Actually, and this data is quite old (about 8 or so years), artists used to get 6.25 cents per song per album as a base royalty rate. This numbe is quite likely a little higher these days and is regualted by the union. The book I read in school (BS in Recording Industry from MTSU) was called "The Musicians Business and Legal Guide". There should be a current edition with updated royalty rates as well as formulas for determing how much an artist makes and from where. I really wish more Slashdot readers would get this book and learn some facts before spouting off all sorts of ridiculous crap.
Pablo Escobar was brought down long before September 11th, and rightly so I might add. Before you jump into your little tirade, learn some of the basic facts first. My comparison, by the way, was between the physical locality of the criminal doesn't always matter when considering who gets a shot at prosecuting them for their crimes.
Where did the crime occur though? He was moving bits around and some of these bits were moved within the US, not just within Austrailia. Drug kingpins in Columbia found themselves being hunted by the US military and Law Enforcement even though they never stepped foot in the US, they merely ran criminal organizations which sold drugs within US borders. This is a very similar type of crime and he should be happy we didn't send in Delta like we did for Pablo Escobar.
"...Blockbuster will not be far behind with your favorite cable company."
Comcast already offers movies through their OnDemand service and I don't have to wait for them to download before I watch them. The service unblocks access to the movie I want for 24 hours so I can watch it anytime I want before the time's up.
You paid for the Space Shuttle too. That doesn't mean you can take it out for a joy ride whenever you want, much less go for a ride along next time they head to the ISS.
"Why should Americans who funded the research with their tax dollars have to pay again to read the research?"
Why should US tax payers subsidize scientific research for other countries to use? If the research is published on teh internet then what mechnisms are going to be put in place to ensure its protection? Is the EU going to help fund the NIH? Just a couple questions to consider, I'm not taking sides here.
"This is sorta irrelavent now, because recently the Canadian mint has come out with several new bills [www.cbc.ca] which are extremely difficult to counterfeit."
That's all fine and well but have they pulled all the old currency out of circulation and if not are they planning on pulling it anytime soon?
Two problems plague countries that face high rates of counterfeit currency. First, the expense of putting new currency into the publics hands is large enough without having to worry about pulling old currency. As long as older bills are around, people can counterfeit them and expect places to accept them should they slip past the meager, if any at all, counterfeit detection most stores employ. Iraq recently went through a currency exchange program and it was utter chaos. The Apocalypse would be far more orderly if they tried something like that in the US.
The second problem is where currency is counterfeited. The US's biggest problem with counterfeit currency isn't in the states, it's overseas and in some countries in South and Central America. Many drug cartels in Columbia have been caught counterfeiting US currency as well. These countries lack the knowledge and/or ability to properly detect counterfeit US currency and it's not until the money is eventually transferred to US banks that it's caught.
"...but non-for-profit and personal use should not be outlawed."
Now define not-for profit and personal use. Should PETA be allowed to use music, speeches, and photographs to promote their causes? What if I as an artist disagree with PETA? What rights do I now have to stop them from using my work? What if they alter part of a photograph o fmine and change the meaning to the exact opposite? One could argue that stadiums do not earn revenue from the use of songs during spoting events, the people are there to watch a game after all regardless of whether or not music is playing. Should they be allowed to use music without licensing it first and paying the artists?
As for personal use, should I be allowed to distribute music via P2P or give it out to friends? How is that personal use exactly since I'm not personally involved with interacting with the art? Couldn't one argue that value is being placed on these works, albeit not monetary, and thus they are creating a commercial enterprise around the trading of intellectual property?
As with most problems the answer lies in the middle and both extremes are wrong, including you. Creative Commons licenses are one area I happen to agree with Lessig. They put the power to allow greater use of their work squarely on the backs of the artist which is where it should be. Any other solution is either trying to "get shit for free" or "locking up art for eternity", neither of which is good for the art community and for the public at large.
"Who decided that holders of government-granted monopolies should determine the future of high tech? I don't remember reading that memo."
One could turn this around and ask who decided that technology creators get to determine who uses intellectual prperty and how? I don't remember reading that memo either. Last I checked, it was teh U.S> Constitution that determined what rights others have concerning intellectual property and while the INDUCE Act may go too far in one direction, allowing P2P apps to run unfettered goes too far in the other direction. Technology can be created but it can also be regulated fairly and in this case, I believe that there should be some sort of regulation and oversight. It is clear that the greatest use by far of P2P apps is the abuse of intellectual property rights and the users have only brought this upon themselves.
Bullshit. I'm looking at both right now and the only similarities I'm seeing are with the album artwork being placed next to the album title and information. Call out the National Guard, storm the Redmond campus.
Why not just say you think it's unfair that Apple isn't given free reign over online digital music sales and distribution and no one else, especially Microsoft, should be allowed to compete. That's what you're really thinking, but instead you pull some old and tired anti-Microsoft diatribe out of your ass and post it to/. hoping to score a little karma. Congratulations, you're officially a whore.
I really wish the mods would pull their heads out of their ass and determine if a comment is full of shit or not before modding it up like this. All it took was to open the MSN Music Store in a web browser, open iTunes, then switch back and forth a little. While these two UIs have some similarities, it's clear the MSN Music Store is not a blatant rip-off of the iTunes store. In fact, I happen to prefer the MSN Music Store UI to the iTunes one.
The site looks better in IE 6.0 than it does in Firefox. In FF everything bumps against the browser window borders making it uncomfortable to read the text and making the blue rounded header/navigation bar look awkward. In IE 6.0 there is a comfortable 1/2" border around the edge of all the page elements making the type easier to read and the navigation area look much better.
Add this to an existing car? They'll be asking how they cn make this themselves from off the shelf parts and old stereo systems, all running Linux of course.
I've been led to believe by many here on/. that Microsoft forces me to upgrade. I don't have a choice, nor does Microsoft need to create incentives for people to upgrade, just brandish the gun and quite those who ask questions. Am I now to believe that that position, promoted by so many on/., including the editors, was wrong? Impossible.
"This service is excellent because the RIAA and MPAA and FBI and whomever else cannot I repeat CANNOT get you on law breaking. As the 'swapping' happens offline, they have no way to find out about it."
Ummmm...can you say "Sting Operation" boys and girls? How the hell do you think they catch kiddie porn freaks who try to meet up with kids offline? Do you know you're not setting yourself up to illegally distribute songs offline with a cop of FBI agent?
You can only parody the copyrighted material itself, not use it to parody whatever the hell you like. This is a very big distinction enumerated in the few exceptions to use of copyrighted material without cnsent from teh copyright holder. This is why JibJab would have lost on that count. They're lucky the copyright had never been renewed or they would be facing a completely different verdict.
Walked around their Maginot Line? Hardly. Germany took control of the Maginot Line in short order. The French practically surrendered on sight and offered to man the line for them while they rounce the rest of Europe. DeGaul was a wimp and allowed Hitler to take France far too quickly.
This just means Pixar could make a little extra by licensing their code or they could distribute it via a similar license to Microsoft's SharedSource, not that their source code should be distributed wholesale via the GPL so anyone and everyone can poke around with it.
"Hey, keep your damn ads off the web." "Damn corporations are everywhere. Get the hell out of here, kill them all." "What right do corporations have to commercial speech?"
--------------------- For one day only on/.:
"Hey, what right does the IOC have infringing the rights of coroprations to freely advertise?"
First off, it's l-o-s-e, not loose. It makes a huge difference.
Second, about your sig, which part of "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,..." do you find difficult to understand? I'm all for allowing people to own guns but I hate it when only half of the second amandment is brought out and waved around. I'm guessing you're not a part of a well regulated militia that is recognized legally.
Oddly enough, many people on Slashdot tend to think laws and technology will never help the RIAA, MPAA, and the BSA stop online piracy. Guess what? It won't help stop spam either and while I agree with your premise, especially concerning print advertisements, I still think there is a way to fix uwanted e-mail.
I subscribe to a few sites newsletter, Apple and Amazon.comn being just two examples. Both occasionaly send me information about specials I might be interested in. In the case of Amazon.com, they recommend similar items I might like based on past purchases. Basically, an opt-in system would solve most unwanted advertisements. There will be a small percentage that will ignore ANY law put in place and these people should be prosecuted accordingly.
Now, I'm very careful to only give out my e-mail address to trusted sites. The only reason I seem to get even this spam is due to the fact that apsmmers datamined the whois database. I've since subscribed to an anonymizing service through my DNS provider so no more spammers can get my e-mail address. Luckily the e-mail address they do get is going to expire in December so my spam should drop to only 5-10 spams e-mails a week. Blocking this Whois hole would contribute to eliminating a lot of spam too. Why my private information needs to be made public just because I want to run a website with a personalized domain name is beyond me. I shouldn't have to pay to have this information made private, it shoudl be private by default.
However, there are many other types of spam that are not going to stop, phishing scams being one. These are by and large the largest kind I tend to get. Generally I don't get much spam at all, about 5-10 a day, 15-20 if you include my hotmail account I use specifically for spam catching. What I do get tends to be autogenerated and contain nonsense "words", such as sjwiersa or fxtjkxxzzqw. These are immediately deleted and I go on to read the rest of my e-mail. I believe these spam e-mails were sent to my e-mail address grabbed off the Whois database prior to my actions to anonymize the information.
That was my thinking. Someone else on the board brought up another analogy with steel screws. You can't tack-on brass screws to this patent just to screw (no pun inended) competition that decided to use brass instead of steel. However, if you had a patent from 1970 it would not matter as it would have expired almost 15 years ago:)
According to The Register article (I know, they have trouble with facts) patents can be extended in scope from their original filing date so all new additions are patented from that date. From teh article, "Patents can be modified to add new elements, and technology companies frequently amend existing intellectual property with new, related ideas - which then apply from the first filing date, in this case April 1999, long before last year's introduction by Microsoft of Xbox Live, its console-oriented online gaming and information service, and which also offers voice chat facilities."
Now I question if this is really true or not and if so to what extent it is true. Surely there are mechanisms in place to limit how much one can add and if one can patent something through an addition to the original patent already in the marketplace and still be granted protection from the original patent application date. The Register article was light on these details.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, and this data is quite old (about 8 or so years), artists used to get 6.25 cents per song per album as a base royalty rate. This numbe is quite likely a little higher these days and is regualted by the union. The book I read in school (BS in Recording Industry from MTSU) was called "The Musicians Business and Legal Guide". There should be a current edition with updated royalty rates as well as formulas for determing how much an artist makes and from where. I really wish more Slashdot readers would get this book and learn some facts before spouting off all sorts of ridiculous crap.
Pablo Escobar was brought down long before September 11th, and rightly so I might add. Before you jump into your little tirade, learn some of the basic facts first. My comparison, by the way, was between the physical locality of the criminal doesn't always matter when considering who gets a shot at prosecuting them for their crimes.
Where did the crime occur though? He was moving bits around and some of these bits were moved within the US, not just within Austrailia. Drug kingpins in Columbia found themselves being hunted by the US military and Law Enforcement even though they never stepped foot in the US, they merely ran criminal organizations which sold drugs within US borders. This is a very similar type of crime and he should be happy we didn't send in Delta like we did for Pablo Escobar.
"...Blockbuster will not be far behind with your favorite cable company."
Comcast already offers movies through their OnDemand service and I don't have to wait for them to download before I watch them. The service unblocks access to the movie I want for 24 hours so I can watch it anytime I want before the time's up.
You paid for the Space Shuttle too. That doesn't mean you can take it out for a joy ride whenever you want, much less go for a ride along next time they head to the ISS.
Two problems plague countries that face high rates of counterfeit currency. First, the expense of putting new currency into the publics hands is large enough without having to worry about pulling old currency. As long as older bills are around, people can counterfeit them and expect places to accept them should they slip past the meager, if any at all, counterfeit detection most stores employ. Iraq recently went through a currency exchange program and it was utter chaos. The Apocalypse would be far more orderly if they tried something like that in the US.
The second problem is where currency is counterfeited. The US's biggest problem with counterfeit currency isn't in the states, it's overseas and in some countries in South and Central America. Many drug cartels in Columbia have been caught counterfeiting US currency as well. These countries lack the knowledge and/or ability to properly detect counterfeit US currency and it's not until the money is eventually transferred to US banks that it's caught.
Now define not-for profit and personal use. Should PETA be allowed to use music, speeches, and photographs to promote their causes? What if I as an artist disagree with PETA? What rights do I now have to stop them from using my work? What if they alter part of a photograph o fmine and change the meaning to the exact opposite? One could argue that stadiums do not earn revenue from the use of songs during spoting events, the people are there to watch a game after all regardless of whether or not music is playing. Should they be allowed to use music without licensing it first and paying the artists?
As for personal use, should I be allowed to distribute music via P2P or give it out to friends? How is that personal use exactly since I'm not personally involved with interacting with the art? Couldn't one argue that value is being placed on these works, albeit not monetary, and thus they are creating a commercial enterprise around the trading of intellectual property?
As with most problems the answer lies in the middle and both extremes are wrong, including you. Creative Commons licenses are one area I happen to agree with Lessig. They put the power to allow greater use of their work squarely on the backs of the artist which is where it should be. Any other solution is either trying to "get shit for free" or "locking up art for eternity", neither of which is good for the art community and for the public at large.
Bullshit. I'm looking at both right now and the only similarities I'm seeing are with the album artwork being placed next to the album title and information. Call out the National Guard, storm the Redmond campus.
/. hoping to score a little karma. Congratulations, you're officially a whore.
Why not just say you think it's unfair that Apple isn't given free reign over online digital music sales and distribution and no one else, especially Microsoft, should be allowed to compete. That's what you're really thinking, but instead you pull some old and tired anti-Microsoft diatribe out of your ass and post it to
I really wish the mods would pull their heads out of their ass and determine if a comment is full of shit or not before modding it up like this. All it took was to open the MSN Music Store in a web browser, open iTunes, then switch back and forth a little. While these two UIs have some similarities, it's clear the MSN Music Store is not a blatant rip-off of the iTunes store. In fact, I happen to prefer the MSN Music Store UI to the iTunes one.
I'm talking about how on Windows the site does not render proplery in Firefox. IE 6.0 displays the site exactly as in your image though.
The site looks better in IE 6.0 than it does in Firefox. In FF everything bumps against the browser window borders making it uncomfortable to read the text and making the blue rounded header/navigation bar look awkward. In IE 6.0 there is a comfortable 1/2" border around the edge of all the page elements making the type easier to read and the navigation area look much better.
Add this to an existing car? They'll be asking how they cn make this themselves from off the shelf parts and old stereo systems, all running Linux of course.
I've been led to believe by many here on /. that Microsoft forces me to upgrade. I don't have a choice, nor does Microsoft need to create incentives for people to upgrade, just brandish the gun and quite those who ask questions. Am I now to believe that that position, promoted by so many on /., including the editors, was wrong? Impossible.
If you think people are using this service to swap legit copies of stuff, I've got some beach front property in Arizona to sell you.
"This service is excellent because the RIAA and MPAA and FBI and whomever else cannot I repeat CANNOT get you on law breaking. As the 'swapping' happens offline, they have no way to find out about it."
Ummmm...can you say "Sting Operation" boys and girls? How the hell do you think they catch kiddie porn freaks who try to meet up with kids offline? Do you know you're not setting yourself up to illegally distribute songs offline with a cop of FBI agent?
Distributing files freely without any method of reimbursement is completely different from running a service a la iTunes.
You can only parody the copyrighted material itself, not use it to parody whatever the hell you like. This is a very big distinction enumerated in the few exceptions to use of copyrighted material without cnsent from teh copyright holder. This is why JibJab would have lost on that count. They're lucky the copyright had never been renewed or they would be facing a completely different verdict.
Walked around their Maginot Line? Hardly. Germany took control of the Maginot Line in short order. The French practically surrendered on sight and offered to man the line for them while they rounce the rest of Europe. DeGaul was a wimp and allowed Hitler to take France far too quickly.
This just means Pixar could make a little extra by licensing their code or they could distribute it via a similar license to Microsoft's SharedSource, not that their source code should be distributed wholesale via the GPL so anyone and everyone can poke around with it.
Typical day on /.:
/.:
"Hey, keep your damn ads off the web."
"Damn corporations are everywhere. Get the hell out of here, kill them all."
"What right do corporations have to commercial speech?"
---------------------
For one day only on
"Hey, what right does the IOC have infringing the rights of coroprations to freely advertise?"
Am I the only one who sees the irony here?
First off, it's l-o-s-e, not loose. It makes a huge difference.
Second, about your sig, which part of "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,..." do you find difficult to understand? I'm all for allowing people to own guns but I hate it when only half of the second amandment is brought out and waved around. I'm guessing you're not a part of a well regulated militia that is recognized legally.
Oddly enough, many people on Slashdot tend to think laws and technology will never help the RIAA, MPAA, and the BSA stop online piracy. Guess what? It won't help stop spam either and while I agree with your premise, especially concerning print advertisements, I still think there is a way to fix uwanted e-mail.
I subscribe to a few sites newsletter, Apple and Amazon.comn being just two examples. Both occasionaly send me information about specials I might be interested in. In the case of Amazon.com, they recommend similar items I might like based on past purchases. Basically, an opt-in system would solve most unwanted advertisements. There will be a small percentage that will ignore ANY law put in place and these people should be prosecuted accordingly.
Now, I'm very careful to only give out my e-mail address to trusted sites. The only reason I seem to get even this spam is due to the fact that apsmmers datamined the whois database. I've since subscribed to an anonymizing service through my DNS provider so no more spammers can get my e-mail address. Luckily the e-mail address they do get is going to expire in December so my spam should drop to only 5-10 spams e-mails a week. Blocking this Whois hole would contribute to eliminating a lot of spam too. Why my private information needs to be made public just because I want to run a website with a personalized domain name is beyond me. I shouldn't have to pay to have this information made private, it shoudl be private by default.
However, there are many other types of spam that are not going to stop, phishing scams being one. These are by and large the largest kind I tend to get. Generally I don't get much spam at all, about 5-10 a day, 15-20 if you include my hotmail account I use specifically for spam catching. What I do get tends to be autogenerated and contain nonsense "words", such as sjwiersa or fxtjkxxzzqw. These are immediately deleted and I go on to read the rest of my e-mail. I believe these spam e-mails were sent to my e-mail address grabbed off the Whois database prior to my actions to anonymize the information.
That was my thinking. Someone else on the board brought up another analogy with steel screws. You can't tack-on brass screws to this patent just to screw (no pun inended) competition that decided to use brass instead of steel. However, if you had a patent from 1970 it would not matter as it would have expired almost 15 years ago :)
According to The Register article (I know, they have trouble with facts) patents can be extended in scope from their original filing date so all new additions are patented from that date. From teh article, "Patents can be modified to add new elements, and technology companies frequently amend existing intellectual property with new, related ideas - which then apply from the first filing date, in this case April 1999, long before last year's introduction by Microsoft of Xbox Live, its console-oriented online gaming and information service, and which also offers voice chat facilities."
Now I question if this is really true or not and if so to what extent it is true. Surely there are mechanisms in place to limit how much one can add and if one can patent something through an addition to the original patent already in the marketplace and still be granted protection from the original patent application date. The Register article was light on these details.