice of hauling your butt to Walmart to pay $15 for a CD or sitting at home and downloading it for free, which would you choose? Sure, a few people -- mostly those who didn't yet have fast modems and CD burners -- might buy a copy after hearing it, but most people would not.
People always gravitate towards free things over things that have a price. Napster is the perfect example of this.
Ralph
I don't disagee with you that too much power has been given to the current crop of IP laws -- Di$ney's extension of copyright to be almost infinity is a good example of this. However, I don't agree with your premise that once a work has been "born", that it isn't owned by anyone. I don't think that eliminaton of IP is the way to solve the problem.
Think about this -- if there was no such thing as copyright, if someone is still brave enough to create a great work, then there would be a gaggle of companies rushing to take that work and distribute it, giving $0 compensation to the work's creator.
The party making the most money from the work will be the party with the most efficient distribution network. If Sony has the ability to take a CD that some starving artist is selling on the internet to niche groups for $5, and sell it on the internet to the world for $1 (without compensating the artist), then who wins there? Sure, the consumers may, but how many starving artists will continue to create if their work is just going to be used for others' gain?
Musicians and movie producers produce movies and music for people to watch and listen to. They put a copyright on their work so nobody else can make identical copies of their work and distribute it as their own work, and so that the proper author's are credited, not necessarily in monetary value.
Are you trying to make the claim that films are made, music is written, and books are written irrespective of money? Why are those things any different from someone writing a good piece of software, or someone who is a really good salesperson? Are you arguing that no one should be compensated for anything? Because that's the road your taking by claiming that artists are primarily concerned with credit, not with compensation.
Say what you want about people still creating creative works, but when you have to work 40+ hours a week, there is little fuel left in the brain for creativity. I know that I perform my most creatively on the weekends or when I'm on vacation -- not after a 10-hour day at work. Do you think people will quit their day jobs so that they can make music that Sony will just take and sell without compensation?
Copyright just doensn't protect the big guy -- it protects the little guy too. It's just swung a little too much in the big guy's favor now.
Ralph
This is almost undoubtably a troll, but I'll respond anyways since some unenlightend people may still cling to this idea.
Intellectual Property is a fiction, it is not property (as in tangible asset) at all. The act of creation ceases when the work is born, only in the 'intellectual property world" does a producer feel the right to control a work once he has borne it.
You state this as a fact, yet it is opposite of what the law says. Intellectual property is a reality, and there are laws that back it up.
You may not like it, but that doesn't matter -- the law is what governs you, and if you choose to ignore it, then you are doing so at the risk of the penalties written in that law.
If you don't buy that argument, would you like it if I walked into you house and said "Property rights are a fiction; everything is derived from the earth, which no one owns, so you can't possibly own that DVD player", and walk out with it? Who made you the supreme lawmaker so that you can declare that "intellectual property is a fiction", claiming that all such works are in the public domain? How could you even be so arrogant.
Ralph
Technology now changes too fast for someone to spend 40 years fastening rivets or programming personal computers that run Windows. A society of citizens with sufficient education in science, technology and business will be flexible enough to keep up with the changing world and do exactly what our capitalist system says we should: keep getting more efficient and finding better uses of our time and resources.
I don't agree with this. The turmoil is being caused because the changes are occuring too rapidly, and transition between careers is nearly impossible.
It is very hard to change careers because experience is necessary for most jobs, and if you're a programmer you're not going to get true experience in customer service to the point where you can compete with someone with even 1 year of experience in the field. I suppose it might be possible to "start at the bottom", but for all practical purposes you can't start at the bottom once you hit a certain age -- because you won't be hired. Presented with the choice to hire someone out of college and train them or to hire a 45-year old ex-carpet maker and train them, which would 99.999% of managers choose?
So what do you do when your industry gets wiped out when you're 45-50 years old and the change happens overnight? How do you even plan for something like that? Ask yourself this question: "if my occupation goes away in 2 years, what will I do? Will I be able to find another job at even 50% of the salary I'm at?" Odds are the answer will be no.
Ralph
It seems only a matter of time before other countries developed their own surrogate weaponry, and the idea of the high-tech Drone War -- machines warring with one another -- moves to the next level.
This won't happen. Why? Because the potential for this is already out there, and it hasn't been used yet.
Why not just play a sporting event between the two countries? Why not just take 50 people from each country and put them in a room, and whoever lives wins the war? Because that's not humiliating and decimating enough to the loser, and because the loser always has another battlefield to fall back on -- human fighting.
Remember, these people are at war, which isn't something you do because someone stuck their tongue out at someone else. You go to war because of serious, grave issues. You go because diplomacy has failed. When you go to war, a country can't lose yet still be 100% intact -- because they will just take the fight to the next level.
This is what makes nuclear weapons so frightening. Do you think that any country that possesses nuclear weapons will allow themselves to be taken over without using them, no matter how horrible their use is? Given the choice of being wiped out by a country that invades you or blowing that country up with nukes, possibly creating a lot of pollution (somewhere else), which would most countries pick?
The only reason that nukes haven't been used yet is that the wars fought by the countries that possess them haven't been important enough for their use. We had nukes in Vietnam. We could have used them. But in the end, we didn't care about that country enough to justify using nukes to win the war. Russia didn't care enough about Afghanistan to justify using nukes to win that war.
Bottom line -- the only way that war can be won or lost between two equal powers is if the powers use their most horrible weapons. Those weapons will not be limited to robots because a country will never accept defeat if only its robots lose the battle.
Ralph
I *do* have a problem with this. Call me an isolationist, but the living conditions and quality of life is vastly different in China and India than it is in the US.
I heard a story on NPR about how India trains people for call centers. They can take a $35,000 job from the US and turn it into a $4,000 job in India.
So what happens to the person making $35,000 over here? Should they take a pay cut to $4,000?
Similarly, I'm sure that people in India and China would be willing to do development for $10/hour. A globalist would say "Great! We can save money by doing that". But what happens to the developers over here?
Hey, I guess they can just move into the textile industry instead. Wait, those jobs are all overseas. How about customer service? Nope -- those are being outsourced too. Manufacturing? No, those are long gone. Auto-making? Nope -- gone to Mexico.
Before long, any job that *can* be done remotely *will* be done remotely when you can pay someone in another country $10/hour to work (plus, want to bet that they have benefits over there?). Which means that a vast majority of professionals will be out of work.
Then what?
We should be calling our representatives about such things. There should be duties paid on software developed in other countries just as there are duties in other industries. I'm not saying that because I want to take a protectionist stance just for the sake of doing so. I'm saying it because there is a huge difference between someone in living India and someone living in Silicon Valley. That difference should not be exploited by corporations looking to save a buck.
Otherwise our standard of living, which is probably the highest in the world, will get lower while the rest of the world's gets higher.
It's like littering -- if one or two companies do it, it's only a nusiance, but when everyone starts to do it, it's a disaster for everyone yet no one can be held accountable for the disaster.
Ralph
- "free software developers should get paid for their time"
- "I always donate to free software companies"
- "there should be a way for these people to get paid".
- "We should have micropayments so that we can be charged a little bit per use"
- "If I like a piece of software, I try and buy something from the developer to support them"
However, when a similar article highlighting the problems of web site publishing came up, the comments were:I didn't see anyone advocating rewriting open-source software to disable payment mechanisms. (That's the equivalent of ad-blocking software).
I saw people recognizing that developers should be compensated, and that there are other expenses (such as rent) that exist for free software. Yet no one bought into this for content.
I saw sympathy towards free-software companies that were financially in trouble. Compare that with the scorn against content providers that are in trouble.
Is it true? Are all /. posters pure hypocrites?
RalphHere's the basic problem. The WWW is probably the best medium to get current and updated information out to people. It's nearly instantaneous. And the excellent side benefit of the information being avaialble long after the event has happened. Plus it's searchable.
That doesn't work so well with newspapers, magazines, and even TV.
But the problem is that there is a cost to producing this information immediately in a reliable manner -- the cost to create the content. Sure, when the WTC got hit, that news made it out pretty fast on all channels. But what if you want to know about Massachusetts plan to raise tolls on the Pike? How many amateurs do you know writing articles on that?
Take sports scores. True, you could try to rely on amateurs to post scores. That might work for popular sports. But do you think you'll reliably be able to get Horse Racing Results from Saratoga every single day of the season -- within 10 minutes of the race closing -- from volunteers? Every day, without exception? I doubt it.
I'm always amazed by the people wishing for the "good old days" of the internet. The good old days may have been ad-free, and charge-free, but the information was largely stale. Someone put up a cool site, maintained it for a couple of weeks, and then let it die once they were bored with it. How many of your favorite sites from 1995 are still up and being updated? When money came, stability followed.
I run a fairly popular website right now -- about 2.5 million pages per month. I've been running it for about 4 years. It's costing me exactly $150/month to host.
If someone told me that they would pay for my hosting fees but that's all I could ever make, I don't think I'd keep the site up indefinitely. There are times when the only reason I'm willing to spend 20+ hours a week on the site is because I have the chance of making some extra money from it -- not a killing, but maybe enough to pay some bills.
Although innovation and creativity isn't dependent on money, money is still an excellent stimulant. If a law was passed that said "as of tomorrow you cannot ever make any money from anything on the internet, not even to recoup your costs", how many sites do you think would remain up and updated?
Ralph
So you're arguing that people should only pay for transfer, that no site should be compensated for creating content, and that every site should only be compensated their costs for transferring that content to others, but no more?
That's seems to be like saying that an employer should only pay their employees enough to drive to work every day.
Ralph
Is it your right to not watch commercials on TV? Of course it is. But if a device that extracts commercials is 100% legal, and everyone adopts it, then free TV programs as we know them will end. The networks will need to find a new business model. Will this be painless? No way. They'll experiment with every intrusive form of advertising that they can. The war won't go away -- it will intensify.
Do you still have doubts? Look at the internet. Banner blockers knock out the 468x60 ads, so we now have all kinds of new, resource-intensive, in-your-face formats. We have popups and popunders. We have birds that fly across your web page. We have "affiliate" pages which masquerade as informational pages, trying to trick you into buying products. And we'll soon have full-screen ads that you have to watch for X seconds before proceeding.
Why do we have this? Because no one is responding to less intrusive banner ads. Creative content costs money to produce, and no one should be happy about preventing money from going the people who produce it.
So although it may be our right to block/skip ads, remember, those ads are what keep the content free. Once they stop working, TV becomes a billable service.
Ralph
You may be looking at the "itch" from a major radio market perspective. How about the rest of us?
I live in a market where there are 6 "rock" stations within range. They break down like this:
2 Classic Rock (Stones, Beatles, etc.)
3 Hard/Metal Rock (Metallica/Poison/Limp Bizkit/Rage)
1 "Progressive Rock" (same as Hard, but without the older metal)
Everything else is either 100% pop/R&B (Britney Spears), 100% Adult Contemporary, or 100% Country/Western. And there is a Bluesy station too. There's NPR, but classical isn't my bag. The college stations play mostly hip-hop, that is when they're on the air (never early in the morning, it seems).
Plus, most of the stations are all-talk for the morning/evening drives. There's often *no* music on.
So of the 20 or so stations, there are about 5 different kinds of music. They all have the same playlists.
I don't like *any* of it. And yes, I have a CD player in my car. But the point of the radio is to discover new music. If I only listen to CD's, then I'm stuck within my own musical limitations. I never hear anything new.
I rarely listen to music on my PC -- most of my listening time comes in the car. But on occassion I will listen to other stations over the internet and I'm blown away with the cool music that's out there -- even from other commercial stations in larger cities. I enjoy travelling to these cities just to hear the music.
I want to hear that kind of music, but up until now the only way to get that in my car was to move to a big city like New York or Boston.
I would pay $10/month for more variety -- to hear stuff that is not the same 15 bands that the local stations focus on.
There's a right way that satellite can work and a wrong way. If they're just going to be regurgitating the same 50 songs on a 3-hour loop, then I won't subscribe. But if they're going to essentially have 100 different radio stations with unique playlists, then I'll be a very happy camper.
Ralph
According to Fox's head of distribution, the ending wasnt' supposed to make sense -- it was just supposed to shock:
e ws .cgi?newsid996445283,25089,
http://www.comingsoon.net/cgi-bin/archive/fulln
In my mind that's bad moviemaking. His quote -- "you've got to remember you just watched a movie about talking monkeys in outer space. Don't look for too much logic, you know." -- is asinine. Just because a movie has supernatural elements doesn't give you carte blanche to violate premises established in the first 99% of the movie just to get a spectacular ending.
It would be like at the end of Star Wars, if everyone magically became invincible without explanation, and were able to defeat the death star.
Ralph
Let's pretend that advertising didn't support TV. What would that mean?
You could pay per individual show. Of course, how would you know if the show was good enough to pay for without seeing it first? Would you get your money back for a show that stunk? Would you enjoy doing a value judgment every time a new show came on -- "hmm, is it worth $5 to me to watch this show"?
You could subscribe to each show for the season. Of course, if you've never seen the show before why would you subscribe? How would you find out about new shows?
You could pay for cable and let cable decide which shows to send you. Of course, the shows are grouped into networks and there are a finite number of shows which makes is somewhat easier for the cable company to choose. Since there would be no advertising your cable bills would probably run $100 per channel though.
My point: I don't think that TV could survive without advertising. Advertising is like a giant tax put on the nation to support TV. Everyone pays the cost of advertising in the form of higher product prices. And we get TV with ads in return.
Likewise I don't think the internet can survive without advertising. There's just no good way to pay for everything.
Ralph
The main effect of this is that newspapers will have to pay royalties to publish archives of their papers, and they'll have to negotiate those royalties per article/writer. Since this is a huge pain, akin to a radio station negotiating a royalty with every artist per song, it will not happen. Therefore a huge trove of information will never be republished.
I wonder if this affects microfilm. Film is essentially a new medium, similar to an online database but just a lot harder to use -- it's not indexed and it's only visible a page at a time. I could use the same argument to say that the newspaper shouldn't be able to publish the information, right?
If microfilm isn't covered, then there is an non-obvious loophole here -- the newspapers could use the electronic text of the articles to provide indexing/search criteria, and could then just display the image of the page that the article appears on. This wouldn't even be a new edition of the paper -- it would be a copy of the old edition of the paper (albeit electronic) that would not require royalty payments.
This could affect one of the greatest research projects underway -- Paper of Record, the project to digitize historical newspapers in their entirety so that they could be easily searched. Think of the knowledge and history that could be unlocked by such a project -- instead of trying to scan through old scratchy microfilm searching for a buried article, you could just do an index search on the words you want and instantly see every article on the subject ever printed.
Of course, with the Supreme Court's ruling, that would not be possible. The archive could not be created without a significant burden on the papers to obtain the permission of every article writer. And article writers wouldn't even have to give their permission -- they could just refuse.
I'm all for royalties, but in this case I believe a music-like organization should be created to distribute royalties on a prenegotiated basis. That system allows someone to record a version of a song as long as they pay the royalties, and radio stations to play the songs as long as they pay too. That's what is needed for article distribution as well.
Ralph Slate
That's not the way it works -- a plane can't see your plates from above. They radio ahead to a trooper trap which pulls you over and tells you how the plane clocked you at X MPH.
This isn't 100% relevant to finding real estate, but you can see what other properties in the neighborhood have sold for so that you can tell if you're overpaying a property.
http://www.domainia.com
allows you to put in an address, a street, or a neighborhood, and you can see the sale prices of all real estate since 1987 to present.
You can see what the previous owner paid for the house if he/she bought it since then!
Ralph
You're not generating the content -- so although you are funding the site from your pocket, it seems to me that the site could run on its own since the users provide the content. You can work nights and weekends to make the money to keep the server going. I don't even see an e-mail address there to contact you.
How much time do you spend a week on the site? Contrast that to someone who runs an online comic strip, or a site that has daily-updated articles. Or even a site like GeekPress which has to hunt down and filter articles.
I know that I'm being somewhat abrasive, but I always find that the people who say "you should provide content for free" typically have never provided any content for free for any length of time.
Ralph