Comparing a replicator to Napster just isn't fair. The societies of ours vs. the fictional star trek world are just too far apart. In the world of star trek, they've repeatedly state that in what, the late 21st century people started getting along to the point where they no longer needed money...
If real life earth can figure out a way to sustain itself without the need for currency of any kind, then things like replicators would be welcomed with open arms, because it'd be for the good of society.
I don't think that we'll ever outgrow the need for currency, and hence won't ever live the utopia that star trek promises. Trade was one of our earliest creations. Who's going to clean the sewers just for the hell of it? Or will everyone take turns?
Modern law can't cope with a replicator very well at all. But fortunately things like that are SO FAR from the present day, that modern law and society will have plenty of time to adapt to the changes it would bring.
Copyright law and IP laws are REQUIRED to make to GPL work. It mandates how people behave if they distribute the software just as much as any other license in the world.
If copyright and software licenses didn't exist, people could still choose to distribute their software with or without source code. It's the GPL that MANDATES that if you distribute the software that you need to provide access to the source. There's just no way that that can or could be mandated without relying on the laws we have in place.
it likely won't fly in court to just shut down napster, as it does have a legitimate use. so, napster could implement a policy to 'filter' the index and remove any word that matches the artist name of an riaa member.
A LOT of things that have legitimate uses have been illegalized in the past:
Freon - for your AC Heroin - pain medication AK-47's - for when you're really having problems with that deer
I could go on and on. The point is that just because you can point to something legitimate that you can do with something doesn't mean that thing has the right to remain legal.
Re:Understanding what Napster is
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What napster would do then is, once it was brought to their attention, start blocking "etallica - Unforgiven" and "3333 - Unforgiven"... eventually all the work arounds that people devised to get around the blocks that kept popping up would render Napster completely unusable, and they would go away.
Re:RIAA demands the impossible
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You are rather naive if you honestly think that the band gets $1.50. It's more like $0.25-0.35, so we are talking a penny or two that the band does not get and a buck that the distributor loses.
Bands generally receive 7-15% of a CD's cover price as royalties... NOT $.25-35. Read up some from sources other than around here before you start making statements that just aren't at all true.
I would happily pay $0.10 per song to the artist for CD quality music and $0.02 per song for 128kbps MP3.
And if mp3's are deemed acceptable to listen to, why should they cost any less than CD quality music? Yes, mp3's are lossy, but if they're displacing cd sales, the royalties a band recieves should at least stay equal, not plummet.
If someone has an MP3 of a song I like that I own on a vorn vinyl I honestly think it is quite legal for me to download that file. I am after all legally entitled to making my own copies of the song for listening where I do not have a disc player (car, work etc).
That's an iffy proposal... kind of like saying that if you bought a movie on VHS 10 years ago you should be entitled to a free upgrade to the DVD version. It's just not happening, and it shouldn't. You should be allowed to, and i believe that you are allowed being that a record is an analog medium, connect your turntable to a pre-amp and connect that to your sound card and convert THAT to mp3 for your own personal use.
Also the fact that a CD is so outrageously expensive makes it les slikely that I buy CD's. Lower the price to a reasonable level and I (and presumably many more) will buy more CD's.
That's just such a bullshit statement coming in a forum full of IT people or aspiring (college student) IT professionals. A music CD which costs a record company tens of thousands to produce prior to it even being pressed (and that's just for a small no-name band) and being sold to you for $15 is too much, but Redhat selling a CD full of software that they in no way financed for $49 is okay.
Microsoft earned more money last year than the entire recording industry did. Some of their CD's cost $2500. Where's the site that lets me download the software for free? And don't say IRC or anything like that... A COMMERCIAL website that actively (by the runners of the website, not posters in a forum) points me to it or provides me with tools to find it? How about the site that gives me GPL'ed binaries without the source?
Everyone here gets up in arms whe nthere's the slightest hint of a company stepping on the GPL, which is based entirely on the concepts of copyright, and expect that they adhere to the license. "If you don't like the license, don't use the code". Well, if you don't like the terms where the music is offered to you, don't listen to the music. It's really that simple.
Re:When will they get it?
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No, i'm sorry... They're just like the dotcoms in that they're not making money yet... Just generating losses for themselves and everyone involved with them... They are however accepting $15 million investments, which would only be made if they had thought of a way to generate revenues. They're paying $2 million to sponsor a Limp Bizkit tour.
Napster might have started as a college drop-outs project, but it's big business now.
Even if the RIAA doesn't get them, their users will when a year from now they find that they're supposed to PAY, in some way, to download something that they had formerly received for free. They're just about backed into a corner with nowhere to go...
Re:RIAA demands the impossible
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Oh, come on... They developed the software to let you search millions of machines simultaneously, do you really think that it would be THAT difficult to either create a table of phrases (song names or bands) or digital signatures of songs that it could process prior to returning results to the users?
And unions are supposed to be set up and run by the people they're representing... Napster isn't... Napsters still too chicken to admit what they're doing in a way that they can present themselves to signed bands as a way to distribute their music. If you figure that the average CD has say 15 songs and the bands get $1.50 per CD which equates to $.10/song, Napster should be trying to figure out a way that they can get the bands $.11/song downloaded. Maybe the labels will up it to $.12/song. Then napster could counter with $.13/song. THAT would trully be good for musicians.
Currently, Napster's taking away many musicians SOLE source of revenue from their music and their supporters repeatedly say that bands should make up for it with tours and T-shirt sales. They don't account for what you just said.... "demand for live bands has plummeted". So, if you're taking away the musicians' royalties and sending them on tour to earn money right as people have stopped going to shows, how is that supposedly HELPING the musicians? That's what unions are for, afterall...
Well, for one, you're obviously not trying to make a living by your music...
And, for two, why is Napster more desirable to you than setting up your own website where people can download your music (a la what you're doing with MP3.com) so that you can have a better way to gauge interest in your music and provide a means of communication between you and your fans?
But Rob doesn't run a service that lets users scour your machine for software and enable them to download it, while trying to make money off of the transaction... Napster does. Big difference.
No one can stop true "peer to peer" file sharing, but they can get rid of centralized, for-profit, corporations that enable it.
Comprende?
Re:When will they get it?
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Well, file sharing is here to stay. It's been here forever, and no one can legitimately try to bar it. But what can be done is to shut down Napster and any other service that attempts to make money without compensation to the producers of the music (artists) and the financers of their attempts (labels)...
See the definition of "Property" according to American Heritage:
property n., pl. properties. Abbr. prop. 1. a. Something owned; a possession. b. A piece of real estate: my country property. c. Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks. d. Possessions considered as a group.
2. The right of ownership; title. 3. An article, except costumes and scenery, that appears on the stage or on screen during a dramatic performance. 4. a. A characteristic trait or peculiarity, especially one serving to define or describe its possessor. b. A characteristic attribute possessed by all members of a class. See Synonyms at quality. 5. A special capability or power; a virtue: a medicine with special properties.
Copyright copyright (kp-rt) n. Abbr. c., C., cop.
The legal right granted to an author, a composer, a playwright, a publisher, or a distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.
So, if someone doesn't have the time, adeptitude, or resources to completely manage themeselves, it's okay to steal their work?
No.
Bands sign with labels for a variety of reasons. If Band A demands or merits a multi-million dollar advance on royalties while Band B asks for $100,000 advanced, of course the label's going to go out of their way to promote band A's record for the simple fact that there's a lot more money on the line for that one. Likewise, if Band A's previous album sold 2.5 million copies, while Band B's previous album sold 50,000 copies, then again, the label's going to go all out for Band A and more or less neglect Band B in comparisson.
That's life. That's fair. Record labels are in the business of promoting music. They, like everyone else, have limited resources. They can't give the same about of coverage to every single band. So they place their bets carefully, hoping to sell what they think people will want to hear.
I don't see in that a reason that Band A or Band B should be screwed out of their royalties simply because a technology has arisen that permits unlimited duplication of their finished work.
That rationale can apply to some things, but not others.
Patents protect and enable the "i got here first" syndrome. I think that this entire forum is in agreeement that the patent system is due for a drastic overhaul ASAP, so there's no need to continue with that argument.
Copyrights, however, are much different than patents. I find it highly improbably that anyone else in the world could have thought up Mickey Mouse than Walt Disney. Or that anyone else could have created the Middle Earth other than Tolkien. The list can go on and on. Those were very specific ideas and products. That's all copyright is meant to protect. A simple idea is not copyrightable, which is why copyrights really don't stand to harm invention or innovation.
Likewise, music should be covered by copyright. Copyrights don't prevent anyone from picking up a guitar and rolling their own music. It's absurd to think that they ever would actually prevent true forward progress. All they do is ensure that the owner of a finished piece of work get's first consideration when that work actually earns money.
But come on... Where I work, I know through annual reports that my division recieves way less than 10% of the company's net revenues for things like payroll. Musicians signed into contracts. That's the simplest fact. If they didn't want the money that the labels give them, they wouldn't have signed... They've heard aweful things about the labels, but in the end they decided it was most beneficial to sign withthem anyways...
And as for paying the RIAA to determine who gets big and who doesn't... That's just an excuse for weakness of will. They don't force you to buy anything you don't want to buy. If the only things that you want to buy are what you see advertisements, i mean video's, for on MTV, then of course you're going to be buying the lowest common denominator of muisc.
The need for IP laws only arose once IP became easily duplicatable... You can't compare teh Renaissance to the current day and age, because we are literally worlds apart from that era. You can look back at it and say, wow, life sure was nice back the, but you can't say "hey we need to do that again. Let's start by ceasing paying producers of things that we like".
Well, actually you can say that, but it's not rooted in any form of reality, I don't think. It's ironic that in this forum, where many of the readers will go on to have careers in technology, and 90% of the readers here will earn more money than 99% of the musical acts, you all complain about how $15 for a CD is too much and that ever band should make their money touring, selling T-shirts, etc...
Well...MPPP's market cap is 1.4 billion... I don't know how many shares they issued when they went public and therefore how much cash they raised, but even if they've drained their coffers, they can just issue 10% of their stock to the public or give 2% stakes to each of the the big 5 and be in the clear.
Yeah, $100 million is a lot, but that's basically the reason that companies go public, to raise funds they wouldn't have had access to before. It's too bad for Mp3 though that the money they would/should have used for things like advertising, bandwidth and servers instead has to to paying off copyright infringement chargers...
1 - JVM's: Microsoft's extreme hatred of Java stemmed from the fact that it commoditized the OS and therefore it tried to destroy it. If the OS constomers want a JVM, they can download one for free. Otherwise, MSFT could just license one from another vendor.
2 - Server software: There's no reason that server software such as SQL Server or Exchange needs to be "integreated" into the OS. If the OS company provides adequate documentation, then ANY 3rd party vendor should be able to do the same thing as Microsoft did in the past. And note that just about every other vendor of server applications happens to support more OSes than just one.
3 - Developer tools... I really think that developer tools should be part of the OS company and not the application company... If someone's going to know enough about the internals of the OS to build tools that make those API's accessible to everyone, it's going to be the OS company. The App company could still have an upperhand on competition by being allowed to develop the tools which other developers need.
4 - Voice Recognition software... I don't know where this should be, really. Again, if Microsoft addequately documents their OS, then there should be a plethora of Voice recognition software to choose from from many different vendors. With open API's, they should all be able to acheive the same level of functionality.
5 - So far as client apps and utilities go... There are some real toughies in there... file sharing, networking, etc... really should be part of the OS in this day and age... but things like ftp, ping, telnet, etc? I guess those again would be part of the OS, just for the simple sake that they're so rudimentary, that they pose no threat's to other software fcompanys.
6 - I think that Microsoft should have at least been split 4 ways (OS, Apps, Internet, Investments)... Is that $20 billion they've got just going to be split down the middle, so they can continue on their buyins spree?
So... Napster one way or the other inadvertently allows users to share/distribute their IP and copyrighted material (songs) without said artists permission and attempts to make it more and more difficult for the artists involved to stop the spread of it... BUT:
Napster gets angry when a band (who actually supports them) lifts their logo (IP and trademark) and distributes T shirts with the sites logo on it?
Will anyone here please realize that if you want to share music with your friends, that's fine... but Napster is trully evil... They stand for nothing that the whole open source movement stands for except the "free as in beer" concept... And even that looks shady if they move forward on charging subscription access.
Yeah... Napster backed down quickly, but even the idea that they acted up about the whole thing in the first place should go to show you that they're just another corporation like any other...
But most of that stuff is junk... you get what you pay for, most of the time... if a site has made it to the point where lots of people find their information useful, entertaining, informative, etc... then generally the owner will go "hey wow! I could make this into a business" and signs up wit h DoubleClick, et al...
Forget about internet connectivity. In all honesty, I'd like to know what sort of defense systems you're country has? What are you going to do if some country gets angry about what you're posting and decides to invade? Honestly! I mean, anyone can take of say, martha's vineyard, with just a few people and declare it it's own independant country, but the US could and would drive them out in a heartbeat. Likewise, I could find a desserted island in the pacific and say it's mine, but only until a country with more weapons than me decides they'ed like it instead... You could ally with another country, and use their arms as your own, but in all likelyhood, the entire purpose of this country seems to be to be able to disregard other countries laws... Thererfore, places like the US, France, etc... aren't very likely to step up to defend you...
Actually, in the few states that I know of, you are indeed breaking the law by doing that. The war on drugs isn't really a good field to make comparison with... After all, thanks to that good old "war" innocent people can lose ALL OF THEIR POSSESSIONS prior to trial... And even if they're found innocent the likelyhood of them getting their stuff back is next to zero, because it's generally auctioned off as quickly as possible. And forget about the nonsense of the link leading directly to a site that isn't yours... I mean, what's the difference between having an A HREF tag that links to an mp3 on your site and a tag that links directly to an mp3 on another site... Regardless as to where it is stored, if a user clicks that link, the file is going to be downloaded to their hard drive. And that's what this is about. If people think that mp3 distribution should be okay, someone should take a stand and just be blatantly honest. Say "i'm trying to take the record companies out of the equation" rather than hiding behind the mask of "i'm providing this as a service to the legitamate listeners of the tracks in question". It's a lame excuse, and it makes everyone involved look dumb when they repeatedly reach into the thin air to find another reason why their service is legit.
I think that CD's converted to MP3's at 128kbps sound great through headphones, but completely suck if you reburn them to CD and play through a real stereo system... It plays fine on the computer because headphones have no bass and not much on the treble(y?) end of the scale, where as when you play through speakers that can handle it and the sounds just not there, you miss it. I do, anyhow.
I've been quite happy with the windows media player on my mac... It runs fine, it just sucks, as in when it streams data, it just can not figure out a way ensure an uninterupted viewing... Even after you watch a movie from start to finish, and play again, it streams it again.
So... err... actually, i'm not at all happy with it. But at least hasn't messed up my machine any. It doesn't crash, either... That's what I meant by being happy with it.
If you want to use a product that makes use of Microsoft's proprietary codec's, you're going to need to download the binary from Microsoft. Patents/copyrights... Opensource/shareware/freeware/any other developers can't distribute microsoft's binaries with their own if their product needs access to it, unless they've licensed it from Microsoft... even though it's distributed freely.
But since i went through that whole thing in saying it, someone here will probably just post a link to it on their machine... what's IP worth these days when you've got slashdot?
and don't put the last chapter online... if it were a great suspense novel, that could work... let them read everything up until the chapter tha puts everything together for them for free... When they're hooked and want to know how it concludes, and click for the next page, they're presented with an ordering page... make it like $10 to receive the book and access to the last page online, or $8 to get access to just the last page online. With the price differential so close, people will probably just buy the book.
If you want to make a cleaner comparison, release it as a book and a fully formatted (from the same file used to make the book) PDF file... Then see which is more popular. Maybe release a text version just to satisfy people who really just desire the text in and of itself. I think that textfiles are fine for short documents, but the longer they get, the more hidious they are on the eyes. Besides that... If you're aiming to stimulate interest in the book, releasing as PDF would stand to both increase interest and increase piracy... it's a win lose situation.
On one hand, people could get a much fuller idea of what they'ed be receiving when they spent their money on the book... On the other hand, with a PDF a lot of the incentive to buy the book will also be killed off... Unless it's really long, there's nothing to prevent anyone from printing the document, binding it (total cost: $.99) and not needing to purchase it from you...
Slashdot Mirror
Comparing a replicator to Napster just isn't fair. The societies of ours vs. the fictional star trek world are just too far apart. In the world of star trek, they've repeatedly state that in what, the late 21st century people started getting along to the point where they no longer needed money...
If real life earth can figure out a way to sustain itself without the need for currency of any kind, then things like replicators would be welcomed with open arms, because it'd be for the good of society.
I don't think that we'll ever outgrow the need for currency, and hence won't ever live the utopia that star trek promises. Trade was one of our earliest creations. Who's going to clean the sewers just for the hell of it? Or will everyone take turns?
Modern law can't cope with a replicator very well at all. But fortunately things like that are SO FAR from the present day, that modern law and society will have plenty of time to adapt to the changes it would bring.
Copyright law and IP laws are REQUIRED to make to GPL work. It mandates how people behave if they distribute the software just as much as any other license in the world.
If copyright and software licenses didn't exist, people could still choose to distribute their software with or without source code. It's the GPL that MANDATES that if you distribute the software that you need to provide access to the source. There's just no way that that can or could be mandated without relying on the laws we have in place.
it likely won't fly in court to just shut down napster, as it does have a legitimate use. so, napster could implement a policy to 'filter' the index and remove any word that matches the artist name of an riaa member.
A LOT of things that have legitimate uses have been illegalized in the past:
Freon - for your AC
Heroin - pain medication
AK-47's - for when you're really having problems with that deer
I could go on and on. The point is that just because you can point to something legitimate that you can do with something doesn't mean that thing has the right to remain legal.
What napster would do then is, once it was brought to their attention, start blocking "etallica - Unforgiven" and "3333 - Unforgiven"... eventually all the work arounds that people devised to get around the blocks that kept popping up would render Napster completely unusable, and they would go away.
You are rather naive if you honestly think that the band gets $1.50. It's more like $0.25-0.35, so we are talking a penny or two that the band does not get and a buck that the distributor loses.
Bands generally receive 7-15% of a CD's cover price as royalties... NOT $.25-35. Read up some from sources other than around here before you start making statements that just aren't at all true.
I would happily pay $0.10 per song to the artist for CD quality music and $0.02 per song for 128kbps MP3.
And if mp3's are deemed acceptable to listen to, why should they cost any less than CD quality music? Yes, mp3's are lossy, but if they're displacing cd sales, the royalties a band recieves should at least stay equal, not plummet.
If someone has an MP3 of a song I like that I own on a vorn vinyl I honestly think it is quite legal for me to download that file. I am after all legally entitled to making my own copies of the song for listening where I do not have a disc player (car, work etc).
That's an iffy proposal... kind of like saying that if you bought a movie on VHS 10 years ago you should be entitled to a free upgrade to the DVD version. It's just not happening, and it shouldn't. You should be allowed to, and i believe that you are allowed being that a record is an analog medium, connect your turntable to a pre-amp and connect that to your sound card and convert THAT to mp3 for your own personal use.
Also the fact that a CD is so outrageously expensive makes it les slikely that I buy CD's. Lower the price to a reasonable level and I (and presumably many more) will buy more CD's.
That's just such a bullshit statement coming in a forum full of IT people or aspiring (college student) IT professionals. A music CD which costs a record company tens of thousands to produce prior to it even being pressed (and that's just for a small no-name band) and being sold to you for $15 is too much, but Redhat selling a CD full of software that they in no way financed for $49 is okay.
Microsoft earned more money last year than the entire recording industry did. Some of their CD's cost $2500. Where's the site that lets me download the software for free? And don't say IRC or anything like that... A COMMERCIAL website that actively (by the runners of the website, not posters in a forum) points me to it or provides me with tools to find it? How about the site that gives me GPL'ed binaries without the source?
Everyone here gets up in arms whe nthere's the slightest hint of a company stepping on the GPL, which is based entirely on the concepts of copyright, and expect that they adhere to the license. "If you don't like the license, don't use the code". Well, if you don't like the terms where the music is offered to you, don't listen to the music. It's really that simple.
No, i'm sorry... They're just like the dotcoms in that they're not making money yet... Just generating losses for themselves and everyone involved with them... They are however accepting $15 million investments, which would only be made if they had thought of a way to generate revenues. They're paying $2 million to sponsor a Limp Bizkit tour.
Napster might have started as a college drop-outs project, but it's big business now.
Even if the RIAA doesn't get them, their users will when a year from now they find that they're supposed to PAY, in some way, to download something that they had formerly received for free. They're just about backed into a corner with nowhere to go...
Oh, come on... They developed the software to let you search millions of machines simultaneously, do you really think that it would be THAT difficult to either create a table of phrases (song names or bands) or digital signatures of songs that it could process prior to returning results to the users?
And unions are supposed to be set up and run by the people they're representing... Napster isn't... Napsters still too chicken to admit what they're doing in a way that they can present themselves to signed bands as a way to distribute their music. If you figure that the average CD has say 15 songs and the bands get $1.50 per CD which equates to $.10/song, Napster should be trying to figure out a way that they can get the bands $.11/song downloaded. Maybe the labels will up it to $.12/song. Then napster could counter with $.13/song. THAT would trully be good for musicians.
Currently, Napster's taking away many musicians SOLE source of revenue from their music and their supporters repeatedly say that bands should make up for it with tours and T-shirt sales. They don't account for what you just said.... "demand for live bands has plummeted". So, if you're taking away the musicians' royalties and sending them on tour to earn money right as people have stopped going to shows, how is that supposedly HELPING the musicians? That's what unions are for, afterall...
Well, for one, you're obviously not trying to make a living by your music...
And, for two, why is Napster more desirable to you than setting up your own website where people can download your music (a la what you're doing with MP3.com) so that you can have a better way to gauge interest in your music and provide a means of communication between you and your fans?
But Rob doesn't run a service that lets users scour your machine for software and enable them to download it, while trying to make money off of the transaction... Napster does. Big difference.
No one can stop true "peer to peer" file sharing, but they can get rid of centralized, for-profit, corporations that enable it.
Comprende?
Well, file sharing is here to stay. It's been here forever, and no one can legitimately try to bar it. But what can be done is to shut down Napster and any other service that attempts to make money without compensation to the producers of the music (artists) and the financers of their attempts (labels)...
See the definition of "Property" according to American Heritage:
property
n., pl. properties. Abbr. prop.
1.
a. Something owned; a possession.
b. A piece of real estate: my country property.
c. Something tangible or intangible to which its owner has legal title: properties such as copyrights and trademarks.
d. Possessions considered as a group.
2. The right of ownership; title.
3. An article, except costumes and scenery, that appears on the stage or on screen during a dramatic performance.
4.
a. A characteristic trait or peculiarity, especially one serving to define or describe its possessor.
b. A characteristic attribute possessed by all members of a class. See Synonyms at quality.
5. A special capability or power; a virtue: a medicine with special properties.
Copyright
copyright (kp-rt)
n. Abbr. c., C., cop.
The legal right granted to an author, a composer, a playwright, a publisher, or a distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.
So, if someone doesn't have the time, adeptitude, or resources to completely manage themeselves, it's okay to steal their work?
No.
Bands sign with labels for a variety of reasons. If Band A demands or merits a multi-million dollar advance on royalties while Band B asks for $100,000 advanced, of course the label's going to go out of their way to promote band A's record for the simple fact that there's a lot more money on the line for that one. Likewise, if Band A's previous album sold 2.5 million copies, while Band B's previous album sold 50,000 copies, then again, the label's going to go all out for Band A and more or less neglect Band B in comparisson.
That's life. That's fair. Record labels are in the business of promoting music. They, like everyone else, have limited resources. They can't give the same about of coverage to every single band. So they place their bets carefully, hoping to sell what they think people will want to hear.
I don't see in that a reason that Band A or Band B should be screwed out of their royalties simply because a technology has arisen that permits unlimited duplication of their finished work.
That rationale can apply to some things, but not others.
Patents protect and enable the "i got here first" syndrome. I think that this entire forum is in agreeement that the patent system is due for a drastic overhaul ASAP, so there's no need to continue with that argument.
Copyrights, however, are much different than patents. I find it highly improbably that anyone else in the world could have thought up Mickey Mouse than Walt Disney. Or that anyone else could have created the Middle Earth other than Tolkien. The list can go on and on. Those were very specific ideas and products. That's all copyright is meant to protect. A simple idea is not copyrightable, which is why copyrights really don't stand to harm invention or innovation.
Likewise, music should be covered by copyright. Copyrights don't prevent anyone from picking up a guitar and rolling their own music. It's absurd to think that they ever would actually prevent true forward progress. All they do is ensure that the owner of a finished piece of work get's first consideration when that work actually earns money.
But come on... Where I work, I know through annual reports that my division recieves way less than 10% of the company's net revenues for things like payroll. Musicians signed into contracts. That's the simplest fact. If they didn't want the money that the labels give them, they wouldn't have signed... They've heard aweful things about the labels, but in the end they decided it was most beneficial to sign withthem anyways...
And as for paying the RIAA to determine who gets big and who doesn't... That's just an excuse for weakness of will. They don't force you to buy anything you don't want to buy. If the only things that you want to buy are what you see advertisements, i mean video's, for on MTV, then of course you're going to be buying the lowest common denominator of muisc.
The need for IP laws only arose once IP became easily duplicatable... You can't compare teh Renaissance to the current day and age, because we are literally worlds apart from that era. You can look back at it and say, wow, life sure was nice back the, but you can't say "hey we need to do that again. Let's start by ceasing paying producers of things that we like".
Well, actually you can say that, but it's not rooted in any form of reality, I don't think. It's ironic that in this forum, where many of the readers will go on to have careers in technology, and 90% of the readers here will earn more money than 99% of the musical acts, you all complain about how $15 for a CD is too much and that ever band should make their money touring, selling T-shirts, etc...
Well...MPPP's market cap is 1.4 billion... I don't know how many shares they issued when they went public and therefore how much cash they raised, but even if they've drained their coffers, they can just issue 10% of their stock to the public or give 2% stakes to each of the the big 5 and be in the clear.
Yeah, $100 million is a lot, but that's basically the reason that companies go public, to raise funds they wouldn't have had access to before. It's too bad for Mp3 though that the money they would/should have used for things like advertising, bandwidth and servers instead has to to paying off copyright infringement chargers...
1 - JVM's: Microsoft's extreme hatred of Java stemmed from the fact that it commoditized the OS and therefore it tried to destroy it. If the OS constomers want a JVM, they can download one for free. Otherwise, MSFT could just license one from another vendor.
2 - Server software: There's no reason that server software such as SQL Server or Exchange needs to be "integreated" into the OS. If the OS company provides adequate documentation, then ANY 3rd party vendor should be able to do the same thing as Microsoft did in the past. And note that just about every other vendor of server applications happens to support more OSes than just one.
3 - Developer tools... I really think that developer tools should be part of the OS company and not the application company... If someone's going to know enough about the internals of the OS to build tools that make those API's accessible to everyone, it's going to be the OS company. The App company could still have an upperhand on competition by being allowed to develop the tools which other developers need.
4 - Voice Recognition software... I don't know where this should be, really. Again, if Microsoft addequately documents their OS, then there should be a plethora of Voice recognition software to choose from from many different vendors. With open API's, they should all be able to acheive the same level of functionality.
5 - So far as client apps and utilities go... There are some real toughies in there... file sharing, networking, etc... really should be part of the OS in this day and age... but things like ftp, ping, telnet, etc? I guess those again would be part of the OS, just for the simple sake that they're so rudimentary, that they pose no threat's to other software fcompanys.
6 - I think that Microsoft should have at least been split 4 ways (OS, Apps, Internet, Investments)... Is that $20 billion they've got just going to be split down the middle, so they can continue on their buyins spree?
So... Napster one way or the other inadvertently allows users to share/distribute their IP and copyrighted material (songs) without said artists permission and attempts to make it more and more difficult for the artists involved to stop the spread of it... BUT:
Napster gets angry when a band (who actually supports them) lifts their logo (IP and trademark) and distributes T shirts with the sites logo on it?
Will anyone here please realize that if you want to share music with your friends, that's fine... but Napster is trully evil... They stand for nothing that the whole open source movement stands for except the "free as in beer" concept... And even that looks shady if they move forward on charging subscription access.
Yeah... Napster backed down quickly, but even the idea that they acted up about the whole thing in the first place should go to show you that they're just another corporation like any other...
But most of that stuff is junk... you get what you pay for, most of the time... if a site has made it to the point where lots of people find their information useful, entertaining, informative, etc... then generally the owner will go "hey wow! I could make this into a business" and signs up wit h DoubleClick, et al...
Forget about internet connectivity. In all honesty, I'd like to know what sort of defense systems you're country has? What are you going to do if some country gets angry about what you're posting and decides to invade? Honestly! I mean, anyone can take of say, martha's vineyard, with just a few people and declare it it's own independant country, but the US could and would drive them out in a heartbeat. Likewise, I could find a desserted island in the pacific and say it's mine, but only until a country with more weapons than me decides they'ed like it instead... You could ally with another country, and use their arms as your own, but in all likelyhood, the entire purpose of this country seems to be to be able to disregard other countries laws... Thererfore, places like the US, France, etc... aren't very likely to step up to defend you...
Actually, in the few states that I know of, you are indeed breaking the law by doing that. The war on drugs isn't really a good field to make comparison with... After all, thanks to that good old "war" innocent people can lose ALL OF THEIR POSSESSIONS prior to trial... And even if they're found innocent the likelyhood of them getting their stuff back is next to zero, because it's generally auctioned off as quickly as possible. And forget about the nonsense of the link leading directly to a site that isn't yours... I mean, what's the difference between having an A HREF tag that links to an mp3 on your site and a tag that links directly to an mp3 on another site... Regardless as to where it is stored, if a user clicks that link, the file is going to be downloaded to their hard drive. And that's what this is about. If people think that mp3 distribution should be okay, someone should take a stand and just be blatantly honest. Say "i'm trying to take the record companies out of the equation" rather than hiding behind the mask of "i'm providing this as a service to the legitamate listeners of the tracks in question". It's a lame excuse, and it makes everyone involved look dumb when they repeatedly reach into the thin air to find another reason why their service is legit.
I think that CD's converted to MP3's at 128kbps sound great through headphones, but completely suck if you reburn them to CD and play through a real stereo system... It plays fine on the computer because headphones have no bass and not much on the treble(y?) end of the scale, where as when you play through speakers that can handle it and the sounds just not there, you miss it. I do, anyhow.
I've been quite happy with the windows media player on my mac... It runs fine, it just sucks, as in when it streams data, it just can not figure out a way ensure an uninterupted viewing... Even after you watch a movie from start to finish, and play again, it streams it again.
So... err... actually, i'm not at all happy with it. But at least hasn't messed up my machine any. It doesn't crash, either... That's what I meant by being happy with it.
If you want to use a product that makes use of Microsoft's proprietary codec's, you're going to need to download the binary from Microsoft. Patents/copyrights... Opensource/shareware/freeware/any other developers can't distribute microsoft's binaries with their own if their product needs access to it, unless they've licensed it from Microsoft... even though it's distributed freely.
But since i went through that whole thing in saying it, someone here will probably just post a link to it on their machine... what's IP worth these days when you've got slashdot?
and don't put the last chapter online... if it were a great suspense novel, that could work... let them read everything up until the chapter tha puts everything together for them for free... When they're hooked and want to know how it concludes, and click for the next page, they're presented with an ordering page... make it like $10 to receive the book and access to the last page online, or $8 to get access to just the last page online. With the price differential so close, people will probably just buy the book.
If you want to make a cleaner comparison, release it as a book and a fully formatted (from the same file used to make the book) PDF file... Then see which is more popular. Maybe release a text version just to satisfy people who really just desire the text in and of itself. I think that textfiles are fine for short documents, but the longer they get, the more hidious they are on the eyes. Besides that... If you're aiming to stimulate interest in the book, releasing as PDF would stand to both increase interest and increase piracy... it's a win lose situation.
On one hand, people could get a much fuller idea of what they'ed be receiving when they spent their money on the book... On the other hand, with a PDF a lot of the incentive to buy the book will also be killed off... Unless it's really long, there's nothing to prevent anyone from printing the document, binding it (total cost: $.99) and not needing to purchase it from you...